Being Change: A Responsive Organisation Needs Responsive People

Over the last series of posts I have illustrated the need to become, and the benefits of, The Responsive Organisation.
I have drilled into how to identify and how to respond to the Context Shocks from which a Responsive Organisation can benefit. I have provided a guide to developing and scaling its capability to benefit.

But, of course, a responsive organisation needs to be populated by Responsive People.
Indeed, from the lessons we learn from feedback loops, the responsiveness of the people who are the organisation will prove either dampener or accelerator to the responsiveness of the organisation.
I referred to the responsiveness in the individual as 'learned personal antifragility' in a previous post and recommended that those of us who had learned this, may hold some responsibility to share how, with others.

That is the intention of this post.

Engaging people in their personal journey of change is, in the reality of the complexity of organisations, entangled with the change of the organisation.

In the chaotic moments of Context Shock, of the kind we are experiencing through Covid19, the need to 'see what we do not see' is essential - and reliant upon the 'wisdom of crowds' that engaging everyone in the organisation can give you. Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework and its application to leadership through crisis provide ample evidence of the value of this.

A fine example of 'what we do not see' - and one shared by Dave - is this widely published image (below). 83% of radiologists miss the anomaly so don't feel bad if you do. Taken individually there's a very large chance it gets missed. But if you ask 100 radiologists it gets found (17 times being enough for you to take a closer look... at the Gorilla in the dark, top, right side of the lungs.

However, in the context of today's post I want to emphasise the purpose of 'asking the crowd' for its additional value in engaging people in change they can embrace.
Very simply the process for this is:
1. Identify and reach out to your crowd
2. Set the constraints of their observations
3. Capture their response as close to real-time as possible
4. Conduct your quantitative analysis
5. Spot the Gorilla and tell the crowd.

Now we have their attention (as well as useful emergence from weak signals to shape responses to the Context Shock).

The next step is to help them learn their personal antifragility. Your responsive organisation is reliant on people seeking learning experiences in change vs responding with fear. The more people you can take on the journey, the more you can amplify the positive benefits of the responsive organisation.

When Rory Yates and I reflected on what had given us some form of personal antifragility, the themes reflected in the slide above became clear (follow previous link for our validations).

With my 4-steps of Making Responsive People (above slide) I am seeking to replicate some of what we have learned from 20+ years in digital innovation and change.

1. Play: If you aren't a gamer and never have been, you missed out on some foundational stuff. We learned trial and error in a very 'safe to fail' environment. Let's close that gap in your psychological armour.
2. Feedback Loops: Properties on the web were so much more instantly measurable than anything that had come before. We learned to try stuff and saw, very quickly, what happened as and when we did. We saw rewards fast and that improved our responsiveness. So find what measures directly what you do, and measures it fast. Then, crucially, we must encourage and reward you to respond to what happens.
3. Positive Psychology: Recognise that most people fear change. They don't seek learning opportunities. They see threat in movement. It's natural. But it can be overcome. Programs which help people identify their 'Fixed Mindset' blindspots (see Carol Dweck's Mindset) can and do help us to change our approach to change. Building happiness through low-effort, high impact activities such as Yale University's (free and online) Science of Wellbeing Course gives us the tools of positive psychology to help.
4. Learn Through Doing: This is the essence of Being Change. But simply thrusting people at anything, from back to normal, to new normal, to no normal, without making them change ready, is a recipe for fear, unhappiness and dampened organisational responsiveness. You may identify some teams are ready to go straight to this step. Game-on for them . But they are in the minority. So for the rest, ensure steps 1-3 are conducted, then start your newly responsive-ready people on small, relatively low risk, test-and-learn projects with very small teams (5 works well).

Applied at scale you have tools to make your people, and with them the organisation, much more responsive.

Learned personal antifragility - if you've got it, share it

Many people you know are struggling with the rate of change coming at them through this latest series of Context Shocks (triggered by COVID-19). Some look at every experience as a learning experience - something to benefit from. Others see things to fear.

