Tag: weeknotes

This week I was doing:

Started at The Prince’s Trust

It was my first week at The Prince’s Trust. The thing that struck me most is that the atmosphere in the office is full of energy. Everyone seems really passionate about what they do, there is lots of positive conversation and people have smiles on their faces. I think that says a lot about the culture of an organisation. The culture is also very much in favour of flexible working. There is no pressure to be seen to be in the office at any particular time, and I feel that there is lots of flexibility in how I apply myself and what value I bring. Part of the reason for the flexibility in how my role shapes out is that the product space is in flux with priorities still being set. This has meant that rather than having to hit the ground running I’ve had time to begin to understand the landscape more.

Writing about the robot invasion

I finished my first essay for the current Innovation and the Knowledge Economy module. It was about whether automation technologies will threaten the employability of graduates. Personally, I think on a long enough time line automation will replace every job, but the research shows that routine jobs will be the ones most affected and that highly skilled creative roles that face novel situations will be least affected. Graduates hold the majority of those roles but interestingly the majority of graduates aren’t working in the same field as they studied which could suggest that being a graduate is more important than what was studied.

Strategic storytelling

I reviewed and provided feedback on the 2020-23 strategy document for Buckinghamshire Mind. It’s been an interesting process to be involved in again. The last time we worked on strategy it was very much about steadying the ship and getting the right foundational things in place. In contrast this strategy feels much more positive and aspirational. The tone of the document is quite conversational and has a narrative feel about it as it tells the story of what we want to achieve over the next three years.

Lean Tea, please

I went to the first of what I hope to be many Agile Lean Coffee meetups. Lean Coffee is a really interesting way to run discussion groups where everyone has equal say in proposing topics and deciding what is talked about. As this group is about Agile, and was attended by engineers and coaches, it was interesting that the majority of the discussions were about the clash between Agile teams and ways of working with the rest of the organisation (or more precisely upper management). It shows that lots of organisations are still struggling to effectively manage the change around Agile and that you can’t really have Agile teams without having an Agile organisation. And a got a sticker.

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This week I was studying:

Predicting future leading technologies

The first part of this week’s lecture was a discussion on General Purpose Technologies, how they are defined, and why it’s important for governments and industry to be able to forecast the next big GPT and understand what socioeconomic impacts it might have. There was some discussion on whether things like 5G really are a new General Purpose Technology or just a continuation of the ICT GPT, and that although it’s impossible to predict the next GPT might be Advanced Materials, Regenerative Medicine or Synthetic Biology.

The second part was a guest talk by Dr Brian MacAulay, Lead Economist atDigital Catapult on “Innovation and Complexity – challenges for modelling change”. He talked about how he is using complexity in building models for understanding the diffusion of innovation in the UK. It gave me a better understanding of complexity and how it might offer some idea about why product direction is so difficult and how to approach it differently. Perhaps picking a direction needs an agent-based model where individuals follow simple behaviours within clear constraints which lead to patterns emerging. So, micro behaviours lead to macro changes, and meso level behaviours between the two. Then, we can see direction as an emergent behaviour and accept that there is no one true trajectory but instead a constantly changing response to change.

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This week I was thinking:

We’re in the experience business

How do we to create a cohesive experience of digital products and real world services that deliver the outcomes users need? Given that our users are young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and getting to the outcome makes the difference between surviving and thriving for them, it seems like an important thing to think about. People talk about ‘creating a seamless experience’ without being clear on what that means or what it will take to achieve it. I think the obvious assumption is that it would require a lot of coordinated upfront work, but I think it could be achieved through user validation on a case by case basis. So, for example, should clicking on a Facebook ad take you to a branded website to offer you multiple channels to make contact, or should it go straight to WhatsApp? We might have to challenge ourselves about how unseamless a thing might seem in order for it to be effective for the young people using it.

Reinventing charity

I did a bit of thinking on Reinventing Charity. It’s really hard to get away from the ‘setup to tackle a specific problem’ thinking for a charity. My thoughts on how problems require a better coordinated approach than they currently get has shifted slightly because of the things I’ve learned about complexity and how outcomes are emergent and so impossible to predict or control. I also did a bit of thinking about the business models for charities, how some are funding conduits, others service delivery, etc. There is a lot to understand.

