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.

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

Why robots are essential to kick-start our next age of innovation

Yamaha's Robot rider could one day end the  chore
of riding fast motorbikes... er, ok it's not all good.

There is an argument - and a well made one at that - that our era is not an age of great technological change - but actually one that is quite stagnant.

Robert J Gordon made the case in his book 'The Rise and Fall of American Growth'. He points out that the Great Inventions that caused real change arrived between 1870 and 1970.

The internal combustion engine changed the way we travel (removing the growing threat of horse manure - which experts predicted would reach 9 feet deep on London's roads by 1950 if allowed to go unchecked). It changed the way we travel much more than any subsequent improvement in performance or styling.

Urban sanitation similarly had a greater impact on our health than medical inventions of more recent years. The invention of the telegraph versus the written message carried by ship, horse and hand which preceded it is a far bigger shift than fax to email or phone to mobile.

The impact was that we got to live (US childhood mortality tumbled from 1/3 in 1860 to 1/200 today), we got to live longer, and we got more time to do with as we pleased (being liberated from household tasks such as washing clothes and preparing meals which had taken 58 hours in 1900 - and 18 in 1970).

Jesse Frederick argues in his assessment of Gordon's ideas that our blindness to the comparative stagnation of the modern era can at least be partially attributed to the fact that the technology of the past mainly created time, whereas today’s technology fills it.

Gordon, published in 2016 - sees this stagnation as permanent. Mostly because the big wins for technology have already been won. But part of the problem is for all our technology we feel as though we have less time. And time is essential for the ideas that make real change.

Enter Robots. the AI revolution and the robotics it is driving are about to answer Jesse's criticism of today's inventions. They are certainly not a technology that fills time, they will create at least 18 hours for us (finishing up the last bits of housework our inventors have failed to resolve so far - ironing, dusting, food prep and cooking, physically moving the devices about etc). The internet of things completes the picture in shopping.

Ok, an 18 hour saving isn't as great as the 40 hour leap that got us here - but this one will come in 5-10 years. The last took 70.

And we haven't even considered the saving in time AI will bring to our working (and commuting) lives. Finally, the time technology promised to free for us will actually arrive.

And yet, even for the slam-dunk win our robot friends will provide, there's an even bigger opportunity for genuine life change: How we organise is changing.

How we organise is society and society is how we live.

As I have long argued; the web enables adhoc self-forming groups to get things done. That's a fundamentally different form of organisation than preferred by 1870-1970. That era was also an era of centralisation and mass production. The next 10 years is about decentralisation and personalisation; whether it be through micro factories in every home (3D printing), the move away from public transport (driverless cars, drones) medical technologies that self diagnose and repair (nanobots) or how we learn, get justice, make contracts and exchange value (blockchain).

We will have the opportunity to live entirely unique, separated lives. But all the evidence of the world since the web is that we will use it to become closer and better connected - without the need for central organisation.

A future without centralised or top-down direction is being enabled through the technologies of this decade and the next. 

Very soon we will have the collective time to carefully consider what our future should look like and imagining how we can reach it - kick-starting the next age of innovation.

And that, when we pause to reflect on the shift from 2010 to 2030, will, I believe, provide us with a case to say we really do live in a time of not just fast, but radical change.

The Distraction Web fades as The Disruption Web rises

Boom. The rate at which new stuff sweeps the web is part of a general acceleration in change provoked by our increasing real-time connectedness. That has resulted in the ever faster emergence of disruptions to industry after industry, business model after business model.

This is the disruption web.

But it has also driven a culture of overnight sensation - Internet 'hits'. The potentially good news is that the life-span of such hits appears to be getting shorter and shorter.

Grow fast, die fast.

Draw Something - the IPhone app a bit like pictionary that sold within weeks of launch to Zynga - is a good recent example. After initial intense use its faded into the background for the vast majority of users.
Why this may be good news is that it could be evidence of our collective tiring of the initial Lolcats (distraction web) phase of the web and a move towards us taking more seriously our individual ability to be part of the disruption web.

Perhaps we are now starting to seek something more, something that matters from our connectedness?
Information alone isn't power. It is the inspiration for the action that delivers the things that matter. The action is organisation. The web enables more of us to self organise to act - to be part of the change that matters to us - than has ever been possible before. Power resides in the ability to organise.

That's been the case since the first bulletin boards and has remained the case as waves of the distraction web have come and gone.

The distractions are coming and going faster and faster - becoming more and more disposable.
I draw (something) a line into our immediate future and see a point at which disruption is more Important to more of us than distraction.

And at that point the true value and impact of the web will have arrived.

It's getting closer.

FasterFuture is regularly updated by David Cushman

Related articles

• Are we entering another bubble? (davidgildeh.com)
• Video: Webciety CeBIT keynote: How the web changes the organisation of business (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

We're trying to change the world - not report on it

Some time ago Neil Perkin asked me to contribute some best practice ideas for social media. ( I must be thinking about that because i'm meeting Neil today - and you really should check out his latest post).

My response was 'best practice being human'.

I've been thinking about the skill sets required to 'do' social media. Many (though not all, as a quick quiz on Twitter revealed this morning, see image, right) of the people I know who have landed up in social media come from a media background one way or another - pr,  advertising and journalism.

But of course the key skills required are not the abilty to craft a good piece of content.

We're trying to change the world here, not report on it.

Look at what's going in in Iran. All the fabulous social media activity Is NOT for our passive consumption, our entertainment. It is individuals using the tools to express what matters to them - and through this to organise without and around those who would control from the centre.

A BBC correspondent prophesised, as the post-election fury uncovered in Iran, that there would be no coup.

"You can't have a revolution without proper organisation", he opined.

If he meant without 'from the top' organisation he was and is, wrong.

Humans organise to do things. Things they share a belief in achieving.  Always have. Now they have tools to do this more rapidly and effectively. And they don't wait for permission from the boss.

The ability to use these tools is an important tactical skill for anyone right now. Understanding the value of real-time self-forming communities of purpose is the more strategic requirement.

Because bringing people together to build stuff they care about is the most important part of this thing we call social media (and it ain't social media if it don't change your organisation!)

How much has that got to do with creating content?

How much has it got to do with media at all?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Alex Wood: What does the #IranElection Twitter trend tell us? (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• Community, by the community (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

Hillary reveals who she's speaking to...

Not that it's anything to do with me but... interesting to note that Hillary Clinton accuses Barack Obama of 'Change you can Xerox' (as in, he's nicking other people's ideas... speeches even).

Not very Net Generation is it? Surely that should be 'Change you can copy and paste'?

Can IT geeks become revolutionary?

If you work in an office every day, using any kind of PC or Mac, you've probably got a working relationship with an IT dept. And some days they'll fix things, some days they'll stop you doing things, and some days you can imagine them just sat there reading your emails...

Well, there is a way that the IT dept could help change your company to actually encourage creativity, growth and more money...Want to know the secret? Let me explain...