Culture and identify in the new future of work

Preparing for the new context of the Future of Work goes beyond the challenge of managing our connections and enabling old processes.

In previous discussions I have identified the limitations of Covid19 innovation to date in this space: A backlog clearing exercise in which the old 'important but not urgent' list suddenly became tagged 'urgent' too: A huge outpouring of effort to build what our experience of old contexts had suggested we need.

The context changed with Covid19 - making distributed working THE way of working among those ordinarily housed in offices. The 'go' button was hit - and hit hard - on tools to deliver productivity in quite traditional processes.

Now the context has changed again. Now it's not a matter of making the best, to patch up a response to muddle us through until we could go back to normal. Now there is the realisation that this new context is here to stay.

Sustained, distributed working comes with a new set of challenges to overcome.

One is cultural.

Where does culture reside when the office is shut? If I think of this from a network perspective, culture is an emergent property of the interactions within the network. The interaction, rather than the position of the nodes (and certainly not the physical position of the nodes) is the primary driver. 

How we enable those interactions has the biggest impact on culture not where we choose to work. With distributed working culture risks being diluted across space and time - and potentially by disconnected leadership.

If an interaction is planned, formal, one-way, hierarchical etc, the culture will reflect all of these.

If the interaction is adhoc, informal, two-way, flattened etc, a different culture is likely to emerge.

The current tools at our disposal tend to the former (I'm very open to hearing alternative views on this) and given the urgenct need to enable somewhat more open, flat, innovative ways of working to handle extremes of ambiguity, it is time to get out of 'backlog' mode and design towards the needs of this new context.

Another relates to our identity

What of the nodes - the people - you and I?

The way in which we, very social, naturally co-operative humans, handle our new distributed - increasingly isolated - paradigm is critical.

How can our digital tools and processes map to key human needs essential to our identities - such as:

1. Our sense of autonomy. When lockdown very clearly constrains our freedom, our sense of control over our own lives and our ability to choose, our technologies - and how we design our use of them, must seek to restore these elements. The paralysing communication defect of slide presentations devoid of anything more than a voice over - and little sense of audience feedback - is one example where design is yet to catch up with the needs of the new context. We need our audience to respond to us, we need to see their smiles and nods. And if the bandwidth can't cope, we have to virtualise a proxy.

2. Our sense of relatedness. Social distancing is breaking down how much we feel others may care about us. This is an area in which distributed and diluted leadership is having a negative impact. And it's a two-way street. Can we become comfortable signalling our need for a little TLC via digital means? Face to face an empathetic leader creates some of their greatest impact by recognising this and responding to what they recognise. Tools that alert and inform, perhaps even via automated emotion tracking in facial and written comms, could help. But be warned - appointing a minister of fun or similar happiness monitor is unlikely to get the result you seek. Happiness is most often an emergent quality of a well-performing team. Delivering more effective tools to collaborate will drive greater team cohesion (and therefore more sense of care about each other) than any amount of time-boxed merry making.

3. Our sense of competence. In times of huge ambiguity, acknowledging and rewarding all learning experiences can help us feel this sense of achievement. Tools reflecting the small, achievable goals in agile, desops and devops should be considered for broader use across rapid, iterative, MVP-disciplined ways of working. Master what is in front of you. Learn what needs to be learned to solve this task.

Tools and processes reflecting these three areas (psychologist call it the ARC of happiness) can help secure a positive sense of identity at a time when our identity is under significant threat from the ending of the work/home divide. 

In order to sustain creativity, the level of cultural connect that makes a collection of people more than the sum of its parts, our design of the Future of Work must be informed by a reality which now looks set to be with us for years rather than months.

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The economy's job is to create a safe and just space for us!

Every time a politician or newscaster refers to 'our' need to save the economy an alarm bell rings in my head. It should in yours, too.

The role of the economy is to prioritise the creation of a safe and just space for humanity.

It's not to deliver GDP or shareholder value. They follow.

If you follow the wrong kpis, you behave the wrong way. The UK's Johnson government is not alone in getting this wrong. It's a global narrative which has grown with the adoption of GDP as a measure of success. A, literally, toxic measure for the planet. Your people can be dieing early from pollution with close correlation to GDP rising, for example. Hardly a wise relationship between resource and need.

As we continue to hurtle headlong through what the UN decribes as The Decisive Decade we have to reclaim this narrative in order to re-establish the correct order or things (expressed in diagram form, here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/never-all-economy-stupid-david-cushman/.