In the same way as organisations must become more responsive - more antifragile when shocks strike - so must we as individuals.

But how do we acquire the antifragile mindset if not blessed with it?
Consider the positions in positive psychology best-seller Mindset (by Carol Dweck). In Mindset we are introduced to the Fixed and Growth Mindsets.

The book offers ways to both recognise your Mindset and change it.

The Science of Wellbeing course offered online and free by Yale University is another route to changing your world-view to increase your happiness (and likely what you regard as success...).

But who reads these books and who completes these courses? I suspect open thinkers, those with a positive hunger for learning, seek these things out. There's a very positive feedback loop in play.

In discussing this with my buddy Rory Yates we wondered if one of the great advantages we had in this regard was that we were both early-in on the internet revolution.

The internet - and more specifically the measurement of web properties, offered us something that wasn't available before: really rapid feedback loops. You made a minor change - you got results in the form of clicks, visits, impressions, pretty much in real time. We had grown up playing computer games - and that, too, helped our understanding of trial and error at pace.

Importantly, for those of us fiddling around with this stuff as the internet took off, we could pretty much do no wrong. The growth of online audiences was exponential so the worst you could do was badly by comparison with others. Initially, hardly anyone cared what others did, they were wrapped up in how well they were doing. The point of this is we got positive feedback loops for almost every experiment we tried. Every learning experience was a good one!

That gave us the psychological armour to handle the tougher times ahead. But what we also learned was to approach things in a rapid, incremental, small, a/b testing, ultimately agile way. This involved giving decision-making control to those implementing and measuring - on the customer interactive edge.

This also led us to another significant understanding: When the consequence of getting things wrong is low (risk is low) experimentation should be high: The upside is considerably greater than the downside. Smart CEOs manage their businesses through this lens. See Unilever's sudden relaxation, allowing itself to become a more Responsive Organisation.

We learned this in the entrepreneurial spirit of start-ups, and MVPs, and multivariate testing.

If your experiences have been at all similar to mine and/or Rory's, you have a lot of advantages in preparing you to handle shocks with a personal antifragility - perhaps best summarised by the Growth Mindset.

It's up to us to use our positive outlooks to help others reframe the things they fear as the things they can learn from. And if we can get them to read a book and do the excercises of the Yale course, too - they'll need us less next time around.

Is furlough a glimpse of a bot-powered economy?

The Context Shock of Covid-19 is forcing underlying trends to the surface at unprecedented rates. We aren't experiencing anything that wasn't going to happen anyway - we are experiencing it faster.

Political economist Orit Gal points out: "complexity theory teaches us that major events are the manifestation of maturing and converging underlying trends: they reflect change that has already occurred within the system."

This means going 'back to normal' is a mistake. As is failing to become more responsive.

I have detailed two of these trends in distributed working, and the responsive organisation (and it can be argued distributed working is nested in and part of the trend towards the responsive organisation).

I have also documented the trend towards treating our planet as a partner, in the way we have become good at treating our customers with respect - in the concept of Planet Experience.

There are, naturally, others. The trend towards a cashless society, for example, away from traditional education (by subject and as a mass production model), for another.

I want to raise some questions about the acceleration of a significant and immediate additional trend today, because its second and third order consequences will have extreme impact on our economic model: Automation. 

As companies survey the challenges facing them over the next 12-18 months they will seek to cut costs both by scaling back on their office needs (distributed working) but also by automating everything they can. If any aspect of your job can be automated and the business you are working for is looking to survive, what it will spend on, is in ways of saving money. And it's undeniable that bots usually look like a short term win in this respect.

We can argue about the harm caused by the loss of smarts from carving people out of a business. The brighter organisations will use bots to lift and shift the bits of people's working lives that don't require creativity and imagination - so that that the people are free to create value by being more creative and imaginative. But that's looking on the bright side.

We are in a darkened world of raised drawbridges, of panic and protectionism. Fear will drive many, many struggling businesses to simply take the savings and worry about the consequences later.

