220930
Today
- Wrote an issue report
- Did a bit of project management and business analysis
- Walk on the beach
- Weeknotes
Tomorrow
- Writing about product standards
- Walking along the coast
Weeknotes 322
Photo of the week:
This week I did:
Lightweight governance
I did some thinking about lightweight governance models. One of the most interesting elements of lightweight governance compared to heavyweight is the assumption of competent users. It replaces prevention with education. Add a feedback loop to take the strategic into the implementation and the implementation to the strategic, and it starts to look like a usable governance model.
The app-ification of work
This week’s irregular ideas email was about how organisations use technology to mediate their relationship with those who work for them.
#ThingsIveReadRecently
20 things I read about governance, canvases, temporal knowledge graphs, alt-text, inequality and innovation, APIs and product management, platforms, content and design, communications, inclusive research and management.
And I read:
Putting the ‘S’ back into ESG
NPC’s briefing on how charities can ensure social issues are considered in environmental, social and governance (‘ESG’) frameworks talks about how charities and companies can work together. It fits in the second means of effecting change that charities use, influencing others to help those that need it.
And thought about:
Integrative goal-setting
The Rotman School of Management defines integrative thinking as: “…the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.”
I’m really starting to like the idea of using integrative thinking for goal-setting where multiple outcomes are all positive and you work on all of them, but as they are conflicting goal only one can be achieved. It embraces uncertainty and increases success.
Elephants
Of everything I’ve read and thought about in the last year or so, the parable of the blind men and an elephant has had the most effect on my thinking. It reminds me that all perspectives are equally right and wrong, and we never really get to the ‘truth’ of the thing.
It tells me that different people understand different things in different ways, and rather than arguing for a single view or trying to get a holistic view, we should embrace the differences even if we think it causes tensions.
Maybe the parable of the blind men and an elephant is the first of the uncertainty embracing product management thinking tools I’ve been looking for.
220929
Today
- Team retro
- Tested a fix for the hearing check
- Chatted about starting some new projects
- Finished my coaching questions
Tomorrow
- Onboarding plan
- Fix going live
- New project setup
- Weeknotes
220928
Today
- Documented some thought on a lightweight governance model
- Chatted about intranet strategy and management
- Writing answers to coaching question
- Walk on the beach
- Responding to a technical issue
Tomorrow
- Testing a new email send solution
- Team retro
- Chatting about some new projects to build a knowledgebase and an incident reporting tool
- Walk along the clifftops
220927
Today
- Data protection group meeting
- Project team check-in
- Team capacity planning
- Accessible recruitment project
- Created an online course
- Thought about lightweight governance
Tomorrow
- Intranet and internal comms strategy
- Team retro
- Coaching questions
220926
Today
- Capacity planning
- Launch our new hearing check
- Went for a walk around the old neighbourhood
Tomorrow
- Team meeting
- Project team check-in
- Coaching questions
- Building an online course
220925
Today
- Family
- Irregular Ideas
Tomorrow
- Team meeting
- Capacity planning
- Go live
- Read Recently
The app-ification of work
My takeaway has just been delivered. The person who delivered it is one of 5 million people working in the gig economy in the UK. He works for a company where he doesn’t know any of his colleagues but they compete with him for work, will never meet a manager or understand why they make the decisions they do. He interacts with his employer solely through an app on his phone.
Technology has always shaped the way we work. In the eighteenth century, the introduction of the factory and the manufacturing of interchangeable parts moved workers from lots of smaller places to fewer bigger places. In the nineteenth century, the electrification of workplaces promised greater productivity. In the twentieth century, office work was changed by computers running regular routine jobs previously done manually. Today, how we work is highly mediated by technology.
Technology changes the dynamics of the relationship between employer and employee. And it changes the power the employee has to change those dynamics.
When, in 1880, Karl Marx conducted a survey of workers it was with the intention of identifying where workers had leverage within the workplace that could enable them to organise successfully against exploitation and advance their own interests. This has long been the power play between company and employee. With traditional employment, because of how work is organised and located, workers have an inherent coordination power. Workers work with each other, they see how many other people work for the company, they talk to their colleagues, share stories of their treatment, and join unions. Unions are intent on improving the working conditions of employers through collective coordinated influence. Where one person can’t influence how a company treats them, a union can.
The app-ification of work changes all this. Where technology mediates the relationship between employer and employee, it removes the coordination power of the workers. It separates them from each other so they do not know each other, can’t talk about their treatment, can’t organise in response to their treatment. It forces them to drive down their own wages, accepting the lowest offer because if they don’t someone else will.
Interestingly, how gig workers feel about gig work depends on whether it is their only source of income or a bit extra in addition to other work. Those for whom gig work is the only job feel unease about the uncertainty of their income. Those who do some gig work in addition to having other, more stable income, appreciate the flexibility it gives them. But referring to those who do this work as gig workers focuses on the piecemeal nature of the work and misses the shift in power that comes with it.
