Category Archive

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So what does fractal mean in plain language?

In the social professions that are my milieu - psychology, HR, workplaces - fractal means “walking the talk”. It means using the working procedures you would like to see in an organization to bring those working practices about.

It means delivering democracy through democratic means.

It means having the same pattern of organization throughout the organization.

I attended the Bucks08 Social Media Camp

at Bucks New University in High Wycombe on Saturday 17 May 2008. It was organized by Chris Hambly and kindly hosted by Bucks.

It was an unconference. It is free, and registration is simple on an open wiki. Any one who wants to present, signs up in the room and time slot of their choice. It is gently organized with people changing rooms on the hour as they wish.

Around 60 people converged from as far afield as Brighton, Leicester, Nottingham and Sweden (yes, it was international with people from at least 7 countries there). Personally, I went to sessions on

• online recruiting
• wiki and facebook support for the careers section at University of London
• community management in a newspaper group
• a 2.0 application ‘Sketchbook’ for assisting arts students develop their portfolio from Julia Gaimster
• a double session on metrics
• running fashion shows in 2nd life from Julia Gaimster and Andy Savery
• my own on personal journeys into 2.0.

How was this fractal?

Social media capitalizes on self-organization. We provide a framework where people can “read and write”. Social media is a framework in which the audience has a voice.

An unconference is minimally structured and, far from being disorganized, captures the energy of people with a purpose. So it is fractal in the subject matter is participation and the method of organizing is participative.

And then it becomes fractal again, because participants leave and blog about the conference on their own initiative and using their own resources. Before I had got home, a High Wycombe website designer, Paul Imre, had written up the session on metrics. Dan Thornton wrote up his take on social metrics with a parallel on reflecting on your marriage. Michael Clarke provided a running blog on the same session with comments on the whole day.

And it becomes fractal again, in that Dan & Paul summarized the discussion with the metaphors of marriages and  “investing in a dam” to build and release potential.  Dan’s metaphor was about managing social media.  Paul was talking about deciding how much to invest in social media.  In so doing, they effectively advanced the discussion and took it to another level. Within the afternoon, several people had replied, continuing the engagement, which I suspect will continue in other forums too.

Bucks New University must be very proud. They would have been happy, I am sure, with a smoothly organized event. This was so much more: it illustrated the power of social media, it supported a community of practice, it engaged new people, it generated new material.

To use Paul’s metaphor, investment that increases potential and to use Dan’s, when we enjoy ourselves, we come back for more!

PS The next media camp is at SAE in London on 5 July 2008.

I hope my title caught your eye and made you panic a little - ooooooh, there is something I should be doing . . .!

Well, I hope to persuade you to do it less. Or, to run a mile from any organization where you hear it a lot.

Reify : To regard or treat an abstraction as if it had concrete or material existence

It really bothers me when we talk of an organization as if it has an existence beyond the people who are in it.

It is true sometimes the organization has a legal persona. We will eventually talk about the Democratic Party nominee, for example. But that is simply a decision that members of the Democratic Party will make following a procedure they devised and adopted.

Real thinking, breathing, living people who are quite entitled to change those procedures as and when they deem it fit. Indeed, they have anticipated doing so and have already laid down procedures on how to initiate change - as do all good organizations.

The rules that we lay down do not live and breathe without us. Every organization has rules that are still written down and have been ignored for years. Every organization also has rules that are extremely powerful and are not written down anywhere.

What the rules tell us, written or unwritten, are the relationships we have with each other.

This is why I think it is dangerous to reify an organization: this is why it is dangerous to present an organization as a mind beyond the minds of the people in it.

Compare the minutes of a meeting which say “it was decided” to “Mary proposed” “Peter seconded” and the votes was carried “10-5″ with no abstentions. Compare these minutes with minutes which include the voting record of each person.

When we say “it was decided”, we are deliberately concealing who said what and who decided. Why are we concealing that information?

Because we don’t want to write down how we made the decision. Whatever we did that day would not, we believe, reflect well on us.

Most likely, we have made a decision we are not entitled to make. Most likely we have usurped authority that is not ours.

Can we get away with saying “it was decided”?

Yes. Often. Rensis Likert has written on this problem.

1. We may not talk about a problem.

2. We may not talk about not talking about a problem.

This is a mark of a festering trouble-spot in an organization. When the double-bind is widespread, the organization is likely to run into deep trouble.