Those consequences will include large scale unemployment. And for many people, pivoting to being an RPA expert (for example) will, realistically, be out of reach.

What this leads us to is the acceleration of a further underlying trend - perhaps towards some version of the Universal Basic Income. Covid-19 has given us an accelerated glimpse of that future through schemes such as the UK Government's Furlough policy. Touted as a job retention scheme on the assumption things get better again fast, coupled with the lock-down experience, it may prove a leading indicator of life after large scale automation. A taste of things to come.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with bots taking peoples jobs. The challenges are in how we judge what constitutes a positive contribution to the society we live in and the ecosystem on which we rely.

If you enjoy time in the sun, exercising, learning, baking, creating art, music, craft, and in time, spending time with friends and family - doing the things you 'enjoy' more of the time than the things that are recognised as making an economic contribution (ie working), then perhaps we should formally value the enjoyable stuff as highly as we do the 'economically valuable' stuff.

But how? How do we get paid if the bots are doing our jobs? 

Stephen Hawkins last message on the web gave us a clue. He said the problem wasn't the bots, it was capitalism - at least the form of market-first capitalism dominant today. Bots are bad if they mean the economic value they create /displace comes back to fewer and fewer owners of this new means of production. Bots are fine if the value they create is more equally distributed to the benefit of both society and planet.

Taxing bots has been suggested to tackle this in the short term, with the tax raised being available to spend on positive interventions for society. Which could include a Universal Basic Income and investment in a happier, healthier society and planet.

This trend demands something important of us - our understanding of our own value, and of what we call success. We will need to start prioritising happiness over stores of wealth.

Is that all bad?



Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

A chance to catch up on Leadership Through and Beyond the Crisis: Panel 4

How to Respond to Context Shocks: Mapping the Consequences

Recognising and responding to Context Shocks is a keystone for the Responsive Organisation.
The lessons taught by response to one, lays the groundwork for preparing for many.

In my recent series of articles and blogposts I have outlined:

• What Context Shocks are (a significant change in the context in which your customers/end users/employees experience their lives). 
• How To Recognise Them: (Two from: Timeframe; Location; Culture; Events).
• How to Respond to Them: (Map The 1st/2nd/3rd Order Consequences; Identify the New Needs; Iterate to value products vs those needs).

I have also outlined how the organisation can benefit from Context Shocks - by making no assumptions about a normal, old or new, they should struggle to return to - instead moving towards the emerging needs of its customers ( a world of No Normal).

Today I want to add a next step in the journey to becoming more responsive - providing the next level of detail in the 'How' of this journey.

MAPPING CONSEQUENCES

Mapping Consequences is the way in which we map the 1st/2nd/3rd order consequences.

I'm suggesting taking a systems approach - an ecosystem of the possible outcomes and their impact, one on another, drawing from systems thinking found in studying the ecosystems of the natural environment.

So building on the first slide shown above (and detailed in 10 Things I've Learned in 20 Years of Digital And Change): (please do click the image to enlarge).

In the slide immediately above, note the emphasis on weak signals - for example an increase in google searches for something related (in this case). 

It is equally important to emphasise that each consequence is itself a new experience context (from 2nd onwards).

We literally draw lines into the future based on our expectations of how human need will change within the new set of constraints each new consequence defines. Examples: If offices close, can we, in this new context, imagine a human need to go to the same streets we used to work in to buy sandwiches? Can we imagine homes replacing offices as offices replaced factories?

The connectors - shown above - of the Mapping Consequences ecosystem above - express consequence, the next bubble they connect to, an imagined new context.

And as in any system, expect feedback loops to apply; eg longer lock-down, greater impact on consquences (with impact on constraints) which impact wellbeing. 

This approach not only steers the Responsive Organisation toward meeting new need, it also emphasises respect for insights drawn from in-context experience.

To look ahead for the direction of consequences and the potential new contexts, we must apply imagination. We can look to the weak signals shared by others in the system to guide our imagination but we must always validate the conclusions we draw by accessing the imagination of larger numbers of people experiencing the system.

