In Belgium a couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of hanging out with Olivier Blanchard. He is ridiculously smart, and a fellow Que author–his book is called Social Media ROI. It is actually quite a nice complement to Humanize (I think Maddie describes it as “Olivier’s book is the how, and our book is the why”). I used an example in his book during my session that delved into some detail about how you humanize your organization (more on that in another post).
But in my first presentation, I made the point that many organizations fall short when it comes to clarity. We don’t give clear instructions. We don’t provide clear rationales. We aren’t clear about what strategic principles should drive decision making. As Maddie reposted, recently, we’re not clear in our “middle level thinking.” After my session, Olivier asked me if I had noticed that organizations that were better at clarity were led by people who had been military officers earlier in their career.
I didn’t have data on that one, but it was an interesting question. Olivier had been an officer in the French military, and in his officer training the need for clarity was reinforced over and over again. Everyone knew that success in the field depends on the troops being very clear on the “commander’s intent,” because when the bullets start flying you won’t have a chance to double check with anyone. They just held themselves to a higher standard when it came to clarity. In short, they were more disciplined about clarity.
This got me thinking about the word “discipline.” In Humanize, we talk about the need for decentralization and openness. You would think this would make our ideas incompatible with military culture. The military pretty much coined the phrase “command and control,” after all. And a part of that command and control is discipline. Making people do things in a very particular way and pushing them hard to meet the standards.
But I have to be careful not to fall into the trap of viewing the military from a solely “Hollywood” lens, where drill sergeants make recruits do stupid or humiliating things to toughen them up. In my conversation with Olivier, I began to see a more nuanced and powerful understanding of what military discipline really means.
Discipline is not just about making people tough or instilling obedience. Discipline is about knowing that “good enough” is not good enough. Discipline is about higher standards. Discipline is about not falling down when it comes to what is valued. Discipline is really ultimately about clarity. As long as you keep things fuzzy, then discipline is easy. If your values stop at “be good,” then just about anything you do is going to qualify. But the sharper you draw the lines, the more true discipline is required to keep you on track.
I think that’s a good thing. I think we need more discipline in our organizations. Not in the sense of forced compliance or identity-less conformity, but in the sense of clarity and higher standards. In the sense of not letting us settle for weak strategies and ineffective processes. In the sense of not backing down when there is conflict between departments, but stepping up to the plate and resolving it. In the sense of not accepting age-old performance metrics that don’t work any more, simply because we’ve always done it that way.
Human organizations embrace discipline.
That’s the response I get from the people who are very passionate about strategic planning. In case you don’t know me, I think strategic planning is horrible. In Humanize, we devote nearly 8 full pages to why strategic planning doesn’t work. And it’s not just us pontificating. We cite respected business school professors, people published in Harvard Business Review, peer-reviewed research studies. And these sources have been around for decades. This isn’t new. The way we do strategic planning is destined to NOT work. It is designed in a way that is deeply inconsistent with the way the world works.
“No,” strategic planning fans will say, “you’re just not doing strategic planning right!” They will concede that the boring, institutional approach to strategic planning that yields those glorious binders that sit on the shelf gathering dust is a thing of the past. That is BAD strategic planning. We definitely don’t want that. They will then try to sell you on their new dynamic, nimble, constantly evolving, “living plan document” system. Besides, you can’t get anywhere unless you have a strategy and some tactics, right? So we HAVE to do strategic planning. But maybe we should just call it something different?
So here’s the deal. I don’t care what you call it. And yes, strategy is important. Yes, planning is a useful human activity. I don’t think doing things purely at random is a great way to shape our future. But I think we’re missing a much bigger and more important point:
All of this is made up.
There is no universal law of management. We pulled it out of thin air. We made it up. And we don’t have terribly strong science to back it up, either. But we have been so immersed in our management regimes (our MECHANICAL management regimes) for so long, we take them as givens. We literally can’t imagine a world where we’re not centrally defining a strategy and a list of tactics for the minions to implement. But here’s the inconvenient truth: people get things done without those. A case in point comes from a blog post from Doug Shaw over in the UK.
