The F-word

As I've said before: change is always personal.

If individuals do not perform differently, then (in business at least) nothing has changed. This means not only thinking about individual behaviour (not always easy, but it's mainly a matter of discipline) but also individual feelings.

There. I said it. I used the f-word.

Feelings.

When we introduce change into a business, we have our reasons. They may be good or bad, but the reasons exist. In this sense, change is rational.

When we think carefully about how best to implement change and look at the factors that we can adjust to support better performance, we will do best if apply some logic to focus on those things that make a difference and minimising those that don't. Again, we are rational.

But change is about people and people are as much emotional beings as they are rational - as Dr McCoy might say.

So if your approach to change is entirely rational, you will fail. And that is what makes it interesting. People have feelings and we need to recognise them. Moreover, their feelings when faced with exactly the same event my be wholly different. One person, on hearing that the company is replacing its customer management system may feel "...fantastic! Just what we need to replace our current old system." while another may feel "...I don't like the sound of this - our old system might be creaky, but I'm used to it."

The game, of course, is to apply rational thinking to the change, to design the work environment to encourage and support the new performance and set up feedback processes to sustain it. At the same time, we have to apply the same quality of thinking to ensuring that most people will feel as well as they can about the change - and plan what you will do for those who don't want to play.

Rational processes, applied to emotional things.

Tough to do, but seriously worthwhile.

- Mike

Pepper and strawberries

The World is changing, not through technology, but by how it changes our assumptions about how we can work.

I was at a small (but perfectly formed) event at the University of Surrey yesterday where two pundits (promoting their wares but graceful with it) told us that the future was (a) going to be filled with sensors giving us an avalanche of real time data that would enable us to make better decisions and (b) going to do so through mobile devices that could be made secure whilst enabling company workers to do what they needed to do out in the field.

They did a good job against their brief, but given the nature of the event and the presence of students as well as captains of industry (or, in my case, a mere lieutenant) the speakers didn't for me really get to the heart of the matter, which was: we know that technology will advance and will enable us all to do cool and groovy things - but that is much less important than knowing how we will manage, work and live with this technology. Because, sure as tech companies go bust or politicians lie, the real impact of technology is not what it does but how we live with it.

Tim Berners-Lee, the folks at ARPANET with email, Marc Andreesen and Netscape, Sergey, Larry and their chums at Google: they developed stuff to fit specific needs and gave them to the world - and the world took these things and took them places that no-one could have predicted. The only thing we can be sure about with new technology is that technology designed for users wins - and that users will do things with it that no-one has ever seen before.

This is especially true when technologies come together: when people make connections that were not there before. In the jargon, this is sometimes called mashing, but it's basic human nature to bring things together and try them out.

For example: most people, when they eat strawberries, are normally struck by one of two thoughts. The first is that they don't taste as good as they did when we were kids. The second is that what they need is a little sugar. What most people don't realise, of course, is that the best way to have strawberries taste like they used to taste (and avoid the perils posed by sugar) is to sprinkle your strawberries liberally with freshly ground black pepper. The pepper, bizarrely, has no effect but to make the strawberries taste like strawberries - only more so.

Honestly. Try it. You'll never look back.

The Law of of Unintended Consequences (or Chaos Theory, take your pick) demonstrates conclusively and continuously that we cannot predict with any certainty what is likely to happen. All we can do is hang on for the ride and look for places to sprinkle some metaphorical pepper on some unlikely strawberries.

In the future, the fun and games will be not around the technology (although some of it will be unbelievably sexy (like this, a year old but cool as heck...)) but around how we choose to live with it. Making choices, like...

...abandoning spending time on developing requirements and spending time just trying things out instead?

...not taking things away in black boxes to be presented to customers some months later only to find out it wasn't what they wanted - but developing it with your customer instead?

....accepting that we'll never communicate ideally with our people properly except by having conversations ?

...recognising that the avalanche of data that new technology offers us gives us unparalleled precision about less and less, but that aggregating that precision into something we can use means that, paradoxically, we must approximate meaning using analogies, stories, visual models, pictures and intuition - and that the next wave of technology must be about equipping us to understand better how best to extract rough-cut meaning at the decision level from diamond-sharp micro-data?

...or recognising that for companies to succeed in the future, they need ways of working and managing where most or all of what they do is managed, owned and delivered by other people - they may not own the data, the supply chain, the intellectual property or the service; they may only be a conduit that streamlines how customers get (to do) what they want?