Further Reading:

1. The Responsive Organisation is Built To Flourish Amid Context Shocks

2. Lock-Down creates the fastest shifts in context we have ever seen.

3. The Greatest Opportunity of our life times - To Create A New Better

4. Lessons in Resilience Any Time-Served Motorcyclist Can Teach.

5. The New Better of Work: Virtualising the best of office and home.

6. The Language of Lock-Down Is Holding Us Back

7. The Future of Work is Distributed across Time, Space & Leadership

8. Urgent Transformation? Dump The Strategy and Get On With It

9. Urgency Makes Everyone An Innovator - And Changes the Organisation

10. In Stressed Environments Speed of Adaption is Key Survival Indicator

Two decades of lessons learned in digital and change

Context Shocks catch us out. The best we can hope for is to get good at reading the weak signals that can indicate significant change is about to happen to us. But even if we can get better at prediction (and we can), we also have to get better at delivering the upside in the shock we predict.

The Responsive Organisation, elements of which I have been outlining over the past several blogposts and Linkedin articles, leans heavily on lessons learned in digital, transformation and change over two decades. It is how we can get better at aligning with need, at speed, generating positive benefits at all times and handling the Context Shocks we are learning to live with.

A quick summary:
1. Value without Insight is like the tides without the moon.
2. You can't be an expert in the new - but you can learn emerging practices from probing it.
3. Exploring the new means accepting ambiguity, expecting complexity.
4. Behaviours aren't 'driven' in complex environments (that would demand clarity of cause and effect, which can't be discerned in complexity) - but we can modulate them - encouraging the positive.
5. Flatter, distributed leadership = faster, more accurate match with need.
6. Work small - compact, insight-led, value-focused, decision-making, cross-functional, distributed product teams, tackling rapid and incremental bite-sized activities.
7. Productise what works as fast as you can - scaling your abilty to respond with value.

I have witnessed and worked on digital change and transformation programs, good and bad. I've learned ways around silos and how to unlock them, how to inspire, excite and persuade, how and why so many change programs and so many 'innovations' fail (for very similar reasons, it turns out). I've learned to recognise complexity is not the same as things being complicated - and that best practice is a great way to do things that may have worked for others, and in the past.

I have learned to adapt - and learned to apply approaches which recognise the challenges of operating in an always-on ambiguity - made even more apparent by the repeated Context Shocks of Covid-19.

The Responsive Organisation recognises both the nature of change and the environment in which that change is happening. It synthesises elements from Design Thinking, Lean Start-up, Agile, Antifragility, Situational Analysis and (Dave Snowden's) Cynefin framework.

It creates an organisation more able to handle, and thrive amid, the unpredictability and ambiguity - more ready to identify, learn from, and respond to, the emerging needs of people to create value that matters to customers and employees.

It must of necessity, be nuanced in order to make sense of the complex environments we increasingly find ourselves learning in. Traditional models of change fail in these environments - anchored as they often are to the milestones, project plans and 'best practices' best left in the Ordered or Complicated, unambiguous world's we have said farewell to.

But despite the complexity of the environments, I want to try to keep the language and the concepts as accessible as possible. The tools must be for everyone.

To that end I am adding an additional building block today - a simple (I hope) guide to recognising the next Context Shock to hit us, and the steps required to move positively towards the emerging needs to create value.

For context, and additional insight and frameworks, the reader may like to explore these recent articles and blogposts:
1. The Responsive Organisation is Built To Flouris Amid Context Shocks
2. Lock-Down creates the fastest shifts in context we have ever seen.
3. The Greatest Opportunity of our life times - To Create A New Better
4. Lessons in Resilience Any Time-Served Motorcyclist Can Teach.
5. The New Better of Work: Virtualising the best of office and home.
6. The Language of Lock-Down Is Holding Us Back
7. The Future of Work is Distributed across Time, Space & Leadership
8. Urgent Transformation? Dump The Strategy and Get On With It
9. Urgency Makes Everyone An Innovator - And Changes the Organisation
10. In Stressed Environments Speed of Adaption is Key Survival Indicator


Photo by Stephen Isaiah on Unsplash

Moving positively towards the needs emerging from Context Shock

Click to enlarge

Change has become the constant. That 'what comes next is unknown,' is the only known.

