Richard Sage

I recently had the opportunity to work with a team who were trying to take a fresh look at the performance measured used by the team. My view on such a situation is that there are really only 2 questions you need to ask yourself:

1. What is the vision?

2. What measurements can I put in place to help me achieve the vision?

In reality, as our discussion progressed it became clear that these two questions were not at the forefront of the teams minds, instead the questions were:

1. What do we measure now that other people expect us to continue measuring?

2. Can we measure something if no one else in the org is measuring the same thing?

3. What if we measure something that gives someone else leverage over us?

4. What if we measure something that makes us look bad?

5. How can I use measurement to push my own agenda?

These are all useless and distracting questions but I think breaking down 4 and 5 provides some interesting insight.

Regarding 4. So what? Isn’t that a good thing? demonstrating poor performance in an era where you want to perform is the first step in improving that performance.

Regarding 5, I think this is an inherently selfish perspective about ‘how can I use measurement to support my individual goals’. Is it naive to think that if an org has a clear and coherent vision then there should be no need for personal agendas because personal agendas are overridden  by buy-in to and pull towards the organisations vision?

The fact that both of these questions exist in the minds of the team hints at a more fundamental set of problems.

What if we returned to the to initial questions I posed and did so from a perspective of openness? Measurement has context, and therefore a commentary, the context is your vision. Does it matter if a measure shows a lack of progress toward achieving the vision? If your vision is valid and aligns with the organisations goals then surely it’s a good thing for others to be aware of something that isn’t contributing as it should so remedial action can be taken?

A problem within a team that constrains the wider organisations ability to achieve its vision is a problem for the whole org, Not just within the team in which it was identified.

Concern over highlighting bad performance against a measurement is a symptom of problems within the culture of the organisation. Blame, lack of responsibility, accountability and ownership, manifest themselves in desire to reduce transparency and question the rationality of openness. 

I believe there is a better way based on radical openness and transparency that permeates organisations, silos and agendas. I’ll write more about this soon. If reading this has sparked some thoughts then i’d welcome any comments either on this blog or @ me on twitter or use the #openwork hashtag

 

So why do we allow our the organisations we create to stifle collaboration, communication and openness with silos, politics and poor communication?

A few weeks ago i blogged the seeds of some thinking around the concept i’m referring to as #openwork In a series of upcoming blog posts i’ll be breaking these thoughts down into something more concrete, a manifesto for openness at work.

If this is an area that resonates with you i’d love to comment on my tumblr or @bakedidea

Bye for now

DSC_0475 on Flickr.Piglets in hay

Below is a copy and paste of the document where i note down all my thoughts on what i’m calling ‘Open work’

I thought i’d share the raw shizzle in the interests of practising what I preach and trying to be as open as possible as I work these thoughts through (hopefully) into something coherent, useful and publishable. Enjoy! all comments welcome

Open Work

What is openness?

Openness is the freedom that is felt at a personal level and experienced in an organisational context to share thoughts feelings, opinions and information
Openness is also the receptiveness to receive what is shared
Openness is the culture that pervades social interactions that are based on freedom

Later on I need to talk about freedom and how to enable that freedom.
Leverage social proof
Don’t judge the sharer, judge the hoarder
Hoarding

The construct that i describe as Openness has both an organisational and personal element

because the Silos can be both be structural and interpersonal
show an organisation, function, team, interpersonal siloes

siloes that can be vertical within hierarchy or horizontol across functions.
graphic of horizontal and vertical partitions.

Ask yourself how many edges do I have, how many edges does my team have? My department? Directorate? How removed am I from these?

What pattern can you apply to break these down? link to fast iterations of virtual structures,
that revolve around hubs. what are the hubs?
Who are the hubs?

WHY?

Symptoms

Where does your orgs ideas come from?
E.g.g corporate goals
Who sponsors your change activity?

are two people/temas working on the same thing in isolation?
Are two intiatives unknowingly working to undermine each other?
are two changes competing for the same resource?
Is there conflict between business units, functions, teams people caused by competing goals?
Do you get different answers if you ask different employees what the organisations top 3 priorities are?

top down
bottom up

top up
bottom down

top bottom
up down

What is wrong with these words where is the width? (Flanking)
These words are part of a language of hierarchy that is anachronistic.

-Reject closed language
Recognise the language you use that is not open.

