You might have heard about “Big Data” but what I want to focus on today is HUMAN Big Data – the information that is gathered about human attitudes and behaviours – particularly in the on-line world. We can collect data about (almost) everything, but can we make sense of it? How do our attitudes about our attitudes about our attitudes affect how we understand Human Big Data, and how we use it effectively.

I was an engineer from an early age – you know, the usual stuff – taking things apart, loosing bits, and eating too many sweets. However, I’ve always been fascinated by people, and by learning. That lead to a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education, and more recently, a Diploma in Psychology. I spend my time straddling the worlds of people and technology, helping them get the best from each other!

From scarce data to abundant data

We are in the middle of a world-changing shift. When I started working in the business world, all of the data for running the business would fit into a single file in today’s spreadsheet applications. Data was scarce, highly sought after, pored over in intimate detail and highly valued. Today we generate huge amounts of data every single day, and one of the biggest challenges in business is dealing with information-overload. The focus is less on gathering data, and more on curating and making sense of it. Technology to the rescue…
IBM’s “portable” hard drive solution from the late 50’s. You’ve probably seen this photo, or variations of it. That drive is actually less than 5Meg – that’s probably less memory than is in your washing machine (at least if you’ve every washed a USB memory stick by accident it is!). Today though, storage is cheap. By the end of this decade, you will likely be able to affordably store the whole of today’s internet in the palm of your hand. That’s changing how we build computer systems, but also changes how we deal with data.

Unstructured data? Not a problem.

The other big, historical, challenge with data was that we needed to have a good idea of what we were going to collect, before we started collecting it. And if we wanted to change our minds half way through, well, that was going to mean tears before bedtime and a lot of hard work. Today, technologies like NoSQL databases mean that we don’t have to worry about the structure of the data until we want to make sense of it. We can also collect different sorts of data in the same system, capturing more or less as our sources change. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook lead to the development of technologies that can process and analyze huge amounts of data in near-real time – restructuring and refactoring it as we go. It’s a revolution in our relationship with data.

Any Questions?

So what does that all mean? Let’s step back a moment, and think about how we collect data. The traditional tool of choice for research has been the questionnaire. Brand surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, these are familiar weapons of the market researcher. Similarly, focus groups and interviews. But all of these methodologies share a challenge: They ASK people what they think. They are attitudinal self-reports: expensive to gather, and tricky to design.

Liar!

“It’s a basic truth of the human condition, that everybody lies. The only variable is about what……I’ve found that when you want to know the truth about somebody, that someone is probably the last person you should ask.”  Dr Gregory House

You have to love the idea of a fictional doctor telling us that we are all liars. Of course we aren’t. But we do bend the truth occasionally. Especially if we think we are being watched (or listened too…).

People will tell you what you what to hear, what they heard and what they would like to hear… …but rarely what they think.

Socially desirable responding is a major challenge with surveys and many other traditional data gathering methods. Certainly, experts can help to minimize their impact, and control for other issues like response set bias. It gets interesting when we turn those biases from issues into data. Technology allows us to record not just the answers, but to record the response times too. This is an altogether different sort of data.

From attitudes to behaviours

We can move from ‘expressed’ measures (attitudes) to observed measures (behaviours). Of course, not all ‘behavioural’ measures are actually measures. Foursquare check ins, for example, are expressions – people don’t (usually) check in at every physical location that they visit. The choice of checking locations is an expression of attitudes about themselves and the location brands. Social media, contrary to opinion, is not about transparency. It is about continual, partial transparency. We need to get smarter about understanding the data that we collect, and learn new techniques to control for the biases in it.

Business social graph (Autodesk)

Of course some data is more ‘objective’ – this is a lovely visualisation of the Autodesk organisation over time. In our early days of working with human data, we spent quite a lot of time building these sorts of visualisation. They have become cheaper and easier to produce, and they are certainly good discussion points. The bigger lesson is that not all data matters, or at least much of the data that we see as important may not actually matter. I can predict more about the interactions of people in an organisation based on the physical distance between their desks, than I can from a hierarchical org chart. Objective information is good, but it is overly valued in business. Aggregate subjective information often tells us more. Not all opinions are meaningless!

Language Tells

One of the most interesting things about social media is that it gives us more access than ever before to the raw language that people use. As software algorhythms have become more advanced, and our understanding of language has improved, we can create software that can analyze, on aggregate, the emotional content of communications. The hedonometer is a great example – how happy is the Twitter-verse today? But language tells us much more…  Shared vocabulary can predict social groupings and influence, in quite unexpected ways.

Looking for patterns can seriously damage your health wealth

Edcrowle – http://www.flickr.com/photos/edcrowle/383301200/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Blindly looking for patterns is a dangerous sport. It hits many of the weak spots in our cognitive systems, and can lead us up all sorts of dark alleys.