No organisation should rush to start the desperate clamber back to their 'new', but diminished, normal in the face of this reality.

In your rush, you may miss the fact that the context of your customers' needs - and those of your employees' - has radically altered. In your rush you may learn very quickly how to do things you've never had to do before (eg how MS Teams works, how to run a workshop online, how to recruit - and layoff - people when you can't be face-to-face etc).

In your rush, you may well scramble back to an approximation of your old normal. But, if you haven't invested in making your organisation more responsive, this new normal will be diminished and set for further decline.
When the next Context Shock comes... you won't be any better placed to do anything other than rinse and repeat your routine of decline.

Crucially, when the next Context Shock comes (and they are coming thick and fast right now) you won't be any better placed to do anything other than rinse and repeat your routine of decline.

Whose problem does this solve?

The smarter alternative is to start building an organisation that benefits from shock. It benefits because it is designed to understand the context of the shock and its impact on the needs of its customers - and to do so at pace. When a Context Shock strikes customers' priorities change. New needs emerge. If you don't keep pace with that, you go into decline.

One straightforward example: When the sale of business formal wear falls through the floor, the less responsive suit seller tries tempting the same customers with a new lower price point. It thinks its problem is its glut of supply.

The responsive org understands the context shock has changed its customers needs. The responsive org thinks its problem is in not having enough information about those new needs. So it gathers insight and builds a response to test vs customer need, at speed.

This is where product-focused, cross-functional, distributed (time, space, leadership) teams are required to generate a rapid, test-measure-learn (probe-sense-respond) responses to the new need.

In our example the responsive organisation starts making and selling sport and leisure wear - if that's what the new context of their customers lives shows them is a demand to be met.
The responsive organisation solves its problems by solving those of its customers.

The responsive organisation has little interest in going back to normal. If the context of its customers and employees lives have changed, then so must it.

It gathers insight on the emerging employee needs the Context Shock has created for its people. It responds to these with a New Better to maintain its competitive edge in the labour market.

It builds a New Better for itself, its customers and its people.

There is much inspiration from antifragility in the Responsive Organisation. For example, the notion of Context Shock (included in this article) attempts to humanise Black Swan change factors. Context Shock thinks of these from the point of view of 2nd and 3rd order consequences for the lives of customers and employees. The Responsive Org seeks rapid insight into these and works to address the needs emerging.

The Responsive Organisation moves positively towards Needs of People rather thinking first of its own 'Need' to repair the 'negative impact of the Context Shock on its 'Normal'.

And crucially, it is ready to continue scaling the New Better with each new Context Shock. There is no end date to the programme - the learning is permanent and hands-on.

The Responsive Org - led by insight, always driving to value and working in distributed teams with distributed leadership - has long been a smart way to design. Its ability to make the impact of Context Shocks positive makes it a wiser way forward than ever.

First steps are easy and relatively low cost. Compared with the alternative, they are the bargain of the century.

Solve your customers problems to solve yours

To solve your business problems all you need to do is just two things:
Solve your customers' problems.
Solve your employees' problems.

All too often, we think the first problem we should prioritise is one of our own:
We have stock to off-load,
We have too much/too little capacity,
We have too little supply. (etc)

All these roads lead to too little cash and looming bills.

You can make all these problems go away by solving your customer's problems and solving your employee's problems. We know this to be true. The problems we end up with (see above) are mostly caused by is failing to gather insight at speed, failing to respond towards employee/customer value and/or failing to respond fast enough.

So, equipping yourself to gather insight, react with value for the end user and respond at the speed of rapidly shifting context, is what pays the bills. Always has been. But the pace at which we must respond has been increasing steadily through successive technology revolutions as information spreads faster and contexts shift.

