For those not familiar with it, PRINCE2  is a UK government endorsed, project management methodology. It stands for PRojects IN Controlled Environments (see what they did there!) and is built around the idea that there is a central point of control (i.e. a project manager! ) for each project . It’s been around since 1996 and has become the de-facto way of managing projects.

However there is a fundamental problem with the type of project management that PRINCE2 encourages….

Centralised control does not work anymore.

If you look back at the history of projects in your organisation I bet you’d see something like…

Ancient History: “Fly the company from A to B”

It used to be that most projects were of the “Fly the company from A to B” type. You knew where you were starting from, you knew where you wanted to get to, you knew how you were going to get there and you could calculate how much fuel (cash) you needed to get there.

In Living Memory: “Fly the company from A to B while upgrading the engine of the plane”

The world outside your organisation was changing faster than before. That meant that there were often changes to the thing you were changing. Cue memories of BIG government IT projects where the computers initially specified were obsolete before the implementation was finished.

Recently: “Fly the company from A to B and upgrade the engine and change the navigation system”

More change, on more fronts. As the number of interacting changes increased the complexity, the chances of making anything happen at all diminished.

Now: “Take off from A, realise B isn’t where you need to be, so work out where C is… while upgrading the engine and changing the navigation system”

Admit it – this pretty much describes what work is like for you right now.

Does this feel like a controlled environment? Look at the trajectory. I’d argue that as the speed of change increases it gets disproportionately harder to maintain centralised control. To maintain central control you need to route all communication about the project through a central point – as the pace of change increases this becomes a bottleneck. If you’re not careful, the need for centralised control actually impedes progress. Thats why traditional methodologies like PRINCE2 are creaking at the seams.

We founded SocialOptic on our belief that the businesses that will thrive in our increasingly changing world are the ones that work differently. The companies that will survive are the ones who organise themselves along the lines of a network, not a command and control hierarchy. We build software that helps those companies.

More and more we see examples of distributed control replacing centralised control. With smart software taking on some of the traditional project managers role of tracking progress and communicating changes and a move away from centralised control where does that leave methodologies like PRINCE2?

In our view, PRINCE2 and similar methodologies will become increasingly irrelevant. That’s not to say all project management skills are redundant – far from it – but smart organisations are distributing Project Management skills across their organisations and smart Project Managers are getting to grips with how to work within a network of people rather than sit in their command and control bunkers.

Hey, who knows, maybe in the future we’ll see job adverts that are asking for certification in PRINUE – PRojects IN Uncontrolled Environments.

There is a tight interception here between business methodology and social technology. People who use social software inside of the firewall, and those responsible for managing the external social media activities of a business, will both hopefully find some useful insights here, as both of those situations expose the problems inherent in hierarchical business structures.

In this CBS News piece, Don Sull outlines the 3 different ways that things get done in complex organisations:

• By hierarchy
• By process
• By commitment

The first shifted out of favour in the 1980′s, although it lingers on! In the 80′s, Six Sigma, TQM and other techniques gave management by process the crown, as it demonstrably out performed management by hierarchy in that era. But just as management by hierarchy creates silos and slows communication across the organisation, management by process creates its own problems.

Management by process originally gained traction in the 1950s in Japan, going on to become a global phenomenon in the 1980s. This view of management sees the organisation as a bundle of processes, and has spawned a sea of different methodologies. They are variations on the same theme, focused on streamlining, removing excess resources and variance, and continuously improving and optimising how the business works. Right there is one of the key problems with management by process: standardisation (and optimisation), which gets in the way of innovation. Mary Benner from Wharton and Michael Tuschman from Harvard found that the higher an organisation’s commitment to standardized processes, the lower the level of innovation in that organisation. In a rapidly changing world, what is most critical to an organisation – optimisation, or innovation? Hopefully that one is obvious. Everyone is having to think outside the box, because their box has moved.

Which brings us to that third approach: managing by commitment. It’s a perspective that looks at an organisation as a network of overlapping, continually evolving promises that people make to each other to get things done. It’s a mindset familiar to anyone who works with social networking platforms. It’s not about groups or devisions, it’s about continually evolving relationships between individuals. It’s an approach that it lends itself well to situations which cannot be standardised: innovation, emergent strategies, and crisis management. It also works well when you need to coordinate among people who don’t report to you: suppliers, distributors, customers, virtual teams and so on. It’s no co-incidence that those applications are where Milestone Planner has its largest number of users.