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This week people on Twitter were saying:

What designers and developers want from product managers

John Cutler tweeted some results of a poll: “design and developers weigh in on the “best” product manager they’ve worked with…“, or to put it another way, “what the people who work with Product Managers want from those Product Managers”. The themes that seem to come out aren’t surprising, things about listening, negotiating, decision-making, but it’s fascinating to see it expressed in this way.

Experiences and solutions

Nate, principal designer for membership, community and ventures at COOP, tweeted about the boundaries between digital products and services.

It seems like lots of people have thought about this same question and some of the replies included some interesting links: “New models for service ownership and leadership” by Ben Holliday and “From squads to swarms” by Chris Collingridge. It’s interesting to me because I’m thinking about how we create experiences that work for young people regardless of whether they are accessed digitally or IRL, and regardless of whether we think of them as a product or service, it should just be a solution.

Joe’s week notes

I read Joe’s week notes every week, he has lots interesting things to share, and this week he mentions the NHS Service Design Manual, which was a big deal on Twitter this week and might be useful for me to know more about in the near future.

He always had a really useful bit on Facebook’s use of data from other sites. Clearly it’s a privacy issue thing, which is important to me given my rants about the weaponisation of digital technology and what the charity sector needs to do about it, but Seth Godin’s podcast about privacy on the internet talks about it really being about expectations and surprise. If you are surprised by how much an organisation knows about you and how they use that information then that is obviously an issue for you. If you expect an organisation to have information about you and they use it in ways you expect then it might not be an issue. It makes me think about ways of reframing the discussion away from dramatic scary words like ‘privacy’ and ‘security’ to words like ‘expectations’ and what’s ‘acceptable’. I don’t think scaring people engages them, it causes a freeze reaction in most people where they decide to do nothing, and as I also ranted about, that confusion-leads-to-paralysis is a tool used to control people widely across our society.

This week I’ve been doing:

RogBot

I haven’t done much on RogBot this week because I’ve been focused on the assignment for my masters course, but I have started writing a user manual for me and collating some info about being an INTJ. I need to get some bitesize chunks from my Insights personality test and then put all of these together in the ‘about’ section on my Miro board so I can figure out the connections between them all.

Will automation threaten the employability of graduates?

I’ve been writing my first assignment for the ‘Innovation in the knowledge economy’ module. As with my other assignments, I’ve enjoyed writing it and reading lots on the subject. Automation replacing humans is something I’m interested in anyway so getting some theoretical background to it has been fascinating.

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This week I’ve been studying:

Lecture 2: Skill biased technological change: Automation and the future of jobs

The second lecture of the ‘Innovation in the knowledge economy’ module was essentially about the trend of technology changing work and how it might change it in the future, or to put it another way, are robots going to take our jobs. The dominant thinking seems to be that automation will affect the routine work that is easy to codify first and the creative work last or possibly not at at. I think it depends on the timeline you are considering. I have no doubt that on a long enough timeline all jobs will be performed by robots, and this raises interesting questions about what society looks like when individuals no longer generate their own wealth and our current concepts of contribution and consumption no longer stand up.

Reading list

• The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerization? 
• The case for a robot revolution, in “Our work here is done. Visions of a robot economy”, NESTA.
• Talk by Eric Brynjolfsson on “The key to growth? Race with the machines” TED talk.
• Reasons for skill-biased technological change
• The CORE curriculum (2015) Unit 2, Technology population and growth
• Effects of skill-biased technological change on jobs.
• Talk by Anthony Goldbloom on “The jobs we’ll lose – and the ones we won’t” TED talk.
• Creativity vs robots: The creative economy and the future of employment, NESTA
• Classifying occupations according to their skill requirements in job advertisements, ESCoE Discussion Paper.
• Which digital skills do you really need? Exploring employer demand for digital skills and occupation growth prospects, NESTA report.
• The Rise of Skills: Human Capital, the Creative Class and Regional Development, CESIS Working Paper.
• The shrinking middle: how new technologies are polarising the labour market, LSE CentrePiece.
• Effects of skill-biased technological change on inequality
• Skills and social insurance: evidence from the relative persistence of innovation during the financial crisis in Europe, Science and Public Policy.
• Technological change, bargaining power and wages, in “Our work here is done. Visions of a robot economy”, NESTA.
• The truth about the minimum wage: neither job killer nor cure-all, Foreign Affairs, January-February.
• Digital Dividends, World Development Report, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