As identified in Doughnut Economics and enshrined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals,

Our role isn't to save the economy. It's the economy's job to create a safe and just space for us!

The stories we tell, the language we use, it has deep power to shape the way we think, respond and behave. I am hopeful that it has the power to transform how we see our relationship with the ecosystem we reside in, too.

So let's start challenging our politicians and our media each time we hear them use the language of subservience to the economy.  It is not your master, we are its. It only exists to do our bidding - to allocate resources as effectively as possible to create a safe and just space for us.

The 'economy' is what emerges from all the interactions of resource and humans. We can shape towards more positive (safe and just) outcomes for us only when we realise our ownership of it and take back control.

That starts with shifting our point of view, changing the way we talk about success, encouraging new measures of success aligned to the unveiled reality that we are the masters of the economy and we control it to do our bidding.

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Sustainability by design in product, service and experience

Sustainability has long been tracked and traced in supply chain. There has been some good work in business process, too. But, to date, there has been little focus on building it into our product, service and experience life cycles.

My perspective as a customer-focused, digital insight-to-value innovation expert, has informed my development of the Planet Experience (PX) framework. The framework acknowledges the importance of providing end-user value for the planet, in the same way that Customer Experience (CX) has been the focus of all successful digital innovation, business models and transformations of the last 20 years.

PX elevates the status of the planet in our sustainable success - just as CX elevated the status of customers. No longer is the planet something to exploit, it is something to build a relationship of mutual benefit with. Through the PX filter it is something to purposefully design a relationship of mutual benefit with.

In order to deliver great CX we have to have great data about customer needs in the context of their lives: Insight. Feeding this in, at every iteration - testing what we are making for the end user, with the end user - is as sure a route to success as we can hope for.

Coupled with the typical market, business and technical constraints of desirability, viability and feasibility, we have a framework for value innovation.

Now we must find the equivalent for delivering great PX.

Viability and feasibility are adjusted by focus on PX. But what are they, and desirability, informed by? Where do we get our PX insight. And how do we make the acquisition of that PX insight affordable and fast enough to keep pace with rapid iterative product/service/experience development life cycles?

Of course, the voice of the customer - the CX data - is a strong indicator of what they will find acceptable vs what you plan to do for/with/to the planet. And it will be an important validation point which can be included in the kind of anthropological research conducted to great effect with platforms such as UserTribe.

In addition we must now add a way of answering the business questions about impact on the planet with data that goes beyond the human response - accessing the potential risk too/ impact on/ benefits for the ecosystem. 

For this we must access scientific expertise/research - delivered in the bite-sized time frames of agile and rapid iterative product life cycles - and framed in direct response to the relevant business-impact questions. That is, we must provide the business interface to the scientific expertise.

This is precisely where we have now reached with Planet Experience. The concept is in place and we are ready to test with pioneering prospective clients.

If you and your business are ready to lead the way in building sustainability into your products, services and experiences - placing PX on the same pedestal you would CX - step forward and be ready to lead.

Analysis by PwC in 2018 showed while 72% of companies mention the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their annual reporting, only 27%, to date, include them in their business strategy. What that says is that they value sustainability - but struggle to make it part of their business as usual.

PX and PX Insight is a way to build planet positivity into everything you  make and do - with these key business benefits:

1. In acting fast - being proactive - you gain market leadership and get ahead of legislation.
2. You attract and retain customers, talent, investment.
3. Drive creative innovation.
4. Reduce risk to supply chain.
5. Cut energy costs.
6. Cut raw materials costs.
7. Cut water costs.
8. Cut waste disposal costs.
9. Savings fund transformation costs.
10. Sustains the eco-system in which you wish to seek to continue to generate profits.

Explore PX here.

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The high price of low cost hires

Forbes' recent article on ageism in the jobs market triggered recognition among over 45s (hands up). And trepidation among those approaching the big 4-oh.

But I think a lot of that reaction is confirmation bias. If you've been seeking a new role in this toughest of times, the anecdotes of the Forbes article - and of many folks experiences - confirm the age paranoia that besets a society which often appears to bow to the alter of youth.

But I want to offer a little reassurance and a little less fatalism.

Let's consider where we are. In simple terms the jobs market can be split into three broad parts.

1. Those that make things. 

    In the digital realm I have made my career in, that's the coders and engineers.