I remember a colleague who used to send out memos headed “from the desk of . .”. Mmmm, she received a lot of replies addressed “To the desk”.

Survival guide to contemporary corporate life

1 Be wary of the passive voice. Ask ‘who dunnit?’

2 Be double wary when inanimate objects and abstract concepts are used to resume the active voice. Ask ‘who substituted a thing or an idea for a person’ , and then,  ‘what have they done that they don’t want me to know’!

3 And if you can, cut your losses. As Clay Shirky said, a four year old knows that any activity not designed for her participation is not worth sitting still for.

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I am looking for my mouse

Clay Shirky at Web2.0 Expo tells the story of a 4 year old who gets bored looking at a DVD and crawls around the back of the screen: “I am looking for my mouse”. This is the story of child brought into a technological age where we expect to participate in whatever we do. “Looking for the mouse” is the mark of a generation who expects to take initiative.

Who moved my cheese?

Just ten years’ ago, we were delighted by another story, an allegory, Who moved my cheese? This story is about a generation who does not expect to take initiative.  Indeed, it resists taking the initiative.  It wants to ‘put the clock back’.

We spend a lot of time crying, “we want the cheese to come back.”  Or, words to that effect.  We celebrate the past rather than the emerging future.

The positive message of this allegory is that once we can move beyond fear, we are free to move on, and find fresher, more interesting, more enjoyable cheese.

My advice is “follow that mouse!”

I live a double life as I have said before. In my one life, I work with Zimbabweans who are frozen in terror about the changes going on in their country. Their fears are real, and justified. So too, is their desire to go back to a time when cheese was there for the taking. Their liberation will ultimately come when they stop protesting the unfairness of it all and start to explore their future.

In my other life, I work with HR professionals who are also frozen in terror.  In the case of HR, there is a little cheese left, but not much. The world has moved on to work patterns where there are new demands and new generation who says “I am looking for the mouse”?

For Zimbabweans and HR professionals, I am looking for my mouse has a sadder meaning The mice have already detected the dwindling cheese supply and have left.

My advice is “follow that mouse”!

If you have never read The Spectator magazine, you should give yourself a treat. It is extraordinarily well written and often has news long before the mainstream British newspapers.

It is also very Conservative. Though timely, erudite and often very funny, it serves more to tell you what you don’t believe, than what you do. It is bit like exploring the inside of a hat, to work out what the outside looks like, and you do it, because the inside is more fun than the outside. Perverse?

Today, in an article intended, I presume, to support the Conservative leader, David Cameron, they wrote about poverty in the UK and two topical issues: the use of metrics, which Brits love to hate; and problem of immigrants who work for less than locals - an odd complaint for a Conservative party I would have thought, but nonetheless! Both these issues point to two themes that are current in contemporary Management Theory.

METRICS

The article suggests what is wrong with so many metrics. A metric is a signpost. It tells you which way to go. It is not the destination.

There is only one destination that is acceptable in management and politics - that is the agreement and happiness of our constituents that we have arrived in the right place.

If we arrive in a place and they decide they don’t like it, we can’t make the argument that we followed the metrics. It just doesn’t wash!

Pick some metrics that guide your leadership. Don’t make them the substitute of leadership !

So to the issue of poverty and politics in the UK. Don’t ask Gordon Brown the numbers about poverty.  Ask him, are you happy about poverty? He blusters and says yes. Ask him, are you interested in my views on poverty - are you going to ask why I asked? He asks! You tell him. Give him the problem you wanted solved and come back next week and tell him how well it has been solved!

Where do metrics fit in? When it is your job to supervise ‘leaders’ like teachers, nurses and police officers, ask them what metrics or signals will help them achieve satisfaction with their leadership. Don’t impose the metric though. When you do, you do not improve leadership, you do the opposite. You relieve them of the responsibility of their actions beyond that metric!

Just hold the conversation about what we want to achieve and how we are going to achieve it! That’s all.

OVERPAID BRITS & OTHERS

The second story was about a Scottish joiner whose job is now done by a Pole at 6 pounds an hour. Apparently the joiner’s wife stood up and asked Cameron what he was going to do about it! Exactly what I recommend. He took the job as leader, give him the problem. His answer - ban Poles!

Bizarre.

