Category: management

The under-rated power of Appreciative Inquiry

Have you heard about Appreciative Inquiry?

It is certainly one of the most powerful coaching tools I know. It works extremely well in change situations – personal or organizational.

What is it about? Often people and organizations know they have to change. They know what they need to change. And they often go in negative spirals like “we have never been able to do that”, “that’s not possible”.

Appreciative inquiry challenges this by pushing people or organizations to find situations in the past that were different and had a little bit of what we intend to change. To the heavy smoker: What were situations where you managed to smoke less? To the organization that never seems to be able to innovate: what were situations in the past where you managed to be a bit innovative?

There were always such occasions, because of the intrinsic variance in the way we behave, in the way things happen. Appreciative inquiry then digs appreciatively into these past events to find what were the factors that elicited those changes, and how it did feel.

It shows that the individual or the organization is able to do the change, and identify what needs to be done more or less to achieve the change that is needed today.

Appreciative inquiry requires external help, and is deeply powerful. It allows to figure out the highly emotionally engaged simple actions that make successful large changes.

Next time you think you are faced with a dead end, something you think is impossible, turn to appreciative inquiry. Dig into your past and recognize how you can change.

More so, appreciate your past and build your future upon the lessons you learnt. They may be hidden but they are there. Go and find them.

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The corporate revolution is upon us!

The coming corporate revolution due to collaborative technology becomes mainstream. See for example this interesting article by Forbes “Social Power and the Coming Social Revolution”.

Several examples in this paper show how consumers can influence company decisions, sometimes decisively. While most of the examples are negative (social networks impede organizations to do something), no doubt that with experience, those contributions will be leveraged positively by successful organizations.

Some quotes for thought from the paper:

In this new world of business, companies and leaders will have to show authenticity, fairness, transparency and good faith. If they don’t, customers and employees may come to distrust them, to potentially disastrous effect.

When confronting social power, you might as well jump in with both feet, because you just can’t hide. […] For one big company it recently turned up 60,000 different social media pages where employees mentioned or discussed company matters. (Not to mention the thousands of employee profiles on LinkedIn.)

Accepting social power as inevitable can significantly change the kind of products you design.

Says Microsoft and Lotus veteran Ozzie: “All this was unstoppable from the moment somebody installed the first network—this steady march toward reducing friction and reducing transaction costs faced by individuals. And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

So, when do you start opening your organization? It becomes every day more urgent! And soon it will be too late!

 

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Open leadership – giving up control is inevitable

As the Fourth Revolution grows and spreads, giving up control is inevitable.

Leaders cannot any more control everything that is being done in the organization. Organizations cannot control any more their market as they used to do (for example, spending millions on advertising and measuring a constant return on investment)…

Charlene Li mentions the 3 levers of change – the 3 levers of the Fourth Revolution, pushing unavoidable change:

  • there are more and more people online
  • social networking sites usage is becoming extremely widespread
  • sharing is a rising habit

To that we need to add that with mobile technologies, employees stay connected to their own virtual world even when they are in office.

Do you want your organization to create more value? So, give up control! Stop barring access to social networks in the office! Real valuable work is anyway today not any more just dumb repetitive production, it is Creative, Emotional Work. Just allow it.

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Video of the month: Gary Hamel on the future of management

In the following video, Gary Hamel, an influential business thinker, tackles the future of management, or how management needs to change to get out of the Industrial Age mindset.

Watch the video: Gary Hamel on “Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishment” by following the link (16 min duration).

In the video, Gary explains what is conventional Industrial Age management, where it comes from, and why it is obsolete. Gary also explains what are the characteristics of the Collaborative Age organization. Don’t miss the example of HCL Technologies, an Indian IT company, where employees rate their boss, open a ticket when they are not happy with their boss or HR that get escalated if no satisfying response has been given within 24h, and more!

If you only have 2 min, look at least at this other video from Gary Hamel, “could you imagine a world without bosses?”

To finish let us dwell on this quote from Gary Hamel’s video:

You can’t build an organization which is fit for the future without making it fit for human beings

When do you change your organization to be more human-oriented?

[This video will be added to the Fourth Revolution Resource Center. Visit the Fourth Revolution Resource Center for all videos, book reviews and papers about the Fourth Revolution!]

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How long will corporations still be able to resist to internal social networks?

Lately the pressure increases dramatically for companies to setup internal social networks.

Two main reasons for that:

  • a lot of people can now access internet on their mobile, so that they can access Facebook and the like without being bothered by the futile attempts by companies to block access
  • large commercial social networks become more pushy to propose solutions to companies (whether they like it or not), leveraging on the fact that many employees are on their network

This blog post about how LinkedIn is going to try to leverage its 100 million professional users to move into the enterprise social network market reveals that the pressures on the companies increase dramatically.

Still, corporations continue to resist (read again my blog post on why organizations do resist to social networks). Those that will continue for too long will be overtaken by those that will understand that social networks can unleash unprecedented value.

Stop resisting. Go for it. Start small and learn. And create the value you deserve.

