Does piece work have a future?

Octinver is a new business and in this early phase of its existence, I have been spending some time thinking about business models. I guess what I do is best described as independent consultancy though I am not entirely happy with that description. One very persuasive approach for the independent consultant, strongly advocated by Alan Weiss, is to use perceived value as the basis for establishing fees and to avoid like the plague using ‘day rates’. He highlights with this guidance the contrast between valuing input as measured by effort multiplied by time as opposed to valuing output directly. On reflection I am convinced that valuing output directly brings obvious benefits for the knowledge worker and for his or her clients; it involves a process of establishing value, a responsibility to provide value and a considerable degree of freedom in how the value is delivered.

It led me to consider how our current pattern of ‘9 to 5’ work has evolved as it appears to a classic example of the ‘effort multiplied by time’ formula. Apart from the obvious fact that the availability daylight probably had something to do with it but I suspect that organised labour began with slavery which then provided the model for patterns of industrial employment. No doubt there is extensive literature on this, ranging from the philosophical through the political to the biographical and one need look no further than Wikipedia to confirm this.

What managers like is control; slavery provided complete control over all aspects of life, wage employment provided pretty extensive control, sanctified through the concept of employment for life which for all its altruism is solidified around the belief that the employer knew best. If managers have control of input then they can manage their resources to generate the output they require.

Given that we have managed to survive and prosper in the developed world without slavery for nearly 200 years, is it possible to envisage a modern society that can flourish without deference to the ticking clock in most if not all instances of what is called work? Is it possible to imagine a more equal society, perhaps not in wealth but in the freedom to decide how to spend time and the confidence to negotiate a value on the output of labour. To keep managers happy the point of control would need to be transferred from input to output; this brings to mind the comparison between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ which is a subject that Hagel and Seely Brown have written about quite extensively. If I am not mistaken it also has something of the ‘kaizen’ approach about it so it is not totally out of sync with recent business thinking.

While it is possible to imagine at least partial manifestations of the ‘pull’ in manufacturing, it requires of me little more determination to see how the ‘pull’ model might work in some service areas of our economy – apart from consultancy that is. Consider for instance security (including the police and fire services), welfare, health care as well as commercial services such as banking. I guess that one of the best examples of a ‘pull’ service might be the lifeboat service in UK which is largely resourced by volunteers. What is also of interest is the increasing prevalence of ‘patient led care’ in the treatment provided by the UK National Health Service. There is experience, then, on which to call for reference when contemplating alternative models of work.

What is really interesting here is that once you get below the surface there is scope for quite radical redesign of working patterns that could be healthier for the individuals and corporations alike.

Leading people, managing relationships

Recently I came across a list of behaviours which the writer claimed would help me to be effective and productive. At first glance it was quite a surprising collection of characteristics. In the first instance, the writer assumed that the readers would have a belief in what they were doing, that they were aligned with the way in which their organisation was going. His next recommendation was that people should behave with integrity; the ends do not justify the means and, as has been demonstrated in many spheres of life recently, a wrong act can unravel a right outcome. But integrity does not justify innocence or naivete and so people should strive for understanding; in some ways this can seem to be quite a burdensome responsibility and it does not seem to allow for the ‘I was only taking orders’ line of excuse. The understanding should be built with honesty and the integrity should be informed by the understanding. What understanding provides is knowledge and with knowledge comes power which the next behaviour, self control is presumably meant to temper.

I think here the distinction is between using our knowledge to outperform our fellows, which is acceptable and using it to humiliate them, which is not. The writer then seems to underline his point by requiring patience. Are they not the same thing? Perhaps not; perhaps self control acts as a filter on our actions and patience acts to attenuate our thoughts and our emotions; so it is not only how we act that is important but how we think and feel. What patience does is anchor the self control and put it into the context of relationships and what is emerging is a picture of the model which the writer has of how we should behave in a community. We tend to think of patience and self control as being very passive behaviours but in this context they are actually very active behaviours because what the writer is advocating is the building of relationships. We are building the capacity to act when the time is right and to act decisively and with impact. What is clear by now is that the writer is expecting his audience to accept the responsibility he is offering and to act pretty autonomously.