Correlation is not causality

Get it printed on a t-shirt. Say it randomly in meetings: “Correlation is not causality.” – ok, it won’t win you many friends, but you’ll be right most of the time. The assumption that unrelated events have causal links almost makes the business world go around. Literally. It is a much harder habit to break that you might think, for reasons I’ll come on to later. When we operate in the world of human data, it is an ever present danger – misunderstanding how variables do (or don’t) relate. Camera tripods have cameras on them. Cameras take good pictures. Cameras don’t like getting wet. Andy here is on a camera tripod. He takes very good pictures. He hates getting wet. Andy is, of course, a photographer, not a camera. But ascertaining that from a few variables (rather than a few megabytes of data and a lifetime of learning) is a very non-trivial problem.

You are biased – Really biased

Perceptual / Attentional biases, observer expectancy effect, anchoring and focusing, conformation bias, availability, cascade effect, bandwagon effect… We have a sea of cognitive biases that play in to one another. We tend to fixate on the first thing that we see, becoming blind to other interpretations, we are biased towards spotting evidence that supports our hypothesis, and ignoring data that doesn’t. We value and believe things based on repetition, more than reliability, and when you put that in a social context, we support what we believe that other people believe. It is a chain of events that leads to big mistakes, and big data is high octane petrol, especially in the business context, where we value ‘objective’ data so highly. Numbers are not always objective, they are vulnerable to subjectivity.

Attention

You will have seen this video on line. Think through the consequences carefully. When told to diligently observe something, we completely miss the gorilla in the room, beating its chest. Apply that to big data. Our perceptual systems keep us safe from predators, and help use locate friends and relatives. They were not specified or tested for analysing terabytes of data on a computer screen…

But you are better than that…

Actually, there’s a name for that bias too: self-enhancement bias. We always over estimate our capabilities. When asked, on average, everyone is above average!

Presentation is bias

“[Big Data] is sometimes seen as a cure-all, as computers were in the 1970s. Chris Anderson…wrote in 2008 that the sheer volume of data would obviate the need for theory, and even the scientific method….

“[T]hese views are badly mistaken. The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning….

[W]e may construe them in self-serving ways that are detached from their objective reality.”Data-driven predictions can succeed — and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves….Unless we work actively to become aware of the biases we introduce, the returns to additional information may be minimal — or diminishing.” Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

There is no such thing as a neutral presentation of data. We always bring something of ourselves to the presentation, even if it is unconscious. Phenomenological approaches to psychological research understand, embrace and control for the biases of the researcher. Ignoring them, or even worse, denying their existence, simply increases their impact. Understand why (at an emotional level) you are measuring what you are measuring, and the story you tell while you present it.

Humans communicate at the level of stories, not at the level of data, so tell stories, and understand stories. Each story is a potentially narrative. Most data has multiple potential narratives. Without a narrative, an embracing context, data is meaningless, or at least meaning less.

Reification

The biggest challenge with Human Big Data is that it breaks the scientific model. Most people working in the data processing world come from a background that draws on the epistemology of natural science. We build a hypothesis, we construct experiments, we measure things. We gradually ‘discover’ the nature of the world around us. Of course human big data doesn’t work that way. Marketing people are paid to CHANGE WHAT PEOPLE BELIEVE. So, if we are measuring what people believe (attitudes) or how they behave (which is related to what they believe – says the marketing world!), we are changing the thing that we are measuring. At a higher level, we are using the learning from big human data to architect the social construct that people operate within. Marketing has never been static. What worked yesterday, won’t always work today. Humans adapt and normalise. If you use behaviour economics in your pricing, eventually you change the behaviours. Why don’t you by the cheapest or the most expensive wine today? By operationalising measurements, we literally ’call them into being’ – giving them substance and reality – even if they had none in the first place.

Designing out bias

When we gather and present human big data, we have to do our best to design out the biases. But we can turn this all on its head and use our biases, combined with big data, to change attitudes and outcomes. Nudge is common parlance today. Decision architectures generally play on age old cognitive biases. When we add social data we turn on the turbo button; we add social proof. The Facebook like button that you see on websites has faces on it for a reason – instrumenting behaviours and playing back the data is powerful.

 The Iron Cage

But we have to be careful. It can be too powerful. Overly rationalizing the world, and using social forces to drive compliance, can lead to an icy and brittle world – to borrow from Max Weber. We need to use these new tools with caution. This is not a single move chess game, and eventually there is a tipping point at which contrarian approaches become the dominant strategy. If we measure emotional responses, and engineer the ultimate film script, and then every film studio follows it, suddenly it becomes bland. We have to apply our learning lightly, and with a bit of fun…

Game mechanics

Probably the fastest way to start a fist fight at a game developers conference is to describe “gamification” as psychology for dummies. Ok. Some parts of that statement might not be true. But what is true is that we can usefully borrow from the tool box of gamification. In gaming, the players enter “the circle” of the game – temporarily adopting a perspective on how the world works. We can escape the game. When we can’t, it stops being a game. There is something else that gamification gives us: The construction of measures. Not everything that we want to measure in human big data has a metric that we can express. In the world of games, we create measures and play them back. Number of lives, energy level… Constructed measures can be used to turn the disadvantages of reification into a positive advantage. We create and combine the things that we can measure, into new measures. Number of twitter followers, number of Facebook likes. These are actually all just constructed measures, which are used to drive behaviours. The players play the game to earn the points they need to level up!

