Public policy and opinion will continue to shape work, workplaces and the future of work in every region, country and global economy. Whether we express or silence our voices will matter. Being politically intelligent citizens means among other things, thinking logically about the long term gains and costs of any strategy. It takes no intelligence to think in the short term, without the logic of the long view.
Should office work hours matter?
One of the common conversations in offices globally is about the relevance of schedule conformity. With increasing tolerance of and preference for work hours flexibility, what matters in these conversations?
We need to transition from the old question of office hours to availability. When do people need to be available to those who depend on them? How can these promises, expectations and agreements be communicated? These are the questions that matter.
Engaged and disengaged leaders
Disengaged leaders create a glass ceiling on the possibilities of growing engaged teams. Teams flourish with engaged leaders. This is the domain of leaders of leaders. Leaders of leaders have the unique opportunity to help leaders become more engaged in their work. This means feeling more connected, free and valued.
Rethinking our why
Our why is the constellation of our dreams, passions and values. Perhaps the best way to think about our why is what we live from rather than what we aim for. This makes why a practice of presence rather than postponement.
This is a more realistic and useful perspective when we embrace the notion that the future is largely uncertain. An optimistic aim is a confident guess about a future with knowns and knowable and unknowable unknowns. We don’t really know. A clear why doesn’t require futuristic certainties. It works more from humility than confidence.
What to do with old habits
When we think of success, we think of achievements and success. We think of goals. As much as considerations of these might be useful, it comes down to the right habits.
When we want to shift from old to new habits of any kind, all it takes is practice of new habits. The brain automatically gives preference to new habits as they grow. We don’t have to understand where old habits originated, how they work and why we keep getting stuck on them. They mindfully direct us until we cultivate new habits.
Emotional debt
In his Medium article, Johnnie Moore talks about the relational corollary to technical debt in projects: emotional debt. This is the accumulation of often unspoken and unresolved tensions on teams that creates drag on collaboration, creativity and fulfillment.
This kind of social debt happens in the absence of teams having simple, comfortable ways to form agreements on what it means to work well together for everyone’s good. Once this habit develops, emotional debt is reduced and prevented. Everyone gains.
Planning as guessing
A guess is an estimation, a commitment to an assumption. That's what planning is, no matter how we treat plans as more than guesses. We work from strategic, operational and project guesses all the time. When our guesses work, it's usually because we stay question-focused along the way. Learning creates agile guessing, the most productive form of guessing possible. Next time someone suggests the need for a plan, use guessing as more accurate and realistic language.
D in the corner
One of our connecting experiences in organizations connects people through stories to discover each other's essential abilities. It's the opposite of diagnostic tools that put people in personality boxes. One of the worst examples we've heard about was a retreat that was designed to connect the owner to the company. The group was segmented into subgroups of their personality boxes. The owner ended up sitting alone in the corner, begin the only one in his personality category, labeling him as a "D." Quite a paradoxical outcome that typifies what often happens. The alternative is to show people how to form new connections around stories and essential abilities.
Liberating structures at work
One of the hallmark indicators of good cultures is freedom. People feel free to connect, contribute, collaborate, grow.
Here are some structures that support freedom at work.
Task initiative agreements: teams agree that anyone can take on and share any work that needs to be done.
Work transparency: anyone can see what anyone is working on at any point in time, ask questions, ask for and offer help.
Ubiquitous conversations: people can have virtual conversations related to any task, meeting, project or question update.
Working from your Why: working with intrinsic motivation by knowing and working from your work why.
The more people feel a sense of freedom in their work, the more meaning, trust and connection they experience. These accelerate performance and the growth of the business.
The change management fallacy
Leaders who "roll out" change programs worry about resistance. They should. People resist what they don't help create. They argue that certain kinds of change must be done by colonistic imposition. It's a logical argument for leaders who don't know how and lack trust of people, and don't know how to build cultures of trust. Fortunately, this learning is possible. Change can cause more inspiration than perspiration.
The consequences of obsessions with quartlerly performance
When companies continue the practice of obsession with quarterly numbers, there are a host of things they intrinsically care less about. Unfortunately they are all lead indicators like culture, learning, proactive investments and strategies. Managing lag indicators like quarterly numbers makes it impossible to act on the root causes of performance beyond the current quarter. All of this is fixable, and easily, with the right rigor.
Rethinking accountability
We still hear leaders claim their diagnosis of inconsistent performance as a "lack of accountability." What we know about inconsistent performance is how it is closely related to an external locus of control. People perform poorly when they think they are the object rather than source of power. Powerlessness leads to mindless, careless, apathetic work.
When holding people accountable means enforcing more control over people with threats and confrontative conversations about their deficiencies, external locus of control increases. People who get fired or demoted are often people leaders are "holding more accountable."
People perform better when they work instead with an internal locus of control. This manifests as working with a sense of trustworthiness rather than fear, apprehension and risk aversion. Smart leaders support the growth of trustworthiness by coaching people on how to work by agreement and focus on learning and success.