The next behaviour he asks for is true commitment; whoops, where is the ‘get out’ clause? ‘Too late’ is his answer; if we are looking for authority and we want to exercise it responsibly, there is a cost and our full commitment is it. If we cannot give it, we should go back to the beginning and question the vision. Our commitment should be emotional, psychological and intellectual; it is an outworking of the integrity that we agreed to earlier. This commitment is to the cause but that is not enough, we need to be committed to our fellows whoever they may be and to behave well towards them. To those with whom we agree to be co-workers we owe a deeper level of commitment; interestingly, this was touched on today by Steve Farber, a leadership coach, in a conversation starter for Harvard Business Publishing where he was strongly advocating a commitment to mentoring. Read it if you dare to see the word ‘love’ in the context of a working relationship.

So where does this get us? A long way from the ‘work harder and work faster’ view of productivity; a long way even from the ‘work smarter’ view. It gets us to a point where relationships are seen as having an important bearing on our effectiveness and productivity. If that is the case, perhaps HR responsibilities should be transferred back to line.

Productivity and effectiveness

Productivity is elusive. Of course there are those who will argue that it can be measured, which is an undeniable fact in certain well defined circumstances. But if we assume that productivity is a measure of value created for a given amount of effort expended, the extent of the problem becomes apparent. One question is now two questions: how do you measure value and how do you measure effort? The situation can be simplified by equating value with money and effort with time, which simplification has served adequately in the industrial age, a period characterised by extensive mechanisation.

How does it fare in the post industrial era? In an era where value is created by logistics and networks such a simple measure begins to feel seriously inadequate. It seems there is a question of timing to be included in the measures of both value and effort and perhaps a more subjective assessment of quality should also be considered as more and more value is delivered in the form of a service. Already it is clear that any approach based on measuring overall performance is going to become complex and unwieldy so there may be benefit in considering an alternative measure, based on education and behaviours. Identify those behaviours in your colleagues that are likely to deliver good value to your customers and to you; educate your colleagues in those behaviours and then reward them for exhibiting the desired behaviours. You are likely to be rewarding behaviours such as honesty, understanding and commitment which does not seem a bad thing in itself and will do no harm to customer relations and loyalty.

If productivity spotlights the behaviours of individual colleagues, consideration of effectiveness returns attention to the bottom line.  The impact here will depend upon how well you have identified those behaviours that deliver value to your customers. The speed with which the right behaviours feed through to the bottom line will depend, among other considerations, upon the natural cycle of your business which might be measured in weeks or months or years. The longer the natural cycle of your business, the more forward looking you will need to be or the more adept at finding ways to accelerate the impact on your business.

As a caveat, it is important to add that there are occasions when it is expedient also to educate your customers with regard to your value proposition and I say this as a card carrying founder member of the Ryanair Frequent Flyers (though I should add that my membership expired in December 1989 and I am not sure how far the Frequent Flyers survived into the next decade).

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.

Interoperability can be fun

I am so frustrated – I recently read an article in the FT by Michael Schrage entitled “Interoperability: the great enabler” (5th Feb). In his article, Schrage introduces the concept of IQ or the Interoperability Quotient but he does not describe how to measure it.  Here I am, in France struggling with interoperability every time I venture out of the house and I could conclude from his article that, with a low IQ, I might be  destined to underachieve. Perhaps willingness makes up a large part of the IQ measure; certainly buying food in a street market was successful and ultimately satisfying as was, at a much deeper level a guided tour of a country house by one of the family who could tell a story about every one of many ‘objets d’interet’ in the house and garden. Even if I could only understand one word in five, the personal intensity of the message conveyed all the meaning necessary.

So here is my real frustration with the article.  While it recognises the technological driving force behind interoperability and an economic context in which it can develop, it does not acknowledge the importance of culture and organisation in determining potential for the wider implemention of interoperability In my opinion, the  factors that will determine success in interoperability have more to do with people, organisations and culture than a quotient relating to components and systems. Alberts talks about this in his book “Power to the edge” where he discusses interoperability in the physical, information, cognitive and social domains. It is not that all these domains are relevant to every instance of operability as this is obviously not the case but Alberts also talks about the need for ‘jointness’ which I take to mean the responsibility of the people involved at each end of any ‘interoperation’ to take responsibility for effective interoperability. People with a shared intent and awareness working ‘jointly’ can provide resilience and adaptability in the deployment of interoperability and these underpin the evolutionary capacity that is a prerequisite for survival.

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.