The road ahead

An exciting journey, with some risky pitfalls, is ahead. Our relationship with data has changed irrevocably, as has our relationship with ourselves and society. New thinking is need to understand how we best make use of the data that we collect about ourselves, be it Google Glass, the instrumented-self or a Facebook marketing campaign. We are measuring more and more, and understanding less and less. The technology exists to turn that around; the next generation of billion dollar businesses will be the ones that create and operationalise a deep understanding of human big data…

Smart People – Dumb Decisions?

If someone smart makes (what looks like) a dumb decision, then they probably know something you don’t. There is, of course, a chance that you know something they don’t, but the further away from the situation you are, the less likely that is. I spend a large proportion of my time hopping between the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of organisations. It means I get to watch decisions get made, communicated and received. Almost every time I hear someone say “that was a dumb decision.” the comment is from someone who doesn’t have access to the same information as the CEO, either because the CEO failed to communicate the context, or because the CEO was prevented from communicating the context. Sometimes we do have additional information or experience, but Marissa Mayer saw the situation at Yahoo! and made a judgement call. I’m pretty sure she knows more about what is happening inside of Yahoo! than any of us do – and that includes disgruntled ex-employees. A few weeks on, and it seems to be working.

So, Working From Home is Dead, Right?

Not so much. There are two very different things here, and I’m going to very deliberately step away from the context of Yahoo! to talk about them. There are two root causes for home working to fail, and they are:

1. Poor management now.
2. Poor management in the past.

‘Managing’ remote employees requires a mature and confident approach. If an employee is in the office, it is easy to ‘feel’ like they are being effectively managed, because they can be observed. That’s an illusion accepted by junior, ineffective managers. The business isn’t paying for someone to sit at a desk, its paying someone to be productive. If I am measuring output (what was created) rather than activity (movement/location), then at the end of the day, I can measure that just as well if the employee is at home. So that’s the first management failure: valuing presence over productivity. Output beats contact, unless you are running a social club – Hold that thought, we’ll come back to it.

Fire Up the Factory

If effective home working is simply a matter of effective measurement, then why do so many businesses struggle with it? Quite simply: Most of us aren’t running a factory, we’re running a studio. In a factory it is easy to measure output: it’s a matter of quantity that meets a quality threshold :- 4,000 working hammers and we’re done. In a factory, work is easily identified and quantified. It is also individualistic and compartmentalised, making it relatively simple to measure the impact of each individual worker or machine. Yes, there are production line dependencies, but it’s pretty easy to spot the robot that has crashed or taken an extended lunch break.

The Studio

Most knowledge-lead businesses are much more like a studio. Output is relatively hard to quantify, except when it is close to the sales process. You only truly know what a painting is worth at the moment it is sold, not a moment before or a moment after. It is also much harder to identify each person’s contribution to the work. What of the person who cleaned the brushes? The person who created the set? The person who fetched the paint? The completion of products is infrequent and sporadic, and it is hard to identify each individuals contribution. And so it is with knowledge work.

A product manager or designer might launch four products a year. That doesn’t give many measurement points. It is very hard to measure progress on a weekly, let alone a daily basis. And who’s work was it anyway? The engineers’? The sales person who provided input? The output is a collaborative effort, in fact the effort may be the collaboration itself. Even if you don’t view your office as a studio, if you are reading this, it is probably more like a studio than a factory.

It’s Not Where You Started From

There are two much larger problems than management and measurement, and the solutions to them actually take management and measurement off of the table as issues. These are, I suspect, the dominant issues at Yahoo! right now:

• What are we trying to achieve?
• Can we achieve it?

The biggest challenge in a distributed environment, like a home working one, is alignment. Alignment is the critical difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Which of these is better:

• One person achieving one thing that moves the business towards a strategic objective.
• One hundred people, each doing ten things towards five irrelevant goals.

Anti-work is corrosive to a businesses, and yet in survey after survey, we find that most workers in a business either don’t know what the goals of the business are, or are working towards a set of goals that were long-since abandoned, updated or replaced by the leadership team.

