Surviving workplace disruption #2
Organisational restructuring seems to be an ever-present solution to many issues - often in the belief that "if we only we had the right structure, we would work better together, be more efficient and effective...etc, etc." A bit like the success fantasy that Vivien wrote about in the previous blog.
Now I'm not suggesting that restructures aren't both necessary and useful in the right circumstances. However, given that they tend to be quite disruptive, and can have serious impacts on staff, it makes sense to consider how to tackle them using a more collaborative mindset - and to consider some Golden Rules for Thriving in Workplace Disruption.
When proposing a new structure, we invariably ask people what they think. We seek feedback because we want to know about the impact the changes might have, and help people through such changes. This is a great start, but it often misses the most important element - how people feel. Some might be excited and enthusiastic, while others might be frustrated, lost or frightened. And how people feel influences how, and even whether, they respond. So you may not know how people think if you don't check and acknowledge how they feel.
One Golden Rule - Check in and listen to how people are feeling, because that is what impacts their behaviour.
Given our unbridled enthusiasm for the change, and the conventional need to be discreet on sensitive restructures, we have a tendency to decide the new structure in a small group and have most of the answers ready in advance. While this seems to make logical sense, such structural changes are inherently complex, impact people, and can never quite appreciate all the nuances of how the organisation operates. From our experience we know that surprising solutions can emerge from tapping into the knowledge and ideas of those involved, and implementation of any new structure is invariably smoother when staff feel they have contributed to the solutions.
Another Golden Rule - Just "try stuff"- generate a range of ideas together (rather than sticking to the first 'right' answer), because that delivers smarter and more owned solutions.
As well as being sure of the answer, we often are quite sure how to progress the planning and implementation i.e. the process of involvement and solution finding. While no doubt efficient, it can leave people feeling a bit disenfranchised and "done to". By stepping back and acknowledging some doubt about what the best process could be, those leading such restructures can invite staff into putting their 'fingerprints' on the process, which encourages staff participation and ownership.
A last Golden Rule - allow people to put their fingerprints on the process, and they are more likely to go on the journey with you.
Sailing into Troubled Waters
I’m just back from a fascinating 10 days sailing Japan’s Setonaikai – the inland sea separating the four main islands. We did a lot of traveling from place to place, which meant every night we had to find a new place to anchor. Simple in theory, but sometimes things didn’t go to plan.
5:00pm: We dropped anchor at the region’s most beautiful beach. It was a little tricky, with the sonar showing us that the beach dropped very steeply away below us into deeper water. It raised some questions about the ‘bite’ that the anchor had in the bottom. If it’s sitting on a steeply sloping bank could it swivel and pull out?
Sometimes the only way to know is to go down and have a look and it was my job to put on the mask and fins, dive in, swim down and check the anchor on the bottom. Easy, right?
But then… “hey this water is really murky! It’s black and I can’t see a thing. There is no way I’m going 10m down into that murk!” Too scary. Too difficult.
And I climbed back up onto the boat, into the calm beauty of the long-shadowed afternoon. It was so much nicer up here!
3:00am: Woke to an energetic rocking motion, lots of rattling rigging and a clear sense of movement. Jump up on deck. “Where’s the beach?” Turns out our fears had been realised. As we slept, the anchor had quietly lost its grip on the sea floor, casting us adrift…..out to sea and into danger. Needless to say, we moved fast. Started the engines, pulled up the anchor, and headed off on the next leg of the trip. No harm done, apart from a scare, some violent words from the skipper and an unusually early start.
Why am I sharing this story? Because I was reminded of it when thinking about some recent work with collaborative teams. I watch them and listen to them working. On the surface, they seem to be going well. They share ideas, they ask questions, they talk and smile politely. It is calm and sunny and comfortable here. But then someone says something revealing, like “it feels as though your team is blocking progress on this and I can’t understand why they are getting in the way…”
Yikes! It feels as though the collaborative anchor is at risk of coming adrift. There is only one way to ensure the connection remains strong; The group needs to dive into the relational water, where it is a bit scary and difficult. They need to do a health check on their relationship and levels of trust. They need to open up and be vulnerable about their feelings and how each group sees the other. But just as I experienced in Japan, it is so much more comfortable to stay on the surface and hope that all will be well. It is deep, black and murky down there. Yet if we don’t brave the relational depths we might find our collaboration coming adrift and coming to grief.
