What’s in a story

I am struggling and at the same time I am reading “More time to think“, a book written by Nancy Kline and published last year. What am I struggling with? Well, I am struggling with the idea that I would like to write a story about the service I am trying to develop and to offer to the business world ‘out there’. Nancy Kline suggests that I need a thinking partner but the cat is asleep so I will have to play both parts in this dialogue, thinker and partner alternately. This dialogue takes the form of question and answer and I think that I have answered the first question; what I want to think about is writing a story about the service that I am offering  to the business world.

The next question is, “What am I assuming that is stopping me from writing that story?” That is a good question. Perhaps the answer is that I am assuming that I do not really have a story to tell. I am assuming that I cannot pull together a coherent and valuable analysis of the experience that I have accumulated over many years working in a number of industrial and academic environments. I am assuming that as an engineer I am not qualified to advise on ideas or working practices that are more in the strategic domain. I am assuming that what I have to say has been said before. Oops, hold on there one minute.  There are several assumptions here; which is the critical one? I think it is that my lack of qualifications will result in my producing a half baked story which will be neither interesting nor convincing to its readers. Even that assumption has another assumption underlying it: that economics and behaviour  are key disciplines in understanding the business environment, in neither of which I have any formal education.

What is the validity of these assumptions? What happens if I assume something different? Is it true that I have no formal education in economics and behaviour? Yes. Is it true that these disciplines are central to understanding the business environment? I think so and there is certainly a case for arguing so. Do my lack of formal qualifications bar me from making a useful contribution to the discussion on strategy and working practice? No, of course not. Whether anyone will listen will depend on how I write and what I write. Let me assume that if I approach the task with a clear focus on delivering value to the reader there is a fair chance I will deliver it.

So how do I free myself to contribute? By recognising, acknowledging and celebrating my background; by engaging with individuals who are debating these issues, becoming a conduit to creative thinking, critical analysis and innovation. And by revelling in the process.

I hope that I have not short changed Nancy Kline in this short exercise. I know it would have worked so much better with a genuine thinking partner but, honestly folks, the germ of a new idea has come to me during the past hour or so. To find out more about thinking environments, go to ‘Time to Think‘.

On the shadow of a reflection

I have reached an age where a number of my contemporaries have died; some have been friends, close friends and others have been members of my extended family. Though my parents are both dead, as yet no other member of my immediate family has died. A number of people whom I hold dear are at this moment in the latter stages of disease.  I am slightly surprised by my reaction though perhaps I should not be; this exposure to death over the past few years has normalised death for me.  I recently realised that I don’t fear death any more, at least not the fact of death. I am not so sanguine about the process of dying as I don’t think I cope with pain very well and having watched my father’s progressive deterioration with Alzheimer’s, that is not an experience into which I would like to lead my family.

What has brought me to this place? Though I still regard myself as young-ish and there are still a few years to go before I reach three score years and ten, no longer would my death be untimely.  Though I know there is more I can offer,  I recognise that I have already had a pretty ‘…good crack of the whip’.  This is not the case for everyone; there are untimely deaths where cruel disease or circumstance takes away a young life before its promise can be fulfilled. There is also the wanton death caused by disaster, poverty or warfare. Such deaths do not fit neatly into a tidy model of the human life cycle; we should fear and resist them lest we become immune to the fragility of our common human heritage. For some people, far too many people, the normality of death is horrific but for me, the normality of death has brought acceptance and I count myself exceeding lucky.

Perhaps the fact that  I don’t think that death is the end also has a part to play. But death is the end for earthly relationships and bereavement is hard to take at any age. I don’t want people to be sad when I die but I know some people will be. Inevitably, they will lose something; they will lose what I am to them, what I represent to them; an ear, a shoulder, a hand, someone who keeps the other side of the bed warm, chases them round trees, drinks with them in a pub, the grandparent of their child to be. So we cannot entirely draw the teeth of death. Perhaps one trite answer to anticipating bereavement is to give everything of yourself to your circle of significant others so that, by the time you die there is nothing left to give  and nothing left to miss.  Trite, trivial, unrealisable but not entirely without truth.

Part of me is driven to apologise for sharing these morbid thoughts. They have been buzzing round my head for some time now and I have written them down because they encourage me and I hope they will encourage others.

Bring back hanging out

This is written on the back of the longest recreational break I have had since I left school in the 1960’s. It all began with a week on a canal boat, which was followed by a friend’s 60^th birthday party, then two weddings on the Pacific coast of North America a fortnight apart and, after a further week, a cousin’s 40^th wedding anniversary. There was even a sort of symmetry about it all – two celebrations for oldies flanking two celebrations for the up and coming generation with a subconscious subtext that relates to passing on a baton of some sort. We, of the post war, baby boomer generation may not have resolved the political, economic and social issues of our times but we have been able to watch our children emerge into a social network of family and friends. In a sense they seem to be better at it than we were, certainly more active as this particular community of cousins has established a lively ‘in your Facebook’ relationship.