It’s Where You Are Going

Clearly set and communicated goals, wrapped in a set of principles that codify ‘how we get things done here’ are the framework that allows people to work both independently, interdependently and flexibly. Goals need to be broken down into meaningful steps (we call these Milestones), so that there is an objective way to establish if things are going off track, failing to progress, or need revising. Business changes rapidly, and changing goals mid-course is a legitimate course of action, although if it happens too frequently, the goal-setting process probably needs carefully looking at. If people know where they are going, they will get there – provided they are motivated! Here is the most fundamental failure of management: The failure to believe, and create belief. It is all very well outlining your ship’s journey, but if your crew aren’t bought into the voyage, then there’s a mutiny ahead. And that’s the best outcome. Worse is an unhappy, meandering journey that doesn’t reach any particular destination.

Better Together or Better Apart?

There is a common myth that having employees in the office will fix the motivation issue. It might do so in a factory, although that is debatable, but it definitely doesn’t do so in the studio. Presenteeism is far more dangerous in the office. One dissatisfied employee can demotivate and entire team, if not an entire organisation. Yes, if people have lost sight of where the business is going, or have lost their belief that, as a team, they can achieve great things, then it’s time to get people back together. Remote working is founded on trust. Actually, all collaborative working is founded on trust, and trust comes out of relationship. People do need to meet face to face, from time to time.

Exception Becoming Normality

The creative energy of the (physical) water cooler conversation is a powerful binding force. Seeing family photos and personal clutter at a fellow employee’s desk all help to create rounded characters that we either want to work with, or know how to work with. When you are running a business, you are running a social club. When fellow workers are de-humanised into bland corporatized stereotypes, disenchantment, if not malfeasance, is not far behind.

People, from the management team, to the latest hire, need to be real and connected. Physical co-location can help with that, but it isn’t always the answer, and it certainly isn’t the only answer. It depends on the type of work, and the type of working. People often convolute two different things. Let’s call them “homeworking” and “teleworking” – the names aren’t actually important, it’s the idea that there are two different types of remote working: One where the home is the permanent place of work, the other where the business office is the main location, but work can happen at other locations. Most customer-facing roles involve at least some degree of teleworking – I’m not quite sure I like the image that the words “road warrior” conjures up, but sales people seem to have (quite literally) run with the term. Again, let’s not fuss over the definition, other than making the point that almost every business operates along a continuum of home to office-based work, and employees operate along that continuum too. Different points on the scale have different benefits and challenges, and require different kinds of infrastructure to work effectively.

My Time is Not Your Time

I think it is probably Paul Graham who most popularised the idea of the different types of different time slicing in business for managers and makers. I alternate between managing, consulting and coding. When I’m managing, I’m operating in very small slices of time. Interruptions are frequent, and part of the flow. Decisions are made in minutes, if not seconds, and then I’m on to the next thing. When I’m consulting, I am at the mercy of other people’s diaries. I’m working in hourly chunks, that’s the rhythm of meetings (or billing). When I’m coding, I’m lost in thought. A two minute interruption can set me back hours. Coding, at least the way I code, is like building a Lego house in your head. Mentally examining each piece, working out where it fits and arranging it. When the phone goes off, it’s like a parent coming into the bedroom with a hoover and an anger management problem. Boom. Start again.

What Works Well at Home?

It’s probably no surprise then, that different types of work suit different types of environment. Note that I say “work” there, not “role” There is a time and a place for homeworking in almost every role. As a manager, it makes sense to be in the office, unless, of course, your staff aren’t. Actually, it’s not about location, it’s about availability. Having Skype and Milestone Planner fired up makes it easy for me to see what needs actioning, answer quick queries, and touch base with the rest of the team. When I’m consulting the diary is king, Skype is off, and the phone is on silent. I am as happy in an office meeting room as I am in a quite coffee shop. When I’m coding, I usually want to be at home, with the phone off, real-time comms shutdown and my two 30 inch monitors keeping the room warm. I often end up coding at night; There’s something about the quiet of the early hours that makes me especially productive.

Yes, there is much about my role that is unique, but the reality remains that the choice of location isn’t a binary one. I know people who are glad to get into the office; either they don’t like the solitude of being home alone, or don’t have a space where they aren’t being climbed over by an overly enthusiastic toddler or disturbed by a noisy neighbour. I also know people whose productivity and creativity in the office is destroyed by constant interruptions and the levels of noise pollution inherent in the kinds of open-plan offices that are so de-regur which many HR folks.

Our business is built upon work force flexibility. I strongly believe that, in the long term, it will enable us to attract and retain talent that is inaccessible to some of our would-be competitors. Sometimes people need to be at home to take a delivery, deal with a child-care logistics issue, or just to concentrate. And if they have a sniffy cold, I am very happy for them to keep that at home, away from the rest of the team. It’s not about when or where people work, it’s about what they get done. Different types of work are best suited to different environments, and in today’s kind of jobs, we are rarely doing the same kinds of work all of the time. I am very sure the same is probably true for your work and your business. Then there’s the environmental benefits and all of that time recouped from commuting.

But Will They Work?