I understand the challenge of diving into difficult waters. We all need some help to do that safely. Sometimes all that our clients need is some timely strategic advice and support to help them take a deep breath and start swimming together. I hope I take my own advice next time I am asked to check an anchor.
If you would like to know more about Twyfords’ strategic advice service, drop me a line.
Surviving workplace disruption #1
Collaborative workspaces are all the rage at the moment. Client organisations are looking for them and commercial developers and interior designers are providing them at speed. But moving offices can be stressful and disruptive to work lives.
We hear about a ‘roam and work’ ethic which involves removing cellular offices and making dedicated desks a thing of the past. We read about desks, booths and lounges arranged into ’village’ formations, tree beds designed into floors, corridors mimicking city footpaths and hanging plants providing a sense of outdoors.
I wonder how the occupants of these new offices, specifically designed for collaboration, will adapt to these new environments. I have heard from colleagues and clients that, for those used to having their own space, their own desk and a place they ‘belong’, the idea of ‘roaming and working’, sitting at a different desk every day and not being able to personalise their space with photos and nic-nacs may be quite confronting. As I heard from a client facing workplace disruption yesterday, “even though we brought people along every step of the way in designing new processes, now they have to work differently our people tend to revert to their familiar, comfortable way of relating to others, telling rather than listening, taking orders rather than taking accountability. Can you help us?”.
One client is watching a new building going up across the street that will house four different government functions. The aim is for the staff of these four departments to use the new layout to work better together. The planners and designers are creating new spaces to support collaboration because this is in their brief. Simultaneously with the space planning, workers in these new collaborative spaces need the opportunity to rethink the way they will do their work in this new environment. Giving staff an opportunity to get their ‘fingerprints’ on both the new environment and a new way of working before the move is important to them understanding and achieving the desired outcomes.
Twyfords has developed some Golden Rules for Thriving in Workplace Disruption. One of those is to avoid the success fantasy. In the office scenario I’m writing about, this success fantasy might play out as “Once the challenge of the move is over, everyone will settle down into a new and more collaborative way of working together.”
We suggest that:
- sharing expectations for new ways of working across functional boundaries in the new spaces .... because this creates ownership ...
- paying attention to feelings and relationships ... because this affects behaviour ...
- having time to try and test new ways of working before and after the move ... because this builds confidence ...
can make a difference.
If you’d like any advice or ideas about how to set functional teams up for success in any new collaborative way of working ... give Twyfords a call.
The Six Roadblocks to Authentic Collaboration - Part 1
This is the first of three blogs in which we explore the things that get in the way of authentic collaboration. Click through for some simple tools to apply.
- The lack of robust collaborative processes
Finding a pathway:
A couple of years ago I was talking to a NZ client about collaboration, and he lamented "the team sits around the table and wants to collaborate, but they don't know how or where to start". He explained that they were keen to do things differently, especially in working across their traditional boundaries, but tended to do what they always did as they had no other guidance other than- 'you need to collaborate'. That often left them confused and frustrated as the experience seemed to be more of the same- lots of talk, little listening, and same old solutions.
Over the next 12 months, we introduced his team to the and they applied it to a couple of projects. He was keen on how they had responded and I asked him why. He said that for the first time they had a series of steps that helped them collaborate- some guidelines and handrails so when they got together they felt confident they were tackling things differently, but not too 'boxed in' to a process- it gave them a roadmap and confidence with their collaboration.
- A business as usual mindset that cripples authentic collaboration
Changing the mindset:
The traditional unilateral approach to problem solving relies on expertise and "knowing the answer".
This is sometimes best demonstrated for me in an organisation with what I call 'the curse of the expert' - ie "if only you knew what I know, you would agree and we could just get on with it"
This thinking can have unintended consequences as it risks closing down collaborative activities when people withdraw and stay silent when confronted with others pushing their answer.
