Category: Innovation

Thursday 8:27pm Sheffield

Did you do what you were supposed to do today? Go to work? Follow the rules? Keep your head below the parapet?

That sounds like a good day’s work. Let’s say it was better than that – let’s say it was a great day’s work.

You finished your todo list, helped a co-worker complete a few more jobs and got a large contract signed. Everything is fabulous.

You go to your manager, bursting with excitement – you’ve got all this stuff done, it’s time to pick up some praise and a well-deserved reward.

So… what do you think you’ll get?

1. A huge cash bonus.
2. An all-expenses paid trip to Bali with your family, with everyone flying first class?
3. More work.

Most of us spend our lives working on other people’s priorities

We live in a world where the education system teaches us to fit in – to be good workers. And that’s great for lots of people.

But not for everyone. And the system doesn’t know how to cope with those people in any way other than putting them in straitjackets.

So we get contracts and rules and policies and training – all things designed to squish us into a role where we do what we are told to do and nothing else.

In other words, we act like pragmatic, reasonable people – agreeing what we should do and doing what we agree, most of the time.

What would a Samurai do?

Hagakure is The Book of the Samurai, a collection of conversations with Yanamoto Tsunetomo, an 18th Century Samurai who became a Buddhist priest.

The Samurai point of view that comes out of these writings is not pragmatic, not reasonable – and it’s not a philosophy. It’s a state of mind, and not one that is easy to understand.

In one of the stories, a warlord attacks and kills another one. When this happens, the soldiers of the dead warlord are ronin, masterless Samurai. What should they do?

The answer is clear. They must take revenge. The way of revenge is simply to force your way into the other warlord’s house and be cut down.

Don’t stop and think. Don’t consider details – like how many soldiers guard the place or what you need to attack. When you do this, the time goes by, your start to think, and then you give up.

It doesn’t matter if the enemy has a thousand soldiers waiting to fight you. You go in with the mindset that you will start with the first one and cut them down, one by one.

Even if it looks like you will lose, take action – recklessly, irrationally. Go in, cut them all down, or be cut down.

Don’t wait and think. Act. With no regard to reason or outcomes.

Would you attack a warlord guarded by such people?

Sometimes life needs that kind of attitude. Was Steve Jobs reasonable about removing all the buttons from the iPhone? Was Elon Musk reasonable about going to Mars?

George Bernard Shaw wrote “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

To win, you need to be the kind of person that will fight, even when it is absolutely certain that you must lose.

When the time comes, you do not reason – you must only act.

Brian Tracy writes about zero-based thinking, asking the question knowing what I now know, is there anything I would do differently?

That is a hard question to think about.

We know what we know. We don’t know how things might have turned out if we had made different choices along the way. We may think they may have turned out better – but doesn’t make today any less real.

Take knowledge, for example. What’s the point of it?

Some people study situations and come up with theories. Others work with real world problems and try to solve them.

A good application of knowledge is when we find a theory that can be applied to solve real world problems.

But things are hardly ever this direct – and that’s because the people involved want different things.

The people who generate knowledge – who sit at their desks and think through ideas and come up with theories – have a system of rewards and incentives based on the respect of their peers.

The people who solve problems have the satisfaction of improving things and knowing that they have created a better situation for others.

Clearly the two are linked – although the connections are not always easy to see.

Keynes wrote “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”

There’s another thing that can pass us by – it’s almost invisible.

Why is it that there are so many books on management – on everything really these days?

It’s because one way of standing out is to come up with a new way of doing something – which is usually a new way of packaging an old way of doing something.

In marketing, for example, we always need to spend some time working out who our customers are – who wants what we have more than they want the money in their pocket?

Whether we use segmentation or psychographics or personas, what we’re trying to do is get a better picture of who these customers are – and then we can try and get to know them better.

So, what writers and consultants do is come up with tools – ways of turning knowledge into methods that can be applied to a problem.

This link between the generation of knowledge, creation of tools and application in a problem situation forms a value chain, according to John H.Roberts, Ujwal Kayande and Stefan Stremersch, who found that when it comes to marketing there is a good link between knowledge and practice – the tools are being applied on the whole.

They found that when the people doing the thinking are also doing some doing, it seems to work better.

Once again – it’s obvious.

That doesn’t mean its easy to do or commonly done.

We need to work to get such three such simple concepts aligned and working in practice in our businesses.

Every generation probably feels that it is living through the most profound changes that have ever happened since the dawn of time.

