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As the end of November approaches, that time has come again when we must consider whether we have the right initiatives in place for ourselves and our organisations as we get ready for 2017.  How are you transforming the capabilities and work practices in your organisation to make sure that your teams are more effective in their work?

Why is Work Changing?

The way we work is fundamentally changing under the influence of five main drivers:

• Pervasive Global connection: As internet connectivity has gone mobile, we now have the ability to connect with, to converse with and to see the whole system of our stakeholders any time anywhere.
• Automation: Digital technology has enabled us to automate simple tasks and string together increasingly complex processes and systems.
• Data and Analytics: As digital connection and digital automation expands so does our ability to gather data and analyse that data to provide insight and run complex algorithmic processes.
• Changing Consumer Expectations: As consumers are exposed to the potential of digital through consumer technology and consumer services, the businesses must meet disruptive and exacting standards for convenience, service, value and speed.
• Accelerating Pace of Change: Disruption, greater responsiveness to change and ever-shortening cycles of feedback are the new norm for business and our work practices must adapt to enable our businesses to keep up.

We have already seen great change in digital transformation.

Further dramatic changes in the nature of work are here but ‘not yet widely distributed’ to borrow the phrase of William Gibson.

2017 Future of Work Recommendations

With these pressures on the way we work, every business should have a focus on how it is changing the way its people work and the practices that will support ongoing transformation of work. Here are my recommendations on what work you should have on your backlog for the new year:

Foundations:

These five are in place in your organisation today. However, they may not be well understood, managed or serving your purpose.  As you look to 2017 it is always worthwhile to ensure that the foundations are sound and well aligned.

Purpose: Be clear on your personal purpose. Look for that purpose in the work you do. Clarify the shared purpose in your organisation. Don’t impose a purpose designed around the leadership table. Discover the purpose through the stories and the work that bring your organisation together.

Strategic Value: What value are you trying to create to fulfil your purpose? What kinds of value matter most to your stakeholders? When do they know you are creating value? What measures tell you that you are achieving your goals?

Networks: To compete in the network era, your organisation must be networked. How are you bringing people together to connect, to share, to solve problems and to respond to the networks around your organisation? The technology matters less than the connection, the behaviours and the shared purpose. Are you clear on the strategic value of your communities, are they well supported with sponsorship, investment and community management so as to accelerate their value creation?

Culture: Move beyond words on a poster. Move beyond generic platitudes. Move beyond an agglomeration of individual team cultures. What specific values are shared across your organisation? Why do these help fulfil your purpose? How do those values translate to expectations about behaviours in and across your teams? Is the culture in your organisation effective for your purpose and the value you are seeking to create? How do you personal role model the behaviours you expect from others?

Employee Experience: Are you working somewhere that values the employee experience and is adapting it to changing work and changing roles in the organisation? How have you aligned your employee experience to your desired customer experience? Does your workplace create rich value for employees and enable them to express their potential in fulfilment of purpose? Does your employee experience work as well for the one-hour temporary contract worker as the long term employee? Does it work equally well for all levels of the hierarchy and all corners of your network?

Personal Effectiveness:  Four Key Future of Work Practices

These four personal practices are enablers of the future of work. They enable an individual employee to deliver greater value in their work by responding to the opportunities and information in their environment. Agile and adaptive they empower employees to continuously improve and innovate.

Working Out Loud: Sharing work in progress in a purposeful way with relevant communities will accelerate learning, sharing and feedback cycles. Start working out loud now.

Personal Knowledge Management: Learn how to turn the personal information flood into effective sense making, learning and sharing. A critical skill to make sense of complexity and to leverage networks for learning.

Adaptive Leadership: Enabling the rebel and the change agent to lead more effectively in any system. Improving understanding, influence and the increasing the breadth of leadership techniques to create collective change in any system.

Experimentation: Move beyond the limits of your expertise. Learn by doing. Resolve uncertainty through action. Shorten cycles of decision making and feedback to increase personal effectiveness.

Organisational Effectiveness: Scaling & Accelerating Change

Organisations are made up individuals. These four practices of organisational effectiveness scale and accelerate the personal practices through a focus on design of systems for connection, learning and adaptation.

Open Collaborative Management: Middle managers are often those who find a change to digital ways of working most threatening and disrupting. Open up the work of management. Move management from planning, allocation and control to facilitation, alignment and coaching. Shorten cycles and improve the performance value of feedback. Foster the role of managers as network navigators and brokers. Management can be a critical point of leverage in achieving more open, more collaborative and more effective work.