Increasingly complex challenges demand a multilateral approach, supported by a "we" mindset, as illustrated in :
- I don't know all the answers,
- I need some help,
- if we listen better we can tap into the diverse expertise available
- and generate solutions we couldn't have come up with on our own
Such shifts in thinking drive new behaviours and so we do things differently when working in the collaborative space (and these new behaviours also positively impact other day to day work).
Gorillas in your midst
A few years ago I was working with a client in the transport sector who was keen to engage with their stakeholders on a new approach to contracting. The client was a large government organisation who used a diverse range of contractors across the state.
At one of the consultation sessions, the client representative was listening to some of the contractors discussing the proposal, when one of them said- "you know Tom, you are the 'big hairy gorilla' in this system, and we are effectively powerless..."
Tom was a bit taken aback and asked what he meant. The contractor responded that "you control the money, and even though you say you are giving up control with this proposed system, you really still have all the power"
I remember being surprised at the reaction of my client Tom. He was genuinely shocked to realise the impact that his organisation's status and behaviour was having on his effort to share control - quite unintended from his perspective, but quite realistic and expected if you sat outside his "bubble".
When talking to Tom later he said that he had actually seen the consultation as a meeting of equals. He was surprised with their reaction, and realised since that them seeing him as the gorilla has obvious implications for relationships and trust which could compromise his good intentions.
I reflected on this recently as we were discussing our topic of power for this month. I reckon it reveals a couple of useful insights about power and control:
- we are often unaware of the impact we have on others
- well intentioned plans can be unknowingly undermined by the perceptions of others
- it can be hard to give up power if it undermines status quo
Are you sometimes the big hairy gorilla, and how would you know?
Are you collaborating at every scale?
Everyone seems to be seeking to collaborate to tackle life’s difficult problems. Whether it is managing water, planning cities, creating policy, developing strategies, collaboration is increasingly seen as the necessary process. Yet I feel we often overlook some important components or ‘units’ of collaboration when seeking to work together.
What is a unit of collaboration? It is simply a way to picture a subset of relationships, where collaboration will be important. Imagine a project manager inside a local government authority tasked with improving water quality in a much-loved and much-stressed local catchment. Being smart our manager realises that Council alone can’t affect change across the catchment, so success will only come from collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders to create and implement solutions together. This realisation drives a number of process, all focussed on what will it take to create a collaborative group comprising a cross-section of stakeholders from across the catchment.
Right here is one of the units of collaboration; a specific component of the whole system that must learn to work together if the project is to succeed. This unit of collaboration is probably the most obvious. After all, if we are going to work together to improve our catchment it is clear that we need to get catchment stakeholders in the room.
In this situation it is easy to focus is on how to set up and support such a collaborative group. In doing so it is also easy to overlook other units of collaboration, putting at risk everything our project manager is seeking to achieve.
There are multiple additional sets of relationships or ‘units of collaboration’ that are equally important. In the case of our Council example they could include:
- The project team unit, collaborating around questions such as: how will we work together to make this happen, and do so collaboratively?
- The management unit comprising the project manager and her boss, and her boss’s boss, who collaborate on questions such as: how will we meet the needs of the Exec and ensure the authorising environment on this project, while ensuring we walk the collaborative talk?
- The branch or division unit, who collaborate on questions such as: how will we resource this project internally, given its implications for the whole team?
- The organisational unit, collaborating on questions such as: how will we bring the assets and strategy teams together on this journey so that implementation is smoothly integrated?
- The governance unit comprising elected reps and senior bureaucrats, facing collaborative questions such as: how will we all get our fingerprints on this project so that there are no surprises for any of us?
Each of these can be considered a ‘unit’ of collaboration and each is critical to the success of the project as a whole. Yet we often overlook them, for a number of reasons, including:
- It can be scary and difficult to try to improve collaboration up the chain of command;
- The need to improve collaboration in these units is invisible. We often just don’t see it so we continue to focus outwards;
- Working on some of these relationships implies a need to change how we think and behave, and that is hard. We would rather not go there. Much easier to work on our external relationships than our internal relationships and processes.