Compare contrast open/closed phrases, investigate the etymology of these words
E.g.
Buy-in
Post
Role
Function
Directorate
Structure
Organisation
Group
Alignment
Influence
Direct report
Subordinate
Meeting
Conference
Desk
Office
Work
Strategy
Outcome
Lead
Manager
Senior
1:1 (like its something special)
Presentation
Promotion
Hot desk
Go for a coffee
Deadline
Cascade
All hands
Rush hour
Deliverable
Stakeholder is there someone who isn’t a stakeholder?
Influence
Performance review
Transparency: of many things e.g. committments
Lunch and learn is a broken concept, why not learn the rest of the time, and why not in work time

Staff survey, do you share the results and raw data?
concepts/principles
Should I split these into, attitude, enablers, constraints, principles?

Leadership = openness
Be brave

‘Open Argument’, argument is not negative!!!
Conflict too strong word, but the debates are open and lead to a better position, rather than seething resentment

Task over structure

Negatives/things to look out for
Openness needs accountavility or you create cracks. May be counter uintuitive

Also decision making

Signal/Noise and noise reduction.

What are the mechanisms for noise reduction?
Timeliness
Context, tagging or do I need to go there
Cones of interest, sharing those up front. What do I need to know

-Context

Bring the contextual baggage to a conversation.

Move conversation through different mediums for maximum value e.g. Start conversation on desktop, continue on mobile

Relate data and meta data to conversations, e.g. Here is the conversation that led me to talk to you.

Design for collision

-radical/extreme/progressive sharing/shariarchy
-channels of discovery
-foster emergence
-Social architecture: (thinking stack/zachman etc)
-connectedness (connectivity and psychological sense by what? shared vision?
-finding
-serendipity design for
-ego-less
-embrace criticism but by embracing criticism how to avoid paralysis (too many arguments)
-Clear threshold for decision making – stops paralysis
-radical un-secrecy
-Virtual Structures
– finite structures, rapid iteration of create, grow, destroy
– task/problem networks (mayfly)
-Now-ness – relate to the when/tenses of sharing future, past, present
-Presence
– hire for compatibility, culture is context context is people, understand organisational context.
– Energy
– feel time
-ownership
-positively reinforce sharing
– Your goals -> our goals
reward/incentivise colab and sharing, how? measure engagement.
– Shared goals are your compass goals are your culture, the thing direction of travel

Embrace emerging structures

– space is not a barrier, space is not as big as it used to be
there are tools to enable skype, vc units, desktop vc mobile vc

Current State:

-No opportunity for serendepity
-Closed networks
-Entropy

Trends:

-Privacy as commodity/desensitisation
-Hyper sharing
-High bandwidth communication/consumption
-Open source, social networks,
– task/problem networks

Thoughts:

There is no reason not to share
There is no impediment to sharing

appendix
valve handbook
open business cushman 90/10?

References:

http://fasterfuture.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-10-principles-of-open-business.html

http://blog.ted.com/2013/01/24/why-radical-openness-is-unnerving-reshaping-and-necessary-a-qa-with-ted-ebook-authors-don-tapscott-and-anthony-d-williams/

http://www.ted.com/pages/tedbooks_library#TapscottWilliams

http://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_four_principles_for_the_open_world_1.html

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671797/from-zappos-4-simple-hacks-to-foster-office-collaboration

gore tex
http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/culture/index.html

http://www.managementexchange.com/story/innovation-democracy-wl-gores-original-management-model

http://metro.co.uk/2013/02/25/facebook-twitter-or-email-what-do-we-share-online-and-why-3508887/

http://www.noop.nl/2012/11/taking-care-of-horses.html

Thanks for the feedback and thoughts, much appreciated. Re point 8 that is what i meant, just managed to not type it 🙂

I had the pleasure of attending a service design ‘learning by doing’ workshop last week. It was a really enjoyable half day, whilst i didn’t learn anything particularly groundbreaking it was fun to put some of the techniques i’d read about into practice. I think there is a lot that could be gained by applying service design thinking to enterprise architecture (which is my primary interest). This isn’t a post about that (sorry) that will be a post for another day.

Several of the attendees were part of the wider design community, of those attendees some were planning to attend (or involved in organising) the global service jam. I’d heard about it before and really liked the idea, unfortunately I can’t attend, but will be catching up on the blog and vids after the event.

I currently work for a company involved in social housing (amongst other things) and during the workshop I started putting two and two together and coming up with a question:

What would a service design jam look like for social housing?