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This week I’ve been thinking about:

How capital investment delivers increasingly marginal returns

Neoclassical economics with its focus on investing in capital vs New Growth theory with its focus on investment in knowledge. Seeing how the neoclassical thinking filters into things such as consumer culture’s drive to buy more things and the project management idea of more people equals increased productivity, it seems like an interesting thing to understand. I also think organisations don’t focus enough on knowledge management and intellectual assets so its interesting to find an economic theory that provides some validity to the capital vs. knowledge argument.
Also I heard the term ‘Return On Asset’ on a podcast in contrast to ‘Return On Investment’ so I might try to find it again and see if it has any connection for me.

Workplace collaboration startups

Merci Victoria Grace‘s article about the current market space for workplace collaboration startups.

I think the real prize is in the Documentation space with anyone who figures out how to help companies turn people’s knowledge into intellectual assets and then leverage these for a competitive advantage standing to make a lot of money. It looks to me like that is what Microsoft is trying to do with Teams, and any direction big players are taking their product strategy is always worth paying attention to.

Theory of change

I’ve been thinking about ‘Theory of change’ and how it could be used for providing context for team and individual OKR’s and/or goals. Rather than setting goals that might be impossible to achieve because no one truly understands the barriers, constraints, and influences on all the complex things that affect even one goal, a team (or even better the entire organisation) should start with a well-documented system map and theory of the changes required in order to achieve the mission. Then, it should be easier to see if achieve the goals is getting the organisation closer to it’s mission.

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This week on my Twitter:

Reinventing charity

Ben Holt, charity innovator previously of CRUK and currently of British Red Cross, posted this request to find people to work with on what a new charity might look like if you designed it from scratch.

I think the hardest thing when starting a charity from scratch would be deciding what its purpose should be, what issues is it going to tackle. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges I foresee for the third sector over the next few decades is going to be how to coordinate services and organisations to solve people’s problems in a connected way rather than the disparate way we do at the moment where we know that the problems people face are often connected but we make them go to one organisation for help with one problem and another organisation for help with a different problem, even though it’s the same person. Perhaps this conceptual charity should start from the point of view that choosing just one problem isn’t really user-centred enough.

It started me thinking about how to approach this as a thought experiment, starting with doing some target space discovery to understand the various ways in which an organisation can exist, whether it is a legal entity like a charity or social movement which doesn’t, what some of the underpinning assumptions are. So if/when I get time I’m going to try to do some work on it.

OKR’s: to cascade or not to cascade

I’ve often struggled to get my head around the different ways people think of and use OKR’s. One of the prevailing ideas seems to be that they should be set up to cascade down through the company. I think this risks complicating what should be a simple (and that’s what makes it difficult) idea about how to align everyone behind an objective. One of the problems with cascading in this way is it often takes months for the uppers and betters to write and agree their OKR’s so that by those in the lower levels of the organisation can set their’s. By the time everyone has done their OKR’s the year is almost over.

I think a clearer approach is ‘This is our mission’ (the Objective), ‘What are you going to do to help achieve that mission?’ (the Key Result). Clearly the answer to that question is going to be different depending on who answers it, but the benefits are that if anything changes, from company strategy to a new recruit joining the team, it’s easy to change the things one person or one team is going to do to help achieve the mission without having to coordinate a change anywhere else as no one else is affected. It also gives more breadth to include learning key results rather than just delivery key results, which isn’t the case with the cascading approach.

This week I’ve been doing:

Rogbot, what do you know about Roger?