2. Those that work out what we should make. 

    Call that strategy and innovation. Product, service and experience design.

3. Those that sell the things that have been made. 

    Sales teams of every hue, from BDMs to consultative client partners.

As I outlined in The Great Backlog Clearance - many a panicked organisation has been caught with its pants down by Covid-19. Finally waking to the urgency of digital transformation, the first thing they have done is got on with the seriously overdue and overlong to-do list they have built up in back-log over a decade or more. 

They know what they want to make. So they need people to make it.

If they were smart they would revalidate desirability, feasibility and viability with the strategy and innovation folk. But many have just 'gone-for-it!'. 

This 'making it' market is mostly served by younger people. Get good at coding or engineering and (way too often) you get promoted into the kind of VP roles that move you out of doing and into thinking. And in the current climate - priced out of a job.

Those in the third part of my break-down, the sellers, they are in demand. They will be in increasing demand. Mostly because when you just crack through your backlog without engaging the strategy and innovation folk, you end up making things people don't want. That gets increasingly hard to sell. The first response is to throw more money at the sell-it part. In time this fails too - and we will see a return to demand for the strategy and innovation folks.

The sales roles are often seen as for the under 45s, too. But there are sales roles in which experience, subject matter expertise and the connections of a lifetime in the world of work, really do count. I'm talking consultative selling. Selling big ideas to bigco.

And these thoughts about the value of experience suggest that instead of seeing our age as a barrier to winning that next role, we should position it as a value proposition. Borrowing from Marcus Aurelius, what is in the way, becomes the way.

So if your age is the barrier (and forgiving that legally, it cannot be) - make it a value proposition. Your age is a powerful thing:

Other companies have had to invest millions of dollars/pounds/euros in creating the person you are today. They invested to enable your experience, skills, extensive network of valuable connections, resilience - and wisdom. 

Now A.N Other business can acquire all that for a fraction of the money previously invested in you. They even get to pay for it in monthly instalments!

Over 45s are an absolute bargain: They (ok, we) represent an acquisition opportunity it would be foolhardy to pass over in favour of a 'cheaper' investment.

There is a reason newer job market entrants cost less to acquire.

I can't leave without resharing this: (3 professional footballers vs 100 kids).

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

The Great Backlog clearance. Building stuff people used to need.

We are in the midst of the Great Backlog Clearance. Innovating backwards.

Granted - there is some smart, future-creating innovation being driven in pockets, but the majority of commercial activity right now has defaulted to a realisation that all that stuff we had been happy adding to backlogs, feeling in the rush of pre-Covid BAU that it could wait, we now realise is an urgent must have.

We've been generating quite a long-list for several years. Now a lot of organisations are hurtling head-long through their to-dos in a game of digital catch-up.

Hence the market demand for people who can make the stuff on that to-do list. Coders, engineers. Nuts and bolts folk. Of course, as the backlog becomes the product to ship, you then need folk to sell it. Hence the current demand for people to sell stuff you've made.

So - people who make the stuff you are in a dash to catch up with. People to sell stuff when you make it.

When you are clearing the backlog, what you don't need is people to tell you what needs to be made. There's so much to do, already, right?

Hence the lack of demand in the insight-to-innovate space.

While this may feel like the appropriate response to difficult economic circumstances, it is, instead, a short-cut to mid-term decline. Dealing with the backlog is dealing with past demand, generated in the context of a different (pre-Covid) world. One which is changed for a minimum of three years and perhaps forever.

You are building responses based on invalid insight. You are innovating backwards. You are building things people used to want. That may feel like you are getting stuff done, but it is not serving the new needs of the new contexts. It is supply to an out-moded demand.

The Responsive Organisation is seeking to build better from change. It is not looking at what it should have done in the old context. It is seeking to understand the new contexts, imagining the experience of its customers in the new, next and possible contexts of the now and next system we are feeling are way through. And it is moving fast to serve those new needs.

It is asking itself, what needs to be made now?

It is enabling the mindset, ways of working, collaborations and commercial approaches, and access to technology, to deliver best-fit solutions for the new and next nows.

So if you are busying yourself building out your pre-Covid backlog - stop. 

Reassess your backlog; revalidate the insight; start from live understanding of need in new contexts, to press the go button on your insight-to-innovate investment. Start responding to now and next.

Lift you head up, look around. You're not in Kansas anymore.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash