The blog of the Resonateers of the https://www.resonate.company. Enjoy! We welcome your contribution and feedback!
For all that wander, hesitate or doubt, procrastinate, spin their wheels, ... , etc.
p.s. Thank you mematic.net, I hope I am not breaking any copyrights (which I could not find) by placing this image on my blog My intention is to spread the goodness of Jim Carrey's thought.
For all these companies that grow fast and try to codify their best practice into some sort of DNA, or just a palette of processes and routines, here is a simple reminder straight from John Kotter that codifying needs to be balanced with spontaneous so that the whole spectrum of personal profiles is represented and thus the diversity necessary for continued innovation and growth is maintained. Otherwise codifying simply filters a range of profiles, e.g. entrepreneurial profiles, out causing bias towards what is known. Clearly entrepreneurs, aka Pioneers, aka Innovators need less rigid environment and more freedom.
"Agile movement is in a confusion. We need to stop trying to change the world using the magic word of "agile". Step back, seek for renewal, open up the doors for other notions."
I had a really good time conducting the interview. It was designed to be a surprise interview to catch the instinct responses and for the interview to be as realistic and natural as possible.
In this interview Michelangelo Canonico shares his personal experience with Agility, transformational engagements, systemic coaching, and even about constellations!
Breaking status-quo.
People do not call me when things are going smoothly for them, but rather when they face an obstacle that they are not sure how to cope with. I augment their knowledge of the field with Wardley Mapping, and they learn how to verbalise their strategy concerns and ideas which they already knew but could not efficiently express. Once that happens, once I see first complicated matters discussed, I feel content and my job is nearly done.
It is usually an introductory call when we together try to identify the area which we will work on. It may be a problematic outsourcing contract, disrupting competition or internal inefficiency. This is a starting point after which we assemble a team that will work on the challenge. Those two steps, in my eyes, decide about 80% of the value the customer gets.
In the world of Wardley Mapping, we call it Landscape. Those are all those things that are around your organisation that influence it but you cannot change them (regulatory requirements, customers, shareholders, competition, providers). If you add forces that influence the Landscape, you get a pretty good understanding of the context of the work that you are supposed to do, and better alignment.
I could say that as a result of my work, important projects are launched or cancelled or money are spent or saved, but the reality is that you never know (nor can you know) what impact can be attributed directly to you, especially that you never get a chance to compare with alternative versions of reality.
I do my job in the best way I can. And I am ready to say I was wrong, I assume I am wrong, and if even with that assumption customers are willing to act in the way Wardley Mapping tells them, the situation can get only better.
Organisational knowledge. Organisations learn just like humans.
They store knowledge in the form of processes, procedures and policies. Once such a thing is approved, and once people change jobs, we have policies that may or may not be relevant for a current situation, and nobody knows what the case is.
Managers avoid breaking stuff, so those artefacts sometimes live for decades unchallenged.
Anonymised answer because of NDA:
I was helping a customer who was pushed by the provider to migrate a particular solution to the cloud. The customer was not sure whether the migrations was a win-win movement, they suspected it was a move that helped the provider only, especially given earlier experiences they had with the provider.
After a not-so-long analysis, the customer figured out that:
(1) they did not trust the provider to meet SLAs during and after the migration. The impact on the customer would be unacceptable.
(2) the migration could be a win-win move.
(3) There was no action that could change the situation without inducing too much risk.
(4) Not changing anything was safe for the organisation.
(5) Other opportunities were more interesting.
Sometimes, this is perhaps the toughest conclusion - there is not much that can be done, so it is better to focus on things that you can change. This customer had plenty of other opportunities, the one that was analysed looked important, but it was not.
I found it to be an act of courage, and I have seen similar situations resolved without taking any actions. Waiting is an action, too.
The Business Strategy, for me, is about continuous learning what is your current situation, what resources you have available, what opportunities do you face, and in which direction you should move, all of that, of course, with a great degree of uncertainty.