From the printing press to the industrial revolution, from world wars to the world wide web, things have changed – and the most visible part of that change is the technology that enables the modern world and, in particular, the technology that affects how we live and work.

So, is it helping us or not? Are we more productive or not?

It’s hard to tell – and that’s because an abundance of something always results in a shortage of something else.

So, take how modern technology has transformed the world of work, making it easier for us to collaborate, have everything everywhere and communicate with others. How are these working out in practice?

Is it easier to work with others?

Many new companies and startups are delighted by how easy it is to collaborate with others on projects now.

Take Google docs, for example. We can share and work on a document at the same time – something impossible in the days when we had to write a draft, send it to someone else, wait for comments, rewrite and repeat the process until everyone was satisfied.

Now we can work together quickly, come to a consensus and publish anything we want pretty fast.

So why is that anything less than perfect?

For two reasons…

First, if two of us can collaborate, then so can others. If it’s easy to have five, ten, fifteen people all providing their input, then we can quickly get locked into a cycle of never ending comments, suggestions and changes.

Procurement is one area where such delays can increase delays massively. It takes much longer to get five buyers to agree than two and the trend towards decision by committee slows things down and doesn’t necessarily improve quality.

The second reason is that when it’s quick and easy to collaborate and produce something, the result is probably going to be of less quality.

That’s why we’re taught to be suspicious of things we read on the internet and to be more accepting of things we read in peer-reviewed journals.

Is it good having everything everywhere?

Dropbox, Google Docs, Office 365 – all these tools have changed the way in which we store information – taking us from a world of USB drives to being able to work on any computer anywhere.

It’s also meant that we can store everything – never lose a thing.

And so many of us pile on the gigs of storage, like the pounds we put on every year since college. It’s gradual, but it grows and, after some time, it shows.

Not every picture we take is worth saving. Not everything we write is worth preserving.

When we had limited space, we had to choose what to keep. So what we had was worth having. Now we have everything, but it’s hard to find what matters.

At some point we’ll probably wake up to the need for a digital diet. Just because its cheap to keep everything doesn’t mean we should, because it makes it more expensive for us to find what is important.

And it’s also annoying that when we get a phone call it could be one of seven contacts that system has scraped from all our accounts – although it’s just the one person…

We never apologise for sending a long letter these days

Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher is credited with writing a long letter with an apology for not having had the time to make it shorter.

When we had to write to each other, we probably took care to express our thoughts clearly and concisely so that we wouldn’t have to fix it weeks later when the replies came back.

With email, we can write to someone so quickly that we no longer need to think about our words and how they might be interpreted – after all we can follow up with a clarification immediately.

And that means we probably take less care – and it shows up in the increased number of emails we need to send to get things done.

It’s easy to communicate – and because it’s so easy we spend more time doing it. It’s also easy to get a meeting in the diary – and that’s why more managers spend their time in meetings than ever before.

But – sitting in a meeting and sending emails is not work – it’s stuff that gets in the way of doing real, useful work – like thinking about strategy, improving operations, recruiting or expanding.

If we all got together less often and interrupted each other less we might get more done.

The problem isn’t technology… it’s us

What we come back to is that the way use technology better is to understand how we humans use stuff. Make it easy for us and we’ll do it more – but something else suffers at the same time.

Technology can help us – but it can also hinder us.

To get the most out of it, we need to remember who is in control – it or us.

Imagine setting up a new business or expanding an existing team.

The first things many organisations do is think about adding people at an office. We need desks, computers, software, phones and all the other things that go with bringing that person online – and that takes time, effort and money.

Why do we do this?

In a world where most people we want to work with already have a desk, a computer and an internet connection that lets them get all the software and communications tech they need – why do we keep thinking working in an office is the way to go?

Or is that still the case? Research from Upwork, the freelancing website, says that two thirds of companies use remote workers. As talented specialists get harder to find, companies that are willing to offer remote working can choose from workers around the world.

Many organisations that have started up now have entirely virtual workplaces – with no central office at all.

So, what do our organisations and managers need to do to make virtual teams work well?

There are three things we need to get right.

1. Focus on outcomes, not process or how we would do it

Individuals now are developing increasingly individual ways of working – and that can be a challenge.

Take something as simple as taking notes – a fundamental part of work.

I’ve jumped from using a reporter’s notebook to a legal pad to One Note to text files to journalling software to Google spreadsheets to custom Excel files back to Moleskine notebooks.

In some businesses notes need to be recorded in a particular way for legal reasons. Reporters need to keep their notes in case they get sued. Policemen need to keep their pocket notebooks as evidence.