Sull points to a study conducted a few years ago that says 40 percent of all employees in the United States added most of their value to their organisations through non-routine activities. And about 70 percent of the growth of employees in the U.S. was among people who did this non-routine, non-hierarchical work. He goes on to say:

A lot of the organisations we’ve traditionally thought of as well-managed companies have put emphasis on making and fulfilling these kinds of commitments. It’s a big deal in General Electric and similarly Goldman Sachs… .[Talking about InBev, the largest brewer in the world:] …They’ve built a culture where people are very clear on what they are being asked to commit to, and their progress on their commitments is very transparent and obvious to people throughout the organisation… …they have posted their key five performance commitments for the year and their progress toward them. The charts are right there on the wall with red, yellow and green tracking stickers for everyone to see. They are very careful about bringing in people who are achievement oriented, not driven by power.

Now, we prefer the progress tracking to be in the cloud of course – not everyone is in the office. Don Sull and Charles Spinosa have researched how individuals make commitments within their teams. According to them the most effective commitments have five characteristics:

• They are public. They’re made publicly and their progress is tracked publicly.
• They’re active. Parties understand what they are agreeing to and what each party is requesting; people don’t just nod, they really have to take responsibility for the commitment.
• They are voluntary. The other party has the option to say something other than “yes”; they can refuse or make counteroffers.
• They are explicit: it has to be clear who is committing. These aren’t committees making promises, they are individuals. And it works best when it is perfectly clear to whom the commitment is made.
• They’re motivating: the rationale is made clear–why it matters to the individuals and the organisation is made clear.

That’s why, in Milestone Planner, we encourage sharing the plan with a broad group of people: The more public the commitment, the more effective it is. We make Actions and Milestones provisional when they are assigned to someone, until the person accepts them, and the comment/reply feature let’s people actively negotiate and renegotiate the commitment. The aim is to help you keep commitments active and voluntary. It’s that process that enables  managing by commitment to work. It is a radically different way of working, and can take a while for people to get their heads around it, but once adopted, it fosters the kind of innovation that hierarchies and process too easily smother. Of course success is not just about the strategy, as Sull says:

Some people think the key to success is nailing the right strategy. But companies in your industry often will have a base strategy very similar to your own. Execution is where the real separation comes between winners and losers. Executing via hierarchies can be too slow in the kind of unstable markets most companies face today. Standardised processes by their very nature don’t lead to the kinds of variation and flexibility you need to execute new types of projects.

Like Sull, we’d say that it’s not a simple case of one model being good, and the rest bad. Hierarchy has a role, as do standardised processes. Most sucessful organisations need a combination of power, processes and commitments. What matters is the kind of work you have to get done, building and tracking the commitments that enable that to happen, while building the supporting processes and structures to enable you to get better at it.

If you’re Toyota, and the bulk of the value you’re adding is in manufacturing a huge number of cars with a low number of defects, then an almost exclusive focus on standardised processes is completely appropriate. The times when you need to be more oriented toward managing by commitments is when you have this kind of emergent work that has to fit within networks rather than within a hierarchy.

It’s the latter kind of work we are seeing in abundance, coupled with a shortage in the ability to manage by commitments. Our aim is to make management by commitments easier, through Milestone Planner. There’s much more we’ll be doing with the commitment graph. This is just the beginning of a conversation.

There are threads within ‘lean’, ‘Social Business’ and many other areas, that risk hurling the baby out with the bath water in their attempts to eliminate structure. Not all structures are bad, and the pursuit of completely unstructured systems is a structural limit in its own right (hence the title of the essay :- the tyranny of structurelessness). In many ways, embracing structure can be liberating, and that is very much the kind of structural change required in modern businesses.

…it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither should we blindly reject them all.

I want to draw from a list of points from the end of the essay. They suggest some principles to keep in mind, which have proven essential to democratic structuring. They are useful points for structuring work, and managing a business:

1. Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks.
2. Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them.
3. Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible.
4. Rotation of tasks among individuals.
5. Allocation of tasks along rational criteria.
6. Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible.
7. Equal access to resources needed by the group.

Let me rephrase those into three, simpler points, which make a good frame work for business collaboration:

• Delegate with authority and accountability

• If you have asked someone to do something, they are responsible for doing it, they are responsible to you, and they have the authority (and autonomy) to do it. We run a very clean delegation model in Milestone Planner. When you create an action for someone, within one of your milestones, they own that action, and that action is being done for you. They can then break that action down in anyway that they want, and sub-delegate it. This is something that will become even stronger in our upcoming releases. Clean accountability is essential for effective working.

