Leadership in an age of abundance

Automation transforms the priorities - and therefore the skills required of - the leaders in a new age of abundance.

By offering limitless low-cost labour it provides:

1. Immediate abundance of capacity.

2. Learned abundance of capability.

Before the opportunity to automate - particularly the opportunity to engage ML/AI-infused automation - successful management was all about control and direction of constrained and relatively fixed capacities and capabilities. These primarily existed in the employee cohort.

Over time this extended to out-sourced cohorts which offered a little more flexibility - but essentially capability and capacity resided in the people you directly or indirectly employed.

The scarcity of labour made the wise and timely allocation of it an essential business skill. That created an entire industry of strategic planning, roadmaps, business case development. HR and logistics to identify the need for new capacities and capabilities and scale up (and down) accordingly.

Pre-digital it was ok to have five-year plans. Digital typically thrust an annual cycle on leaders; the combined effect of the cloud and of globalization has already been to rapidly close any gap a 'strategy' may initially provide by way of competitive advantage.

With automation, there is no cycle. Leaders can summon up or switch off entire new swathes of digital workforces in seconds. Enabling this friction-free recruitment and redundancy through the cloud and appropriate pricing models is the near-term competitive battlefield for automation vendors.

And it closes the enablement gap between strategy and execution in ways 20th century leaders could only dream of.

But it also threatens some fundamental relationships between the organization and work. How many times have we heard leaders proclaim 'people are our greatest asset'. Now our leaders command a digital workforce - to both do the grunt work and augment the decision-making and creative delivery of their human teams.

Today's leader must become skilled in directing an automated workforce to deliver on decisions made by a human workforce, augmented and amplified by their digital peers.

Their choices are less about how many people they direct to to do what, and more about carving out the differentiation that informs what data they seek, where from and how it is interpreted for insight.

With so much data available to understand needs and wants, so many systems available to listen-learn-respond to those needs and understand customer contexts, and such limitless low-cost labour to deliver vs those needs in more and more customised configurations, business process operations will be honed  in ever-improving, self-learning and natively automated iterative cycles.

Recognising and assembling the technologies to do this (as described by the OneOffice Emerging TechPlatform) at least places the enterprise on a level playing field with all the others that are smart enough and fast enough to recognise how digital transformation gets out of a strategists head and into the systems of the organisation.

Make no mistake, first-mover does offer an advantage here. The first to set their systems of learning rolling will accelerate their self-improving processes, and get faster and better at doing so - opening a gap that laggards will find hard to close.

But it is in the will to break down silos, in the quality and systemization of change, the emphasis on scaling their organisational digital fluency, and in the selection of a domain to extend expertise in, that competitive differentiation will emerge.

These then are the areas in which tomorrow's leaders must accelerate their skills. Not all come naturally. Selecting the domain comes down to legacy purpose or establishing one. This is where vision and belief come together to encompass both goals and ways of working to attract employees, partners, and customers and to inform and be reflected by the algorithms of the business - as much part of your brand as anything.

This will require a step-change in the embrace of data and insight for decision making, driving process and supporting the employee and customer experience.

Tomorrow's C-suite must be skilled and able to coach their intelligent automation processes to assist and complement their expertise - just as much as they coach their human reports to better support them in the future.

They must learn to trust in, and act on, the new opportunities their systems of anticipatory insight present them. They must accept that much of judgment now resides in backing the real-time data - ready to press the go-button on instant new divisions of digital labour to take advantage.

For some, the trust will only come when they understand and believe in the decisions embedded in the processes that deliver that data. They have to go on their journeys of discovery right now. Because before long we will stop talking about lucky generals and ballsy decisions.

The complete leader will be an insight-led pragmatic decision-maker, combining a scientific approach to data with the emotional intelligence, imagination and empathy to guide both people and bots towards an intended future in which the shared values and concerns of the humans engaged are brightly and clearly reflected.

Photo by Raphael Rychetsky on Unsplash

Distributed working can drive a personalised approach to employee experience

Optimising employee experience for business benefit is an emergent trend of our increasingly digitally-connected but physically distributed work forces.