For most jobs, however, how people take notes doesn’t matter. What they do after that does matter.

For example, do they liberate the main points from their notes and share them with colleagues who need to know them? Does a sales person’s notes provide enough information for a service team member to take on the account?

With remote teams we need to focus on outcomes – the way things turn out – rather than the way in which they are done or the way in which we would do it.

2. Be clear on what you expect from others

I remember being on a train down to London and hearing a conversation a few years ago.

The speaker, who sounded like an entrepreneur, was quite loud and making no effort to speak quietly – but the gist of the talking was that a remote worker who was at home couldn’t be contacted on instant messaging – and that wasn’t acceptable.

Any sort of situation that makes us want to stand with our hands on our hips crossly is one where our expectations are not being met.

In this case, the entrepreneur’s expectation was that the remote worker needed to be available to contact during work hours on this system.

The worker may have had a perfectly good reason to be away from the desk at that time – or may have been in the park throwing snowballs. We don’t know – but that simple inability to contact the worker was enough to cause a work problem.

Some organisations recognise that instant messaging interruptions are as bad as actual interruptions, and set expectations that such contact is by arrangement and usual business is conducted by email.

The point is that much irritation can be avoided if expectations are clarified up front.

3. Make the effort to make contact and stay in touch

At the same time, workers will find managers much more relaxed if they make the effort to keep in touch.

Where there is little or no face to face contact, email updates, messages and phone calls can all help keep the lines of communication open.

Managers get nervous when they don’t hear anything for long periods of time. And – quite probably – when people don’t keep in touch it’s because things aren’t working and they are looking for, or working on, something else.

Lack of contact quite often leads to termination of appointments.

Interestingly – sharing personal updates before moving to business can help reinforce the feeling of being on the same team and help maintain a warmer relationship.

Summary

Many of us, if we don’t already, will experience remote working, virtual teams and more flexible ways of working.

For new starters, it will simply be the norm. For older workers, it is what they do as they move away from corporate jobs and focus on a more balanced life that looks after their health and family.

Whether we’re in offices together or on the phone – the things that make us human are what will cause us to succeed or fail.

Working towards a common outcome, being clear on what we expect from each other and taking the time to keep in touch and talk will help us manage this new world of work.

Imagine having to ask the CEO of a company about their strategy or a prospective employee about his or her capability.

What they show and tell us will depend on the kind of questions we ask.

How do we know we are asking the right ones? The ones that will throw up opportunities and show us what is really happening?

There are lots of lists of questions we could ask. The important ones are about what is not there – and there are three important versions of these.

What is the unmet need?

The first comes from Jo Miller’s conversation with Ellie Pidot, VP of Strategy at Medtronic who asks What are your customer’s unmet needs?.

One way to think of this is like whitespace on a page.

What is left out helps us make more sense of what is there.

We can ask people what they do and what they want and we will be told a story, probably one that is logical and coherent.

They might tell us what they are doing – and the things identified as needs.

All too often, what they tell us and what they actually need can be different.

This happens quite a lot in IT, for example. There is often a gap between what software developers think people want and what they actually need.

The best programmers are able to bridge that gap and create the right kinds of tools to help us.

What would an outsider do?

The second question comes from Freek Vermeulen who asks what would other, external people do, if they found themselves in charge of this company?

This can be thought of like a blank page.

What would we do if we were starting from scratch? From a zero base – with no sunk costs or investments of time, effort and energy?

Bryan Tracy suggests asking – knowing what I now know, would I do things differently?

Are there things we would do more of, less of, start or stop?

It’s hard looking at the same things through the same eyes.

It might help if we try and look at them through the eyes of someone else, someone we respect. What would they say or do?

Then – do we have the courage to do that ourselves?

What would be least risky?

The third question is from Tim Ferriss’ interview with Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb.

Many people think that to get ahead we need to take more risk. Higher risk equals higher returns.

That’s not really the case.

Take B2B sales, for example. Joe points out that B2B customers, given a choice between a low price and low risk, will take the lower risk option.

Entrepreneurs who have taken what seem to be huge risks often have carefully calculated the downside and decided that they can live with the odds.

The Dhandho approach follows this – Heads I win. Tails I don’t lose much.

Often the course of action that people will follow is not the one that gets them the most but the one that looks the safest.

So, in this case, its the absence of obstacles that matters.

Summary

There are more questions that we could ask than ever could be answered.

We need to ask the ones that show what isn’t there.

The whitespace, blank page, absence – that’s where the opportunities are hiding.