This requires a short introduction to Taleb works - peolpe in general (including risk specialists) put too much focus on Gaussian distributions. Real life risks are far less predictable than many of us think, and this is the reson why many risk management frameworks give us sense of protection without doing much. But if you accept our limits in how we measure and quantify risk, you get a pretty holistic framework that does not differentiates between Risk & Strategy. They are the same, because you can define a risk called 'Strategic Failure' and derive your entire strategy from it.
My this year's challenge is to focus only on things that I can change. The race, its fairness, prize & winners do not fall into this category, so I am afraid I will not answer this one.
I do not want to diminish the work of any person from the Big 3, and while I do appreciate their different attitudes, I think they are very convergent in their thinking. Moreover, to me things that they differ are the source of complementarity between them rather than conflicting them. I guess I should play the question back: "How can you follow only one"?
Know your customers, who they are and why they are using your products and services. And I mean a true "why", not because of "we are the best". This is an entry point that allows you to think about how your customers may change over the years, pick up subtle change indicators and prepare accordingly.
We have just started our adventure in Business Strategies and Situational Awareness, so many years may pass until we learn what the ideal is.
In other words, I have no idea, but I can only imagine that experimenting more seems like an excellent direction to explore.
This is something vaguely defined as the position - how well is company positioned to exploit current market opportunities and how well can it spot and transition to other fields. This trumps everything else, but, unfortunately, is not immediately visible in the company balance sheets, so only unlisted companies may find this attractive.
From the perspective of shareholders, it is all about profits, not strategy. They "do strategy" on the portfolio level.
It's 2020 and we seem to have just learned that the world is so complex that we cannot predict results of our own actions (Taleb, Snowden, plenty of others). We are still trying to figure out how to reconcile goal-oriented budgeting and planning with the exploratory, experimental nature of strategy. Some companies do that, some pretend doing it, and plenty of others does not understand what is the difference.
Leaders willing to take risks and field experts willing to speak up, but mostly the former. When the environment is supportive, experts talk.
I refuse to speculate, but I can identify a few first steps which will help any company - calculate your carbon footprint and make sure you have nothing to be ashamed of.
Welcome to the resonate's Summer Series again. Hope you are enjoying your personal time this summer!
This series is meant to be a series of reflections on what we do on daily basis. The reflections taken from an external, disconnected perspective, so that it influences you to improve and evolve. Please enjoy with proper mental distance and hopefully a glass of Chardonnay in your hand.
The AI influence on our lives has clearly been a subject of interest and discussions all around the globe for decades. Today I take a perspective on the AI's influence from the angle of human relations at workplace.
As we experience it these days companies look for highly performing individuals to be able to compete with their market competitors. This leads to creation of specific work environment in which high performers contributing to the competitive race are valued over any other type of workers. Here is my hypothesis:
Performance of individuals will no longer be the most sought trait of individuals in the AI era. Employers will be looking for purely human traits that AI cannot replicate as human relations will be even more important than today.
And here is my thinking behind the hypothesis:
In the MIT Technology Review’s article titled Elon Musk’s Neuralink says it’s nearly ready for the first human volunteers, Elon says: Even under a benign AI, we will be left behind. With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we will have the option to go along for the ride.
During an event in San Francisco yesterday evening, the startup unveiled a sewing-machine-like robot used to implant ultrafine flexible electrodes deep into the brain to detect neuron activity.
Imagine the times when AI is significantly more intelligent than human. And the fact of its dominance is widely accepted by individuals, societies and governments. These will be liberating times for many - individuals will not be the highest performers in the area of executing logical tasks in the Universe. Naturally, for some individuals the declaration will be painful and will take a form of: Not that I like it but I have to accept it.
In terms of intelligence, i.e. IQ, individuals will be assessed and measured as very similar and close to each other: the variation between 50 to 150 IQ points that spans the whole range of intelligence available for human beings will simply become a single point around the value of 100 on the wider scale of intelligence available for AI. What seems to be big differences among individuals today will be neglectable when compared to AI IQ power. Imagine AI systems with IQ on the level of 10^6. The Roger Waters post-war dream that We are all equal in the end will come true in this aspect :)
What does this IQ equality mean to relations at the workplace and to hiring preferences of companies? Clearly the competitiveness and performance will no longer be in the center HR interest as AI will be dominating in this area. Employers will be looking for purely human traits that AI cannot replicate as human relations will be even more important than today. The more human one will be, the more chances s/he will have to get a job.