- The business as a whole is not really interested in collaboration and unprepared to put any effort into understanding it and learning how to do it better. Much more comfortable to pretend that collaboration is only about how that project team works with those stakeholders.
Of course the consequence of ignoring these important relationships is that we never really collaborate. Despite the best efforts and intentions of our project manager, she is severely hamstrung by the lack of collaborative capability within the organisational system. Her relationships with external stakeholder may be good but the ability of the organisation to back up the talk with a different way of supporting and implementing the catchment project means that business as usual continues to rule. How could it be otherwise?
What to do about this? The key finding is how important it is to focus on the smallest units of collaboration, just as much as the larger, more obvious and external units. Every collaborative project or process is made up of multiple components over multiple scales. The smaller tend to be less visible, often more difficult, easier to ignore, but if we are serious about working differently with others, we have to commit to that at every scale across the project, whether internal or external. This realisation lies at the heart of our most popular capability building program, Collaboration Builder, which helps people get results while working on their external and internal collaboration.
So, what are your units of collaboration and how are you ensuring that collaboration is happening in every one?
Key Questions for Collaborators
Collaboration is the essential process when we are facing high uncertainty and the need to create something new together. That means we collaborate when we don’t know the answer. In such situations it is easy to focus the energy on trying to find answers and solutions, but collaborators know that the path to solutions is paved with smart questions.
But not just any questions. While our usual practice is to ask questions about the problem, collaborators know they must ask questions about the process. Put another way, the tendency is to ask ‘content’ questions – what is the problem? what is going on? how does it work? what is causing this…? And these are important, but successful collaboration requires us also to ask ‘process’ questions designed to help us focus on the state of our collaboration.
Here are some simple process questions you can use to reflect on and nurture your collaboration. If reflecting alone the questions are ‘am I…” questions. If reflecting as a group use “Are we…” questions. Note that as a group we might be reflecting on how are we collaborating together, or on how are we collaborating with others:
- Are we thinking 'with' or 'to' and how would we know?
- How would doing this 'with' look different from what we are doing now?
- Are we all building commitment through co-defining the dilemma and co-designing the process together?
- Are we all getting our fingerprints on this work? How do we know?
- Are we experimenting or solving? That is, are we trying to solve our complex problem (as though we can work out in advance how to do that) or are we learning together through hypothesis and testing?
- Are we letting go and sharing control?
- Are we sitting with uncertainty or rushing to find answers?
This isn’t an exhaustive list but it’s a great set of questions to start with. And of course it generates the need for one more over-arching question collaborators must regularly ask themselves: Are we stopping to ask ourselves about the state of our collaboration in order to improve our practice?
When collaborating, reflection on process is essential, for without it we revert to business as usual. The constant temptation will be to dive into the detail and trouble-shoot the project, but with good process questions we can coach each other to continually build our collaborative muscles. If we hear lots of content, stop!.... and reflect on process instead. Only in this way will our collaboration thrive and great results follow.
Any questions?
Curiosity creates better questions
We ask questions to find answers. So, when we ask questions within an important conversation, it’s essential that we are really curious to find out what another person thinks. I’d like to explore the topic of curiosity as one element of asking better questions.
But first, what do we mean by a ‘better question’?
Warren Berger, a questionologist (a person who studies questions), defines a beautiful question as “An ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceived or think about something – and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.”
Fran Peavey, another question studier, talks about strategic questioning as “focused on what could be, and upon the creation of active participation in present and future transactions”.
Fran suggests the questions that are useful in a conversation include those that don’t force anyone to defend a position; questions that move the conversation forward and open it up to new thinking, that help create new options. Perhaps a genuinely curious question “How often do you fill your bins for recycling and green waste?” is more likely to generate ideas about waste management than: “Why don’t you sort your household waste properly?” She suggests that better questions are often the unaskable questions which give them great power, asked simply in a single sentence. In the Emperor’s new clothes story, it was the child who asked, quite simply, “Why doesn’t the Emperor have any clothes on?” because he was genuinely curious about so obvious an issue.
So, how does our curiosity help us create better questions?