The most common push back I hear about home working is this: Surely people don’t work when they are at home. And, believe this or not, I’ve come across more than one business where “working from home for the day” does actually seem to mean “taking the day off.” That’s not typical, trust me! Factories need managers. Studios need leaders. Motivating team members, and being sure that they will do the right thing is not a location problem. Is a leadership problem. Yes, there is a fine art to accountability – you will need to agree and track outcomes. Yes, you will need some tools to support you (and we’d love you to talk to us about that :) ). Yes, you might need some leadership training for your team leaders (we can point you to some great folks). But by being flexible about where people work, you are going to create a more flexible, better designed business. It gives the ability to attract unique talent, and keep people engaged in the business. Oh, and by the way, you’ll probably fix your disaster recovery challenges at the same time.

The title of this evening’s talk caught my attention because I know that a huge amount of project time is spent ‘selling’ – it’s something Milestone Planner users mention time and time again. So, Dan’s opening gambit? Like it or not, we are all in sales now.

When asked “what percentage of your work involved convincing, or persuading people to give up something they value, for something you can offer?” People responded that it accounted for 41% of their time on the job. That’s 24 mins of every hour spent doing, as Daniel put it, things that are “kinda, sorta like sales” or “non-sales selling.” That’s a pretty striking statistic.

We’re all in sales now

“Non-sales selling” is selling, but where no money changes hands. Think of it as sales denominated in attention, resource and all sorts of other non-cash things. Dan’s logic, is that if 1 in 10 people are in sales-sales, and 9 in 10 are doing non-sales selling… Then that puts ten out of ten people in sales, regardless of the cats preferring it.

And here is a thing: Almost universally, we don’t like sales. Dan’s research asked “When you think of sales or selling what is the first word that comes to mind?” The answers were not pretty. So why does sales have such a negative connotation in our culture? He argued that the reputation of sales comes from the context of selling, not the process. The history of sales is a history of ‘information asymmetry.’ Traditionally the sales person had the information, and the power, which puts us as buyers ‘on guard….’ Remember ‘buyer beware’ and all that comes with it? Information asymmetry. Now it’s a world of seller beware… The premium in sales has shifted from problem solving, to problem finding. Solutions are often obvious, problems rarely are (at least not until it is too late), so it’s a much more valuable skill.

From Surviving to Thriving in Sales

Dan’s research cites three keys to thriving in a world of selling: Attunement, buoyancy and clarity. The problem with sales is that, in the words of one sales person, every day you face an ocean of rejection. The key to surviving that rests in “Buoyancy” – your explaining style. How do you explain failure? Research by Marty Seligman (who has also spoken at the RSA), has shown that the way we explain failures to ourselves and others is key in how we recover from them. There is a growing body of research that is finding ways to build resiliency into our character. Enabling people to recover from set backs.

Avoiding rejection in the first place is obviously a good strategy too, and that’s where attunement and clarity come in. Successful sales people cut through the noise and get to the signal. This is clarity. Clearly stating things, and removing confusion, is a powerful tool of persuasion. Dan listed a number of rules for attunement, the first of which was to “Increase your power by reducing it.” Leadership qualities came up a number of times during the talk, and Jim Collins was heavily referenced. Collins and other researchers point out that humility is a key leadership skill.

One of the keys to attunement is aligning with the receiver of your message. Match the conventions of the recipient. A common cause of failure, particularly in technical sales, is that people use their own language, not the language of their customers. Don’t use your own technical terms, use your customers’ terms. Communicate your project or product in the language of the people you are trying to persuade, and connect with them.

Here was an interesting myth that was blown apart during the evening: Are sales people extroverts? Or do you have to be extroverted to be a good sales person? Research shows that extroverts are more likely to go into sales, more likely to get promoted in sales, and generally get on, but actually, the correlation between introversion/extroversion and success in sales is non-existent. Actually, the best sales people are ‘ambiverts‘ – those who are neither strongly introverted, nor extroverted actually, and can adapt their style. Strong introverts and strong extroverts both do badly in sales.

Attunement, buoyancy and clarity

There was much more discussed during the evening and the audience Q&A afterwards – I suspect many of the topics covered are in Dan’s latest book, which you might want to grab from Amazon: To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others

Attunement, buoyancy and clarity was definitely the key message. Welcome to sales, or at least the non-salesy selling of your next project…

Kevan Hall

More and more of the conversations we are having with Milestone Planner users are about the challenges of matrix working. The formal definition of a matrix is anywhere there are dual reporting lines i.e. people have more than one formal boss. Almost anyone using Milestone Planner will be working on teams where they take instructions from, or are reliant upon, others, either within their own organisation or externally. That means a greater need for matrix management skills, so I was very pleased to have the chance to catch up with Kevan Hall, the author of  the new book “Making the Matrix Work.”

What are ‘matrix management’ skills?

