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Category: Business & Communities

Talking cuts? Don’t. Talk service.

Published July 2, 2010 by Jo Jordan

planning poker warm up by fsse8info via flickrWhat will happen if we cut by 25%

Yesterday on Twitter, there was a lot of chatter about impending cuts. If we cut this, then this bad thing will happen. Today, we heard that if we reduce a budget by 25%, we will get more terrorism. All of this may be true, but it illustrates a fundamental error in managing public services (and public servants).

Lead by substance not by budget

Don’t conflate the service and the budget! Simply don’t allow the conversation.

Ask only this – what do you want to do?

Never allow a public servant to talk about the budget. Their job is to deliver a service.  Talk about the service.  The budget is your responsibility.

Overcoming objections

If you try this, st first you will get a lot of reverting to type. These will be the typical excuses/worries/concerns.

  • It is important to do X, but that person over there won’t do Y, so I can’t do X (and I can throw a wobbly). Persist in keeping the conversation about X.   What do you want to do?  And why?  Understand fully what the person believes is important.  Pay attention and let people see you pay attention.
  • It is important to do X but I cannot do it without an assistant Y.   Keep the conversation about X.  Y is budget.  Understand X fully.  If X is important and well thought out,  you’ll find budget.  But X will fail anyway if it is poorly thought out and more to do with assistants than goals.  Don’t say the last two sentences aloud.   Just keep the conversation about X and about what the person believes to be important.  Pay attention! They know what they are talking about and after all they are going to do the work!
  • I won’t talk about this at all.  Unspoken here are two thoughts.  If I suggest something, you will make me do double work with half the budget.  Or, I might suggest a lesser project than my colleagues and lose out in the status stakes.  Simply state that you want to know what is important to the person and to make sure their projects are on the table because everyone else is making their bids.  Sadly, if you have a reputation for stabbing your staff in the back, you might take some time to develop trust.  Leave you knives at home from now on!  You have to be sure that you will too.  Stab anyone now and no one will trust you ever again.

Being patient

  • This exercise will take time and a lot of one-on-one’s. But if you have the patience, your patience alone will communicate that you are dependable.  You will find out what is important and everyone will understand they are responsible for conceiving a quality service that is needed, doable and credit to the service providers and the organization at a whole.  They have it all in their head.  Everyone does.  We all know what we want to do and we all have our pride.

Being prepared

Now for the hard work.  You must have done your homework.  You must have gathered together and fully analysed three sets of data.

  • The general regulations, law and physical constraints of your work unit.  You need to model the work of your unit on a spreadsheet.  It’s likely that you will have outputs in rows and inputs in columns and have sets of calculations at the top, bottom and side of your table.   You must know what is generally required of your unit and be able to slot in numbers quickly so that you can assess the impact of any one plan on all other plans at the touch of refresh button.  You will be assessing a lot of scenarios before you are done.
  • You must know the past performance of your unit and what is likely to happen if you carried on without changing anything.  Do the analyzes yourself.  The accountants in your organization might have strange ideas about how your unit works.
  • You must know your costs.  Forget managing your budget if you don’t know your costs down to the last penny.

Now to work!

When you have all this information on hand, you can honor your promise.  You tell your staff to work out what should be done and you will look after the budget.

If their ideas are not economically (financially) viable, then you will tell them and they will have to think again.

But they don’t have to worry about money.  That’s your job.

And whatever you do, don’t allow the agenda to be driven by the budget.

First define the service.  Then ask if it is economically possible.

Don’t conflate service and budget.  Don’t allow the conversation.

You will be surprised how much can be done with less money.  And if you have to tell your political masters that less  will be done, at least you will have all the numbers to hand.

But if you can’t deliver a good service on less money in a way that is far more enjoyable for your staff, I will eat my hat.

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What are management consultants for?

Published July 2, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Zoom Ahead by Vikram Vetrivel via FlickrShould we hire management consultants?

I’ve worked as a management consultant all my life. Maybe that qualifies me to write this post. Maybe my experience disqualifies me.  This is what I think.  Much as I welcome the business and interesting assignments, hiring consultants can be a bad sign.