Being curious, and having a personal desire to learn from others, gives us courage to ask what might sometimes feel like dumb questions. I once sat on a Board of a financial institution and initially felt I didn’t have enough knowledge of the industry to ask what other Board members might think was a dumb question that just exposed how little I knew. I was encouraged by another Board Member from the steel industry who used to preface his question with the words “Well I’m just a simple production man, but this issue doesn’t make too much sense to me. Can someone please explain why this is so?” I was often curious about things I didn't understand, and found this way of asking a question useful for me and also allowed me to be useful to the group by introducing ideas from a female perspective and from outside the finance industry.
Curiosity keeps us asking questions even after getting an answer, so we explore the situation more deeply. An answer to the waste question “I have lots of stuff to recycle but not much green waste”, could lead to a broader conversation about recycling as part of waste management and generate new thinking. Perhaps continuing the curious questioning might eventually generate a better question and new ideas about our society’s use of plastic.
Curiosity helps us to learn from failure and move from a loss to a personal gain. I have always found that I learned more from my failures and disappointments than from my successes, because I am curious to know not only why I didn’t get the results I anticipated, but also why my reasoning was faulty. Curiosity pushed me to ask more and different questions about why I failed and what I might change. Failing is fine in my book, even necessary, because there is so much to learn if we are curious about, rather than defeated by, failure.
Finally, curiosity helps us to overcome fear, to listen without judgement to whatever answer comes from our better questions; to be interested in and willing to explore any small piece of an answer that takes us both forward.
I suggest being constantly curious and unafraid to ask, helps us to formulate better questions over time particularly if we listen carefully to every answer.
Are you planning to act or acting to learn?
Most of us would be familiar with the management aphorism: “If you fail to plan you are planning to fail”, and there is a lot of truth to it. But there is a darker side to this saying as well, one which many of my clients struggle with. Clients like Bob.
Bob is a project manager, smart, competent and successful. He works in a large water company, but there are many like him in all sorts of companies around the world. Bob has a track record of managing a range of difficult projects from planning through to delivery. Most recently he took on the exciting task of working with a diversity of stakeholders to improve water quality and amenity across a large urban water catchment. Bob knows his organisation can’t deliver outcomes on its own, and he is committed to collaborating with others to create lasting solutions together.
But a few months in, progress wasn’t as fast or as easy as he had expected. In fact, he was very worried that the collaboration would fall apart. People seemed unsure, unhappy, frustrated at the complexity and messiness of the task. Bob felt it too. But, being an experienced project manager, Bob gritted his teeth and applied himself to the problem of how to ensure this collaborative group delivered outcomes.
Going back to first principles, Bob decided he needed a plan of action, setting out the steps he and his collaborators would to take in order to get outcomes in a timely fashion. So he sat down with some smart colleagues to create the document.
But there was a problem. He actually didn’t know what the next steps should be. He wasn’t sure what the problem was – is it lack of commitment or lack of clarity or lack of resources…? He wasn’t sure who should be a part of the problem-solving process or who wanted to be a part of it.
What did Bob do? Being a good project manager, he decided to gather more data so that he could answer some of these questions in order to write the plan. But hang on, what data did he need? Where should he get it? What will that data mean..? He needs a plan for this…
Poor Bob was stuck in the space of not knowing; paralysed by the need to get the answers in order to proceed. His powerful urge to line up the ducks on this project was clashing with its unknowability.
The lesson is that planning can only take you so far when collaborating in complex situations. Rather than plan in order to act, Bob found more success when he began to act in order to learn. In practice, that meant Bob and his collaborators confronting and acknowledging the inevitable uncertainty of the situations they faced, but not getting paralysed by it. Instead, they tried things, developing small experiments to run. And together they learned from those activities. Some things didn’t work so well. Other things were more effective. All have been useful to help shed further light on how to tackle this catchment management problem. Only by taking action has the group learned what it takes to make a difference to their waterway.
Taking action when we don’t have all the answers can be scary, but Bob has now been working this way for many months as part of our program, and together he and his collaborators have created actions that no plan could have covered. They have learned not to plan in order to act, but to act in order to learn.