Granted, he’s just one person. This is not a research finding. But it is shining a light on something very important: the way we manage is only assumed to make us more successful. I think it’s more likely that our organizations are succeeding despite the way we manage them, not because of it. And it’s quite possible that managing in radically different ways (like finally jettisoning strategic planning) could actually make us more successful.
Maybe–just maybe–the world is not flat. I know that sounds crazy, but I feel like it’s time for a few of us to have the courage to set sail, willing to fall off the edge of the earth, and bring the rest of you into the 21st century. 
You’ve probably already seen this on Maddie’s blog. And if not, you can also see it on Charlie Judy’s HR Fishbowl site. And now I’m putting it here. What is it?
It’s a “manifesto” about the future of work. Maddie is the one who wrote it up, but it was the result of a weekend retreat last fall of twelve people (including me, Maddie and Charlie; Maddie lists them all in her post) in, of all places, Omaha, Nebraska. These are some exceptionally awesome people I got to hang out with that weekend, and I think the awesomeness of this manifesto is a reflection of that. I think we pulled together some very important thoughts in a very powerful way.
The purpose of a manifesto like this, of course, is to spark conversation. Go look at Maddie’s post, because it has 24 comments. And then look at Charlie’s post, because it has 25 comments too. And I’m sure the comments are going to continue to roll in. Let’s keep talking about this, because it’s really important.
And if you’ve read Humanize, you’re going to see some familiar thoughts and ideas. I know we get a lot of coverage of Humanize in the context of social media, since we apply the lessons of social media to how we run our organizations. But Humanize is fundamentally a book about management innovation. It’s a new view on leadership. It is ultimately about creating better organizations, more powerful organizations, organizations where people WANT to come to work–human organizations. We’re talking about the kind of organizations where work doesn’t suck.
So read the manifesto. Embrace this Manifesto’s challenge to make work suck less. Participate in the conversations, either here or on Maddie’s or Charlie’s sites, or wherever else they pop up. This manifesto is the beginning, not the end. “The future of work starts right here, right now.”
The Future of Work: A Manifesto
The future of work starts right here, right now.
This manifesto is about the future of work in a post-Cluetrain world. This manifesto is also about an emerging ideology of business, where people are at the center of a human ecosystem instead of boxed into a mechanical system.
If markets are conversations, then the people who are doing the talking and the listening and the sharing are the most important asset we have. The groundswell exists and is powerful–we’re part of the groundswell and we can make the future of work happen right now, in lots of little ways.
Heard the phrase, “the future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed”? We all have the social capital to help fix that.
Let’s talk about the things that human beings bring to the table in a work environment. Let’s leverage our human attributes and make people and all of their whole selves the fuel that makes organizations and businesses grow and flourish. Let’s unleash our power as networked individuals. Let’s make Dilbert cartoons and The Office something we can enjoy as the relics of a past industrial, mechanical age. Let’s stop work from sucking. Let’s empower ourselves and each other to make our lives better, and thereby make our societies better.
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Some truths we hold to be self-evident:
- Work matters. We want work to suck less – for everyone, not just the few lucky ones.
- The distinction between “work” and “life” is artificial and a barrier to leveraging both the power of the individual and that of the organization.
- Work is the expending of effort for the creation of value. If there’s no effort, but it’s still considered work, it should be automated; if there’s no value, the work is pointless and wasteful.
- Work is the process of creating something for the purpose of human flourishing. Let’s get rid of what doesn’t do that. Work has meaning for every individual. Work involves identity.
- Work involves a sense of belonging. Work has meaning for the networks each individual is connected to. Work has meaning for the local community and for the global community. Work involves social responsibility.
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Therefore:
I. Human beings are the most important asset we have.
- We need to bring our whole true selves to work. Human-ness has value for the organization.
- Our best work is at the intersection of what we like doing, what we are good at doing, and what we get paid for. Our goal is for those three things to blend more. Flow has value for the organization.
