Everyone's A Winner

Do the right things, and the right things happen.

I was in London on Monday with the nice people from the Made Simple group. They're setting up a groovy new portal (that's an information-rich base for folks on the web, not the game) for folks in Small-to-Medium-sized-Enterprises ("SME's" in the jargon) and (I've had a sneak preview) it's looking very good: attractive, informative, useful and easy to use.

I was up there because Howard Graham, the guy behind the Made Simple shebang, had put out a call asking for volunteers to make podcasts for the new site and I was one of those who responded. (It will be appearing there in few weeks - I'll let you know when it's up).

I like these win-win things. Howard got some content for his portal, I got a chance to introduce Bloomstorm to some more people, and (hopefully) the portal users will get something useful and interesting. It's a good way to do business.

We got to talking afterwards about networking (Howard's a big noise in BNI, the networking organisation) and I was struck again about the only principle of economics that to me has any real force.

It goes back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and is a corollary of the Law of Comparative Advantage, for those of you interested in that kind of thing) but as I understand it, the upshot of is that after any reasonable economic transaction in a fair market, both parties - the buyer and the seller - are better off. The buyer gets what they want, and the seller gets what they want. Value - to both parties - has increased.

To make a transaction work, therefore, each party needs to reduce the cost and maximise the payoff to the other party of doing business (while not giving away the farm in the process).

I love this idea, for all sorts of reasons.

It's self-correcting - if a buyer loses out once, they won't repeat the transaction.

It requires you to know the thing you do that offers most value to your customers

It shows how there is no limit to economic growth (because the economy grows with every fair transaction, and will continue to grow as transactions continue).

It is the only proven way to make war zones sustainably peaceful (give people the chance to trade and the personal value from peaceful transactions quickly outweighs the value they get from war. Northern Ireland is a great example. It's much harder to get people to riot when they might lose their digital video recorders in the mayhem - so the whole 'riot transaction' is not worth their while...)

I think it'll be only way way we'll beat global warming (A whole other post, maybe - but I will add one comment: yes, I get it about how it might also be the cause of global warming).

And it shows that the best way to get rich is to work with your customers and your suppliers and your partners to maximise the value they get from dealing with you.

How do we do this?

Be nice (or at the very least, courteous) to people, and so decrease the cost of doing business with you.

Be honest - if you lie about what you are selling (or, interestingly, about what you are buying) then the chance of getting the value you want drops down hard.

Help people - value does not have to measured immediately in pounds and pence.

Know the value of what you offer - in the other person's terms

Make it easy to do business with you.

Demonstrate that you can be trusted.

Interestingly, if these conditions apply, you don't have to sell what you are offering - you simply need to let people know what you've got to sell, and they'll buy.

And this is why I think the whole idea of networking is such a good one for your business. It's not about exchanging business cards and crocodile smiles and getting 'contacts'. It's about widening the pool of people who know you, trust you and want to work with you - or tell others that they should work with you - because the chance of a win/win outcome is very high.

And it makes doing business a pleasure.

- Mike

Beaming like a baby

Communication can kill your project.

I was at a client's project washup session (a 'post-implementation review' in the jargon) a while ago where we were to review a project to relocate a couple of call centres.

The project, to put it politely, had been going to hell in a handbasket. The client asked me to help when the project was already seriously derailed.

We got it back on course, and delivered much of what was wanted, not too late, and without doing too much damage to an already stretched budget.

Even so, very few were looking forward to the session. Three hours of reports of limited success, powerpoint presentations on 'things we should have done earlier/better/faster', flipcharts full of 'learnings for next time' - a steady stream of formal self-flagellation, almost like a Maoist re-education session. What could be more exciting :-( ?

The only person smiling was the representative from the communications ('comms') team. By luck or judgement, he went first. He presented a set of (beautifully prepared) slides showing us the comms plan, how they had delivered against it (largely on time and under budget, unlike almost every other part of the project) and then he revealed his coup de grace - the project comms team had been shortlisted for the final of a national competition run by a trade magazine. He sat down, beaming like a baby, newly fed.

His bubble was only slightly burst when John, the project manager, commented, “I wonder why the communications team keeps winning awards, while the projects they work on don’t?”

And I was struck by a blinding flash of the obvious.