Couldn’t he have said: Here is my aide. Call him/her and make an appointment - we will work this out.

To the aide, he says: find me the smartest MBA student on our books.  Ask him/her to give me a briefing in a week.  I want to know about all and every industry that uses joining as a skill.   Could s/he also social-network other students to brainstorm any and every industry who can possibly use joining to advantage?  And give me a list of the top ten business people in the UK who might use joiners.

And then meet the joiner, find out what he really wants, with the MBA student on hand, and work out who should be meeting with each other to use this skill, and joining is a skill, that is obviously not being used.

Get the right people together and  ask them to produce a business plan for how the joiner is going to use his skill to make lots of money (and lots of taxes).

And ask them to report back to him in a week.

Who is betting the answer would include “more Poles please” and a air ticket for the Scottish joiner to nip over to Poland to do the recruiting with his wife in tow to explain the Scottish school system (she is a school teacher by all accounts).

People don’t ask politicians questions (or managers for that matter) as a prompt to blame someone else. They want a solution.

They want positive ideas based on our skills, passions, interests, wants, hopes and dreams. This is leadership.

BUSINESS MODELS OF THE FUTURE

Managers are struggling with contemporary ideas about human capital.

In addition to money being capital, in addition to land being capital, we are capital.

Our hopes and dreams, our sense of entitlement (!): this is our capital.

Businesses of the 21st century will be built around who we are and what we want to be.  That is the challenge of management and leadership.

Building our lives around us.  Positively.  Cheerfully.  Collectively.

Cheers to The Spectator.

1 Flow

I love flow.  I know some people who think it is great to be in flow, or in the zone, for half-an-hour a day.  I am a flow junkie.  I go for all 24 hours counting a good sleep as good flow.

2 Crossing the Rubicon

But there is something I love more.

That is the rush when you have a crystal clear idea that you know will work and that is, in that instant, so obvious.

What is the name for that?

I know Peter Gollwitzer, the psychologist calls it “crossing the rubicon” - moving from wish to intent.

3 Corporate anthropology

This corporate anthropologist, who studies the use of mobile phones, must also get a daily dose traveling around the world studying the way phones are used.

My questions to you?

Why don’t we study this sensation, whatever-it-is-called, a lot more than we do?

Why don’t we study people at work they way this guy studies phones?

Why aren’t we interested in why and when work is blissful fun?

Why are aren’t we interested in making jobs as enjoyable as Nokia tries to make its phones?

I could do that all do long and never get tired of it!!  Could you?  Do you?

Alex Deschamps-Sonsino linked yesterday suggesting a degree of jadedness in the design industry.

Rick Poyno wrote this about design conferences.  As most of us discover this after going to one or two professional conferences, I thought it might be worth pasting it in here to reassure ‘newbies’ that they aren’t the only ones who have noticed.

Typical professional conference

“Only rarely at this kind of event will you encounter strong analysis and original new ideas. “Programmers of design conferences often appear to be unaware of the limits of their worldview, uninterested in new thinking and practice, and insufficiently confident to address controversial issues,” says Nico Macdonald, one of the most active conference-goers on the British design scene. “Design conferences tend to be aimed at ‘jobbing’ designers, who the program­mers think want ‘dog and pony’ show-and-tells, maximising presentation with minimal explanation and little”

So what do we want from our conferences?

“Too many design conferences don’t aim much higher than entertainment, escapism and the vaguest kind of hero-worshipping ‘inspi­ration’ – as in, “I wish I could be a famous designer like you.” What they should provide is unique occasions to concentrate design thinking and propel it to a higher level. discussion.”

Still, the most rewarding conferences are those that succeed in promoting interaction and debate

For that purpose, small and focused is likely to work best.

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I have a question to ask my colleagues in HR - if we were to sketch out “what” we are managing, what would we draw?  And what principles might we use?

To kick this off, I googled the maps of London.

1 The London A to Z

In 1935, Phyllis Pearsall began working on the London A to Z that we know so well.  She walked 3000 miles of the 23000 streets of London waking up at 5am everyday and working an 18 hour day.

2 The underground map

Harry Beck drew the map of “the tube”  in 1933, oddly before Phyllis Pearsall started work on the A to Z.   As anyone knows who has used the Beck map to estimate the walk between two stations, it is not geographically accurate.  It is brilliant though because it shows “how to get from one station to another, and where to change trains.”

