Monday 10 December 2018

A Double Standard Is No Standard At All!

If there's one thing guaranteed to make me mad in the workplace it's the failure of people to follow internal standards or guidelines for internal projects. In the IT world, this appears to be the normal state of affairs. I've lost count of the number of internal initiatives that I've been involved with which have no requirements (documented or not), no clear objectives, no stated business benefit, no plan, and no effective management per se.


These companies often have highly developed processes and procedures covering just about every aspect of their business, and yet internal projects (and programmes) are kicked off on a regular basis without even so much as the back of a fag packet plan.

How many times have you been tasked with creating a tool to monitor some aspect of your organisation without any of the prerequisites demanded by management for a customer-facing tool? You must have had the conversation that goes...

Manager: "Knock me up a spreadsheet to track our widget usage across the organisation. Nothing fancy, but I'll need it for the leadership team meeting first thing in the morning".

You: "You can use the corporate widget monitoring tool for that"

Manager: "I don't need the full monty, just a snapshot - it'll only take you a few minutes. You can do it during your lunch break"

You: "OK, then. I'll have it ready for you early by 14:00" 

Back at your desk, you start banging your head against the wood because you know what's going to happen next. The quick and dirty spreadsheet 'project' is soon going to morph into something monstrous and you'll never get an opportunity to eat lunch again. Soon, everyone will be wanting additional features, customisations and modifications (not one of which will be written down).

I've written and spoken about the dangers of the end-user cottage industry of dashboards in the past but the truth is that major corporations run vast tracts of their business affairs using unregulated and un-auditable spreadsheets. Far more complex initiatives are undertaken in exactly the same way and the outcomes are always the same. And they are not good...for anyone!

Organisational change is still one of the most difficult undertakings for a business, and yet many of them still believe they can perform it without any understanding, planning or proper management. The metaphor of building the aeroplane while it is in-flight is entirely appropriate. You’ll be familiar with the executive who is parachuted into your department and immediately starts to take control by issuing edicts about how things need to be done, despite having no previous experience in anything to do with what your department does.

You might think you’ve got lucky when the exec announces he is setting up an internal working party. And then you find that the working party includes all his management cronies and a token member of your department - the one person in the team who is guaranteed to not rock the boat. A few days later you get the memo about the changes and after shaking your head in disbelief you start plotting with the other reliable members of your team as to how to block the change and undermine the new manager. And businesses wonder why change fails.

Maverick workers may be a pain in the backside, but they often operate for the good of their colleagues. Maverick managers, on the other hand, are often only in it to further their own careers. These kind of parachute appointments are very often temporary, and any damage that is done can often be put right before too long, once the exec has been assigned to another department!

But if organisations really want their employees to react positively to change, senior executives must keep an eye out for double standards, where managers expect others to behave a certain way, but fail to do so themselves. If managers can’t follow internal processes then their leaders should be asking why not. If the processes are wrong, then fix them. If managers won’t follow internal processes, then either re-educate them or get rid of them.

A double standard is no standard at all.




Friday 30 November 2018

Collaboration and Innovation: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” *


Show me a recent company mission statement or a set of corporate values and I'm willing to bet that it'll contain the words collaboration and innovation. It'll probably also contain the word agile and maybe lean as well but let's not get sidetracked in the first paragraph.

Whilst I don’t dispute that innovation and collaboration are ‘good things’, when they appear in high-level mission statements and value propositions, they are usually little more than words plucked off a jargon bingo sheet, fairly meaningless and probably not understood by the people who wrote them any more than the executives and managers tasked to make them happen.

The biggest misplaced assumption about innovation and collaboration is that these things can be made to happen on demand. Secondly, there is the rather suspect assumption that for businesses to succeed everybody in the organisation must be an innovator and a collaborator. Thirdly and finally I take issue with the assumptions that innovation needs to be centralised and that collaboration and teamwork are synonymous.

My main issue with these assumptions is that both collaboration and innovation are organic. They cannot be turned on and off like a tap and management cannot force people to do either (at least not successfully).

I’ve spent quite large portions of my working life as a remote worker so I’ve always been interested in the way ‘home-based working’ falls in and out of management favour. As a remote worker, generally you become a natural collaborator, otherwise, you tend to go slightly deranged. You also become something of an innovator, because there are times when you are the only person who can come up with a solution to a problem you face. Yahoo, IBM and HPE all made headline news when they announced an end to home working because they needed everyone in the office to ensure maximum collaboration. As if being in an office in San Francisco is going to make you any better at collaborating with your colleagues in Bangalore than if you were at home (actually it’s more likely to be the reverse, but let’s not go there).

I recently came across a question asking how to enhance Global Collaboration in an organisation. The question pertained specifically to a situation where the business comprised a significant itinerant workforce. But regardless of the specifics, I was intrigued by what was meant by “Global Collaboration”. Was there an expectation that management could force people across the world to collaborate, regardless of their role, department, or whatever other artificial organisational constructs you’d care to add? Even if that were the case, why on earth would you want it? It sounds like a recipe for disaster in terms of organisational productivity. You could spend all day in meetings collaborating with people you’d never heard of before about subjects you know nothing about!

Collaboration needs a driver and a context. Groups of people need to collaborate from time to time - some more than others. And a failure to collaborate is exactly what causes organisational meltdowns on occasion.  Organisational failure often occurs at the interfaces within those artificial organisational constructs I mentioned earlier, and more often than not is brought about by the very creation of those constructs such as setting conflicting objectives for sales and marketing teams and engineering teams. Or trying to create an agile organisation one project at a time. When individuals or groups of people understand that they have mutual goals like deliver a product to the customer in the fastest time, it’s amazing how quickly they learn to collaborate.

In the same way, it’s amazing how people will collaborate in order to innovate a solution to solve a problem. But management doesn’t generally see this as good enough because they are constantly being told (by people who don’t have a clue what they are talking about) that they need to innovate faster to stay ahead. So soft drinks manufacturers, for example, constantly come up with improvements to their age-old, much-loved recipes that no-one likes and no-one buys. They’ve innovated their way out millions of dollars of marketing, R&D and customer loyalty. Of course, they could have gone to their frontline workforce and asked them if they could come up with better solutions to create their existing products (yup - that’s also innovation!), but that’s not enough to satisfy greedy investors and analysts.

The relatively new fad of creating Centres of Innovation, where good ideas go through various filters before they get approved or rejected and then end up in the hands of people who implement something completely unrecognisable from the initial proposal, sends out an extraordinary message to employees. It says - we don’t trust you to be able to take an idea from nothing to implementation; we need someone better qualified to do that. And in so doing it stifles innovation from the very people who know best what needs to be done.

If you take a dozen people and put them on a desert island with no interaction with the outside world, they’ll innovate a way to kill each other, after the strongest have collaborated together to find out which of the others to kill first.

* Quote from the 1967 film, Cool Hand Luke by The Captain (played by Strother Martin)