Why is this important? Here follows a digression rather than a direct answer. Though each of these celebrations involved an event on a particular day, they were each the focus of concerted involvement of family and friends for days before and after the event. Circumstances, principally being on holiday, allowed us to be involved in these pre- and after-shock happenings which ranged from a visit to the manicurist (for some reason blokes didn’t get to do this) through meals, cycle rides, walks to simply hanging out together.

Now hanging out is a term that I associate with teenagers with nothing better to do, so the experience of ‘whole family hanging out’, as conceptualised by American friends was a novelty to me. It needed to be approached with all sorts of British caution and reserve -‘we don’t want to intrude’, ‘they will need family time’ and so on. We were a little slow to allow our friends to know their own minds and to accept their invitation as an invitation.

Why was the experience something of a revelation to me? Perhaps because in recent years I have been far more willing and able to allocate time to a purpose than purpose to a time. By that I mean that the purposes I espoused were largely limited and specific, with some measurable outcome in prospect. This is not to say that I am not aware of the larger purposes in life and that I do not pay lip service to them; however, my behaviour strongly suggests that I prioritise the specific: reading a book, cutting the grass, even writing a blog. This is strange when the outcome I count as most rewarding is that each of our children not only has an established network of friends but that they are firmly established in their community of cousins.

Returning to the question, why is this important? a couple of words that reflect past experience in the pharmaceutical industry come to mind: verification and validation. Verification confirms my identity, that I am who I am and verification has the greatest authority when it is provided by the family from which I come. As a parent it is reassuring to know that your children’s identity will be verified for them long after I am gone by as wide a community as is possible. Verification is important to us all but is often overlooked. Validation on the other hand is more immediately recognised as a need; it affirms our value and can come from any community of friends or family.

Communities are created by building relationships; relationships are built over time and it seems to me that hanging out is all about allocating the purpose of building relationships to a time, whether it be an hour or an afternoon or a week. If this is something we did in our teens, my message to myself is, “Bring back hanging out”.

The ‘how’ of business is important too

Businesses, even small businesses, sometimes work against themselves. This becomes a problem when the situation is not recognised or when it is recognised and ignored or when it is recognised and glossed over. The telltale signs can include a chronic inability of the business to perform to its true potential or a growing frustration amongst key colleagues which becomes a real issue if they should eventually decide to leave. However in the short term what may appear to be a marginal performance shortfall is unlikely to be the most pressing issue for a business. If a business is growing there are likely to be other priorities and other options; resource shortfalls for instance can be met by investment and recruitment. At the other extreme when things are tight and everyone is stretched, ‘the best may be the enemy of the good’ and in this case ‘good’ may be survival. In either instance, a very good case would need to be made for persuading business leaders to spend much time on what might appear to be fine tuning as all businesses are ultimately ‘needs’ driven.

Though ‘needs’ define the why of business they do not represent the only business driver and recognising other drivers can provide some interesting insights. For instance, ‘needs’ do not define the ‘how’ or the ‘who’. The ‘how’ is very much in the hands of the business leader because he (or she) it is who determines the business culture and who also ultimately determines the organisation and the technology that the business will adopt in order to operate. In the natural flow of events the culture, the organisation and the technology often evolve as the business itself develops. Not only do they evolve together but they also adapt to each other. So what happens when in the fullness of time a business is asked to embrace a significant change in culture or organisation or technology? Or what happens when the technology or the organisation or, perhaps more likely, the culture comes to be regarded as immutable and its evolutionary progress is stalled or even reversed. Some sort of imbalance is introduced to the business which leads to stresses and strains which distort the behaviour of the business and constrain its performance.

Here is a problem, however. Business leaders by and large are not comfortable with relying on any process that can be described as evolutionary. For one reason it sounds like long term deal and for another the process sounds like it is out of their control. Thankfully it is possible to find at least anecdotal evidence that might provide some encouragement for them. In the first instance, a number of the changes that have affected our culture, organisation and technology at a societal level in the past 30 years have followed an evolutionary pattern where the adoption rate is slow initially but then accelerates dramatically, following a characteristic ‘S’ curve as saturation is approached in due course. The growth in sales of mobile phones is an example of this pattern. An item that was seen primarily as a piece of business equipment and supplementary to fixed line telephony has been instrumental in changing the social opportunities and behaviour of a generation in the developed world and has been the means of bypassing the need for costly investment in fixed line infrastructure in the developing world.