In the future, success will come to those who try things out with real customers and have the mechanisms in place to adapt instantly to the feedback they give. It may look like the technologists own the future, but the technology will be owned by those who can run their businesses - and their lives - by involving customers, real time, and accommodating to them instantly as they show us where technology should go.

It's going to be a brave new world - and while I'm waiting, I'm going to pepper my strawberries.

- Mike

The Monty Python Kipper

Tell it straight or have your project fail.

I've been thinking recently about some of the change programmes I have led or been part of over the past ten years (and damn, there have been a lot) trying to identify those things that helped make them succeed - and those that made success difficult.

And something came up and slapped me in the face like a wet kipper wielded by a Monty Python extra: Every time a project had gone wrong, it was because someone wasn't being honest.

Every time.

And this doesn't mean that I work with dishonest scumbags seeking to lie and cheat their way to success. On the contrary: the people with whom I work (colleagues and clients) are amongst the most stand-up, ethical and well-intentioned people found anywhere. In fact, this is part of the problem.

The dishonesty to which I refer is that driven by good intentions. In almost every case, the dishonesty arises because the organisation needs to change - and those making the change happen are worried about hurting those affected. A person is not performing, say, or their role is going to have to change in some significant fashion - and no-one tells them.

Until the last possible moment.

And then only with weasel words that talk around the topic - they aren't fired, they are redeployed. Their performance wasn't bad, it was just constrained by the environment.

But when someone isn't performing, they know. They feel guilty that they aren't delivering. Guilt breeds anxiety; so does change. Anxiety - when the person feels out of control - can quickly turn to (quite reasonable) paranoia. And if you lie to a paranoid person, they can tell.

And, by lying to them, you give them something else (not the change) to vent about - and immediately what you are trying to do gets derailed.

The most successful projects, on the other hand, don't pussy-foot about - they identify the people affected early and tell them straight. Most people get it; most people want to do the right thing.

Really. They do.

And when we fail to recognise this, we fail.

- Mike

Out Of The Soup

If you concentrate on changing the culture rather than the business, you'll end up in the soup.

A long time ago I was doing a Master's degree and my thesis concerned the implementation of a manufacturing planning and scheduling system in a food factory. The system took customer orders and worked out which machines did what and when and with which ingredients to make for the order. In theory, the order came in to the factory and at the alloted time, the right materials in the right amounts arrived at the right machines and were turned into baked beans.

In theory.

In practice, the stuff was late or the materials were wrong or the machine was busy or the order couldn't be traced and everyone knew that the cardinal sin was to leave a machine sitting idle - so they kept some stock back so that if the worst came to the worst, they could make the standby product: tomato soup.

So their warehouses ended up stocked with (I kid you not) three years' worth of tomato soup.

This was not a viable way to proceed.

The company had spent millions on the system and had millions tied up in unsold tomato soup (you could just imagine the eBay auction now, can't you: 'For sale: 100 million cans tomato soup, no reserve'). Part of my project was to design and deliver the training necessary to equip the business to work in the new ways - without treading on the toes of the folk doing the technical and systems training.

Anyway, I was delivering a workshop on the importance of managing inventory correctly at 4am in the morning (permanent night shifts are a very strange world) when it struck me that many of the problems we faced were because we were confusing two kinds of change. What I christened 'first order change' were things like the installation of the physical system; 'second order change' was the change needed in the organisation and the individuals who had to work with it. Addressiing one without equal emphasis on the other was a recipe for disaster.

This was the heart of the company's problem. It needed the system to do what it was supposed to do: what they were learning (at great expense) was that getting the system right is much easier - and is much less important - than having people to do the right thing. What we ended up doing was using the system as a vehicle for changing behaviour - and changing the system as a result.

This distinction has stood me in good stead ever since. Now, whenever I have to oversee implementation of a system or a physical change in an enbvironment, I immediately seek to understand how people need to work differently as a result - and strive to make the work we put in on the people side is a real and as specific as that on the systems side. At the same time, I am with Herman Goering who made famous the quote from Hanns Johst, "Whenever I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my revolver." In other words, change does not happen simply because we seek to 'change the culture' - the only sustainable way to change the culture of an organisation is through delivery of real things that require people to work differently: workshops don't do it.

In short, don't spend money on systems without spending equivalent time working with your people on helping them to work differently - and don't waste money on training to improve culture unless you are implementing real, physical change in the work environment.

For example, currently I'm working with a team developing a two-day workshop to change attitudes - so we are making it a 90-day programme to deliver real change, with two days' of training at the start.

Simple, really.

- Mike