Cooperation is an emergent social phenomenon, bottom-up. Coordination is an imposed managerial construct, top-down. Both are present and necessary within an organisation. Managerial thinking and practice often that only recognises the latter misses out on a sphere of influence that occurs from organic social interactions.
This week I’ve been doing:
This week at work we’ve been mobilising our response to the effects of the coronavirus on young people. We launched our Young People Action Plan. Moving fast, changing priorities.
I’ve been impressed with our leadership team and the level of response they have taken. They could have taken the approach that the current situation is temporary, made the least change possible to continue to deliver services for young people, and waited for it all to go back to normal. Instead they seem to be taking this as an opportunity to rethink and redesign how the organisation supports young people in a digital world.
Lockdown started early this week. I spent the last evening of not-lockdown-ness on the beach.
I wonder how other minimalist digital nomads will cope with having to be stuck inside in one place for the next few weeks?
I wrote a short guide to creating a roadmap for your life with the aim of helping someone find some focus and direction. It’s a technique I’ve used with a few people and I wonder if it’s something I should write more about.
This week I’ve been studying:
This assignment is a tough one. It’s on a topic I’m not very interested in, and is in two parts, one of 500 words and the other of 3500 words. To counter my lack of interest I’m being more organised, breaking the work down into small chunks and scheduling them over the next couple of weeks to make sure I finish it before the deadline.
This week I’ve been thinking about:
I’ve been considering the future, what’s important to me, reviewing the five principles I wrote x years ago, and asking myself if they are still relevant. It’s a difficult thing to do in such uncertain times but it feels even more important than usual for focusing and making the most of my time.
This week, people I follow on Twitter have been saying:
Paul Smith tweeted “I’m biased but seriously, Just how good is http://gov.uk?! – Fixing publishing for government was such a good and wise thing. Can you imagine the disarray of outdated and repeated information on those 100’s of sites before? #nationalnfrastructure”
Government digital teams ‘fix the plumbing’ approach has proved it’s worth.
This is roughly what a roadmap for your life looks like:
| Now | Next | Later | Done | |
| Career: have a fulfilling career as a hair stylist. | Choose personal brand name Set up social media accounts and blog | Arrange volunteer work experience at a salon. Watch YouTube videos about hair styling Ask friends to practice styling their hair | Training to get qualified Apply for hair stylist jobsAdvertise home visit hair stylistMake videos for social media Set up own salon | |
| Relationships: surround myself with positive people. | Spend time with friendsFind an awesome boyfriend | Find more friendsSpend more time with family | ||
| Health: be able to run a marathon in 2022 | Buy running gearPlan 1 mile route to run | Research training tipsJoin a running club.Plan 3 mile route to run | Sign up for a half marathon in 2021Sign up for a marathon in 2022 | Eat a healthy meal every day |
It has five columns, the first of which is for your goals, and then the other four (Now, Next, Later Done) hold the tasks that are going to help you in achieving your goal.
You can set up your roadmap however suits you, as postit notes on the wall, on a Trello.com board, or in a spreadsheet, as long as you can see it all at once and it’s easy to move tasks around.
Visualising what you are going to be doing on a board like the example above is important for being able to understand the big picture of the direction you are taking your life and what you are focusing on.
We all only have a certain amount of time in our lives, so in order for this to be effective we have to limit the number of things in our Now column. How much you limit it to depends on how much time you have and how many rows you are working on. The now column is all about focus, so it should only have the few things that you are actually working on.
The Next column contains the tasks that you want to do soon. They are things that you know you want to do because you’ve been able to answer ‘yes’ to the decision-making question below. We try not to set dates for things as other stuff in life gets in the way and we feel bad about not achieving it by the deadline, but if its something that has a deadline from outside (like signing up for a marathon in the example above). The important thing about the Next column is that it is ordered so that the most important thing is at the top and the least important at the bottom. When you have completed a task in your Now column and moved it to the Done column you’ve opened up space to move the task from the top of the Next column into the Now column. As not all tasks take the same amount of time and effort it sometimes might mean that you have to complete a move to Done a few small tasks before you move a big task from the Next to Now column.
The Later column is for all your ideas. Whether they are sensible or wild ideas, you add them to your Later column so you don’t forget them. You can regularly spend some time looking through the ideas here and ask yourself the decision-making question below. If you answer ‘yes’ then you can move the task into Next so it can be ordered with all the other tasks. Sometimes ideas in this column are too big and so need to be broken down into a number of smaller more achievable tasks.
The Done column contains all the tasks you’ve completed. Look at it occasionally to appreciate how much you’ve achieved towards your goal
How do you decide on what goals to work towards? Start with the biggest problem in your life, the thing that frustrates you the most. This goes in the top box in the left hand column. In the example above its Career.
Then we need to get a vision of how we’ll know if we’re achieving the goal. I say ‘achieving’ and not ‘achieved’ because the thing about life goals is that they are never ‘done’ or ‘finished’. In the example the vision is ‘have a fulfilling career as a hair stylist’. This is a good vision because it is specific enough to give some direction but not too prescriptive so that it doesn’t limit how the goal can be achieved. So, ‘have a fulfilling career’ isn’t specific enough, and ‘have a fulfilling career as a hair stylist at X salon’ is too specific.
This works even if you don’t know what career you want, the vision becomes something like ‘figure out what I want to do with my life’.
I usually start by getting people to think big about what they want to do with their life by asking things like ‘how do you want to contribute to the world around you?’ rather than just ‘what do you want to do to make some money?’. This is because fulfilling careers usually come about when the person feels they are doing something useful and worthwhile in the world.
Then pick the second most unsatisfactory thing in your life and do the same exercise. Once you have your goals (hopefully not too many) you can then think about the tasks that are going to help you with achieving your goals.