Scalable Capability Development: Turn each employee’s learning into a contribution to scalable system for delivering strategic value. Create Big Learning systems that scale learning around strategic capabilities for the organisation’s success. Coordinate your learning agenda as an agile change program. Curate the capability building of your teams and leverage social learning to bring 70:20:10 and a performance-oriented approach to learning to life at scale and in the workplace.

Effective Networked Organisations: Take advantage of the networks in and around your organisation to rethink your business model and organisational design choices. Break the centralised/decentralised binary and move beyond hierarchy. Enable autonomy, foster alignment and improve effectiveness for purpose. Skill your teams to achieve effectiveness in the wirearchy. You don’t need to purchase a new management system. You need to adapt your approach to managing knowledge, trust, credibility and results to your purpose, culture and community.

Agile Innovation & Change: Adapt to the changing needs of the environment and stakeholders to deliver new value. Accelerate innovation and change through new approaches and by putting in place the systemic support for employee-led innovation, change and transformation to a more responsive organisation.

If you or your organisation are interested in exploring any of these areas of work, Change Agents Worldwide are ready to help. Our members are leading practitioners in the future of work and developing innovative change programs for organisations around the world to make work more effective.

Simon Terry provides consulting, advice, speaking and thought leadership to global clients through his own consulting practice, and as a Charter Member of Change Agents Worldwide, a network of progressive and passionate professionals, specializing in Future of Work technologies and practices.  The focus of Simon’s practice is assisting organizations to transform innovation, collaboration, learning and leadership

 

Change Agents Worldwide is very excited to be a partner in the 2015 Global Rebel Jam.  The Jam will be held on Friday, June 26

This event will involve 24 hours of speakers sharing stories, observations and emerging practices about creating change and reshaping the future of work.  Look forward to being challenged and inspired by their stories.

Kickoff times for 24-hour online event

• Europe (CEST): noon
• United States (EDT); 6 a.m.
• United States (PDT) 3 a.m.
• Australia (EST): 8 p.m.

Log-in information:

• Log in to this WebEx site
• Event # #206 461 629
• Password: RebelJam

We will be using the Twitter handle:  #RebelJam15 so that you can follow along and review the conversation.

You can view our Schedule of speakers and topics and there is still time to get involved as a speaker.

 

The Global Rebel Jam is generously sponsored by:

 

Produced by

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hierarchy likes order. Networks manage complexity.
Hierarchy walks in an orderly procession. Networks hustle.
Hierarchy wants projects to go from a through to z. Networks experiment across the alphabet.
Hierarchy wants a clean status. Networks solve for problems & mess.
Hierarchy reinforces status. Networks value results
Hierarchy manages stocks. Networks manage flows.
Hierarchy likes secrets. Networks share.
Hierarchy approves, authorises and allocates. Networks learn, enable and do
You can wait for your spot in the orderly procession. However the orderly procession might never reach you or might pass you by blind to your talents to walk in lockstep.

Join the network of doers instead.

Change Agents Worldwide is a network that believes the future of work will leverage the leadership and potential of the network. This post first appeared on simonterry.tumblr.com

In The Social Psychology of Organizing, Karl Weick exposed the theory of enactment, stating that organizations were fundamentally an abstraction of the reality, essentially brought to life through management’s narrative. In that sense, changing the way we work requires much more than technology and knowledge workers’ empowerment. Taking a broader perspective, and looking at organizations, not only as a production and profit-making machines, but as center of a part of human activities mainly taking place in cities, sheds a different light on their role and nature.

While trade was an important part of the wealth of cities during Antiquity, we had to wait until the XIth century for economic exchanges to regain importance after almost half a millenium of Barbaric invasions and feudal wars. At that time, cities began to define themselves through their economic activities, and to specialize their production. Physically, as well as symbolically, delimited by heavy walls, the medieval city grew organically, around a center dominated by religious buildings, and commercial activities cohabited with residential houses at the heart of mostly undifferentiated territories. Furthermore, despite its strong geographical delimitation, the medieval city was interdependent with its surroundings. Rural territories provided the necessary food, were the place to build roads to link cities, and were inhabited by the most important part of the population (85% in France).

During the Renaissance, cities undertook a crucial transformation. Letting them grow anarchically was no more an option, and new cities began to take shape, planned and designed according to the notions of harmony, symmetry and simplicity rediscovered from Antiquity. At the same time, and during the following centuries, specialization was taken to another level, as cities were specially built to accommodate and support one of the three main powers of this era: economical, political and administrative, and military. Everywhere across Europe, royal cities competed in refinement, while engineers like Vauban in France or van Coehoorn in the Netherlands conceived and built fortified towns by applying to the principles of military architecture to urbanism. The economic role of cities was at that time preponderant, and more than a few had their name directly associated with a production or transformation activity. Think for example about Antwerp’s diamond commerce or Calais’s lace manufacturing.