Think of it like this. When I go to see my GP (family physician), I expect them to refer me to ‘consultants’ or specialists for rare conditions. It makes sense to see someone who works all day and everyday in one field.

But think of the reverse. Imagine going to a specialist hospital and having the leading specialist refer you to a GP. Now that is back to front.

Sadly, often management consultants are not specialists. They are often young, inexperienced and unqualified. Why then are they used to advise experienced managers?

Why do we hire management consultants?

There can be many reasons. But one of the obvious, of course, is that managers don’t know what to do. Not knowing what to do is not a crime. We all read. We all go on courses. We are learning all the time.

But when consultants aren’t specialists being hired to do specialist tasks, there is often a very specific malaise in the organization. And the malaise may be this.  The managers are doing work one level below their appointment.

The senior managers, for example, are planning budgets and developing working procedures and checking efficiencies. They are supposed to be looking ahead and anticipating the obstacles of 5 years time that we need to start solving now.  The middle managers will plan the actual work and review its efficiency.  The junior managers will make sure the work is done and tweak procedures to fit the specifics of the moment.

In military terms, senior managers don’t go to war; they don’t necessarily plan this war. They plan the next war.

In turn, the top managers  might be solving the problems of tomorrow when they should be deciding what business to be in and what kind of organizational structure and business model is required to succeed in that business.

In military terms, they assess which of our allies of today will be our enemies of tomorrow.  They anticipate innovation in weaponry and have the right research and development going on at military universities.  They look into the future that we cannot see.

Of course, senior managers should understand how middle managers draw up budgets just as generals must know what is happening to colonels and troops on the ground.  They should know how well things are going. When they walk into a work site, they should understand what is happening as a general should be able to comfortably go out on patrol.   They need to understand the organization from bottom to top, but they must do their own jobs not someone elses.  If no one is steering the ship of the organization, we will go to sea without maps, food, fuel and skills.

The sad reality of consulting

When we hire consultants, the excuse that we often give is that our subordinates are not up to their jobs. Let’s do some thought experiments.

  • In a well-run organization, when the boss is away, (when we are away) can somebody sit in our chair and makes the decisions we would ordinarily make.  If not, its not surprising we think our subordinates are incompetent.  We don’t let them see the world from where we see it.
  • When we are away, are our subordinates able to do more work and make better decisions than when we are around?
  • When our  incompetent subordinate is away, do things run better or worse?
  • When our incompetent subordinate is away, is one of his or her subordinates automatically taking over his or her responsibilities?  And if not, why not?

Specialist work that occurs rarely is legitimate work for a consultant.  Doing a senior managers job is not.  And the test is whether the senior manager can state whether they have assessed the obstacles the organization will face over the next five years and what they are doing to ameliorate the difficulties.

They may be more comfortable doing month-to-month management, or even day-to-day management, but while they are doing their juniors work for them, the work of leadership is not happening.  A simple solution is to move the senior managers to another building where they cannot interfere quite so readily.  Limit the email and telephone contact upwards with daily meetings at a set time.

Very soon they won’t need  a consultant at all.

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What happens when we make savage cuts to an organization?

Published July 2, 2010 by Jo Jordan

A window on the Cliffs by tostao_meravigliao via FlickrWhat happens when a boss walks into a room and says, we have to make cuts?

Our obvious response is emotional. We are angry. We are scared. We are threatened. We are determined not to get hurt.

But what happens to the organization?

Yesterday, Patrick Butler blogged on the Guardian’s Joe Public blog about the chances that the budget cuts would lead to innovation and creativity. I responded there and have edited my comments below.

My comments about the impact on the organization itself are based on experience and interpreted through lens of the principles of organizational design.  My conclusions are counter-intuitive.  That is, they are not the most obvious things we might think of.  There are good reasons for us expecting organizations to behave differently to what they do but I  won’t go into those reasons here. For the curious, they are to do with hegemony, reification and other similar concepts.  Let me say here that I am not making a prediction about what will happen in the public service in the UK.  I am simply describing what I have seen elsewhere and what might be worth thinking about.