In this way the two cardinal traits of individuals sought for in the "Orange" evolutionary level of the workplace, performance and competitiveness, will no longer be in the center of employers’ interest. Many people will be able to quit the exhaustive game of corporate career race and will be able to relax, and concentrate on developing their personal humanity. People will have more reasons to live in harmony, focused on the welfare of their societies, local communities and the environment they live in. As a consequence the "Orange" evolutionary level will be left behind allowing workplaces and societies to evolve beyond IQ dominance.
What a liberating thread of thought!
Welcome to the resonate's Summer Series again. Hope you are enjoying your personal time this summer!
This series is meant to be a series of reflections on what we do on daily basis. The reflections taken from an external, disconnected perspective, so that it influences you to improve and evolve. Please enjoy with proper mental distance and hopefully a glass of Chardonnay in your hand.
There has been an ongoing dispute which approach to evolution of companies is better: to reform current companies or to start building companies n.0 from scratch and let the current ones die out.
Personally, I keep both options open :)) The key for me is that the companies as we know them need to evolve (see my other blog posts on why and the wider context). Since both of the above ways can contribute to the evolution I am supporting both of them in parallel. There is no need to choose a specific ways at that point on time. That would be premature optimization.
Anyway, if you are serious about organizational design and future of work than you definitely have your views on the topic and hence you are a part of this discussion. And since you are a part of this discussion you need to know and respect all of the existing points of view. It is easy to accept the constructive models that bring meaning to your work. It comes much harder, at least for me, to accept destructive models. Yet I have learnt the humility to familiarize with and accept all possible perspectives: it is fair in the first place and also helps me in limiting biases of my mind and thus develop personally. This blog post is a great example of such a case.
Today I want you to reflect on three inter-related concepts: The Gervais Principle and The MacLeod's Organization Lifecycle. These were introduced in the Ribbonfarm blog back in 2009 by Venkatesh Rao in his blogpost The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office".
Read on carefully - these might be depressing models, you have been warned :)
The Gervais Principle is for me the ultimately destructive successor of the already depressing Peter's Principle:
Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.
The MacLeod's organization lifecycle is for me the ultimately destructive model of an organization lifecycle:
A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.
Personal journey
[I expect you to spend some meaningful amount of time on the above quotes]
Now a bit of my personal reflection and my personal journey so far. For most of my career I would qualify myself to the Clueless cast, and for the rest - to the Losers cast. And honestly for a long time I did not not know what to do about these concepts. I mean: How to take my efforts at work seriously? Where to seek for fulfillment?, etc. My mind was just clueless... :) I had been trying to ignore those, as my best way of dealing with the concepts, for most of the time, but they were coming back...
I find the concepts deeply logical - the concepts are precisely formulated, elegant, models are coherent and based on purest logic. For most of the time I found them ultimately destructive. This summer I have found those concepts ultimately liberating too...
They are liberating from meaning, from hope of contribution, from burden of the an expected outcome, from any long term responsibility towards any organization, etc. And in the first place the concepts are liberating from the mental frame of ability to contribute and expectation of fulfillment. The mental model was at the core of my feeling of being torn apart, yet I took a desperate attempt to stuck to it - I have always treated meaning and responsibility as the original reasons to engage with organizations.
Now, being ultimately liberated by these concepts, I feel empowered to do what I trust is most appropriate and valuable for an organization at any particular time disregarding of what I am asked to do. And most importantly I feel empowered to stick to my skills, interests and values as the source of a fulfilled life.
It feels like I came a long way from my initial understanding of my role in organizations (the Losers cast and the Clueless cast) through the shock of discovering alternative perspective, through negation of the "destructive" models, to rebuilding myself into a new mental model that actually leads me to personal liberation, empowerment and productivity.
Now I belong to the Losers cast, and I feel good about it as I made my own sense of the concepts and re-calibrated my expectations, and so I am not torn apart anymore. Looks like a bit more self-aware Loser! :)