• Distribute responsibility widely and rationally

• Keeping decision making centralised makes for slow responses, which slow exponentially as the organisation grows. Distribute decision making as far out as you can, and negotiate based on the impact of the decision, rather than the criteria for the decision. Task completion date is the most obvious external impact, but there are others. Distributing management makes for more informed, more rapid decision making.
• Centralised project management does not work in today’s fast moving world. Jim’s next post will discuss why. Distribute to get velocity, agility and efficiency.

• Provide broad access to information and resources

• Traditional IT systems were built to lock away information. This gate keeper mentality is generally costly, dangerous and increasingly outmoded. Let everyone see the whole plan, unless there is a very specific reason that is not practicable, and let everyone have access to the resources they need, and negotiate reasonably for them. The increased context provided by broader information sharing leads to a clearer sense of purpose. The increased transparency also reduces the chances of poor or ill-advised decision making.

To be able to adapt to change, we need to adapt our organisations to change. While that means new models of organisation, it doesn’t invalidate traditional good business sense!

Life in a modern business is tough and it’s getting tougher. It’s something that came up again and again during the sessions at Social Media Week London.

I suspect that if I asked you to grab a piece of paper and sketch a graph of the amount of change in your organisation over time it would look something like this.

The amount of change is going up. To make things even more interesting, the rate at which the change is going up is increasing too. Double whammy – your graph has an upward curve. Of course you know this already – the amount of change you saw last year was significantly more than the year before, and next year you expect to see even more.

If your graph doesn’t look like this then you’re lucky. Maybe you work in an industry where things are calmer? If so, you can stop reading now, this post isn’t for you.

Now think about how your business learns. How quickly can it change direction? How quickly can it reshuffle people and teams? How rapidly can it find and build new skillsets? What is your organisation’s capacity for learning from and reacting to change?

Once again let’s sketch a graph. Does yours look like this?

As time goes by it gets harder to improve. As you reach economies of scale it gets much more difficult to incrementally improve your processes, you’ve grabbed all the ‘low hanging fruit’ and you’re now into what a former boss of mine used to call the ‘hard yards’.

Anyone think there’s a problem with the shape of these two different graphs? Of course there is – the change curve is getting steeper at the same time as the capacity to learn is flattening out.

In fact what happens if you superimpose the two? You get something like this.

So – and here’s the big question… Which side of the “interesting” line do you think you are on right now? If you’re not already on the scary right-hand side of it, you will be soon – social technology is pushing us there by increasing the speed of communication and driving the rate of change.

So what are the implications? How do our organisations adapt to an environment where the world changes so fast it outstrips our capacity to learn how to deal with it?

One of my favourite thinkers on the subject is Eddie Obeng (a Professor at the School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Henley Business School). His book All Change – The Project Leaders Secret Handbook is one of the best practical guides to managing change I’ve ever read. I first heard Eddie talk about this dilemma over 15 years ago – yes, he was drawing the same curves back then – so he’s obviously a man ahead of his time. He calls the right hand side of the line the “New World” and writes and teaches about how businesses can organise themselves to cope with it – you should check him out.

When we started building Milestone Planner, we knew that we wanted to build a tool that would help people and organisations operate in the “New World“. Plans are made, but then change quickly to keep in step with the rapidly changing landscape. People work in ‘virtual teams’ in a fluid organisation. More and more of the companies we work with are looking to find some clarity in this rapidly changing world, where old notions of command and control are being made obsolete, and a new, networked organisation is emerging.

At the heart of Milestone Planner is the idea that organisations in the New World are no longer rigid hierarchies, but networks. There are many great tools out there for planning and project management which worked really well in the old world, but we’re aiming for something different. We believe we have something very special in Milestone Planner and as we continue to develop it for our New World customers, I’m pleased to say we’re finding more ways of helping them manage the change and find some sanity on the right hand side of the graph. Social technology may have caused some of the problem, but it also has some of the answers.

The question of measurement is an interesting one. My original engineering background lead me to believe that anything can be measured, and that certainly seems to be the view that prevails across much of the computer programming world. My move into marketing quickly taught me that actually you couldn’t measure many of the things you needed to measure, and even when you could, the measurement was often so far after the fact as to be (at least commercially) useless.