Of course the communications team were winning the awards – because, for them, their job was delivery of defined communications, not the delivery of the project. When we reviewed the communications plan in the project each week, we were reviewing communications activity, not whether the communication was successful in helping the project meet its goals. Mugs and posters (not like these) and 'plenary sessions' were all very well, but very little of this directly affected what was delivered on the ground.

Suddenly other things fell into place. A key frustration during the project was that it had been very tough to brief delivery teams and stakeholders directly. The reason? We had to comply with our communications team policy that our messages 'were consistent’ and that ‘the seniors had been briefed’ before we could discuss the project with others. This in turn delayed project work as we waited for ‘communications’.

Worse, because the comms team moderated communications from the middle, and not on the ground, much of what they did communicate was too general to be relevant to those doing the work. As the project delivery teams did not understand what was needed - in terms that mattered to them - much of the work they did needed to be redone. No wonder (as we found when we completed the washup) the single biggest issue affecting the project was 'communication'.

All the communication activity in the comms plan and in our policies was actually damaging the project – because it was preventing effective communication.

The project team had abdicated responsibility for communication to the communications machine – just when we needed to be able to explain to our project people, in practical, day-to-day terms, what we needed them to do.

I have seen this behaviour before in a number of my clients and it explains a lot. The logic of giving communications to a specialist overwhelms the common sense notion of enabling folks on the ground to communicate quickly and easily with each other to get the work done.

'Communication' can fill your project’s pockets with lead weights and send it for a swim straight to the bottom.

Remember, communication is no substitute for conversation.

- Mike

An American Mystery

Travel raises many questions - like this.

Over the years I've travelled a lot to the US - and have encountered many fascinating things and a bright and generous people. But there is one thing that no-one has ever explained to me. It may be cultural, or economic, or a reflection of collective taste...but it is a mystery nonetheless: why do all American hotels have beige bathrooms?

- Mike

Beating Boredom

Sometimes, exciting things happen in unexciting places.

Cranfield University is a post-graduate technology and management campus set in the middle of rural England in Bedfordshire between London and Birmingham. It was originally an airfield chosen by the RAF because the surrounding countryside was so empty of landmarks that German bombers could not find it during the Second World War. This – the avoidance of German military airpower – was possibly the most exciting thing to happen in Cranfield’s history.

From the aerodrome came a college of aeronautics, from that, a school of engineering, then manufacturing, then management until now it has become possibly the most boring University in the World.

For one thing, it is entirely a post-grad school – no party-loving undergraduates at all. For another, its subject mix means that it is 85% male. The result is that if you ever have the misfortune to be walking through the campus on a Saturday night, the loudest sound you hear is the Microsoft theme tune through an open window as someone starts up their PC for another exciting evening’s work on their thesis.

But occasionally, slightly funky things happen.

One of these was in the late eighties when IBM apparently decided that more people in British manufacturing needed to be familiar with the value that computers (especially IBM computers) could bring to industry. So they proposed to found a University department in Computer Integrated Manufacturing. Despite the catchy title (!), several universities bid for the money and Cranfield won. They built a building, put a couple of million pounds-worth of IBM mainframe, software, terminals and staff and set about recruiting an academic team. They found it at the University of Bath, where they found a set of academics who were interested in the “interface between technology and organisations.”

And this is where things got fun. Because no sooner had this crew come in than they started preaching heresy. Successful use of technology, they argued, was only interesting when it supported appropriate business change. The purpose of education in CIM was therefore less to do with the technology and more to do with working cross-functionally in teams to drive behavioural and process change – which technology could then support.

So that’s what they did - in interesting and radical ways.

I attended a Masters programme in CIM at Cranfield at the end of the eighties and it was an exceptional experience. The year comprised three segments: a taught course, followed by a group project, followed by an individual project. What made it different – on the surface – was fundamentally two things: first, that the projects were paid for by companies who wanted solutions to problems, not interesting theses. This meant that we very quickly adopted a ‘Real World’ focus (which was useful). And the second thing was that although the programme was continually assessed, at no time were we given our grades.

That’s right: throughout the course we had no idea how we were doing – were we passing, failing, at the top of the class, near the bottom? Not a clue.