Today the pace is greater than any of us has ever witnessed.
Lock-down rules, as they tighten or loosen, create instant new contexts against which customer and employee need must be reinterpreted. Today is different from yesterday. Tomorrow could be more so. Now is the time to remodel for faster and more accurate response to change.

Two models offer instant support:

1 Respond at Speed to Customer Need: Rapid Iterative Solution Development

With a smart and repeatable approach to access to actionable insight, clarity of constraints, a real discipline around what constitutes the minimum viable product, authority delegated into the solutions team and supported with appropriate process and tools, you can keep pace with the craziest of schedules. Crucially, working in this approach can be achieved by teams working across both distributed time and space.
2. Respond at Speed to Employee Need: Rapid Route To Better Working


The context of our work changed massively with lock-down. For some, work became impossible. But office and information workers have embarked on an accelerated journey toward distributed working, from which there is no coming back.

Some are simply making do with the tech, processes and leadership of the central office model left in place. And in failing to respond to the employee needs emerging from each new context, they create additional problems for themselves - those of employee capacity and supply in the new better in which they must now compete.

Solve your customers problems, solve your employees problems. They will solve yours.

Lessons in resilience from retired motorcyclists

Any motorcyclist who spends a good length of time in the saddle learns a lot about resilience. Most have an accident or two early on in their riding careers. With luck those accidents are minor enough to bounce back from, to take the lessons learned into how they ride into a long future.
Their first response may be to buy a better set of leathers, a higher quality crash helmet. But those are just symbols of safety (more often symbols of status, if truth be told). This kind of after-the-event protection is classic rear-view-mirror strategy - a too-late response to something that already happened.
The more important response is to build on the experience they have had, learn from it, perhaps seek out training, to give themselves more capacity to cope with the next random shock. This is classic forward-looking strategy.
They do so in a way that allows them to continue to move at pace - but with a greater capacity to recognise - and respond - to risk. Sounds useful today, right?

They learn:

• Read the road ahead. The further ahead you look, the faster you can go in (relative) safety. You will spot the hints about the direction the road is about to take (tree lines, power lines, signage, street lamps etc) and the bumps (literally, in it). The better you get at knowing what to look for, the better you will be prepared for what comes next.
• Use the whole road available to you: Within the constraints available, go right out to the gutter to get the best view around the next corner, preparing you to accelerate through the turn as you see the road open up. As the view opens up, you open the throttle.
• Acknowledge and compensate for your blind spots. Watch a biker regularly turn their head to ensure they are constantly gathering information. The 'life-saver' head-turn before a manoeuvre is a constant reminder of the blind spots we all have and the information-gathering from 'unexpected' sources we should consider to cover them - all the time.
• Don't target fixate: Once you recognise the risk you need to look away from it to swerve around it. Focusing on the pothole means you hit the pothole. So look for the smoother road you actually want to be on in to ensure you continuing making progress.
• Sometimes it's smarter to cross the lines: It's not part of Police System Advanced Motorcycle riding today, but when I was taught, the broken white lines down the centre of the road were simply 'hazard warning lines'. You were at liberty to cross them at any time to give yourself a better view. Be prepared to go where others don't.
• Ride defensively: Riding defensively is about recognising risk and taking appropriate action in response. Riding at speed is never without risk, but in your recognition of risk and your actions to ameliorate, you make yourself a lot less exposed to what may seem like the random acts of other road users. Examples: Car driver's not seeing you, pulling out of junctions, driveways, from the side of the road etc, as if you weren't there. The defensive rider reads the road ahead and, where there is a risk situation ahead, uses the full-width of the road to increase their distance from that risk and or slows a little to allow a little more time in which to respond.

Steve Jobs was a motorcyclist.

Photo by Harley-Davidson on Unsplash

Leadership Beyond The Crisis: Preview Video

Add the benefits of the workplace to those of distributed working

The post I published on Friday (May 1, 2020) prompted great conversations and questions which will help us build the benefits of the workplace into the distributed way of working we are experiencing now and seek to improve. Today, I'm asking for your help to take the next step on this journey.