Gartner's Future of Work Trends - with data gathered in April this year - already identified 16% of employers admitted to increasing the gathering of passive employee data collection. For example: virtual logging/clocking in and out; computer and phone use; use of email, internal communication and chats; and location or movement.

The data is available to far more than 16% of companies. Working from home has rocketed to closer to 50%. There are ethical questions of course. The same ethical questions facing us as consumers. How relaxed we are about having our every key-stroke captured, stored, diced and used to serve us depends very much on the discernible benefits to us. Increasingly we want to understand what's in it for them, too.

But employers can use this passive employee data more effectively for carrot than for stick.

Given the reported 'burnout' experienced by many - the increase in monthly hours worked (with estimates running at 20-30 extra per employee per month), the physical and creative downsides of parking behind a computer all day, given all this and more, there are new opportunities emerging for data-driven, employer-led wellness interventions.

We are fine when our car tells us it's time to take a break after two hours in the driving seat - perhaps passive data can be used to enforce mental and physical screen breaks? And if, from aggregating data the employer can understand more about what makes an individual effective, even applying some of the A/B testing techniques so readily applied to us as live, real-time consumers, then perhaps demands on us, styles of communications, engagement in meetings, workshops, pitches et al, can start to be designed to suit end user needs with the kind of specificity we have long enjoyed as customers.

Welcome to insight-led, experience-centred, employee and workplace experience. We just have to treat employees with the same respect we have come to understand the customer must be treated with.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Carson Arias on Unsplash

When almost every human interaction is a 'meeting'

A very smart connection of mine shared his list of rules for effective meetings. They were drawn up pre-Covid19. And I believe there are many circumstances in which they remain 100 per cent valid. You should download them for yourself and use them as appropriate.

But the list of best practices prompted me to think about the pivotal role now held by meetings in the organisational life of distributed teams. Where once they were simply part of the toolbox of human interaction prompts and touch points within an organisation, today, as we seek to maintain connection from our homes, they have become almost the only show in town.

If you have a sudden flash of inspiration, the kind you used to be able to call out to the person sitting by your side, or opposite your desk, now you have to go schedule a zoom/teams etc call. And the protocols of agendas, timing, note taking, action points, co-availability and all the rest may be too high a transaction cost for that idea. So you might just not bother raising it at all.

So in the current context I am wary of suggesting any best practice surrounding meetings.

In working with distributed teams for many years, I have learned that effective meetings start with social connection - the chat bit that we may think is non-productive, but which has huge value for team wellbeing, empathy building and well, caring about each other.

I get that other 'coming togethers' can handle the serendipity and idea sparks we are missing in our current daily interactions but I also think it may be wise to avoid any dogma around what is or isn't the right way to run a meeting when our contexts are changing so rapidly.

This is a time in which best practices will seldom be applicable, in which, instead, novel and emergent practices should be tested in order to shape a way forwards.

What we do know is high performing teams have strong empathy for each other, and enjoy an 'equity of conversation' - ie they all talk for about the same share of time when they are interacting.

Perhaps those are the initial constraints we should try applying to explore what meetings may become?

Photo by Alex McCarthy on Unsplash

Offices are places to create, not deliver.

When we established the Collaboratory space at Cognizant - with its inspiring tech access and demos, creative, soft-furnished spaces, multiple screens, writable surfaces everywhere you turned (etc), one side effect was workspace envy.
Colleagues more usually housed in row-upon-row of hot desks (when not on client sites) at the European HQ in London found multiple excuses to use the Think-Create-Make spaces a handful of us called home. They preferred to hold meetings in there, to chat with friends, to get creative.
I recall lobbying global HQ to consider rolling out the Collaboratory concept to become standard practice for all Cognizant office space.
Perhaps, at this time of crisis for the office, it's time to review that possibility?
The threat to the office/opportunity for new and better ways of working came up at last night's, increasingly regular, Beers & Ideas. Contributions came from Rory Yates, Jessica Yates, Pete Ahearn and Dean Corney.
We noted the two-speed nature of the journey 'back to work' - with those who had no choice but to be physically present at work being exposed to the greatest risks. We considered that those who had a choice should consider using it to offer some protection to those who don't.
We noted that home work brought environmental, local community and productivity advantages but that we had yet to understand the impact of our lack of human interaction on creative thought, serendipity and, of course, well-being.
The office is not dead. But it may be about to undergo a metamorphosis of the caterpillar to butterfly variety. We will continue needing spaces to come together, to be together. But those spaces may focus on the needs our social time best serve.
We will need less space for 'bums on seats' placed in dreary rows. Instead we will need spaces to ideate, create concepts, get hands on with prototypes. The office space should transform to one proactively designed for human interaction, prompting and promoting serendipity.
We will visit such spaces to actively spend face-to-face time with other people - rather than check-in, log-on and head-down. We can do the latter so much better at home. But the former - the bits that define what we could and should be heads-down about, that is the role of the office post-Covid19.
It may be a day a week or a week a month. The important realisation is that offices should be places optimised to create - the home can be where we get focused on the work and get the delivery done.
Like so many other trends that this Context Shock has revealed and accelerated - this one has been a long time coming.
Teams are already coping with a great deal of change - much of it sub-optimal. So, rather than watch the office stagger back on to its feet, let's see it leap forward and play its part in the creation of a new and better way of working.