Test Me On This

More recently, adventures in designing and carrying out psychology experiments has helped me realised that you can actually measure things that don’t exist, and that you can’t measure many things that do exist. Now, this isn’t new news to any theoretical physisists out there, but it is something that many in social media haven’t yet figured out.

Measurement has long been a central tenet of the natural sciences. Come up with a hypothesis, then devise an experiment that involves measuring something that hopefully doesn’t disprove it (or the null hypothesis). Weights, heights, speeds and hundreds of other metrics have been constructed and calculated to enable us to describe and detail things in the physical world. However, this central tendency towards measurement is far from natural, and at times quite unscientific, when it comes to human beings.

We’ve Been Here Before, Haven’t We?

Applying behavioural measurements to human beings has a long history, and while Klout, Peerindex and Kred are wonderfully new and shiny (although increasingly less shiny in the case of Klout), they are the second cousins, once removed, of psychometrics – the scientific art of slapping a number on a human being. It is a science that is so problematic that there are not only shelves of books about it, there are also whole books written just about how problematic it is. Many of the thoughts here are inspired by “Putting Psychology in its place” by G. Richards, but most texts on psychometrics touch on the issues I’m going to raise. As I’ve read a fairly large number of them over the last 10 years or so, many of the sources have merged into an amorphous blob in my head, so I’m not going to pretend that any of what comes next is very original thought.

Just Because You Can Measure It…

…Doesn’t mean that it exists. One word: Reification. It is possible, simply be measuring something, to bring it into being. This isn’t some weird mystery taking place, it is an epistemological phenomenon that unfolds around the world of the natural sciences. If I create a “flumpy” score for humans, devise a scale for measuring “flumpiness”, and a tool for assessing a “flump” score for each of my friends, then I will have a repeatable, ‘scientific’ and objectively valid measurement. That’s even though there is no real-world correlate for ‘flumpiness’ – although my spell checker seems to think it is frumpiness, that is by the by. Now, if I can get people to believe that people with high degrees of flumpiness are more loyal customers, and should be given higher discounts, then my work is complete. The customers get their discounts, they become more loyal, I measure their flumpiness to prove how effective a predictor it as, and I have myself a multimillion dollar industry.

You’ve Got to be Objective?

Measurements, including those in the social media world, have to latch on to externally observable phenomena, from number of followers to the propagation of messages. These are the linga-franca of the natural sciences, and they are the only objective measures that we have. But, and this is a very big, ugly but, behavioural measures such as influence are inherently individual and personal measurements, and thus they they belong to the subjective domain. They are concerned with the inner worlds of individuals. These are worlds that will be the last to be explored by mankind, and according to Socrates, the least explored by man.

If we hardly know what is going off in our own minds, how can we understand what is going off in the minds of others? Think about the last product purchase you made. Why did you make it? No, really, why did you make it? What was the chain of micro decisions and chance happening that lead you to purchase product X rather than product Y? How many things and people influenced your decisions along the way? And that’s just the ones you were consciously aware of. Many more will have crept in subconsciously.

The task facing Psychology once it moves beyond simple phenomena like reaction times has been identifying overt, publicly ‘measurable’, indices of the essentially inaccessible phenomena it seeks to study such as memory, motivation, thinking, imagery, the structure of personality and intelligence.

Thinking Is…

Rearranging our current prejudices? Right now, that’s pretty much what all of the social media influence metrics I have seen are. The assumptions (which is just a nice way of saying the prejudices) of some well-meaning individuals, projected onto available metrics (which may or may not correlate with ‘flumpiness’). If someone constructed an experiment that has predicted someone’s influence, then measured the actual influence on someone’s real world behaviours, then I missed that blog post. Even if they had, then they are at the start of the 100+ year journey that has lead psychology to an on going set of experiments, debates and hypothesis about what are and are not valid psychometric instruments (probably not Myers-Briggs, maybe 16-PF, possibly OCEAN/Big 5).

One Thing I Know

All that said, those that were in the room, or that followed the first link in this post, will remember that I said “yes” I did think that there could be a single measure of influence. The trick is in the domain-specificity of that influence. Could you construct a measure of the likeliness that I might retweet a link on a specific topic, on a specific day and time? Yes, you absolutely could. It also probably wouldn’t be valid in a few years time, or possibly even a few week’s time, as my interests wax and wane. Oh, and of course, it would just be a probability – you have a measure that gives you “quite likely” – it is not “will” or “won’t”. The measure will also have an error range, which will be a very large one if the -/+50% changes in Klout scores are anything to go by.