- Work is about learning. Learning is never complete and we have a responsibility as individuals to make sure we’re always learning. We also have a responsibility as organizations to provide resources and environments for learning. This is not a choice, it’s an imperative. Learning has value for the organization.
- Work involves collaboration with others. Work doesn’t happen in a vaccuum. Collaboration – both internal and external – has value for the organization.
- We have a need to communicate and share what we do and how we each do it differently. We work better in the open. Transparency has value for the organization.
- We are able to do more than one thing. Our individual skills, whatever they are, have value and that value is marketable.
- The formula for marketability is the same for everyone but the weight of each component is different and may change over time. Agility, defined as the capability to evolve with our networks, has value for the organization.
- We are connected and we bring networks with us to work. Our connectedness has value for the organization.
- We will feel a sense of belonging and purpose if we’re involved in the direction and purpose of the system. Ownership has value for the organization.
- We build relationships. Relationships – and the human emotions involved in nurturing them – have value for the organization.
- We need to give as well as receive constructive feedback. Truth has value for the organization.
- We will trust our employers if our employers trust us. Trust has value for the organization.
- We have intuition as well as intellect. Intuition has value for the organization.
- We all aspire to love what we do. To love where we work and who we work with. Love has value for the organization.
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II. Organizations that flourish are systems that maximize the value of their human assets.
The blurring of boundaries between the “I” (individual human beings) and the “we” (organizations and systems) creates value that is both shallow and deep.
- Markets are conversations and organizations can harness conversations in order to create value.
- The pace of change is accelerating. The only way an organization will keep up is through its people, who have a natural ability to pay attention.
- Individuals represent nodes and networks. Organizations need to recognize the value of building relationships with networks.
- Proximity is no longer a prerequisite for relationships and networks. Let’s make the technologies that enable virtual communication invisible and ubiquitous, so we can just get on with it.
- Organizations need to better understand individual talent, and they need to better understand how to communicate the requirements for needs-based work.
- Individual talent means individual customization; which means an exponentially longer tail of marketable and monetizable skills.
- Individual talent means hyperlocal talent; invisible technology means that hyperlocal talent has global reach.
- Individuals have a wealth of so-called “soft” attributes that provide organizational value and are therefore marketable and monetizable. Let’s start paying for skills like the ability to:
- build relationships
- act as a bridge
- distill information
- focus deeply
- debate
- influence
- facilitate
- see the bigger picture
- tell a story
- manage complexity
- draw meaning
- write persuasively
- manage group dynamics
- solve open-ended problems
9. Strategic transparency is the only way to achieve trust; trust is the only way to maximize the value of the people in a system.
10. Trust provides structure and predictability in a much more powerful way than hierarchies and organizational charts do.
11. Strategic transparency enables clarity over control, also known as scalable simplicity – the capacity for all parts of the system to work towards the common goal of the system.
12. Decentralized leadership requires less middle management, but more middle level thinking.
- The role of management is to be the “keeper of the story”. To make sure there is transparency flowing from top echelon to front line.
- The role of management is to facilitate difficult conversations and manage conflict.
- The role of management is to facilitate the finding of solutions; not to dictate them.
- The role of management is to be the “connector”, to match people with the right skills and abilities to projects where those skills are most needed.
- The role of management is to be the “bridger”, to protect and ensure inclusion – to ensure that different voices and perspectives are heard and involved in the work of the organization at all levels.
- The role of management is to eradicate the fallacy of “best practices” – to ensure there is constant learning and agility in business processes.
- The role of management is to be the “space-maker”, to ensure learning can happen on a continuous basis by providing containers where experimentation is encouraged.
- The role of management is to remove hurdles to engagement.
- The role of management is to release the flow of information and data and to get it to the right people at the right time. The new workplace is data-driven; but information is not wisdom. It’s the human analysis of the data that drives value.
- Data is the start of experimentation and learning, not the end.
- The role of management is to hire talent that is agile enough to shift and flow based on market need.
- The role of management is to get out of the way.
13. Leadership is the systems’ capacity to shape its future. Leadership comes out of the group and participates at every level of the system.