I wanted a new project so I started developing a chatbot for my website that will surface information about me from my CV, personality test results, and my user manual (thanks to Becky for the inspiration). I wanted to try to find a way to make the conversational interface more than just ‘here’s stuff from my CV’ and ‘here’s stuff from my personality test’, so that it isn’t about presenting individual documents but has some sense of a cohesive picture of what I’ve done, what I’m doing, what I’m like, etc. So it needs to surface the info in the documents rather than the documents themselves, and in the context of questions that someone might ask.

I started with Postit notes on a wall to help me see each item I wanted to include in the bot. This helped me figure out how to connect it all, and the answer was to allow the user to create a unique(ish) journey by connecting each answer the bot provides to three other pieces of information that will allow the user to jump between work history, projects, ideas, etc., without me having to preempt the journey.

My first iteration is a short quiz about me, which was really just about getting the chatbot on my website with something vaguely interesting to interact with. The next thing on my roadmap is to use the Trello API to pull in my life roadmap and the Google Calendar API to enable the bot to show what I’m doing at any point in time.

Jab, cross. Track, review

I started Krav Maga. It’s been in the Next column on my roadmap for a while so I decided to start classes and move it to the Now column. I also added it my ‘Lead an intentional life’ OKR for 2020 so I can track how many classes I go to. I currently have 130 key results to track against my three objectives, and my current score is 0.12 (but hey, we’re only two weeks into the year). I think I’d like to add reading books to my KRs but I’m not sure I’ll have time so will probably review this in a couple of months.

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This week I’ve been studying:

Balancing academic with ideas

Term starts next week so this is my last week without lectures for a while. I am only studying one module this term, ‘Innovation in the knowledge economy’, so I can spend less time studying course material and hopefully have some time to progress some of my thinking about how anarchism and systems thinking can change how we thinking about innovation.

I started reading Ten faces of innovation and The Free-Market Innovation Machine.

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This week I’ve been thinking about:

Running discovery on a new role

How can we start in a new role in a way that gives you the best chance of success? Approaching it as a fire control problem I could develop an understanding of the target and target space, move early in the direction of the target, get regular feedback to course correct so that I have the best chance of hitting the target. I need to give this a lot more thought and formalise it to make it useful.

In How to start, Lauren Currie talks about the conventional wisdom and the reality of starting a new role, things like fixing problems, making a good impressions, and learning the sweet spot between the company way of doing things and how you work.

What does county council innovation look like?

I read Tom Harrison’s weeknote about the new Buckinghamshire County Council website. Seeing a bit of how he and the team there are approaching this work is interesting in itself, but it’s especially interesting for me because I live in Buckinghamshire and it is becoming a unitary authority, which makes me wonder if the new website is a result of that and how an organisation going through such a complicated process affects the process of building the website.

It also made me think about what an innovation team could do for a county council. Having seen the experience someone went through in applying for a blue parking badge it looks like there would be lots of opportunities for rethinking the processes that citizens go through and making them easier and more efficient for everyone.

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This week, people I follow on Twitter were saying:

Making decisions

There seemed to be a bit of a theme of talking about the different ways of approach decision-making. Kent Beck showed his cycle for observing effort/output to outcome/impact, and how difficult it is to connect the two. Simon Wardley talked about how maps don’t tell you what to do, they help to create a shared understanding of the landscape and challenges to make more informed choices, and that Cynefin is an excellent decision-making framework. Allen Holub was talking about how T-shaped teams have all the skills they need to make decisions and don’t have to delay waiting for an expert from outside the team.

Blaming the product

There were tweets about Microsoft Teams. Lots of people don’t like it and I wonder about why that is. Could it be that blaming a product (which is faceless and immediately in front of you) feels easier than blaming the people behind the product (which we probably don’t even think about that much)? Products are the way they are because of decisions people have made. MS Teams has an extra layer of that as the people at Microsoft who built it made decisions, and then there are people at the implementing organisation (usually the IT team) who also make decisions about how to configure it. Making those decisions is always going to be complicated and dependent on lots of constraints, and I guess it should be for a Product Manager to take on the responsibility for them. Of course, in many organisations implementing Teams there won’t be a Product Manager who can speak to users to understand their needs to inform those decisions.