On That Subject

Of course, this new shiny measure wouldn’t be valid for a different topic (I don’t think I’ve retweeted much on knitting recently, although I did tweet something about knitting QR codes!). One of the lunch-time games in the office, which has lead to much hilarity, is seeing what topics we are apparently influential for. Apparently, we have expertise in social media (of course), jam (don’t ask), toothpaste (I said, don’t ask) and … You get the idea. Computer algorithms for assigning opinions to categories are a fine art, and even getting groups of humans to do it reliably is a regular form of intense frustration in psychology studies.

You Might Be Lucky

If a narrow, transient and probabilistic measurement with a wide margin of error is what you are after, then your luck may be in (no pun intended). Given that people sort CVs by the number of pages, or the hand writing on them, then using influence scores to hand out favours and goodies is probably no greater crime against humanity. Just be aware of the dice that you are rolling.

We’ve found that much of the trick of successful project management is helping people to make clear commitments, which are visible to the entire team, and then doing everything you can to help them achieve that.

One of the simplest ways to make commitments and progress visible is schedule regular time to review these with the team.

Assuming that you’ll be meeting weekly, there are three questions you need to address at that weekly review…

• What did we plan to do this week?
• What actually happened this week?
• What re-planning is required to take account of this weeks events?

So to prepare for the weekly meeting, list each of the key milestones and actions that the team agreed to deliver in the last seven days, and get updates from each of the team members on the status of each of these (you can do this in the meeting, but its a much better use of time to begin the meeting with all of the facts already documented). Use the time in the meeting to address the “why’s” of any issues, then move onto re-planning where you need to and setting out the key milestones and action for the next seven days.

Of course. if you are using Milestone Planner with your team then we’ve already done all of the meeting preparation for you. If you make sure you and your team update actions and milestones as they happen, then you’ll find an up-to-date weekly report under the ‘review’ tab for your plan. It contains all of the facts you’ll need to run a really effective weekly team get together…. if you want to send the info out in advance then theres an option to automatically generate a pdf document which you can send out to your team.

So if you want to help your team get more done and be super organised get those weekly sessions in the diary today.

There was a flow and a pace to her work. She was lost in concentration, unaware of the onlookers and clearly enjoying what she was doing. The white paper was rapidly transforming into an intriguing backdrop. Had I arrived a few days later, I probably would have walked right past and not given it a second thought. Being there during the construction gave me the opportunity to appreciate the beauty of the process, the beauty of the work, not just the outcome.

A different perspective, a different outcome.

Using different perspectives to change things obviously isn’t a new idea. Much of my study time at the moment is spent in the depths of Social Psychology. It is an academic field with all the challenges of working between two disciplines (Sociology and Psychology) and bears the scars of long fought battles about the nature and position of ‘the person’. These differences have lead to distinctly different perspectives, and different methods associated with them. The way that we see reality, and the tools that we use to access it, actually change our reality, as they shift our attitudes and our behaviours.

The same applies to work, and the way that we perceive and frame it. Management science comes from a tradition that centered on ‘piece work’ in the manufacturing world. Frederick Winslow Taylor and the other founding fathers focused on how work could be optimised – increasing flow rates and output. Inherent in that thinking were the assumptions that:

• Work is well defined and repeatable
  • The exact specifications of the work are known at the outset.
  • Production can be simplified.
  • There is a mass market.
• People are ‘standard resources’
  • All resources (people) are nominally equal and substitutable.
  • There is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ equate to fast and slow.
  • Resources ‘soldier‘ – workers are lazy, not autonomous, and do not self actualise.
• Workers act as individuals, not as groups
  • Individual pay is the primary motivation.
  • Workers must co-ordinated, work must be individualised.

Now, I don’t know about your work and your teams, but mine aren’t like that. However, I do recognise that style of management (although not around these parts!). Just like the window dresser in the picture, knowledge-based businesses, and the workers in them, operate in a world where the exact specifications of the work are often not known at the outset. People are often passionate about their work and do not ‘soldier’ – they find flow, they push boundaries, they want to learn and discover. They also don’t work alone – even when it looks as if they do.