So get the change right and it can be the leaders who end up being the limiting factor. One important feature of such changes that must be borne in mind is that they are often ‘pulled’ by the adopters (the ‘out of the leader’s control’ factor) but there is also possible encouragement for business leaders here, too. Multidisciplinary research by various groups under the broad heading of complexity science suggests that it is possible to build models of complex behaviour involving groups of agents that interact according to relatively simple rules. This will not provide a tool for leaders to use to control the evolutionary process but it can provide them with a better understanding of the process with which they can better position themselves to influence it. The words say it all; an evolutionary process calls for an influencing style of leadership rather than a controlling style. It is not right for every situation but if you want to align the organisation, culture and technology of your business, then ‘influencing leadership’ is the way to go. And before you go, remember an effective communication flow of knowledge and information throughout the business process is the very lifeblood of an influencing style of leadership.

There are business tools that can help; one I have used with some success in the past is AIM (Accelerated Implementation Methodology) which is available from Implementation Management Associates.

Organisation, technology, culture and their impact on the implementation of innovation.

In the 1980’s leading research into the successful introduction of new technologies identified the need for mutual adaptation of technology and organisation. There needs to be explicit recognition of the major influence culture has in determining success.

Dorothy Leonard-Barton asserts  in a paper* that “The major point in this paper is that implementation is innovation.” She is a writer whose work I regard highly even if the way that she writes and the way that I read are not well aligned and I usually make heavy weather of her texts. The important thing is that in this instance perseverance is well rewarded. If I were to change her assertion, it would be to say that innovation is the implementation of invention.

This 20 year old paper is interesting in its continued relevance to the business world of today. Leonard-Barton studied 12 instances of the introduction of new technologies into the operations of large corporations in the 1980’s, with outcomes that ranged from ‘Highly successful’ through degrees of  moderate success and partial failure to ‘Total failure’. She states that ” … a technology almost never fits perfectly into the user environment” and this situation she describes as misalignment. However there is not a single misalignment but a combination of misalignments which create complexity and which must be addressed by what she calls ‘mutual adaptation’. This involves “… reinvention of the technology and the simultaneous adaptation of the organization.” There follows a discussion assessing:

1. the significance and impact of misalignments at different strata of the organisation
2. the nature of adaptation cycles, both large and small; their impact on the business and the implications of committing to them

Some examples of adaptation options are presented and Leonard-Barton concludes that a degree of ‘mutual adaptation’ is an essential part of successful implementation. She also comments in her conclusions that “… research on survival in highly competitive industries suggests that the surviving companies are those that are open to advances in process technology – even if the price of that openness is expensive technical experimentation and costly organizational shifts.” There is no reason to think that the situation is any different now; indeed, I would argue that this broad conclusion can be applied much more widely to innovations in any aspect of  business.

One dimension in the process of implementation that is implicit in her discussion  is the influence of culture. At several places in the paper, the behaviour of individuals and groups and the effect those behaviours have on outcomes is described.  Behaviour is not a factor of technology or organisation so while it has been observed it has not been considered as a variable in this study. If you accept, for the sake of argument, that behaviour is driven by culture then the interfaces between organisation, technology and culture must all be taken into consideration and included in the process of adaptation if probability of success in the implementation of change is to be maximised. I will come back to the relationship between culture and behaviour in future posts.

* “Implementation as mutual adaptation of technology and organization”, Dorothy Leonard-Barton; Research Policy 17, 1988, pp251-267; Elsevier

Exploring the edge

I first came across the word ‘edge’ being used in the context of business organisation in the work of John Hagel III and John Seely Brown. The material in their book, “The Only Sustainable Edge” and in John Hagel’s blog “Edge Perspectives” (http://www.edgeperspectives.typepad.com/ and http://www.edgeperspectives.com/) provided a rich vein of resource material as I began to think about how to respond to the increasing uncertainty in my own work environment. If you are familiar with situations where your efforts to improve productivity are like sticking ‘a finger in the dyke’ and there are alluring but poorly quantified references to the benefits of outsourcing and offshoring, then give this material a look. However, they are not on their own; powerful support comes literally in the form of “Power to the Edge” (http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Alberts_Power.pdf), a treatise by David Alberts and Richard Hayes on a transformation that is being proposed for military organisation. With an occasional nod to the industrial and commercial world, this book describes in compelling fashion how networked communication provides the only basis for an effective and affordable force, capable of responding in diverse conflict situations. If the words ‘flexible’ and ‘agile’ are being bandied about in your business, read these texts.