First weeknote of 2020. The future is here (it’s just not yet evenly distributed).

This week I’ve been doing:

Annual expenditure analysis

Updated my budget tracker (because I’m just that rock ‘n’ roll) and analysed how much money I’d spent over last year and what on. 12% of my expenditure was on my car (tax, insurance, maintenance), 11% on my education (course fees and books), 9.8% on fuel for my car and 3.6% travel (train fare). I expect the balance of expenditure to shift next year with more going on travel and less on my car and fuel.

What do mental health carers need

Started thinking about a side project I might want to work on over this year. I’ve only just started discovery work but I think there is a need for support for people acting as carers of people with mental illness problems. There is growing awareness people suffering from mental illness and what support is or isn’t available, but maybe their carers need support and that is a hidden problem. Based on my experience, and some recent thinking based on a discussion about the book The Chimp Paradox, my hypothesis is that ‘the problem to solve’ is that carers feel like the illness of the person they are caring for controls both of their lives, so I think feeling more in control of their own lives helps them to maintain their own health and support the person they are caring for. I don’t know if this will ever develop into anything as I don’t really have time to work on it but I’ll continue with some discovery work for the time being.

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This week I’ve been studying:

The cost/benefit of reading a book

Haven’t done much studying this week. I have lots of books to read but not enough time to read them. I feel a bit torn between reading academic books that are about the past and wanting to develop my own ideas for the future. I get that the accepted academic research provides an important and necessary background for my own thinking, but reading an entire book feels like a large time cost for a small knowledge return

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This week I’ve been thinking about:

The future paradigm for innovation is systems-thinking

For a while now I’ve held the belief that the ‘creative destruction’ paradigm that underpins our dominant thinking about innovation isn’t fit for purpose in the 21st century. It comes predominantly from Schumpeter, an Austrian political economist writing in the 1930s. His ideas about innovation being about the new new thing and first mover advantage came out of him living at the time of the Great Depression and in between two world wars. The backdrop of this economic and political world climate undoubtedly coloured what Schumpeter saw as the purpose of innovation and what it required to achieve economic success.

But times have changed. This thinking is almost a hundred years old and yet it still informs how most organisations approach innovation. Innovation needs a new paradigm. And I think Systems Thinking is it. Systems thinking requires synthesis approaches rather than reductionist analysis, it looks at how the parts work together rather than isolating the parts from the whole, and it recognises that change is evolutionary, building on what exists, rather the perpetuating the myth of innovation as newness.

I need to spend a lot more time learning about systems thinking, how it can serve as a paradigm for innovation activities and thinking.

Web 3.0

I’m really interested in decentralisation as a model for the web and as an idea for leadership. This video provides a quick overview of the different versions of the web and why 3.0 is so important.

I set up a blockstack ID for myself, and played with some DApps (Decentralised Apps). There are lots of alternatives to the centralised monopolistic internet services like Dpage instead of blogging services like WordPress, but it’s really not very user friendly, a barrier that will have to be overcome if it’s to get widespread consumer adoption.

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This week on my Twitter people were talking about:

What they did in 2019 and how things have changed since 2009

Lots of people were posting about things they’d achieved in the past year and what has changed in their lives during the past decade. I think reviewing the past (essentially running a retrospective for yourself) is really useful. I did a quick ‘What I did in 2019’ blog post, but I haven’t really done enough retro-thinking about the year. It was definitely a year of lots of change.

Different ways of writing week notes

I’ve also looked a bit more deeply at how people are using week notes and what benefits they get out of them. For me it’s part of a reflective practice, being able pull together lots of different moments and thoughts from a defined time period into a (semi-) cohesive picture on a regular cadence forces me to think critically about my week. Although I don’t look back at old posts that much, and I wonder if anyone looks back at what they previously wrote, perhaps just the act of writing about what happened is sufficient for learning. Of course being public means that only those things that are deemed ok to be publicly mentioned are included. I wonder if this prevents/reduces reflection on the private things, or whether there is another mechanism like week notes for encouraging that.