I am sure that if that person in the shop window had been given numbered instructions that said ‘pick up brush’, ‘dip in paint’, ‘draw circle 300mm’, ‘draw another circle  of 57mm next to the circle’, ‘repeat 400 times’ the result wouldn’t have been the lovely backdrop that emerged. When I was working in Asia, and in Africa, I saw art produced that way – cheaply and at volume. Sadly, a huge amount of physical work went in to creating artefacts that had little commercial value. The majority of the products our businesses produce are not mass market, their value rests in their uniqueness. Just as significantly, the process of the work, once mechanised, was far less enjoyable, both for the artist and for the observer. That leads me on to the third assumption… That work is done as individuals in groups, rather than groups containing individuals.

Social Psychology, whichever of its perspectives you choose to follow, asserts and demonstrates that no person is an island (to un paraphrase that song). We are impacted by those that work around us. Most obviously by their work (ie their output), but also by their attitudes and demeanor. I can’t remember meeting someone who had autonomy in their role for many, many years. In a world of matrix management, virtual teams, and cross-disciplinary working, we constantly rely on the input and actions of other people to ‘get the job done’. In the knowledge-based world it is all about the group, not the individual.

Kurt Lewin and others recognised the importance and effect of the interactions between people. The friction between workers and managers is friction in the process of work itself. Even more so in knowledge-based business, where much of what happens is dependent on the discretionary effort of individuals. Those touch points are typically commitments – “you need this from me” or “I need this from you”. Work can be defined as a series of commitments, the final one representing an end goal. In the case of the window dresser, that might have been articulated as the delivery of a captivating window display, that was sympathetic to the ‘brand values’ of the shop.

However, even the most beautiful of work can be made ugly by reducing it to a list of inflexible work items to be done by anyone, with a minimum of discretionary effort and no personal interaction… Rather than minimising interactions, maximise them, and rather than over specifying the way to do something, under specify it, but set expectations about the value and purpose of the results.

Milestone Planner was built as a way for teams to work together in outcome-based, commitment lead environments. Having a place to track commitments (large ones as Milestones and smaller ones as Actions) leaves our minds free to get on with quality work (rather than fretting about who needs what by when). And having work defined in terms of outcomes enables us to use our skill and creativity to get the very best results.

Work can be beautiful. More than that it should be beautiful. It needs to be, in order to get the best from any team. Google makes the work place beautiful, by providing amazing facilities to its employees, other businesses focus on amazing problems that satisfy people’s personal need to make a difference. The challenge for every business leader is to make work more beautiful.

“We’ve developed bi-polar thinking” Fons declared, before running through a series of examples of the polar opposites and apparent contradictions that businesses find themselves challenged by daily (interjected by a steady stream of jokes at the expense of MBAs of course). The most obvious dilemma is the age old “centralising versus decentralising.”

We’re riding the wave of decentralisation right now, supporting increasingly distributed organisations, but Fons pointed out that the only reason for a business to centralise is that it was decentralised in the first place, otherwise there would be nothing to centralise. If you follow. Is the body centralised or distributed? “yes” said Fons, with the finesse of a seasoned business consultant, or as a scientist might put it “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

Now, from my perspective, I think ‘distance’ is being steadily eroded by technology – many of the traditional reasons for centralising are being mitigated by presence, social computing, mobile technology and increasingly high bandwidth. I think distributed will be with us for quite a while to come.

Fon’s thesis is that innovation is the art of combining these contradictory ideas (like central versus distributed) that are apparently contradictory and turning them into concrete and measurable actions, to realise tangible business benefits. That’s quite a challenge, but this integration of opposites has a process to it:

• Recognize – increase awareness.
• Respect – appreciate the cultural differences.
• Reconcile – resolve those cultural differences.

The concept is built on a model of culture – a dynamic process of solving human problems and dilemmas – and the assumption that as humans we are loaded with values that are “half killed by our culture”. What we do and what we want to do are rarely the same. Fons made liberal use of cultural stereo types to illustrate that we live in a world that is more culturally diverse than we realise. Increasing international travel and population mobility has made us more aware of those differences. The themes across the bulk of innovation literature, which Fons outlined,  are these: Inclusion, Diversity and Leadership – and a particular type of leadership at that.

“Successful leaders have the competence to help organizations and their teams reconcile dilemmas for better sustainable business performances.”

One lens through which to view an organisation is a classic 2×2 grid, with the axises being:

• Hierarchical versus egalitarian.
• Person-orientated versus task-orientated.

Its a model we’re already familiar with, but what was interesting to me is that these four quadrants lead to four distinct styles of employee motivation:

• MBS – management by subjection – the boss is the boss.
• MBO – management by objective – things to do are the things that matter.
• MBJD – management by job description – the role defines the individual.
• MBP – management by passion – the vision drives the action.