My observations are three fold which may seem contradictory but are not.

  • There are unlimited depths to our creativity
  • The organization will be turned inside out but the leadership won’t acknowledge what they have done and will spend considerable resources covering up what they have done
  • Employees will put their efforts into developing autonomous careers and ‘business units’.

These outcome can be avoided but simply choosing the route of cuts suggests we may see these or similarly dysfunctional effects.  The superiors in an organization are responsible for resourcing an organization.  When they duck this responsibility, the game has begun

We have unlimited depths to our creativity

It is true that the individuals in any job know a multitude of better ways of doing a job.  I could find solid research evidence but let’s just say for now that tt is more than our ‘jobsworth’ to tell anyone.  Bosses don’t take kindly to being out shone. A wise employee does the boss’ way; even if that way is expensive, silly and possibly stupid.

The organization will be turned inside out

In my experience, when cut kick in, people do generate alternative ways of working, because they can.  They know what they are doing.

The difficult that arises is that the boss has now done him (or her) self out of a job.  In a hierarchical organization, it is the boss’ job, to find resources and to supply greater know-how.

When the know-how and resources come from below, the difference between ranks becomes redundant and the chain of command has to acknowledge that leadership is also bottom-up.

This challenge is not often acknowledged and this will be sad consequence. ‘Bosses’ will spend more and more resources having conferences to ‘problem solve’, meeting stakeholders to try to re-assert legitimacy,  and staging confrontations with employees over perceived ‘insubordination’ (by which they mean their sense of inadequacy because the leadership is coming from below), etc.  They will swell their ranks with more managers, experts and consultants (that has already happened in some parts of the public service.)

Ultimately the leadership begins to live in the Pink Floyd or was it U2 world where they watch themselves on closed circuit TV and they are genuinely surprised by reality on the odd occasion they encounter it.

Employees will put their efforts into autonomous careers

At the bottom levels, innovation is now at the discretion of the members of the organization and the key is in the word discretion.

Ordinary employees may be carrying the organization and its mission even to the point of paying their own salaries and part of the organization’s overheads. This may be seem extreme but I’ve seen it more than once and I’ve seen it in the UK.

Employees may also decide to match the effort they put in with their pay. A consultant coined a saying about salaries in Africa. The annual salary may vary a lot. The hourly salary does not.

Many people develop second careers (it seems that has already begun among British police). Businesses are run from work. Businesses are run outside work.  Second houses are another career. Living abroad and arbitraging costs is another version.

In the UK, I’ve seen some online sites and plenty of workplace business models where work is sub-contracted indicating huge rents in the price charged to the customer. Employees don’t take long to work that out the system of rents for themselves and to find ways of owning the outfit which supplies the contractors.

Is the breakdown of organizational legitimacy inevitable?

Depressing? Possibly corrupt?

The key (and the game) is the legitimacy of the organization. In hierarchical organizations, the raison d’etre of rank is to manage and dispense resources and know-how.

When the ‘bosses’ make the statement that they do not have resources to run the organization, both the organization and the managers lose legitimacy.

The organization could, of course, reorganize both its purpose and the way it organizes to execute its purpose.   This is rare though.  After all, if this re-direction was on the cards, it would have taken place to prempt the cuts and the challenge to the managers’ legitimacy.  A much more likely out come is the expenditure of vast sums shoring up the appearance of  managerial legitimacy while the operational business develops a like and mind (many minds) of its own.

It will be good to see leadership that rejuvenates organizations and in the end, what happens is what happens.  This is not science. This is life. What happens is what we decide to do together. And we make our decisions iteratively.  You decide.  I decide.  You revise.  and so on.

Right now, everyone is waiting for the bosses to make the first move. I hope this move is not “tell us what to do”.  I hope even more it is not “do the same work with less resources”.  Either of these moves  is game-over – at least for the hierarchy.

Then a new game begins of what will replace what we once had.  That is another story.