14. The new human workplace has a responsibility for the sustainability of all the resources it uses, including human beings. The new human workplace therefore has a responsibility for social good.
I’m back from my Chicago/Belgium trip, and I had a GREAT time. I am posting my slides, below from the two presentations I did in Belgium at the Fusion Marketing Experience conference (which together cover all that I spoke about in Chicago, and then some).
The first presentation is the basic overview of the Humanize book. In it, I talk about the deep problems we have with the way we run today’s organizations (like how we haven’t seen significant innovation in management in over fifty years), and contrast that with the incredible growth of social media. I connect the trends by pointing out that social media has grown by connecting deeply to what makes us human, while management is failing because it is infused with “machine thinking.” I then talk about the four human elements we propose as guides for creating more human organizations (open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous), and then I dig into the first element, open, in a bit more detail.
The People-Centric Organization
View more presentations from Jamie Notter.
The second session built upon the first and talked in more detail about how you can go about changing into a human organization. I presented a little bit on the larger model we present in the book, which is to connect the four elements to the three levels of change in an organization: culture, process, and behavior. But then I talked in more concrete terms about how you can move in this direction simply by solving the problems that people face in organizations when trying to implement social media, like duplication of efforts, silos fighting for control of social media, and lack of trust of younger staff to implement social media.
I was very pleased with both presentations, but particularly the second one, because it was the first time I was able to go one level deeper in talking about how you actually make your organization more human.
If you’re interested in me (or Maddie) speaking to your group about the Humanize book, check out our speaking page on the book site. It has all the details.
I am off to Chicago and Antwerp this week.
On Tuesday morning, I’ll be doing the opening keynote at the annual meeting of IHRIM, the association for the Human Resource Information Management industry. The title of my talk is “Unlocking the Power of Human Organizations.” I’ll hang around after my talk to sign some books in the exhibit hall, but then I’ve got some free time before my flight to Belgium that evening (who’s up for lunch or coffee?).
Then Thursday and Friday I am speaking at the Fusion Marketing Experience conference in Antwerp. I am excited about my first gig in Europe. I’ll do two sessions there, the first covering the basic arguments in Humanize, and then the second digging a little more deeply into how you can start to make change in your organization.
I try to keep all the speaking engagements up to date over on the Humanize book site if you want to keep up with where Maddie and I will be next. If you’re interested in booking me to speak at an event, please contact Marsha Broniszewski at Infinite Speakers.
Sohrab Vossoughi wrote a great post on HBR about Sony and how its successful strategy in the 1980s ended up being unique to that context. In other words, a winning strategy is context specific, thus it needs to evolve and grow (we talk about this in Humanize in the chapter on Generative). Sony’s model didn’t evolve, and now it’s in trouble. In the middle of the post, he talks about how the economy has shifted, where consumers now care more about experience, rather than just product. Here’s the excerpt:
In the early 80s, simply delivering technology in a usable form was still the biggest challenge, and Sony got it right before anyone else. It had an astonishing ability to find the next technical hurdle—a brighter TV, a smaller tape player, an integrated camcorder—and leap over it with grace, before its competitors even thought to try. In an industrial, product-oriented economy, this was enough. Every year saw new products with unprecedented capabilities. As long as it could do something new, we didn’t seem to care what kind of experience we had using it. Plowing through 70-page manuals and fussing with Dolby II and Metal/Non-Metal switches was just part of the deal.
In the experience economy, these expectations are reversed. Technology is a given, and the question of “what are the specs?” has been replaced by “what is it like to use?” Sony’s expertise at making the next great thing has been matched by companies like Samsung and LG, and soon enough, they’ll all be caught by increasingly sophisticated Chinese manufacturers. Without modifying its business model, Sony has been left behind by a world that’s changed its relationship with technology.
The post is about Sony. And it’s not about Sony. It’s about all of us. That last sentence seems hugely powerful to me. Just make “Sony” and “technology” fill-in-the-blanks spots, and it hits home for most of us:
- Without modifying its business model, [newspapers] have been left behind by a world that changed its relationship with [information].
- Without modifying its business model, [associations] have been left behind by a world that changed its relationship with [learning and community].