Photo by Hillary Ungson on Unsplash

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

The future of work is distributed: leadership, space - and time

In building the modern, responsive, antifragile organisation, we have adopted models in which leadership is distributed (think agile, to lean start-up, to holocracy etc). But the accelerating impact of COVID-19 identifies two other ways in which distribution is the key to understanding the future of work.
Distributed across space, has become a given. Many of us have been asked to work from home, accelerating our understanding of the tools which allow us to work in teams operating across distributed space.
And as we consider how we may emerge from lock-down in a pre-vaccine world, we find ourselves rapidly coming to terms with work having to be distributed across time.
The time constraints of traditional working; 9-5; 5 days-a-week; 25 days holiday; bank holidays etc are likely to be a problem to be overcome as we build a new normal.
Imagine, for example, the challenge of mass transit commuting. Could we see regulations limiting our travel to specified and immutable times - eg You are issued with a start and finish time so that there are no commuting peaks. Your start time may be 6am. Mine 7am, my colleagues 8am, etc through to folk starting at 5am 23 hours later. To make that more effective we may have to break that down to 15 minute slots. All to avoid being closer than 2m from the next person on your commute.
Imagine working in manufacture; 24-hour working with reduced numbers 'on' per shift may have to replace a one or two shift models across 'daytime'.
It's a monumental task, which will accelerate distributed leadership, too. The boss can't be there 24/7. A decision maker will have to be. So the pressure to distribute decision making power to those 'on the job' will inevitably build.
It will accelerate distribution through space too - you may only be allowed to travel on certain days, so the push to get still better at working across space, usually from home, will only get harder.
Making the organisation flexible requires that people are flexible too. Cultural norms around 'time off' that everyone can share (weekends, bank holidays, evenings) will inevitably be challenged.
In the next few months all of us will be involved in rapidly innovating new models of distributed work - through leadership, space and time.
The lessons we learn from this crisis will help us create more antifragile organisations, better able to cope with the shocks that are yet to come.
How ready are you?

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash

Predicting how long your job will last

If you want to predict the future, look at what has stood the test of time.

When we talk about the future of work - naturally there are going to be new roles. There may be less or different tasks, the latter more likely.

But what you can bank on is that the roles that were here 100 years ago are far more likely to be here in another 100 years than those roles that have been with us for just a few short years.

That's not to say none of the new ones will stand the test of time, but a far higher percentage of the old ones will.

The longer anything lasts - the longer it is likely to continue to last. This is one of the lessons we can draw from Antifragility and other work by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He would say it is a lesson we can learn from the wisdom of our grandparents.

Will a teacher's job exist in 100 years time? 90% yes. Will a social media strategists? 90% no.

We are often dazzled by the new and make projections into the future on very shallow data. This fails. As AI is proving all over again.

To create value with AI the proposition needs to be reframed in terms of prediction. But unless the correct weighting of what has come before is built into the programming, researchers find they hit the problem they call 'catastrophic forgetting'. The solution is to build in virtual memories (eg Deep Mind's Differential Neural Computer).

For AI to succeed it has to factor for what you and I instinctively know - the longer something has lasted, the longer it will succeed.