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Crowd-sourcing develops wisdom. It doesn’t find answers

Published July 1, 2010 by Jo Jordan

I dream of sunrise by Indy Kethdy via Flickr
I dream of sunrise by Indy Kethdy via Flickr

Zeitgeist of our age

As I dillied-dallied this morning, putting off the moment when I bury myself in an Excel spreadsheet, I pondered the bizarre experience of academics, like myself, teaching management in a classroom, and checked out the twitter chatter on the new crowd sourcing website being offered by government.

Crowd-sourcing is here

People seem willing to consult the populace online but don’t know what to make of the responses they get back.  There was even a spirited interchanged between a Gen Y blogger, whom I follow, and a Gen X geek, whom I also follow.  The Gen Yer was telling the Gen X to take down all his comments and get behind her drum. Hmm . . .

Someone even challenged Nick Clegg on the workability of crowd-sourced consultation. Hat-tip to @DT for this audioboo from Mark Hilary.

We want answers so that we don’t have to engage

I couldn’t quite hear Nick Clegg’s answer but the dilemma seems clear.

People are looking for answers so they can say that’s done – don’t have to talk (to you) any more.

Engagement is ongoing, messy and never ending

Engagement is ongoing – more people, more complexity, rising understanding, defined initiatives in context of a conversation.

Social psychologist, Karl E Weick provides the basic framework for understanding engagement & leadership

I don’t want to turn this into an advert for my own work but by chance, or rather because, I tried to write a plain English a few days ago, I can point you to what Weick wrote in the aftermath of 9/11 – what constitutes leadership when the world shifts abruptly beneath our feet?

What does it take to lead a community when the issues are so widespread that we must get everyone involved to be able to move forward together?

Karl E Weick is a a notoriously difficult read and I am not sure that I simplified his work sufficiently.  So let me have another go here.

  • Basically, the country has moved from the flight-fight reaction to the financial crisis, the initial startle and anger response.
  • We can give this coalition government its due in that they have moved us through the bargaining stage and to a thinking-it out stage (hopefully by-passing depression).

We are in the over-complicating stage of collectively re-thinking our world views

Weick points out that in this stage, our discussion becomes more complicated.  Indeed it becomes overly-complicated.

Over-complication is a process of looking at a problem from many perspectives

But this process of over-complication helps us understand the social context in which we frame initiatives and make small experiments in our own lives.

We gain a deep and wide appreciation of the context, or in other words, the issues as the appear from the perspectives of many people who are different to us.

Wide consultation provides the backdrop for wisdom and judgment

The context provides the backdrop for wisdom and judgment.

With this backdrop, we can take tentative steps in our own lives and in areas of our own responsibility to move forward.

The principle of self-organization and emergence apply

The leaders won’t decide for us.  We will decide just as a flock of birds decides.

  • We fly in roughly the same direction as everyone else.
  • We fly at roughly the same speed as everyone else.
  • We keep a respectable “stopping distance” so we don’t bash into each other.
  • And when the bird “on point” (the leader in human-speak), gets tired, it falls back and someone else flies point.

And note, to know where to go, the bird on point is using an exquisite sense of where the birds behind it are going.  Like all good leaders, it finds out where its followers are going so it can follow them.

So how will crowd-sourcing online help us?

  • We will not get behind one leader and follow them through predefined cause.
  • It will be messy.
  • We will use some technology to vote issues up and down and to cluster through tags.
  • some of us with an academic/journalistic bent will trawl through the data and look for themese.

But it will be messy and the gains go to anyone who is bothered to listen.

The Special Advisors are going to earn their keep reading all the threads and summarizing them. That is their traditional role isn’t it?  That’s what they are taught at uni, isn’t it?

To discern the common threads and brief their principals.

People who have rallied behind one particular cause, like the legitimate marijuana crowd in the States, will be noted.  They will stand out.  But that is not what this is about. This is a listening exercise. This is a develop nuances exercise.  This is involve people who normally would stay quiet exercise.

The essence of crowd-sourcing

This is a an exercise in developing a common appreciation of where we are going together, so we can fly like a flock of birds to where we need to go without bashing into each other, and without assuming any one of us has super-human powers to understand where we are going.

Leaders get people involved.  Leaders get people to listen.  Our common sense of who and what we are will emerge from that process – special interests and all.