Businesses don’t live out their whole lives in one quadrant, the transitions between the quadrants are the crises that define distinct phases of a business. They key is to understand what sort of business you are in, and tool up appropriately. Finally, back to that culture of innovation, how do you build it?

• Start with the creative individual.
• Build the inventive team.
• Create the innovative organisation.

There. Simple. It’s always the implementation that’s the challenge isn’t it? Fons gave us a word for it – “xnovation” – partnering with people outside of your industry, and learning from business models outside of your industry. Reminds me of the Medici effect. More learning happening here on the Orange Business Live Blog…

The Harvard Business Review blog has a post on “How To Ignite Creative Leadership In Your Organization” which draws on the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study. The report talks about the rapid escalation of complexity, and CEO’s doubts about their ability to manage it. It’s a time of rapid change for businesses, with global integration causing the world to operate in different ways. From volcanoes to volatile markets, business leaders are constantly being confronted by blind spots.

That doesn’t bother the kind of outcome-based, collaborative leaders we get to interact with. They aren’t phased. The Harvard post puts it like this:

Creativity in this context is about creative leadership — i.e., the ability to shed long-held beliefs and come up with original and at times radical concepts and execution. And this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. We believe, however, that this isn’t about having a lone creative leader at the top but rather about creating a “field” of creative leadership, by igniting the collective creativity of the organization from the bottom up.

We put it like this: Plan across the social networks that exist within your business. Let information and change propagate through them in real-time. Set milestones, aim for them, adapt them, adjust them, put everyone in charge. A “field” of leadership, rather than a point of leadership. In our world, people propagate the key information between plans and projects. People, with the right social tools, do a much better job of getting the right information to the right place, and innovating with it, than any of today’s computing power possibly can.

Creativity isn’t the enemy of good planning, it is its absolute best friend. Back to that Harvard post:

Creative leaders in these firms are more prepared and willing to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To win, they take more calculated risks and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate. They are ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful and are committed to ongoing experimentation with disruptive business solutions.

Frank Kern: Senior Vice President, IBM Global Business Services talks about the background to their report: “We’re entering a pivot point…”

The 2010 CEO Study is here. Of course this isn’t new news. Dr Anne Marie McEwan of The Smart Work Company has been shaping our thoughts on what we can learn from the past for quite some time (Smart Working: Learn From The Past). What makes for good leaders hasn’t changed. What is different is that technology is moving from being a barrier to good leadership to being an enabler. Here’s to creative (and collaborative) leadership.

There Must Be a Better Plan?

Enter Milestone Planner. Here it is easy to set up a project space that all of the different collaborators can be involved in, regardless of whether they are inside or outside of your organisation. When one person needs to know where folks are at with a particular aspect of the project, they simply check the history of that milestone to be brought up to date – no need to trawl through emails or arrange an unnecessary meeting.

Working Independently Together

Each person can update the individual aspects of the project autonomously, without needing to worry about whether they have informed the right people – anyone who needs to know will be able to see at a glance.  Effective communication is key to the smooth running of a project, but as Craig Buckler warns:

“Be careful not to bombard them with multiple calls and never make assumptions about their decisions.”

Milestone Planner can provide the forum to strike the balance between effective communication and overdoing the phone calls and meetings.

Of the many projects I have seen over the years, I often seen a pattern of over thinking the details, while under thinking the purpose of the projects. The former creates rails for things to go off, while the latter means that people are unclear of what to do when things go off track, as they do inevitably.

Focussing on outcomes, the steps to get to them, and the constraints around them, actually creates more flexibility than focussing on activities and who will do them.

Here are those ten questions:

1. What’s wrong with the current situation?
2. How will things be different when we’ve finished?
3. What are the performance criteria?
4. What’s the scope of the assignment?
5. What are the cost constraints?
6. What are the time constraints?
7. What project specific constraints exist?
8. Who is the project sponsor?
9. Who is the project manager?
10. What authority is being delegated?

Lots of people have asked us to add multiple owners for milestones and workstreams in Milestone Planner. We hear you. We are working on a way to do this, but one which keeps points 8,9 and 10 clear. Clear ownership means clear accountability and less risk of “hot potatoes”. Clear responsibilities and ownership are key to ensuring that projects progress along. The feedback we are getting is that Milestone Planner really does help to keep things on-track, and provide clarity for everyone involved.