Many Milestone Planner users will know – better than most – that work refuses to fit neatly within old-fashioned silos. (As an interesting aside, the matrix structure evolved from the need to manage very complex projects in the aerospace industry in the 1970s.) We need to get things done irrespective of the reporting structure of the people involved. We often need the skills to get things done without having direct control over people and resources needed to deliver results, and have little traditional authority and control fall back on.

This isn’t always a bad thing. Kevan is the CEO of training consultancy Global Integration, which specialises in matrix management, virtual teams and global working. A recent internal study inside one of the company’s clients showed that employees actually slightly preferred their ‘dotted line’ bosses to their ‘solid line’ bosses, because the dotted line bosses have to try harder to persuade and motivate them to deliver what they want/need.

We cannot simply focus on activity any more: we need to build long-term relationships and to sustain teams and groups, and that means time and attention needs to be spent on people management as part of any plan.

To add to this, competition for attention is increasing. Global Integration’s benchmarking survey (conducted using SurveyOptic) of over 4,000 people who work in large organisations shows that people are now, on average, a member of five teams. Multiple streams of activity are the norm – another project might simply tip the balance into overload.

However, there is academic evidence that multiple team membership actually leads to an increase in productivity, as people have to become more effective at managing their time. Of course, that is not an unlimited effect – at some point it becomes too much!

These are the kinds of issues addressed in Kevan’s latest book, Making the Matrix Work – how matrix managers engage people and cut through complexity,  available from February 7, 2013 – today!). Note: If you work on a team where you think multiple copies may be useful, drop us a line , I’m sure that Global Integration can arrange some discounted copies for your teams.

New ways of working require new ways of thinking, planning and managing. Today’s businesses are very different from those of a few decades ago. It’s time to learn some new skills!

The problem with many team meetings is that they can feel like a monologue with witnesses. That’s not how great teams work. However, Tu says that he finds great teams do start with great individuals. Great individuals are often awkward, or at least difficult to manage. That’s not a bad thing, as George Bernard-Shaw put it “all progress is due to unreasonable people.”

Start with good people

While great individuals are important, in most areas it is teams, not individuals, that achieve things. Steve Jobs learnt that lesson when he was removed from Apple because he wasn’t working with the team. On starting Pixar, he hand picked a great team, and built an amazing success story together with them. Another great team success is The Rolling Stones, especially as they represent a business that has turned over 1.3 billion in revenue. Like any good team, said Tu, they have different characters, creating both conflict and cohesion. While Jagger is a firebrand, the other team members balance out with different attributes. The harmoniser, the stoic, each has their place in a super team. In great teams there is creative friction between the different individuals, but there are also things that keep them together – teams need a compelling and common purpose to keep them on track and performing.

“A powerful idea pulls people together”

Teams need this balance of conflict and cohesion to work. Too much cohesion, and creativity drains away, and group think sets in. Too much conflict, and the team breaks apart. You absolutely need both, to get the best ideas and the best execution.

Team excellence is a learned habit

Tu talked about “the protocol for performance” – super teams have a codified way of doing things (something that can often become a culture) and an agreed way of assessing performance. There is a democracy of ideas, but a dictatorship of decisions. Ideas are freely explored, but commitments are made and adhered to – this is the balance of creativity and execution.

“Practice really does make perfect.”

Formula 1 teams get good by practicing pit stops over and over again. Practice is key in any team – whilst there is creativity in exploring ideas, there is consistency in execution.

The Q & A after Tu’s talk raised some interesting questions. The first was about size. Teams fill that gap between an individual and the organisarion, but there does seem to be an ideal size, generally from 4to 12.. The Red Cross says you need at least 4 people to get the benefits of diversity, but beyond 12, is becomes difficult to “herd the cats.”

The same objectives and no disproportionate rewards

There was also a question about leaderless teams, which Khoi answered with the example of the SAS, which recruits highly independent, free thinking individuals, who are also completely submitted to the discipline of the team. Ideally you want teams to be as flat as possible, but there is a place for heiracrchy, although more important than any form of status is a sense of fairness.

“The leitmotiv of a disaster is chaos. That doesn’t mean that you take a chaotic approach to tackling it. You need a solid dependable base to respond from.”

Change the person before changing the people

There will always be conflicts in a good team, but the key, as a team member or leader, is to pick the right fights (and sometimes, just to pick fights!). Too much harmony leads to group think (for example, the financial crisis), so sometimes people need to play out the opposing views. Sometimes at Pixar, they had people take an opposing view, to create the friction, but committing, and agreeing to, the the final decision is key.

Teams are often viewed as highly inclusive, but when do you exclude people from the team? There is often a view that you need to change the people to change the team, but there is a lot that can be done before that. Changing a person out is not the first answer, there are many other steps before that, advised Khoi. Reliability of team members is key (that leads to trust), and a sense of mutual protection (will this person protect me – have they got my back).

One of Khoi’s key tests of a team is to ask each member what the three key purposes of the team are. Divergent answers point to issues in the team. In general, the main issues in underperforming teams are: they don’t know where they are, they don’t know where they are going, and if they do, they don’t know how to get between the two.