3 The underground by time

And I found this attempt to redraw the underground map to show how much time it takes to travel from station to station.

If we were drawing a map of what we manage, what would we want to show?

The historical influences shaping Gen Y

There is an excellent article on Gen Y from The Office NewB on Brazen Careerist today. And who says Gen Y can’t write! It sums up the influences on Gen Y and shows the potential of their generation.

1. Getting along in an equal world.

2. Taking personal responsibility for the economic viability & sustainability of our work and lifestyle.

3. Re-centering our lives on our families and community life.

4. Fully exploring new technologies.

5. Extending self-determination to our relationships in the workplace.

I recently had an assignment in which I worked intensively with a large Gen Y client-base for three years. As a Gen X’er, I had a steep learning curve, and it is one that I glad I made.

I’ve found Gen Y refreshing. It is true that they want information to be personally meaningful. But who doesn’t? Gen Y simply live at a time when technology has allowed democracy to step forward. They are showing us the way.

Are Gen Y prepared for leadership?

I’ve also recently had some bad experiences with Gen Y as leaders and I asked around the blogosphere for their thoughts. This is important. Many Gen Yers are already in positions of responsibility and I have particularly disliked they way they are unable to relate to people with experience. I don’t mean kow-tow; I mean to relate; to acknowledge the existence of others; to enquire and to learn from others. These failures challenged my understanding that Gen Y are good at working in teams.

In drafting my comment to The Office NewB’s post, I may have found the answer and I would be interested in your opinion.

Gen Y are good at dealing with distributed decision making, not teams per se. In distributed decision making, the final conclusion is found by repeated iterations. Consensus is marked by a majority vote in some cases and supported in others by the absence of another compelling argument.

Distributed decision making does not require a leader to encourage involvement. The distributed system has been set up by a games designer, or puppet master, whom players acknowledge, implicitly but do not communicate with directly. Leadership in these systems moves around depending on who is contributing the most interesting solution. The games designers and puppet masters also respond to the players as the game unfolds.

In a conventional workplace, leadership does not move around. It is vested predominantly in one person and that person has an obligation to find the information relevant to the problem. The system assumes the leader has the cognitive and behavioral framework to detect and to collate all the information.

It is not and never has been a feature of command and control to ignore subordinates. That would be so silly.

If the system is malfunctioning and the ‘boss’ is not sufficiently capable to recognize and organize all the relevant information, or if the people put in those positions don’t expect to play that role, or if they problems we are addressing are too complex for any one person to function in that way, then we may need to overhaul either our processes or our structures.

I wonder if anyone else has a view one this?

Some resources: here

Hawaiin approach: here

There is a wonderful cartoon about computer interfaces doing the rounds contrasting the simplicity of Apple and Google with the interfaces most of us construct.

Oh! I do like this expression. How do we solve large problems or answer large questions? Break the question into as many small questions as we can.

And if we are group or a family, do the same thing. Brainstorm the question and ask everyone to contribute, “two or three (neither more or less) specific things” about how they will be affected by the big question.

Bang on time - this will be useful this weekend!

I wrote up these FIVE steps for one of my other blogs around a discussion of what is important to startups and how to choose people to work with.

I think it is important to know why you are hiring someone. It helps to be clear why they are critical to your operation. It is very hard though, when you don’t really understand what they do or how they do it. Most of us would feel like that about somebody in the organization, say the accountant? We might also, without thinking about it, feel like that towards the intern!

I like my 5 steps and I thought I would share them here. I am using them now to talk to myself about tasks I don’t like. They seem to work.

1. Explain!

2. Show me!

3. What’s next?

4. When will we finish?

5. What is my role here?

Sociologists sometimes write of a masculine culture. Hofstede writes of masculine and feminine cultures.

The ‘prep’ scene in Goodbye Mr Chips illustrates this point. A pupil slams down a books while Mr Chips’ back is turned. This pupil has already challenged Mr Chips successfully on two occasions: mimicking his walk behind his back and disrupting his class spectacularly.

At first, Mr Chips does not know who is making the noise. He cunningly uses the glass of a large picture as a mirror and calls on the boy without giving away how he knows who is the culprit. Then luck would have it that the boy’s name is “collie” and he is able to humiliate the boy by suggesting that is the name of a dog. And so it goes on.