This week I’ve been doing:

Alpha Mike Foxtrot

It was my last two days of working at BSI, time I spent finishing off project handover notes. It’s been an interesting six months and I’ve learned a lot, mostly through challenges to my ideas and assumptions about how teams work and how important cultural fit is. I feel like I need to spend some time reflecting and thinking about how to reset before starting my next role so I’m in a good place.

Having books and reading books are two different things

I received nine new books (thanks, Santa) on topics from innovation and digital business to ecommerce and the network society. Finding the time to read them is going to be a challenge. My books database says of over a hundred books on my list I haven’t even bought about a quarter of them, and I’ve only read 30 of them.

End of year organisation

I updated the About page on my website to talk about my three objectives. And I updated my Roadmap so that the things in the Now, Next and Later columns align with my objectives. I’m happy with my objectives (which are slightly tweaked from 2019) and think they’ve really helped me focus over the past year on getting a new job, starting a Masters course, and starting to write a book. I also updated the workflow for my Personal Kanban to use Google Assistant to allow my to add items to my Trello board using voice.

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This week I’ve been studying:

The future of innovation

Not having lectures this week has given me a bit of time to work on research for The Fire Control Problem, and my ideas about the future of innovation. In previous weeks I’ve reached the conclusion that the ‘creative destruction’ mindset for innovation isn’t fit for the future and that Systems Thinking can offer a more evolutionary approach.

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This week I’ve been thinking about:

Scales for systems thinking

Systems thinking is very interesting, I don’t know why I’ve only just found out about it. My first thoughts were that it was a useful tool for problem definition (as the second stage in a double-diamond process) as it focuses on uncovering the surrounding and underlying causes of a problem, but questioned how well it could be used to understand unknowns. I think Mintzberg’s puzzling puzzles might be more useful for uncovering unknowns. It also occurred to me that systems thinking adds to my thoughts about platforms providing value in a circular manner in comparison to pipelines providing value in linear ways. This video changed and expanded my perspective and helped me see that it is also a paradigm shifting idea. Moving from always approaching work with a reductionist analysis mindset (which using systems thinking for problem definition is) to a systems-thinking synthesis approach feels awesome and inspiring, and something I want to explore much more.

It’s not all about riots

I’ve also found out a bit about anarchism, which has opened my mind to some of the philosophical underpinning anarchism provides for autonomous teams, cooperative working and how it works at the speed of trust. It’s something else I want to find out a lot more about and figure out how it fits as a useful set of ideas.

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This week on my Twitter people were talking about:

Working in the open

Using digital and Internet-era ways of working means being open about things you’ve learned, mistakes you’ve made, prototypes you’ve launched. I think a reflective practice is so important for learning and sharing it publicly spreads the learning and helps us all get better. ‘Digital’ is more than just a channel for marketing and embedding digital-thinking in all the work we do is going to be an even more essential in the next few years.

What leadership looks like

There was an interesting discussion about what modern leadership look like, including:

• “the only goal that makes sense is learning”
• “its not about telling people what to do, but about understanding what people are trying to achieve and helping coordinate different interests towards a common goal”
• “adapt the plan to the people, not the people to the plan”
• “those working on related things are not competitors, and being open about what you are working on, and promoting and encouraging people who are working on similar things, is a good thing.”

To me, some of this fits with my thoughts on everyone’s job being to learn and integrate the learning into the organisation, and how leadership allows and encourages this. How an organisation integrates learning is essential for it to become or remain an innovative organisation, as knowledge, information and intellectual assets are so vital for innovation.

This week I’ve been doing:

Talking about using Microsoft Teams

I had a few chats about Microsoft Teams, why organisations should use it and what benefits they should be aiming for from it. As a digital office space Teams offers communication and collaboration tools that can help people be more efficient but I think there is a bigger picture in how tools like Teams help to manage organisational knowledge and information and enable companies to turn it into competitive advantage. I put together some thoughts on Microsoft Teams.