Getting the questions right
Machine and artificial intelligence, robotics and smart automation. Following the arc of these curves, we arrive at a world where most jobs can be done without people. This is the world of cost-reduction based profit growth. It will be prominent in business and strategic plans, as well as economic and social policy considerations. These are new questions that will challenge the boundaries of our sense of social responsibility. If anything, they will expand beyond the familiar and will impact every national and global business and economy. Another opportunity to get the questions right.
Growing our potential
It's interesting to think of our potential in specifics rather than generalities. For instance, we can think about our potential for writing well. The strength of our potential for writing is equal to how well we have learned to write well, through reading, expert guidance and practice. Little learning equals little potential. We grow our potential through learning.
The focus on growing our potential in any ability through learning is the opposite of a deficiency approach to our weaknesses. We don't will our way out of weaknesses. We learn our way into new levels of potential. This is true for any ability we want to begin or strengthen in mastery and consistency.
Realizing your potential
At the core of our potential is everything we can physically do. This includes things we do well and other we don't, things we do consistency and those we don't, and things that align with our why and those that don't.
To enagage any aspects of our potential is to realize our potential. Each part of our day is an opportunity to realize more of our potential. The intention to realize more of our potential goes beyond the intention to just get things done. It infuses action with meaning. It grows our potential.
We can consider what kinds of our potential we can engage in any task, meeting, conversation, project or relationship. It's useful to regularly check in on and update our potentials inventory we plan our days, weeks and months.
When we regularly notice the usefulness of any specific potential, we can turn it into more of a habit so it automatically kicks in when we need it most. The more connected we are with our potentially, the more we live and work with confidence, clarity and courage.
3 Steps to Buiding New Habits
Much of personal success is more about habit building than will power. Good habits give us the focus, energy and persistence required to do what we want to do in life.
Now that we have the science and research of habits, habit growing is now possible. Here are three simple steps.
Know your why
The more clear we become on the potential benefits of a new habit, the more energy we have for growing it.
Give it time
Literally, decide when - in what situations and what conditions - in your daily and weekly schedule you will practice the new habit.
Progress in steps
Increase the consistency and frequency of practice one step at a time, aiming for ongoing progress rather than instant perfection.
The art of pep talks
A recent HBR piece outlines three secrets to talks with people that work. Three strategies create focus, trust and passion.
We create focus through uncertainty-reducing guidance on how things can get done. We create trust through empathy for what people struggle with. We create passion by illuminating the meaning of what people do in the larger narrative.
These three simple approaches empower people do work together at their best.
The Real Shelf Life of Strategic Plans
What is the shelf life of strategic plans?
Many organizations resist strategic plans, weary of how quickly they become out of date. Most that still do them shelve them after two quarters because of their unintended irrelevance.
A couple of years ago, we guided a struggling company product division in strategic planning. Their sales were steadily disappointing in what were believed to be promising global markets. The group was fragmented and diverse. Their sense of the future was dim, which made them far more reactive than proactive. They felt more that their past was their destiny instead of a starting place for renewal.
We used the Agile Canvas model to shape their growth. When we did their first two quarter update, over half of their canvas changed.
The reasons were many. The team changed. They had new talents to understand and engage. They had new learning that inspired reimagining their long view and many of the near view definition of strategic projects. Their achievements opened space for new constellations of known and unknowns. As old problems were solved, solutions led to new problems and opportunities, New questions emerged.
Over the course of the next year, they went from the lowest performing division in the company to a star team with doubling sales that continue. The agility of refreshing their plan every two quarters empowered them as never before. They discovered the power of balancing being responsive and proactive.
The research is that planning assumptions, no matter how valid and reliable, are accurate at high levels for about two quarters, after which their accuracy diminishes. This is reality, and as such more opportunity than risk. Smart organizations plan and invest accordingly.
Big Logic
As much spotlight as we give Big Data, we would be wise to share attention with Big Logic. This is the art and practice of considering intended and unintended impacts in large social systems like organizations, communities and networks. It is discovering impacts, not speculating or assuming what they are or could be based on our mental or political models. It's asking new question about what actually happens when we do and don't take action on any parts of social systems.
There are so many examples of old ways of doing things that result in paradoxical outcomes, things getting worse or sustained in status quo when the "right" things are done. How we come to new questions is considering natural patterns of how people think, behave and interact. Big logic is more than big data. It is pattern sensing beyond the conclusions and collusions of data.
The politics of both-and
It is paradoxical to asssociate politics and inclusive thinking. In inclusive thinking, we sit on the same side of the table, considering how to optimize or scale the advantages of anything and minimize or mitigate the disadvantages. Every strategy has advantages and disadvantages. To whom each is favors is irrelevant to the the effort of inclusive thinking.
Politics as usual is exclusive either-or thinking. Either-or is the basis of win-lose which in an interdependent world results ultimately in lose-lose. Both-and is the basis of win-win.
One of the signals that a person, group or community has moved from adolescent to adult cognitive development is the movement from exclusive to inclusive thinking. It is quite possible, in that all it does is combine in new ways the kinds of cognitive operations that 8 year olds are capable of handling. People only need to learn how to do so. The rewards are abundant.