It was an experiment – and it worked. Because we did not know how we were doing, we measured ourselves against each other – especially against those we knew were doing well. So we worked 70 hour weeks, asked penetrating questions and drove each other in a frenzy of peer pressure to meet and exceed our own expectations – all without any cajoling or coaxing by the staff. On more than one occasion, students broke into the building at night to carry on working.

Those of us who survived – because not everyone could take the pressure or the ambiguity – came out having had an exceptional learning experience, and confident that we were equipped to lead change in almost any organisation.

Of course, this wasn’t true (is anyone capable of this?) but we were better able than most.

Nowadays, of course, the litigation nazis have come in and they have to give grades – and no-one is really interested in Computer Integrated Manufacturing any more. But for a brief time, something interesting happened at the most boring University in the World.

And I took my first baby steps in the business of change.

- Mike

Reaching for the revolver

The business of change is about the practicalities, so don't try to fix the culture.

Apologies for the delay in getting this one out, but I've been offsite with some nice people who've been letting me practice on them. It went pretty well, although there are a few things that we need to tweak, which is great - I would worry if it had all gone perfectly.

I spent two days with this team - a set of people I trust, who do a tough job very well indeed. They have a transformational role in an international technology firm that is helping to lead a revolution for customers.

I was helping them to scope their quarterly objectives and work out the specific issues and jobs that needed to be done to meet them. This work was counter-cultural - their organisation is very action-oriented, so that people are expected to take objectives and run with them delivering as they go, and not take time to think about them properly.

And this, of course, was the problem. The business is now awash with people running round trying to do things that they only partially understand, have only partly under their control and which have a practical planning horizon of only days or weeks. The outcome is that everyone spends more and more time trying to establish control of vague clouds of action, having endless meetings to establish boundaries and accountabilities for things that are unclear, generating huge amounts of office politics and resulting in...not very much, really.

All I did was enable this team to understand the specifics of what they needed to do. Now they are in a position to take control of their remit, and be very clear about they need from others. In practice, what the rest of the business will see is that this team will question others in more rigorous ways, and set a higher standard for the information that they need to get and use. I expect, however, because they now know how to use such higher quality information, there will be a step change in their performance.

Which is what we wanted to do. It was a good chance for me to prove the Bloomstorm model of using new skills to solve real issues, and a fair return, I think, for two days of their time.

There is, however, a wider point. It is easy to think that the solution to such problems is to understand the culture that leads to the behaviour we were trying to change. This is lazy thinking. You change culture by changing the way the business works - not the other way round. Viewed in this light, efforts to change culture are usually a complete waste of money with little or no return.

If, however, you set out to change specific behaviour for practical purposes, then you get the results you want - and as a side-effect, the culture has to change. But that's not why you make the change. You make the change to make the business better - the culture just follows along.

- Mike

Change and the Discworld

A new year is a good time for launching new ideas.

2008? Where did 2007 go? Seriously, I hope you all had a great holiday season and that 2008 will bring you what you hope for. As for us, Jan 1 2008 was the first official day of Bloomstorming (is that a word? Should it be?) and we're moving more to doing, rather than simply thinking, mode.

Bloomstorm, as you know if you've got this far, is about making real, enduring change happen. I've been trying to summarise the practical and effective nature of what we do with limited success and it has been an increasing source of frustration to me.

And this state would have continued, had I not been given a copy of Terry Pratchett's latest tome, 'Making Money,' for Christmas. For those who don't know (and I think this will include most readers outside of the UK) Terry Pratchett was the UK's biggest selling living author until a certain Ms Rowling introduced the world to Harry Potter. Pratchett's milieu is the Discworld, an alternate, late-middle-ages world with magic and is the most telling and consistent (and consistently funny) satire on our modern world that exists in print.

Throughout the Discworld series, Pratchett uses humour to disguises the fact that he has quite a lot to say on matters of philosophy, theology, government and human nature.

And in this, his latest work, I found the following exchange:

"Why are you always in such a hurry, Mr Lipwig?"
"Because people don't like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one kind of normal to another."

This seems to me to be so accurate, so profoundly correct, that I am adopting it as my abiding principle for 2008: Make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

In Bloomstorm, we look forward to putting skates on change and strapping on the rockets...

Happy New Year.

- Mike

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