More and more work is being app-ified. Not only delivery drivers but warehouse pickers, care workers, taxi drivers, dog walkers, waiters, maintenance and repair workers. As this happens, the power shifts in favour of the platform provider. Benjamin Sachs, professor of labour and industry at Harvard Law School, says “History shows that if workers don’t have an institution, organisation or mechanism to translate their market power into some kind of sustained form of collective voices, then signs of optimism from employee activism soon fade”. The power of the platforms to prevent activism by ensuring workers never coordinate and have no choice but to compete with each other, means no mechanisms can arise from those workers themselves. That leaves the only power in the hands of law-makers, and the gig economy has proved hard to regulate and platform providers quick to find ways around laws.
Technology mediates so much of the relationship between employees and employers, and it will do so more and more in the future. How workers create a sustained collective voice in the face of the app-ification of work is a significant challenge for the coming decades.
220924
Today
- Finished weeknotes
- Quick blog post about charity opportunity canvas
- Family birthday party
- Started writing irregular ideas
Tomorrow
- Irregular Ideas
Weeknotes 321
This week I did:
Getting ready
Quite a lot of this week has been about getting ready for the next quarter in two ways; one getting to information we need about the work we could be doing so we can make the right prioritisation decisions, and two deciding which process experiments we want to do, documenting our hypotheses and how these experiments fit into our overall system. One of the interesting things I’ve noticed in this is more of a shift towards problem-oriented thinking, which is great to see.
Building on top of what went before
This week’s Irregular Idea was about how we probably don’t think about what we build nowadays in ways that mean we create something others could build on in the future. We tend towards replacing things, but maybe that’s because those things weren’t built to be built upon.
#ThingsIveReadRecently
This week’s reading list included things about the Internet, social capital, digital reading, artificial intelligence, innovation & waste.
Canvas
I’ve been gradually working on developing a canvas for exploring opportunities for charities and am now starting to put it into action. If anyone wants to use it, give me feedback on it, adapt it, please go ahead.
And I read:
The Invidious Hand
James Plunkett’s essay on social justice in the age of control is a really interesting look at platform products and how they have a different set of rules that we aren’t entirely familiar with yet. There isn’t much to disagree with, but something I strongly agree with is that the current institutions based on centuries old thinking, and the mechanisms they have for controlling companies, aren’t fit for purpose when it comes to regulating platforms. It makes me want to get back to my thinking about charity-as-a-platform to resolve the conflict of how platform business models don’t fit charities so those models are about reinforcing growth and charities are trying to reduce the problem they are tackling.
Agile comms
I started reading Giles Turnbull’s Agile Comms Handbook about faster and more flexible ways to communicate. I know I over-think and over-write when I’m communicating so maybe this will help me learn some other ways.
The third Climate Change Risk Assessment
I stumbled onto this report when looking for other things on the Internet, but it’s a really interesting read. The upshot of it is that, based on earlier plans, the UK’s response to climate change was to adapt (rather than act to reduce climate change) but this report shows that the national adaptation plans are failing and the gap between the gap between the level of risk we face and the level of adaptation underway has widened. My conclusion? Put your own adaption plans in place.
And thought about:
Who’s objective is it?
Where there is any tension between how to achieve a goal, the question shouldn’t be, ‘Who is the decision-maker?’ but ‘Who’s objective is it?’. Asking who the decision-maker is, is vague when the decision relies on expert knowledge from . For example, a product manager working with an internal stakeholder should either be trying to achieve their objectives or the stakeholders objectives. They should present all the relevant information, make recommendations, etc., but if it isn’t their objective to achieve then it isn’t for them to make the decision. They should disagree and commit.
How long is data useful for?
The cells of our bodies are replaced every seven years, and yet in some database somewhere is a record of something I did on the internet twenty years ago. Is it still relevant data? How quickly does data go out of date? Temporal knowledge graphs are a way to think about these questions.
In the future, when we have digital twins in the metaverse, how the data stays up to date is an important question. We can’t even explain for ourselves how our current decisions are based on past experiences, so it’ll be interesting to see how our digital twins maintain an up to date representation of us.
Long-term incentives
I had a brief chat about the issues with how companies approach talent acquisition, and after giving it some thought, I think the root of the problems is short term thinking on the part of the company. When hiring, the aim is to find the person best suited to the role. But being best suited comes from systemic privilege, which means the person who isn’t best suited has fewer opportunities. And we know that privilege is more available to certain types of people. So, the more companies focus on the short-term benefits of hiring the person they think is best suited to role, the more inequality they drive in the labour market and the smaller the pool of people who are judged to be best suited becomes. Perhaps, companies that are able to, could do more to recruit people that they judge to not be the best suited and help them develop to become better suited in the future. The more companies that take this long term view of creating a better future labour market, rather than the short term view of what’s best for them in the present, the stronger the labour market will be in the future. Viewing talent acquisition as a competitive advantage is harmful to society and increases inequality. I want to reread the literature on the Resource-Based View of the firm and see how that does or doesn’t fit.