- Without modifying its business model, [doctors] have been left behind by a world that changed its relationship with [wellness decisions].
Those are just postulates, actually (well, with the exception of the newspapers; I think that one is a fact). But I think no matter what industry we’re in, we need to have our radars tuned to whatever goes in that last fill-in-the-blank spot. What RELATIONSHIP is changing in our market, and are we responding?
Also, note that when a world (your customers, your members, your stakeholders, your employees) changes its relationship with something that is part of your business, it’s not always easy to identify it. It’s complex and shifting. It requires nuanced conversations and insight to really be able to see what is changing. I don’t think you identify a changing relationship by doing a member needs assessment. I don’t think you’ll be on top of a changing relationship by doing strategic planning sessions once a year. I think it’s a mistake to require a single visionary leader to identify a changing relationship. Leadership, as I’ve said before, is a system capacity, which seems critical for an issue like this.
I also really like the last sentence in the first paragraph, where he talks about what people put up with as “part of the deal” before the relationship changed. That might be something to try and focus on when identifying a changing relationship. What is your company’s (or your industry’s) equivalent of “plowing through 70 page manuals and fussing with metal/non-metal switches.” These are things that were required when you were delivering last decade’s value, but now are viewed as unacceptable obstructions since the relationship has changed. Maybe something like putting up with lame keynote speakers at conferences?
I have officially grown tired of the excuse that change is hard. Change is not hard. And it’s not change that people resist in organizations. As long as we think that, we’ll never get better. Here’s what people resist:
- Stupid ideas
- Being told what to do
- Things that produce results that run counter to their interests
- People who don’t care about them.
- Things that remind them of their powerlessness
- Unnecessary extra work
True, when people develop deep habits, changing them can be a challenge. But that is a small piece of what we face when we’re changing things in organizations. Most of what we face is in those bullets above, so let’s figure out how to deal with that rather than lamenting about how hard change is. Solving problems is hard. Figuring out how to have an awesome workplace is hard. Life is hard. But not change.
In an organizational context, the word “vision” will often score you a point in “buzzword bingo.” And that’s too bad, because like a lot of those words, it has some important meaning behind it. On the other hand, I get why it has achieved buzzword bingo status. I think most of us, when we think of “vision” in the business context, think of lofty goals and a beautiful image of the future where our organization is always the “preeminent” something or other. And I guess that’s okay. I do value getting clear on our intention. The power of that positive image in your head is significant, even though it feels a little intangible. Then, of course, we need to have a shared vision with our colleagues, and that led to vision statements, and I think that’s where it went downhill a bit. We too often end up with lowest-common-denominator visions, which become become boring and often just like everyone else’s. Our “visions” end up too disconnected from the real world.
So we ignore them and focus on our work. But here’s where we need a different kind of “vision,” and one that I think is woefully under developed in our organizations. It’s the ability to see clearly in the complicated whirlwind that is our workday and workweek. There’s a lot going on, and a lot to do, so can we see through the complexity and zero in on exactly what needs to be done right now. It’s not focusing on the distant horizon. But it’s more than seeing only what’s two feet in front of you. This kind of vision is often talked about in sports contexts. Being able to see the whole field, or see plays develop.
Have you ever been at a hockey game and notice that there are a handful of people that stand up or react to an exciting play about a half-second before everyone else does? These are people who really know hockey. They’ve either watched a ton of it, or played it in their lives (or both). What they have (that the rest of us don’t) is vision. They see the play unfolding. What to the rest of us looks like a jumbled bunch of players in the neutral zone, becomes clear to them as a breakaway opportunity about to happen. We see it a few seconds later, as it happens. Sometimes we don’t see it until after the puck is in the net.
We need this kind of vision in our organizations. We need middle managers who can connect the disparate complaints in their department to the new strategic emphasis they just heard from the management team. We need the people who are implementing the project to have some awareness of how their work is impacting other departments. We need the C-suite inhabitants to care less about covering their you-know-what and care more about what it takes to reinvent the enterprise. We need people who can see things at multiple levels. We need people who can handle conflicting information and continue with the conversation. We need people–at all levels–with vision.
