High Voltage

Voltage: a.k.a. Potential difference or electric tension

I started the Rightshifting campaign out of a concern for the enormous waste of human potential in knowledge-work organisations just about everywhere. Waste I had seen myself, in over twenty-plus years of working in and with a wide variety of knowledge-work organisations.

Not much has changed even today, it seems. Organisations continue to obsess about “utilisation” – making sure all their employees are busy, busy, busy. And continue to fail to use anything like the full talents, experience and know-how of their people.

I’m not talking here about the waste from the organisation’s perspective: “get as much out of folks as possible” or “sweat the assets”. I’m talking about the waste of human potential from the perspective of the folks involved. i.e. “Be all you can be”.

Evidence

People like to give of their best. A massive, twenty-five year Gallup survey involving more than eighty thousand managers and one million staff demonstrates as much. Far too few organisations even begin to make this possible:

“Over the years, as I’ve worked with various groups of corporate leaders, I’ve asked the following question: “To what degree does your organization actually utilize the experience, skills and knowledge you possess?” I’ve posed that question periodically for the past 35 years and the answers have been extremely consistent. People say something like: “Oh, about 40% of my talents and skills are being utilized.” Now, this is admittedly a non-scientific, non-rigorous appraisal of leader productivity. I make no attempt to suggest that it is precisely accurate. However, I would argue that it contains a powerful message and a huge opportunity for most organizations.”

~ Jack Zenger

Here, Jack Zenger is talking about the responses of senior executives. How much more potential is wasted of people with less of a grip on the reins of power?

I can attest to this personally, too. I have rarely been in situations where it’s been even possible for me to give of more than around twenty percent of my potential.

If you think it’s not happening in your organisation, right now, you’re probably very sadly mistaken.

“Perhaps our organisations should be asking questions such as the following:

1. How could our organization better utilize the talents, experience and knowledge you possess?
2. What’s getting in the way of you making the biggest contribution to this organization that you could possibly make?
3. What could we change that would enable you to make the contribution you’d like to make to this organization?”

How about you? To what degree does your organization actually utilize the experience, skills and knowledge you possess? I’d love to hear from you.

– Bob

Further Reading

First Break All the Rules ~ Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
Why Don’t We Measure the Productivity of Leaders? ~ Jack Zenger article in Forbes

Wanna See me Juggle?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

~ Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961

Most of us know this quote. It’s by one of the most highly regarded writers, inventors and futurists of the twentieth century.

And most folks will have heard the aphorism:

“You wouldn’t want to hire a juggler without seeing him juggle.”

The thing is, assessing the skills and talents of a juggler is easy. Just about any sighted person can watch someone juggle and decide if they’re any good or not.

But how to watch a manager “manage”? Or a developer “develop”? Or a Business Analyst “analyse”? Not only are these inside-the-head skills barely discernible to the observer, but they also involve both collaboration and working within a “system”.

Attempting an assessment of a typical knowledge-work candidate would be more like watching a troupe of jugglers cross-juggle whilst in a bus trundling around a ploughed field. Not so easy to mark out the star performer, here.

And to compound it all – and here’s the kicker – even if you could identify the “great juggler”, would that make for a commercially successful juggling show? Even with a great juggler – would the paying audience be truly entertained? In other words, is a given juggler – and the style of their juggling – effective commercial entertainment?

Drawing back from an analogy too far, the question in my mind is, when hiring folks whose key skills are intellectual rather than motor, how can anyone judge candidates effectively? I share Kahneman’s view that it’s next to impossible using e.g. pre-hire observations.

The “Modern Management” Benchmark

“Modern management isn’t just a suite of useful tools and techniques; it is a paradigm, to borrow a sound bite from Thomas Kuhn’s overused argot. A paradigm is more than a way of thinking—it’s a worldview, a broadly and deeply held belief about what types of problems are worth solving, or are even solvable.”

~ Prof Gary Hamel, The Future of Management

By what benchmark, or yardstick, do folks hiring managers judge the candidates in front of them? By and large, they’ll compare candidates against “established norms”. Even if folks adopted Kahneman’s suggestion for using a list of metrics rather than mythos as the “established norms”, it’s almost inevitable that “modern management” candidates will win out over more effective candidates – i.e. “more of the same”.

The thing is, when hiring for most kinds of position, and management positions in particular, organisations look at where they are, not where they want to be. There is a prevailing, implicit and unconscious assumption that the way things work now are the way things will continue to work. Especially when it comes to how things are managed. Management innovation (and candidates that can contribute thereto) rarely gets a look-in.