There isn’t a problem in being in multiple teams, unless there’s a problem. People can be in multiple teams, as long as the objectives don’t conflict. A common goal is clear need in any team, and that goal might be avoiding a bad outcome – teams are at their best when the alternatives are worse.

The key ingredients

Via Twitter, Khoi was asked what the key ingredients would be if he was baking a super team pie. He said:

• Great individuals.
• Diversity of the team (in all senses).
• Clear protocols about performance.
• Building trust and cohesion.

Reflection and practice are also key ingredients. Take time out to sharpen the axe before cutting down the tree – business teams simply don’t spend enough time practicing.

Failure is also important. Every team needs to fail quickly, then recover from it, Khoi said. The shared experience of surviving tough things is key to the cohesion of a team.

Habits in groups can become culture

As a side note, it was interesting that someone who has spent much time studying teams, sees personality type as being much more of a situational thing. Teams shape behaviour and, ultimately, the culture of the organisations they are part of. There is an interplay between the business culture, team culture and the behaviour of individuals. A super team brings out the best in great people.

Repeat That

Ever got to the end of a project and thought “that was good, let’s do that again?”  Well now you can. Simply click the “Repeat” button on a project, or a workstream, milestone, or even an action. This creates a new copy of that item (and everything in it). You can shift the repeat forward by a day, a week, 2, 4 or 12 weeks – more options in future releases. Once you have created the repeat you can adjust the new actions, sub-actions and milestones as you need – they are completely independent copies.

From Discovery to Optimisation

The repeat feature completes the planning cycle: Start with a blank page. Add in milestones and actions, and continue to build them out as the project continues. At the end of the project, you can ‘repeat’ it – review the new plan to ensure that you have captured all of your learning, and use the pattern as a template for future projects. At a smaller level, you can create repeatable patterns within a project – for example if the plan requires multiple press releases, or software releases, create a check list of actions underneath a milestone, then repeat it as frequently as you need to.

Agile Meets Waterfall

As we build out Milestone Planner’s functionality, we are increasingly working to bring together the best of the Waterfall and Agile worlds. Different methods are appropriate for different moments, and an effective project management tool needs to be able to pivot between them.

Although I didn’t physically manage to get to #mindtheproduct2012, I did get to enjoy the tweetstream, mainly thanks to the tweets of @welovelean and @mindtheproduct (the latter under the prolific fingertips of James Mayes). If you are, or aspire to be, a product manager, then Mind The Product is a great site, and the presentations will be up there later. I’ve captured the sound bites, and done my best to attribute them to the appropriate speakers (I’m sure the Twitterverse will let me know if I’ve made any slips – it was tricky, as there were quite a few Tom’s on stage - Tom Chi, Tom Loosemore, Tom Coates!). I’ve worked in (and around) product management for two decades, and am still learning. There’s a great mixture of sound advice and inspiration here:

Marty Cagan of svpg

Marty talked about products that can change the world, driving disruption, and putting design and experimentation (and prototyping) front and centre. Product management is about reaching beyond what the customer already knows, to bring them something much better.

“I cannot point to a single successful Founder who was purely mercenary” – driving vision is key.

“Figure out what your customers can’t know” – Customers don’t know what’s possible!

“Two thirds of your ideas won’t work”. Keep that as a rule of thumb!

“If you’re not killing at least half your ideas, you’re wasting build time.”

“Be very stubborn on vision and very flexible on details.”

“Cross-functional, co-located teams.” – a low tech approach with massive benefits.

“Design is not a coat of paint at the end, it’s how it ALL works.”

“the biggest source of innovation is typically the Engineer, they best understand what’s possible.”

“If you’re just using your developers to code, you’re only getting about half their value.”

“It’s not about process, it’s about culture…”

“…Data beats opinions.”

“Quick physical mock-ups can offer huge leaps in interaction understanding.”

“Rate based goals. If one thing has 5% change of success, by the time you try 20 things, 64% of success.”

“To maximise the rate of learning, minimise the time to try things.”

“It’s just as important to define what your product should not be”.

The Nordstrom Labs innovation videos were recommended as a great illustration of these concepts, you can watch them here: Nordstrom Labs.

Tom Hulme - Design Director @ IDEO

Tom had some great points around lean methodology (and its weaknesses):

“Pivoting is promiscuity. It does not necessarily mean progress.”

You have to go through “Ignorant optimism, Informed pessimism” before you can approach value.

“Great businesses evolve their purpose over time.”

“One hour window, each month. Stop, reflect, what’s our purpose? Are we all clear on this?”

“You are what you measure…. so measure the right things!”

“It’s not good enough to drive for revenues, they have to be the right revenues.”

“What metrics tell you if you’re tracking your purpose?”