This is a masculine culture. It is based on pecking order, domination and humiliation.

We aren’t being rude about guys. Why should you put up with it either? The story line in Goodbye Mr Chips is that guys were challenging this way of life in 1910, one hundred years ago.

The alternative

If you want the alternative, look at the scene where Mrs Chips challenges the headmaster. The challenge is based on reason, persuasion, and persistence. Not domination and subjugation. The headmaster deftly avoids the challenge. He rejects an unfamiliar idea, which would be alright in its own terms. He rejects it, though, to restore his domination. Later, in the dance scene, being a wise man, he concedes the validity of the new idea (and validates it by including it in the hierarchy!)

Does life has to be a series of battles? Can we not trade visions? Can we not have Eureka moments when we learn something unexpected? Can we not do the equivalent of come up to a crest of a hill and be amazed by the vista in from of us?

If the 21st century will be about anything, it will be about a currency of visions rather than the currency of force.

Yesterday, I was down in London to attend the CIPD meeting on talent management. This is a hot issue.

“The war for talent”

With my recent experience teaching management to 900 predominantly Gen Y students in New Zealand, I wondered what they would make of that expression.

Would you like two employers to go to war to win you? Sounds good.

Are you a prize to be won? Mmmm . . .

There may be a war to be the best employer though, because Gen Y not only clutches a mobile, it is mobile.

Gen Y are often described as a feckless generation. They aren’t in my experience. Their mobile phones, metaphors of the age, deliver personal, relevant and timely information. They are more focused, more connected, more socially responsible and more time oriented than any generation that have gone before.

Are we going to keep up with them? Who will win the war for a Gen-Y-ready organization?

This reminds me of that famous saying. Whoops, there go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.

Someone asked the question from the floor. Is talent management always about slots that we want to fill? Or, are the ambitions and interests of our people, and how they develop when they work with each other, our real competitive edge?

Is Gen Y going to rewrite the employment contract? Will work become a place where we are agentic? Where there is room for initiative? Where we become purposeful and imaginative because our work brings out what is purposeful and imaginative?

Will people or talent become less of a commodity, and more of an essential alliance between stakeholders?

is well explained in this Times on line article.

The first time I encountered this idea, around 25 years ago now, I found it an assault to my classical training as a psychologist.  Over time though, I have come to understand that the question of whether leaders are born or made is the wrong question.  The right question is a sociological and anthropological question:  what role does “leadership” play in organizing society and what are the different ways we use the concept?

At an organizational level, I have become convinced that leadership resides in the followers.  There are times when someone is in the right place at the right time and it all comes together.

The process begins with the people talking to each other in a bounded space, such as an organization.  These people talking together look for a leader, not to tell them what to do, but to represent who and what they want as a kind of shorthand to themselves and to the world.

The day a leader stops being representative of their collective wishes, either because s/he has stopped listening or because s/he no longer is what they want, then the relationship all falls apart and force needs to be used to maintain the position of “leadership”.

I suppose another sociological/anthropological question is the circumstances in which we allow leaders to run away with power and to use force against us.

It has long been agreed in the democratic English speaking world that the essence of good government is replacing leaders in an orderly way.  I wish we could see the same as the standard in business organizations.  The use of force against employees is a sign that something has gone wrong.  Alarm bells should go off.  And HR should be on the scene in a flash trying to understand why the leader believes so little in his or her people that s/he feels the need to bully them.

Young managers often don’t trust their subordinates.  A skill that is rarely talked about is the skill of believing in one’s people and seeing their strengths.

I would love to collaborate with someone on this.   It could make a great 2.0 app.

So many people believe that management and leadership are separate, even antagonistic, activities. But I still believe that the two go hand-in-hand.  Leadership requires good management.  It is important to understand how work is organized and to shape institutions so we can make work easier, more fun and more productive.

I’ve just tracked back to Martin Seligman’s original plans to develop critical mass for positive psychology.  It is an excellent case study of organizational leadership as this paper was published at the outset and we can see the results for ourselves.

I couldn’t help thinking of the parallels in the Executive Summary and Barach Obama’s speeches.

Diagrammatic models of positive and negative leadership from the US Air Force circa 2004.

I would be more productive if I had a different boss?

Interesting data from Zimbabwe. Only 1 out of 50 do not care whether or not they would be more productive with another boss.