Work and the city: the historical divorce

With the XIXth century’s industrial revolution took place a rapid and radical disruption: at that time, firms took over cities as symbols as well as guarantors of the whole economic activity. Work began to be dissociated from other social activities. The city, from holistic center of human activities, has progressively seen its role and influence diminish over time. As companies were gradually loosing contact with the other aspects of human life, some attempts were made to provide workers with a unified environment, this time not under the responsibility of city’s governance, but the one of modern “captains of industry”. Taking inspiration from Charles Fourier’s utopian theory of phalanxes, between 1856 and 1858, Jean-Baptiste Godin built the Familistère in Guise, Belgium, to provide workers with all the necessary infrastructure and services he supposed they needed to be productive at work. At the beginning of the XXth century, Edouard Michelin has built whole new districts in Clermont-Ferrand, allotting them schools, sports facilities, and even a church.

But such initiatives remained the exception. Most of the time, the city abdicated and the divorce with work was pronounced, leading to deep transformations. In Europe, under the influence of US cities, new districts discarded the old organic design to adopt a grid-like arrangement. Streets were drawn to favorite circulation over communication. Consumption based transactions themselves were progressively displaced from city centers to peripheral malls and hypermarkets. The modern city was functional and efficient, according to The Athens Charter, the urban planning guidelines written by Le Corbusier and published in 1943. By losing its role as entity of production, the city had lost its connections to other cities, resulting in a fragmentation of local territories, and in an overall competition, as Richard Florida wrote. Competition in which they are mainly spectators, as being orchestrated by external economical powers,. Overall, it lost most of its soul. In 1961, Lewis Mumford stated:

“A universal suburb is almost as much of a nightmare, humanly speaking, as a universal megalopolis: yet it is toward this proliferating nonentity that our present random or misdirected urban growth has been steadily tending. A large scale pattern of expressways and airfields and sprawling car parks and golf-courses envelops a small scale, increasingly shrunken mode of life.”

From customer-centricity to citizen-centricity

Drawing a parallel between the evolution of the city and the one of the workplace is of course tempting. The industrial era has rationalized space, productivity has got rid of shapeless shops and offices to implement neat open spaces, large passageways and functional lines of production. This analogy could be pushed even further, as a majority of companies still operate in a Modernist-like manner: managers are the workplace equivalent of continuous commuters (the dark side of mobility), and knowledge workers populate impersonal open spaces or tentacular alignments of cubicles… But there is much more to be understood in the evolution of cities and of their relationships with economical actors.

The failure of Modernism, which gave birth to endless low-rise housing suburbs as well as dehumanized minimalist districts, nurtured alternative ways to rethink the city. Starting in the middle of the seventies, the post-modernist movement rejected the utilitarian view of post-war urbanists, aiming at integrating new constructions into the context of the city, and at reconciling the main human activities within the same space. Cities are complex systems, in which many networks and symbolic structures superpose or interweave, and the search for new harmony pursued by many urbanists and policy makers is a still to be solved wicked problem. But the movement has started…

Inside organizations, the frontier separating private from professional life is rotting, and “work” is no more a monolithic activity separated from others. Increased mobility and remote working, as enabled by technology, are gaining in importance, and are quietly involving brand new relationships to time and to space. For how long will we afford to keep on dealing with urban landscapes and with the “socialization” of business as two separate perspectives?

As John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote, the workplace needs radical redesign to allow for more collaboration and continuous learning. Customers’ new behaviors not only are forcing many companies to redefine their business model, but require them to rethink their spatial and symbolic relationships with them. Providing them with more channels to interact is not enough, we need to conceive and design those in a more human way, and allow customers to embed these channels in their way of life. Cities, and those who think and design them, are often ahead of organizations in tackling these problems.

Furthermore, the divorce between work and other facets of human life which took place during the industrial era has to be considered under the light of organizational design. As organizations aim at leveraging the relationships dynamics, they must begin to take seriously into account their own role in the city, which encompasses most of these dynamics. Redesigning work means rethinking the place of work inside human activities, thus inside cities. Restoring the city’s economical role and identity has become a sine qua non condition to a successful urbanism as well as a truly social business. Organizations do not need to become customer-centric, but citizen-centric. Utopia? Have a look for instance at Zappos’ Downtown Project, which goal is to restore a continuity between the workplace and the urban community. The future of work lies at the heart of the city.