The four traps on the path to a digital water future
In its recent Digital Water report, the International Water Association lays out a map for the transformation water utilities are undergoing towards a digital future. The report draws on interviews with many industry leaders to arrive at eight key findings.
I do a lot of work with water companies, and I am working on a number of ‘digital futures’ projects. These experiences have highlighted some important, and surprising, risks to successful transformation. These are the traps that are likely to capture the unwary business as they walk the slippery path to a digital future.
Trap 1. The need for certainty in an uncertain world.
The world of digital technology is changing rapidly – even exponentially. This brings with it unavoidable complexity and uncertainty. The only thing we know for sure is that the technology and systems available in 10+ years will be different in ways we haven’t imagined yet.
The uncertainty of the digital future means managers will have less clarity than ever before. They will have to make decisions and find the way forward when the ‘right way’ is impossible to know. They will have to act even when the outcome is unclear.
The trap is apparent in the IWA report itself. The advice from leaders is to build a clear roadmap for the journey, identify priorities, outline strategies, allocate funding, get approval for plans. The trap is that doing so from a business as usual (BAU) mindset will lock managers into a fruitless search for certainty through endless planning. In a complex and emergent realm, BAU project management can’t deliver, yet it is often the only tool we know. Managers will continue to plan in order to act, when the transformative approach is to act in order to learn.
Trap 2. The curse of the expert.
The water sector is full of subject matter experts, operating in a culture that relies upon and rewards expertise. Knowing the science and applying it to problem solving has long been the key to success in the industry.
Yet in a complex and emergent world, we must recognise the limits to our knowledge, and the limits to our ability to work things out. Building a networked organisation to deliver emerging solutions to fast-evolving challenges, in a complex social, regulatory and political environment, brings with it the painful inevitability of saying “I don’t know”.
The trap is that that while we rationally recognise this and understand the logic of it, in many cases our organisational and personal identities are built on the ability to deliver, to have the answer or to solve the problem. The curse of the expert dooms us to relying on our experience and knowledge, even when these are insufficient to the task. Organisation who can’t break the curse will struggle to make the transformation to a digital future.
Trap 3. Knowing the solution before we understand what the problem is.
As the report highlights, moving to a digital water future will involve a wide range of stakeholders and a wide range of technologies. The promise is that getting all of the different parties to work and co-create together will ensure smart and implementable solutions.
The trap comes from the very human urge to get on and solve the problem - an urge that is very hard to resist, even when we rationally know that the problem is complex and messy. The technology providers will each come with a particular tech solution to an often-unspecified problem. Communities will be looking for a different range of outcomes. Water companies will have another suite of solutions based on a long history of providing safe water and sanitation. But what’s the problem we are trying to solve here?
Stepping back from ‘my’ view of the problem and solution is a very difficult thing to do. The tendency is to gloss over this part of the process and get into the exciting work of doing ‘new stuff’. The consequence is everyone running off in different directions. No alignment, No clarity. No results. If we don’t learn to be curious about the problem together, before considering solutions, we will put at risk the creation of a smart digital water future.
Trap 4. The need to control
The report describes a digital maturity curve from a transactional organisation through transitional, to dynamic and flexible, with strong networks within and between utilities and other stakeholders. This requires a less siloed, more connected and collaborative organisation.
The trap is that while leaders talk about collaboration, many continue to maintain control through BAU systems, relationships and structures. Some drivers are obvious – leaders are expected to be accountable for all that happens, so they naturally want to have their hands on the levers. But the key trap is in the less obvious drivers, such as the unconscious belief that ‘as a leader I should be the person who makes the decisions and calls the shots’. The flip side is the equally powerful tendency for team members to feel that ‘I had better take this to the boss, just in case I’m doing something wrong here’. In other words, all levels of organisations conspire to maintain existing power structures, even in the face of broad agreement that things must change. Without transforming the power dynamics, a flexible and collaborative organisation is out of reach.
These four traps aren’t the only ones that lie in wait for water businesses on the path to a digital future, but they represent the subtle complexity of the task. They also demonstrate that achieving a digital future is not simply a matter of focussing on smart technology. It is, at heart, a human journey, and all the more transformative for that.