Measuring and motivating

There is an interesting interplay between explicit and tacit measures of success. Both drive behaviour, sometimes in unexpected ways, and I have lots of questions about how we measure people, how closely connected measurement is to motivation. PDR’s are hard.

Storytelling for strategy

Strategy doesn’t have to be boring. I had some fantastically inspiring chats today about presenting strategy as an aspirational story, mixing in testimonials and impact measures from the past year with the vision or where we want to get to and how we’re going to get there.

We also chatted about how the biggest challenge for the charity sector over the next ten years is going to be to deliver coordinated solutions to problems rather than charities focusing on single solutions such as homelessness, alcohol abuse, or mental health.

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This week I’ve been studying:

CSR as a response to market pressures

Last week was the end if term so this was my first week without lectures. I finished and handed in my assignment for the Principles of Management module was answers the question “Organisations implement CSR practices and make ethical decisions primarily to increase shareholder profit as opposed to wider social considerations“. I’m not very confident it’s going to be good enough to pass as I think I’ve misunderstood what was expected by this assignment, but if so I can rewrite it next term.

It feels weird not having the pressure of lectures, pre-reading, reviewing notes, revising for exams, and writing essays, but I’m hoping the next few weeks will give me the space to study more broadly some of the things that have interested me most this term.

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This week I’ve been thinking about:

I’ve been taking some of what I learned about innovation last term and thinking about what an innovative organisation of the future might look like.

Why is flexible working about more than just letting people work from home

Listening to a podcast on flexible working helped me to get my thoughts together on why it’s essential for organisations as it helps them make the boundaries between the organisation and society more permeable, which allows more diverse ideas in and can become a competitive advantage.

What role will HR have in innovative companies of the future

I think the role of the HR department will have to drastically change from what it does in most organisations now and what organisations will need it to do in the future. When the knowledge workforce no longer needs a HR department to secure it’s commitment to the work (because those knowledge workers will bring their own commitment) then the role will shift to being more about managing human intellectual assets, ideas, knowledge and information, and enabling the organisation to turn those into a competitive advantage.

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This week on my Twitter people were talking about:

Things that change together belong together

Kent Beck tweeted about how things that change at the same pace belong together. He was talking about programming but I think it’s an interesting idea for other things, such as ‘fixed scope fixed cadence’ work. So if two tasks need to be completed and one exhibits greater change than the other, then does tackling them both at the same regularity make sense? We tend to think in time spans of daily, weekly, monthly and annually because that’s how our calendars are organised but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to complete work. I wonder if setting thresholds to trigger work makes more sense, so, for example financial records are reconciled when a number of transactions have been reached rather than daily, and project status reports are issued when a certain amount of progress has been made rather than monthly.

I’ve also been thinking about product strategy as an intention to keep pace with the rate of change in market. So, the strategy could be either to ‘get ahead’ of changes in the market, ‘stay on the curve’, or ‘lag behind’ the market. This feels like a more responsive approach and informs how investment decisions are made based on that intention.

This week I’ve been studying:

Managing people in organisations

The week 2 lecture in the Principles of Organisational Management module was about managing people and the role of Human Resource Management.

I learned about how the employment relationship is both a legal contract and a social relationship. As a legal contract it establishes certain rights and obligations between the employer and the employee. As a social relationship, it is dependent on the existence of labour as a commodity, and gives rise to various social phenomena within and beyond the workplace. Conflict is inherent in the employment relationship but what is established is what Goodrich called ‘The frontier of control’.

I also learned about how HR is fundamentally individualistic, which means that the nature of the relationship between the organisation and the employer is one-to-one rather than one-to-many or many-to-many. It’s through the nature of this relationship that the employer

Business models for a smarter economy

In the intellectual capital and competitiveness module lecture I learned that innovation requires a number of things, and that these seven criteria of a good innovator form a useful model

I found the idea of ‘agility and absorptive capability’ really interesting.