In The Language of Lock-down is holding us back, I argued there was a risk of adding cost and cutting productivity in 'going back' to normal. Going back to the office, to the torturous commute - ramps up a heap of costs and negative impacts for us and our planet.

But - as pointed out by contributors to the Lock-Down discussion, there are benefits to office life: practical, social, creative, career, psychological, etc

What we need are solutions that enable us to distribute work across time/space/leadership but which acknowledge and seek to replicate, the benefits of being together in time and space and under traditional centralised leadership.

The first step is to capture those benefits:

I will start here - and build as your contributions (through comments/ other feedback) allow me to build it out. The intention is, as we near a complete list, to take each and either identify the counter from the positives of distributed work - or identify the need for a solution to be added to provisions for distributed work.

Benefits of the office:
Practical:
1. Economies of scale
2. Work stations
3. Meeting rooms
4. Power,
5. Technology (and internet access)

Social:
1. Time face-to-face with colleagues
2. Fun and laughter with colleagues
3. Relaxed lunches and after-work drinks
4. Build intimacy with peers
5. Build trust with peers, prospects and clients

Psychological:
1. Space to focus in without interruption
2. Escape from pressures and concerns of home life
3. Compartmentalise your life
4. Clarity of direction - set by centralised leadership

Creativity:
1. Opportunity to share, compare and collide ideas informally and very regularly
2. Spaces designed specifically for open ideation/ concept development
3. The water-cooler

Career Development:
1. Opportunity to be seen to be performing by bosses
2. Out of sight - out of mind: Physical proximity tends to positive bias at promotion time

Benefits of the commute:
1. Your time: Opportunity to disconnect - simply read, think, or listen to music etc
2. Fitness - you tend to walk more
3. Motivates early start to your day

Back to normal - or forward to a better world?

The language of lock-down is preventing progress in economically and environmentally damaging ways.
When we talk about 'getting back to normal' we skew the conversation towards returning to a pre-crisis status quo that was both inefficient and ineffective.
When we talk about lock-down, we fool ourselves that we are less free now than we were before. But that's not true, is it?
Certainly not in the service sector which makes up 81% of economic output and 84% of UK jobs. We were locked-down in an unproductive, high-cost, low-benefit, presenteeist, shiney-edifice office culture.
UK productivity is (on average) around 16% lower per person than our G7 competitors (we are 27% behind the US...).  Is it coincidence that we have Europe's longest commute times (an average of 1.5 hours a day, rising to 2 hours for London). Turning up is not effective.
And commuting is not fun. It means we often don't get enough sleep, we have additional stress at both ends of the day, we have increased personal costs, our free time is massively reduced. Our choices constrained and our environment damaged.
How free is that? How much are you looking forward to going back to that?
The smart and progressive thing to do is respond to what you have learned about how to work these past few weeks. Already Barclays are concluding big offices may be a thing of the past. They have a network of branches which they plan on repurposing to enable their Canary Wharf workers to change their lives for the better by working closer to home.
That's just one of the dimensions of distribution required in a new and better way of working I raised yesterday - The Space one. In itself it will force acceleration of distribution along the other dimensions - of Leadership and of Time.
The language - used by UK Government and other small 'c' conservatives - is always about returning to the past. This is not only backward-thinking - it is high risk.
It is high risk because going back risks going backwards to all the high cost of maintaining large offices, the impact on productivity of soul-sapping, stress-laden, time-claiming commutes, the business costs of running huge buildings to park people's butts in.
The old ways of working in the old places of working are less productive, less flexible, less resilient, less responsive, a psychological drag on our creativity and leave less space for our well being across the board.
Why plan to add all that to the cost already sustained from COVID-19? That's one risk you could - and should - avoid.

I am grateful to my friend - the very visionary Rory Yates - for the conversation that inspired this post.

Image via (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/commuting-is-as-stressful-as-moving-house-survey-of-european-cities-finds-10210051.html)