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Leadership and the monkey business illusion

Published June 29, 2010 by Jo Jordan

12 by wang_zqhhh via FlickrWhere has all the leadership gone?

Leadership is a funny thing.  We want to break it up into lots of small parts and promised ourselves that if we do more of something, or if someone else does more of something, then we will have more leadership.

When I put the  analytical process in those terms, it sounds ridiculous.  Leadership isn’t something that is made up of lots of things.  But sometimes it is there and sometimes it isn’t.  And when it isn’t, we not only miss it, we get angry.  Why isn’t there leadership?

The monkey business illusion

Well maybe we are looking for leadership in all the wrong places.  The monkey business illusi0n explains the point.

Oh, yes, I know you’ve seen this.  But not this version, watch it.

We see what we want to see.  When we see no leadership, maybe, just maybe, we didn’t see it.

Maybe we spent our time looking at non-leadership so we screened out leadership?

Why do we feel there is no leadership?

Why do we see non-leadership instead of leadership?

Simply because that’s what we were looking for.

When we start by looking for leadership and honouring it when we see it, then it is there.  When we ignore it, it’s not.  It’s as simple as that.

When we do a test of leadership and we say leadership wasn’t there, we are jumping our logical tracks.  We can say we didn’t see leadership; that’s all.

That’s why democracy is important.  It is not that the voters recognize leaders.  It is what they recognize is leadership.

Leadership exists when we say it does.

Find it. Honor it.

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Anton Wilhem Amo – First African thesis in psychology

Published June 28, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Vuvuzela Up close and personal by voltageek via FlickrCan you guess the date of the first African thesis in psychology?

I’ll tell you that it is really early – well before Wundt.

Have your written down the date?

Now you can download (from the files below) the Life and Times of Anton Wilhem Amo who wrote the first known thesis in psychology by an African.  It’s a 2 page Word document.

I guarantee you will be surprised.

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A big research question?

Published June 22, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Crowd by Genista via FlickrWhich way will sterling move?

Today I asked a client: shall we pay this bill in USD today?  Or should we wait for the budget?  Do we expect the pound to gain (or to lose) when people hear what the Chancellor of the Exchequer has in store for us?  (What a fab job title!)

So there we were trying to anticipate what the Chancellor would say and what the markets would think?  And so was everyone else.

Anticipating the collective mind

Anticipating collective reactions is an interesting business.  We can take a poll and work out an average but that is relatively dull.

Let’s take the general election as an example.  People wanted to discipline the politicians and were keen on a ‘hung’ parliament.  When we achieved that, some people were furious. “I voted ‘Lib Dem'”, one tweeter said.

Yes, indeed.  We all had our preferences and as we voted tactically, some of us could actually vote for the party we wanted.

The genius of the outcome is that we had to judge what everyone else would do while they were judging what we would do.   The pollsters did work out averages but you and I made a more complicated judgment.

Anticipating the market is a little bit simpler because we aren’t trying to achieve a collective outcome.  Maybe we should be, but most of us are only trying to position ourselves advantageously.

So we watch the graphs of forex prices and we listen to the chatter (or in this case lack of chatter) and make the best call we can.

What models can we use to understand the collective mind?

What research has been done on the collective mind?  Do you know?  Do you know of any models?

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Cribsheet for HR Planning & Design

Published June 15, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Global Warming Ice Cream Van queue at Studland by Watt_Dabney via FlickrBasics of HR Planning & Design

I am tidying up (again) and I thought I would post a revision crib sheet that I made for students of HRM.

HR Planning & Design of HR System

What is HR planning? (mention supply, demand and matching actions)

Demand

How do we understand and project demand for HR? (pattern of sales, technology)

Is demand for HR a fixed number (such as 3 engineers)?

Supply

How can we understand and project supply of HR? (internally and externally)

Is supply of HR a fixed number?

Match demand & supply

How do we match demand for HR that we are pretty certain about?

How can we match demand for HR that is volatile/that we are uncertain about?

How else can we improve the match of supply and demand of HR?

Metrics: How well do we match supply & demand?