“For an innovative company in our fast-changing modern day business landscape, it is not enough just to be resourced by innovative employees and driven by a culture that encourages innovation. Dynamism is increasingly becoming a required attribute of innovative companies. In other words, an innovative company is one that is agile and flexible enough to adjust to changing conditions, and quick enough to capture emerging opportunities. Useful internal indicators of these usually include how fluid and flexible, or bureaucratic and encumbered, the company’s decision-making processes are, and whether the company feels comfortable exploring business ideas and opportunities beyond its comfort zone. Externally, these manifest in whether a company is able to capture first-mover, or at least early-mover, advantages, and the extent to which a company has been successful in projects or initiatives in a different market, or sector, that require different skills and competencies.”

The Big Innovation Centre has developed an online tool at biginnovationmap.com to allow organisations to understand how innovative they are against the seven criteria.

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This week I’ve been thinking about:

Feedback loops

How feedback loops and course-correction might be a better way to achieve a target than measurement alone.

The usual measurement approach seems like we start by setting where we want to get to, what measures we are going to use to monitor progress, and often leave out defining the actions to get there. This is understandable as we don’t usually know ahead of time what we’ll need to do. We try something but only know if its helping us reach the target at a measurement point. And as the measurement is the visible thing in this scenario it’s easy to game the actions to make the measurements look good but not really achieve the target.

Instead, we could approach it by setting where we want to get to, what the first action we can do to take us in that direction, and how we’re going to get feedback to tell us if we’re heading in the right direction, and if not course-correct by choosing a different action. I think this approach would give us a far greater chance of achieving the target because we can get an idea of whether we’re heading the right direction sooner and do something about it if we’re not. I guess this is a bit of a micro version of the fire control problem, which one day I’m going to write a book about.

ProductOps

ProductOps as a team/function/concept is increasingly becoming a thing. I’m starting to see it as a response to Product Management’s focus on building new things and consequently not being able to give sufficient investment to maintaining and sustaining product ecosystems (not just technical but supplier contract renewals, etc.)

Digital future

I’ve thinking a lot more about what a digital future looks like for organisations (and especially charities, partly prompted by Joe’s article below). I’ve been thinking about whether my idea of digital strata will help to communicate how profoundly digital is going to change our lives, our society and the entire world. It has philosophy at the deepest level (metamodernism replacing post-modernism), principles (such as platforms replacing pipelines for value delivery) one layer up, processes (such as centralised command & control decision-making replaced by decentralised and distributed decision-making) above, and then practices (like how we communicate in smaller chunks, faster, and more frequently) at the upper most level. I intend to write about my ideas in more detail some time soon.

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This week on my Twitter people were talking about:

Digital leadership

Joe Freeman wrote a post on Charity Comms about Digital Leadership. I like how Joe writes. He’s very practical and offers some useful advice, which is in complete contrast to my random spouting of completely conceptual ideas. Joe’s stance on digital (if I can put words in his mouth) is that it is merely another tool for marketing and communications, something that charities need to invest in understanding and using better, but fundamentally just an enabler or channel for what the charity is already doing.

I see digital as requiring and even forcing an entire paradigm shift for charity. In order to stay relevant over the rest of this century and beyond charities need to begin to figure out how they will completely redesign themselves using digital concepts to replace the industrial concepts that most charities were built on. The future will require that they have completely new models for governance, decision-making, leadership, financing, managing staff and volunteers, etc., etc. I worry that if charities are convinced that digital is just a channel and so don’t do this necessary thinking they’ll get left behind as the pace of change increases more rapidly over the coming years.

World Mental Health Day

10th October was World Mental Health Day. Lots of people and organisations were tweeting about experiences they had had or calling for more funding for the NHS to spend of mental health. One of the mental health bloggers I follow on Twitter tweeted that this year’s WMHD felt different to previous years with more focus on calling for action rather than just raising awareness.

Innovation at charities

RNLI shared their approach towards innovation along with 98 slides of trends that see affecting their future. Apart being an awesome piece of work to guide their innovations what I found just as interesting was that they made it public. That feels like a big shift when most charities keep any kind of work-in-progress or direction-setting private. I think it’s really good to see charities like RNLI and Red Cross doing such good work around sharing how they are innovating ideas publicly.