And how could it be otherwise, when “any sufficiently advanced management approach is indistinguishable from magic”? Are we hiring jugglers – or magicians, here?

Aside: For those readers already acquainted with the Marshall Model, I have in mind here the Synergistic or Chaordic mindsets when I write “any sufficiently advanced management approach”.

As Professor Gary Hamel says in his recent book “The Future of Management” :

“Today, every CEO claims to be a champion of innovation—so why the barn-sized blind spot when it comes to management innovation? I believe there are three likely explanations:

First, managers don’t see themselves as inventors…
Second, many executives doubt that bold management innovation is actually possible…
And third, most managers see themselves [and thus, candidates in their image] as pragmatic doers, not starry-eyed dreamers.”

~ Prof Gary Hamel, The Future of Management

It’s no easy thing to get management innovation on any agenda, the hiring agenda not least:

“To get started, you’re going to have to cross swords with innovation’s deadliest foe: the often unarticulated and mostly unexamined beliefs that tether you and your colleagues to the management status quo. All of us are held hostage by our axiomatic beliefs. We are jailbirds incarcerated within the fortress of dogma and precedent. And yet, for the most part, we are oblivious to our own captivity.”

~ Prof Gary Hamel, The Future of Management

And even if organisations do manage (sic) to get management innovation on the hiring agenda, it’s more than likely that they’ll be looking to hire managers-who-can-innovate, rather than at other forms of organisational-guidance-inspiration-and-direction capability:

“Put bluntly, there is no way to build tomorrow’s essential organizational capabilities atop the scaffolding of 20th-century management precepts. To jump onto a new management S-curve, we’re going to need some new management principles.”

~ Prof Gary Hamel, The Future of Management

So next time you want to see a management candidate – or any other knowledge-work candidate – juggle:

“You got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’
Well do ya, Punk?”

~ Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan in the film “Dirty Harry”

– Bob

Further Reading

Using Metrics Over Myths in Hiring ~ Iterative Path blog post
The Future of Management ~ Gary Hamel

Business 42.0

“New! Improved!” used to be enough to sell new products (and new ideas).

Now there seems to be a trend – I’m sure you’ve noticed it too – for slapping a number on the end of a word in an attempt to appear trendy and progressive. As if e.g. Business 3.0 is a “new, improved, washes-whiter” version of whatever Business 2.0 was.

It’s getting to the point where I suspect escalation will soon set in. I wanted to rant about it, but in a constructive way – and then found I was fresh out of ideas for a rant. But I did come up with this:

Memeplex Namespaces

In the world of promoting collections of ideas – Web 2.0, Social 2.0, Organisation 2.0, Management 3.0 (several versions), Business 2.0, etc. – the coinage has become so debased that such terms are on the verge of risibility. Maybe more relevant, though, we’ll all soon lose track of the ever-growing collection of such memeplexes.

We might choose to regard each such label – let’s take “Management 3.0” as an example – as an identifier for a certain, source-specific memeplex in the global namespace of organisational memeplexes.

Aside: Personally, I’d love to see some conventions arise for the structuring and presentation of the content (e.g. memes) of these memeplexes, too.

If we really want to provide unique identifiers for each memeplex, avoiding inadvertent clashes, and giving some clues as to the original context for the memeplex, we might choose to use a scheme similar to the way Java handles package naming issue: i.e. the use of hierarchical domain names in memeplex identifiers. This also offers an alternative to the gee-wiz naming escalation I wanted to rant about.

Combine this convention with e.g. version control (git or mercurial spring to mind) of the content (memes, structure) of each memeplex, and we have the possibility of a global memeplex namespace with versioned content. We might also obviate the possibility of memeplex name clashes in the future.

Some examples of memeplex names using namespaces:

• com.fallingblossoms.management.synergistic
• co.uk.virginwines.analytic
• com.salesforce.synergistic
• de.bosch.automotivsystems.gerlingen

Of course, where marketing is involved, logical and rational organisation often plays second fiddle to naked self-interest.

Postscript: The Singularity

Of course, soon after the technological singularity arrives, computers will be running our organisations (even assuming we then still have “organisations”). It would be nice to anticipate that future and lay the groundwork for some aspects, like namespaces, of the software systems that will make that happen. Executable memeplexes will emerge – it might be nice to lay some of that groundwork now.

– Bob

Further Reading

Memeplex – Wikipedia definition