Social housing organisations (and their customers) are going through some interesting times at the moment, factors such as increasing competition or government benefits changes threatening revenue streams and significantly impacting customer’s lives. Some organisations are reacting to these new pressures but my view is for the most part the sector is still delivering the same services to customers using the same processes. Everyone does tenancy sustainment, everyone does financial inclusion, everyone does tenant engagement. What I don’t see is much design more design by default, the design that fulfils the business expectations of the service to be delivered rather than the customer’s need. I’m not putting down the work that is done to engage customers in decision making and the delivery of services, I just wonder whether the ‘How’ could be improved and maybe service design is an additional ‘how’ that can be used in conjunction with the traditional techniques to make much better experiences for our customers.

So, to answer my own question this is what I think of when i think of a service design jam for social housing

1. Participants from different organisations within the sector coming together for a day/weekend
2. Participants coming from different departments/functions within social housing organisations
3. Participants from the same organisation being split between teams
4. Teams facilitated by ‘expert’ service design people
5. Design challenges crowdsourced before the event (I know this breaks one of the SDJ principles, but figure being able to contribute to the challenges will help people feel like they will get something tangible from the jam
6. Each team focuses on a challenge for the duration of the jam.
7. I wonder if one of the participating organisations has a space large enough to facilitate the jam?
8. I wonder how we could introduce ‘the voice of the customer’ into the jam? integrate them into teams? invite some along for design teams to access?

 

So this is what is buzzing around my head at the moment. I’d love it if anyone has any thoughts on this. Is it practical? would there be any demand for this sort of thing? Please leave a comment or @bakedidea on Twitter

 

Open Work

An initial sketch of ideas around the concept of ‘Open work’, a developing idea for a manifesto for a new way of working that leverages concepts around openness and technology that enables openness to enable us all to work better, together.

Other than this preamble this is a straight dump of notes i’ve been jotting down, just thought i’d get it out there on the blog as a vehicle for making myself think more deeply about what i want to achieve. My plan is to start fleshing these notes out, into principles (hey i’m an architect!) and trace these concepts to some reality. When I first started thinking about these ideas I happened upon david cushman’s great writing (http://fasterfuture.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-10-principles-of-open-business.html) on the area of ‘open business’, so i’m mindful not to re-hash or at worst plagiarise David’s thoughts (you’ll notice some of my headings map to some of david’s principles.

So my plans consist of trying to frame some interesting and hopefully original thinking, whether this ends up as a post on my blog an ebook, or whatever, i’m not really sure, I’ve just got fed up of thinking things through, so thought its about time I should start, er, writing them through.

concepts/principles

-Context
-radical sharing/shariarchy
-discovery
-foster emergence
-Social architecture: (thinking stack/zachman etc)
-connectedness (connectivity and psychological sense by what? shared vision?
-finding
-serendipity
-ego-less
-embrace criticism but by embracing criticism how to avoid paralysis (too many arguments)
-Clear threshold for decision making – stops paralysis
-radical un-secrecy
-Virtual Structures
-Now-ness – relate to the when/tenses of sharing future, past, present
-Presence
– Energy

Current State:

-No opportunity for serendepity
-Closed networks
-Entropy

Trends:

-Privacy as commodity
-Hyper sharing
-High bandwidth communication/consumption

Thoughts:

There is no reason not to share
There is no impediment to sharing

At the start of this year of 2012 I decided that I was going to get off my arse and do things, work on the ideas that are always flying around my head and actually, not just work on them, but finish them as well!

(These are all non-day job related things, ill save all that stuff for another post)

I started off the year with the first version of ‘songs as a service’:
http://songsasaservice.wordpress.com

I then took my first stab at ebook publishing by writing a parody ‘business book’ called ‘How to be a dick’:

http://leanpub.com/howtobeadick

Then I wrote a 30 day diary recording me using Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’:

http://leanpub.com/30daysonobliquestrategies

I then rounded off the year with a 2nd version of ‘songs as a service’:
http://www.songsasaservice.com

Some of these things were successful, some were not, but most importantly they were all fun experiences that I learnt a lot from. My hope for 2013 is to build on the confidence that working on these things have given me and do something even more challenging in the coming year.

As of tonight the ebook detailing my journey through 30 days of using Oblique Strategies in a bog standard work context is now available to buy on leanpub

It has been a while since i last posted, but i have a good reason! its because i’m currently blogging my way through my latest little challenge to use Oblique Strategies for the next 30 days well 23 I’ve already done 6).

The blog is here

Had to communicate a high level roadmap to some stakeholders. I’m quite please how i managed to simplify the complexity of the situation in this diagram, so thought i’d share an anonymised version of it.