How do you choose which tasks to add to the board? Because almost all tasks start as ideas in the Later column they don’t have to be fully formed and can be as wild as you like. When looking for ideas, for example about having a fulfilling career as a hair stylist, it’s easy to look around at what other hair stylists are doing. The wider you’re research the more ideas you’ll get. You can also look at what similar careers are doing, so if yoga teachers (similar because they are both about making people feel good about themselves) are selling training courses to help people become yoga instructors then you could apply the same idea to hair stylists and offer training for other hair stylists. Even if you don’t feel skilled enough right now, it doesn’t matter because the idea is going in the Later column.
Once you have your roadmap set up, and have clear goals you can use it to help you make decisions by asking yourself the question, “Does doing this take me closer to achieving my goals?” This question applies mostly when ordering tasks, but it can also help with deciding what not to do. So, you might not have ‘Don’t eat lots of chocolate cake’ as a task on your board, but you recognise that eating too much cake is going to help in achieving your Health goal, so asking yourself the question helps you decide not to.
For most people, getting their roadmap set up is the easy bit. The hard part is having the motivation to work on the tasks. It can help to have someone who holds you accountable and asks, what have you done today?, when are you going to do that?
If the goals are inspiring enough, over time you’ll not only get used to having the self-discipline to work on tasks, but you’ll actually enjoy it because you’ll see that you are getting closer to your goal.
This week I’ve been doing:
For obvious reasons, it’s been a week involving lots of things changing at a fast pace. We are all adapting to new ways of working, different pressures, and an uncertain future. In the short term, we still need to find ways to support young people and, for the medium and longer term, we need to think about how to be a more digital charity, to deliver services that young people need in ways that fit the world and times we live in. Getting alignment between individuals, teams, objectives at a time of such flux is futile. Instead we should try to have trajectories that mean we are all aiming at the same goal but expect that we will take different routes to get there, and that if things change for a team they don’t become ‘unaligned’ but just change trajectory. My team has been talking about how we do this so that one part of what we’re doing can change without affecting the other parts.
I’ve had a few discussions this week broadly around the same topic of feeling like you don’t own your own schedule and not letting others to set your priorities and focus. It’s a tough cycle to break out of but it’s important for us to feel in control of the things that we can control. I’d say it’s even more important in times like these.
I’ve taken the opportunity of remote working to become nomadic. As I can work anywhere, that anywhere might as well be somewhere nice and be different each day. Luckily for me I have no intention of going where people are so I’m also self-isolating whilst getting lots of fresh air, and getting more focus in my work, study, and writing.
This week I’ve been thinking about:
The coronavirus seems to have greater second, third and so on order effects every day. Organisations of all types and sizes are either shutting down or trying how to continue to offer their services at-a-distance or online. Some organisations are undoubtedly trying to weather the storm and hope that everything returns to normal soon enough. I think that the organisations that manage to step out of crisis-mode and redesign their business model and reshape what they do to deliver value will be the ones that succeed in a post-coronavirus world. It’s day one for these organisations. If you were starting something completely new, how would you go about it to avoid reliance on past ways whilst not being over swayed by reacting against those ways?
Uubs, restaurants, gyms, etc., are being told to close. The British Heart Foundation shut all it’s shops. Office workers are working from home. ‘Social distancing’ is surely going to be added to the dictionary by the end of 2020. Some people have tried to make the point that the term is inaccurate and we should be using ‘physical distancing’ instead to indicate that we need to physically stay away from each other but socially and emotionally become closer. I’m completely behind the idea of ‘social distancing’ (as a way of life, not just a response to a virus), as a means to flatten the curve of infections. It makes me think of Pirsig’s static quality patterns and how social patterns and behaviours have a moral right to overcome a biological pattern (such as a virus).
This week, people I follow on Twitter have been saying:
Lots of people have been working on how to help charities that are being affected by the coronavirus. It’s really good to see people willing to help and the diversity of things they are developing. I think decentralised, distributed help is a better approach than one organisation trying to own it and organise everyone else.
Kylie Havelock tweeted, “Digital, design, and tech folks @cmmonknowledge needs your skills to help support local COVID-19 Mutual Aid community groups across the U.K.”
Ross McCulloch tweeted about his zoom call to “help charities think about how they can deliver information, support and other services online using livechat, video and other tech.”
Bobi Robson tweeted asking for anyone “interested in helping to share techniques and skills to help organisations pivot at this time” to sign up
I wonder what problems they are seeing. And what range of solutions they are coming up with. Kylie also wrote about how crisis massively increases cognitive load and even looking in from the sidelines I can see some of the impact having to deal with a drop in funding, not being able to support service users, having to make people redundant, and all the other difficult things charities are dealing with, and affecting the people having to make those difficult decisions. Whilst I absolutely believe that digital can offer some new ways of doing things, I would if us digital people might be guilty of trying to apply known solutions to unknown problems.
A few people on Twitter seem to think that coronavirus spells the end for capitalism. Clearly this isn’t going to be the case. Whether you go by the crisis model or cycles model of capitalism, globalisation was a spatial fix to reduce costs. But globalization has issues, such as aiding the spread of viruses, and Digitization seems like the likely next big fix capitalism will apply to counter these issues. If digitization causes a shift from a ‘move the people to the work’ approach to a ‘move the work to the people’, and along with this organisations shift to measuring people by value delivered rather than hours worked, then perhaps we are moving further away from the wage labour basis of capitalism, but probably not the end of it
Quote of the week
“It’s digital’s time to shine; to help people (who are literally stuck) needing help, entertainment and life-saving information… Our digital delivery has arguably never been so important.”
Joe Freeman
“Designing for crisis” by Kylie Havelock https://link.medium.com/Lxm5Ibil04