What metrics doe we use to monitor our success in matching supply and demand in HR? (think HR Costs and Sales Revenue)

UPDATE: If you need an example, here is a link to planning for surgeons in the NHS.

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Rational data analysts have to consider motive first

Published June 13, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Winners by Ann Morgan via FlickrDo the leaders of the world consider hard cold data when they make decisions?

I was sitting on aeroplane, catching up with the executive of an houshold name mulitinational, when he said something that was either the befuddled product of a jet-lagged brain, or something quite profound.  I know he is capable of both, so see what you think.

He said that he had learned, that “at this level  [buying and selling business units across borders]” the final decision just depends on the person making the decision.

Is there a general truth in this observation?

It is true, that like the son of a rich man, a firm can seem to “do well” just because of inherited wealth.  If we compare like-with-like and mentally subract the advantage of licenses and capital, is it true that at some point, organizations stop making rational decisions, and revert to the prejudices, preferences and whims of decision-makers?

Is the world ultimately run on whim, concealed by the size of major organizations?

Does data and rational decision making really matter in this complex and fast moving world?

I doubt we would ever have the hard data to systemaically explore this speculation. Wee may as well put it aside.  But another question does suggest itself.

If the world is puttering along on the basis of whim and prejudice, maybe we should stop worrying about being rational?  Maybe we should just suck-our-thumbs and join in? Put two stones in our pocket and say yes or no depending on which one we pull out?  Should we worry about having data at all?

What is the purpose of data?

It seems to me that we data pundits may have created a “straw man”.

Skilled leaders know that every decision is, at the last, personal.  Their decisions are their choice and the choice of the people they represent.  For them, the important order of events is not data and then preference.  It is preference then data.

Data is not there to tell people what is rational.  Data is there to follow through personal choices rationally.

Do we always use data sensibly?

There are, of course, foolish leaders who discard data when it does not endorse their naïve preferences.  The are inept leaders who discard data when it is ‘politically impossible’ to convey bad news to the people they represent.

More enlightened leaders, and I’ve known a few, use data to learn more about the group’s preferred possibilities and more about ways of achieving their preferences.  The enlightened leader becomes more conscious about what they need to negotiate, with whom, to secure their preferences.  The enlightened leader becomes more aware of what to look out for as they enact their preferences.  The enlightened leader becomes aware of side-effects that might undermine their preferences once the achieve them.

Data is useful to them but not when we try to tell them what they and their followers want out of life.  Data is useful to them when we elaborate their values and help to understand more fully what they want to do.

What is the role of a data pundit?

In short, I suspect data is always welcomed by enlightened leaders when it helps their mental model become

  • fuller
  • more flexible
  • more oriented to the outside world
  • and more supportive of informed, sensitive engagement.

A concrete example

I think Iit’s pretty much like taking a long haul flight with several segments across the world.  If I need to be in a certain city by a certain time, a rational analysis of options is pretty useless.  I am only interested in my options for achieving that goal.  And if that goal becomes uncertain or impossible, then I want data that allows me to re-formulate my goal and communicate to all the people who will be affected.

Leaders are rational; they are motivated

This seems obvious but we expect leaders to be more rational.  They aren’t rational.  They are motivated.

Sometimes we think that is wrong.  But following that reasoning,  it would be equally wrong to want to be in a certain place by a certain time.

The questions facing data pundits are

  • which motives do we enjoy serving?
  • and which data puzzles  can help to solve?
  • Executives often seem satisfied to support massively important decisions with sub-standard data.
  • Our data often seems good.  Yet they throw it out.  We jump to the conclusion that they are too motivated to follow a course of action without a rational analysis.
  • The reality is that we may have done the wrong task.  We may have interrogated a question that interests us rather than people we serve.

So why did I bother to write this post?

We shouldn’t be dismissing leaders as being willing to proceed without data.  They’ve been forced to proceed without data because we didn’t make data available to address the problem facing them today.   We might think they could make better use  of their time and effort but it is likely they would use data that elaborates what they value should we make it easily available.

Motive first. Analysis second?  First, be clear about the motives of the leaders and people we serve?

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