 

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Establishing effective co-located teams is not in contradiction with the Fourth Revolution

There is a misunderstanding hanging around.

The Fourth Revolution allows long-distance communication, the creation of networks and communities across incredible distances.

Yet for the process of creativity to unfold, when something really challenging needs to be done, nothing can beat the geographical co-location of effective teams.

That’s not a contradiction. These are just two complementary ways of connecting.

For challenging work, for emotional work to be done, tight connection is needed, of the kind that can almost only be happening in a face-to-face relationship. This is primordial. And around these temporary, closely linked teams, a wide-ranging network of less involved contributors also helps.

This is the model of the Fourth Revolution. Travel and relocation is not dead. It is even more important. It is necessary. And it comes in complement to virtual, long distance communication.

When do you move closer to a team to produce something really exceptional?

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Emotional work: where the value lies today

Today, in the Fourth Revolution, what is the value chain of human activities like?

At the bottom is manual work. That’s worth almost nothing, because anybody can do it.

Above that is intellectual work, in the sense of processing work (IQ). In the Industrial Age that was the tip of the value chain, because processing capability was scarce. Those who were very good at it were highly paid and regarded. The problem is that now, we have a lot of processing capability available in the form of computers and the like. Its value has melted away.

So what’s next?

Emotional work. Today, it is where the value lies. It is what leaders get paid to do. It is both personal internal emotional work, and exceptional inter-personal work. And that’s the basis of soft power. Power today does not lie in hard facts and logic. Power lies in the soft issues of emotions.

Scary, maybe, because our mindset is geared toward the value of intellectual work. But so real. How much emotional work do you think you are doing? Do more, that’s where the value is. That’s where the difference is. That’s what will make you successful.

 

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A sure way to retain your employees

As knowledge and development is today a major part of the compensation package, then the one and only way to retain your employees is to give them more of: knowledge and development!

And you know what? That can be almost free if you take the time to develop them in the workplace.

Knowledge and development is part of the compensation package. If you don’t provide it you are not competitive and K.E.E.N. will leave. If you provide plenty of it you can pay less money.

And if you want to retain people, stop the stupid practice of the Industrial Age which was to cut all the training and development budgets as soon as the sea gets rough. Rather, increase it. Publicize that your company is a great place for development.

What’s more, if you leave people space for their own development the rewards to the organization will be plentiful and unexpected. The organization’s culture will be open and collaborative.

Today in the Fourth Revolution, giving more knowledge and personal development opportunities is the secret recipe to employees retention.

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Modern collaboration tools… going against the Fourth Revolution!

There is an amusing contradiction.

We could think that all virtual collaboration tools should be bringing us toward the Fourth Revolution, into the Collaborative Age. On the contrary, some virtual tools do in fact keep us in the Industrial Age mindset.

distributing work to be done
distributing work to be done (old fashioned)

Most tools that have been developed to enhance long distance collaboration, in particular when it comes to project management, are in fact deeply ingrained into the Industrial mindset. Look at most tools for virtual collaboration: they enhance this tendency to breakdown the work into tasks and asking individuals to address them based on their competency.

This will never lead to the incredible creativity of people working together, closely, emotionally connected, toward a challenging goal. This makes real, effective teams an impossibility. This makes creating technological ruptures and devising astoundingly clever ideas completely impossible.

Amazingly, a vast array of virtual tools continue to propagate the Industrial Age mindset. When will it stop? When will we understand that these tools are obsolete when it comes to creating the real value of the Fourth Revolution?

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How to measure the degree of bureaucracy of your organization

How bureaucratic is your organization?

Stack of procedures
bureaucracy at work

Here is the ultimate test.

It’s fairly simple.

It’s based on the fact that bureaucracy is the triumph of the means over the end.

So, take the objectives of your organizations, of your department, or your personal objectives in the organization. What proportion of these objectives are about producing means, for keeping busy (for example, write a policy about… write 3 procedures about… produce one press release every so and so…)

Conversely, what proportion is about real results that matter to other people (clients, stakeholders). Like: increase satisfaction level by so many %, deliver under 3 days…

The proportion of objectives related to means is a good measure of how bureaucratic your organization is. Experience shows that it is generally fairly consistent across the organization, except maybe at the top.

Move! Make sure most of your own objectives are result-driven and that you’re left the choice of the means. And you know what? It’s much more fun!

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What motivates the K.E.E.N.?

There is a great video from Dan Pink about motivation: the surprising truth about what motivates us.

It shows the incentive schemes of the Industrial Age corporation only work for mechanical skills. Once the task involves cognitive skill, rewards lead to lower performance!!

What then does motivate the K.E.E.N, the Knowledge Enhancing Exchanging Networker of the Collaborative Age? According to Dan Pink, there are 3 main factors: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

  • Autonomy like self-direction.
  • Mastery like getting better at something.
  • Purpose like getting up in the morning.
purpose maximizer
We are purpose maximizers

According to Dan Pink, we are purpose maximizers, not just profit maximizers.
So, when do you start maximizing your purpose?

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