I have a love/hate relationship with measurement. On one level, I can be frustrated by people who demand we measure everything, as if numbers proved the “truth.” Many of the things that are the very most important in life can’t be assigned meaningful numbers, and in our obsession with metrics, we often miss less objective data and make bad decisions or miss opportunities.
On the other hand, my nickname in my cycling community is “Stats.” I actually like numbers, and in my current organization, I’m the one on the management team that likes to sit with the spreadsheets for a while and see what insight I can pull out of the messy data. I think measurement can be a critical part of clarity and learning, so pretending you don’t need data and relying only on intuition doesn’t sound like a good plan to me either.
The key here is clarity. As I’ve said before, data rarely give you the “answers.” They are the beginning of the conversation, not the end. But the good ones will clear things up enough to guide you on a more productive conversation.
For example, look at your employees. What do we measure in terms of performance? I know the answers will be all over the map, but I am guessing that too many of us will answer “not much.” We do our vague, annual performance review, we track attendance, and we keep our eye on big, organization-wide metrics, but that’s about it. Patrick Lencioni talks about this in his book, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. One of the signs is a word he made up: immeasurement.
Immeasurement essentially is an employee’s lack of a clear means of assessing his or her progress or success on the job. This creates ambiguity and a feeling of dependence on a manager to subjectively judge the employee’s daily or weekly or monthly achievement.
To come up with good metrics, however, you need real clarity. We very rarely know what “success on the job” looks like. What does success on the job look like for a meeting planner? Happy participants at the meeting? No, because so much of that is dependent on a lot of people and factors, not just that one meeting planner. That won’t help that meeting planner know, on an ongoing basis, if he is doing his job well. There’s nothing wrong with measuring how happy people are with the meeting, of course, but that’s not the same thing as understanding how one person has “success on the job.” We need more attention on that.
Figuring it out may not be an easy conversation. Both employee and manager might question the metrics the other side comes up with, but remember: neither side alone knows the answer here. Managers will tend to go to “high,” looking at metrics that are beyond the single job, and employees will tend to go too low, focusing only on their own situation. Finding that blend is the key.
In Humanize, we talk a lot about courage. Courage is one of the four human elements–arguably the hardest one for organizations to master. Fear has long been at the root of organizational dysfunction. We are arguing that we need more courageous organizations. Ones committed to learning, experimenting, and supporting personal development among its people.
To do all that, however, we have to confront failure. In many cases, THIS is what we are afraid of: failing. But as Seth Godin points out in a recent post, what we are actually afraid of is the FEELING of failure, not the actual impact or costs of the failure.
This is huge. When we fear the FEELING of failure, then there are TONS of potential actions that we will avoid for fear that we will fail. That’s one of the biggest problems with fear, or a lack of courage: it causes us to NOT act. The feeling of failing will hit you whether that experiment cost you $10 and 15 minutes of time, or if it cost you $100,000 and two FTEs for a year. It still feels like failure. You want to avoid that, so you don’t act.
So we need to work on our emotional intelligence and let go of that negative feeling that washes over you when you feel the failure, so we can open our eyes and evaluate the costs of what failed and focus on the learning. If that feeling became less of a big deal, then we could be trying new things every week, watching many of them fail and gleaning learning that can be applied to the next experiment. And we’d be able to talk to other people in the organization about the failure (because it wouldn’t have that stigma attached to it). They’d be learning too. This can create a flywheel effect.
After I spoke recently about Humanize, someone came up to me to tell me about an award they gave at their organization called the “Spatula Award.” It was to celebrate a failure or a mistake. It is a small thing, but it actually helps to remove that negative feeling you get from failing. It’s not that they embraced failure all the time (the idea behind the “spatula” is that if you get this award too many times, they may end up just giving you the spatula to use at your next job–flipping burgers). But they’re making it okay. Look for ways to convey that message and see if it helps your people to try more things and focus more on learning.
Jamie is a Vice President at MSP where he leads the consulting division. 