I’ll leave you with a last quote from Richard’s post:

Of course, laying a firm foundation is only the first step to creating the project deliverable and many potential pitfalls remain for the unwary project manager. But without clear answers to these ten questions it is highly likely that the project will encounter significant problems later.

Benjamin Ellis by SylwiaPresley (cc)

Last week I shared some thoughts at MediaCamp London #3, which seem good to offer up here. Coffee in hand, I talked through the things I’ve discovered about the management of knowledge-driven and creative businesses over this past decade. I can’t say that they are complete thoughts, but in the way of a blogger, I’ll share them here for you for agree/disagree/clarify/extend. The slides I used are on slideshare already:

I use the phrase “cat herding” because it is about the best I have to describe managing very bright, creative people. For the avoidance for doubt, the term isn’t meant to be derogatory, it’s simply one I’ve come to use for the skills involved in leading highly-autonomous, bright folk – The kind of people you don’t realise the potential of by providing a to-do list. There were three sections to the talk: Being a great cat herder, being a great herd member and being a great cat. I’ll cover the first in this post.

Being a great cat herder

Whenever I ask people what makes a good manager, and what makes a bad one, a standard set of themes emerge. For the good manager, it is around emotional intelligence – “being understood/understanding”, “supportive/encouraging”, “being fair”. For the bad it is around process: “not explaining things”, “being absent/being overly present – a micromanager” and so on. Good managers are people rather than process oriented. They get the process things done, but they don’t let them dominate. Perhaps they are better referred to as leaders? I’m increasingly convinced that you manage things, but lead people. They are different skills.

Knowledge workers and creatives generally don’t like being told what to do or how to do it. And rightly so. If you hire people for their skills and knowledge, then you aren’t going to go far if you don’t use them. In a knowledge-business, the boss is no longer the smartest person in the room for every (or any?) given question.

Realise the Potential

One of the biggest failings of managers – or perhaps one of the differences between a manager and a leader – rests in realising the potential of their team. If you’ve hired bright people, you don’t need to tell them what to do, you need to explain why you want them to do it, and then provide them with what they need to be successful. The ‘what’ that needs doing may be different than you at first thought, and in today’s real-time business world it might change while it is being done too. The ‘why’ rarely shifts, and if it does, generally the need for the project goes away with it.

Give your team a clear purpose. Explain what is happening, provide the background, and an explanation of not just what is happening, but why it is happening. The key to an outstanding business is unlocking the discretionary effort of its staff, and that means giving people the motivation to go the extra mile and do their best, rather than “what will do”. Enable people to give their all, and throw their full selves into the business. To borrow from Maslow, that means meeting their needs, from the physiological, through providing stability and certainty, to providing a sense belonging in the business and an appreciation of what they bring to it.

Traditional business management looks at people, processes and systems – although mostly processes and systems. Today’s business environment has simultaneously commoditised processes and systems, so that there is no competitive differentiation in them, and become so fast moving as to render most of them useless before they can be implemented.

Differentiation in today’s market place rests in having great people, and building an environment that lets them operate at their highest level. In my early working life, in retail, the businesses were driven by process, but all of the businesses I have worked in over the last few decades have been driven by skills and knowledge. It’s a big shift in the way that a business is built, and in the kind of systems that are required.

Be More Than Slightly Better

The scales that balance Innovation and Execution have also shifted, tipping relentlessly towards innovation. Being competitive means constantly disrupting your business to create better products and services, and more closely meet the needs of those all-important customers. Small incremental improvements in process are no longer enough to keep up with the competition, and differentiation comes from the philosophy of the business as much as from strategy – witness Toyota’s recent retrenchment back to its core philosophy. Philosophy drives strategy, and strategy drives execution, and the latter two are subject to a rapidly changing market place.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Milestone Planner resonates with much of this thinking. It enables emergent planning, balancing clear ownership with shared responsibility for what happens, and the ability to change tactics in real-time. In recent years I have become convinced that social media, or rather social technology, IS the new process, or at least that it is the scaffolding around which the necessary process can be built. Putting people in the middle of everything, and connecting them with the relevant information, propagated via their social graph, is the core of a knowledge-intensive business. Connecting all of this with the mission of the company, and a clear vision of where it is headed, creates an unstoppable force that drives great execution, and that is the responsibility of every good cat herder.

Next, part 2: Being a good member of the herd.