“Halfway through 4 week training, Zappos offer people $1k to LEAVE”. If they’re motivated, they stay.

Rule of three. If someone’s already doing it well, you need 3x the resource to break in there (paraphrased, via @jearner)

“Don’t copy without understanding. It’s about how it works, not just how it looks”

From Charles Adler (@cadler – co-founder of Kickstarter.com)

“Each feature, each function we put out, regardless of intent, is an experiment”

“Hire curious people, then get out the way”

Tom Loosemore – @tomskitomski of UK Gov’t Digital Services

“Vision should represent the emotional response you want from your customer”

“Hire for attitude. Curious, passionate polymaths”

“Design rules include optimise for common case, build for inclusion, understand context, start with needs”

“We own the process, it doesn’t own us. Kind of Agile Jazz, really!”

“Publish the deadline and vision widely, then we managed scope to fit”

Critical to ensure you don’t live in a bubble and build what you want… actual user, front and centre.

“Start small. Run fast. Gather momentum”

“Feel fear. Then do the right thing anyway”

My top 5 favourite quotes, actually 6 – think of it as a 20% extra offer!

“Be stubborn on vision, be flexible on details.” Marty Cagan

“Process is mostly religion. It’s about the culture you create.” Marty Cagan

“Most our meetings are a big guess-athon. Don’t guess. Learn.” Tom Chi

“Don’t pivot just because the problem is tough to solve.” Tom Hulme

“Methodology beats process. Choose the right tools for the job.” Charles Adler, Kickstarter

“We own the process. The process doesn’t own us. We call it Agile Jazz..” Tom Loosemore

Product management has evolved massively as a discipline over the past decade, but I think we are only just at the beginning of it’s evolution, as skills in design, human behaviour, project management (yes, that) and management sciences converge on the role. If you are a project manager, enjoy it and excel! If you aren’t, but you work with one, be kind – it’s a tough mission!

The KTN event looked at business models and how social media is changing them. At one side of the spectrum, people talk about “Social Business” as the area of businesses becoming focused on serving communities, rather than profit. At the other end, people talk about a “Social Business” as a business that had set up a Facebook page. Perhaps not, but the reality rests between those two extremes. Mellissa Norman, Business Models and Growth Champion for the Creative Industries KTN, asked for my thoughts on how business models are changing. My answer was captured on video:

Benjamin Ellis – How social media is impacting business models from Creative Industries KTN on Vimeo.

My take, in short: Social Media is impacting on every single part of the business model. It’s impacting on the way you acquire and interact with customers. It is changing the way you reach existing customers, disrupting existing channels, and turning customers into referrers and channels themselves. It’s impacting on how the inside of the business works, by making communication even more rapid, and disrupting business processes. It’s changing partnership models too, enabling even small businesses to maintain quite large ecosystems. It’s also disrupting how business gather the inputs for their business decisions, and carry out market research.

For any business, now is a good time to stop and look at your business model. Not just where the revenues are coming from, and where your costs are, but what happens in between the two of those things. Who are your partners? How do you get to your customers? How do your internal processes work? Ask yourself how social technology is, or can, change those.

Get ahead of the curve by disrupting your business, before someone else does. Ask yourself difficult questions about your business, and about how you can do things differently. Look at what other people are doing in your space, and adjacent industries, and see what the best practice is.

Social Media is opening up huge opportunities to innovate. It’s time to ask your business what you are going to do about that, and to tool up to take advantage of the new opportunities, while defending the old. For us here at SocialOptic, actively providing some of these technologies means that we are seeing many of these changes first hand. It also means we have to think even harder about how we manage and run our own business. Avoiding the hard questions, is the easiest way to miss the big opportunities.

This video walks through the updated interface, and you might spot some power-user tricks too…

There’s more to come, keep the feedback coming, and remember to check back in to Milestone Planner to update those plans up to date – it’ll be the most productive thing you do today!

“Cloud” has become the buzz word to bolt on to every tech vendors products. Cloud computing, cloud software, I’ve even seen “cloud” broadband routers. Since The Internet was born, it has been the inevitable destination of services. Back in the 70′s and 80′s, computing was centralised, with remote terminals providing access to software running in huge data centres on the other side of the planet.

Roll forward a few decades, neatly hopping over the Personal Computing revolution, and we are back in the same model, but this time the flickering green-screen terminals are shining multi-media cell phones, and ultra-portable executive laptops. In the last week, I’ve listened to a few people talking down the cloud (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun). The Cloud model definitely has both strengths and weaknesses. The key weaknesses being:

• Depends on network connectivity – no network, no service!
• Data security and continuity dependent on third party. Their data loss is your data loss.
• Access to data may be limited. Can’t always get out what you put it.

On the other hand, there are big benefits:

• Cross device availability of data – from  desktop to mobile, no syncing problems.
• Independent of location/network – remote access is baked in.
• Data survives device failures – broken laptop or phone? Change it. No problem!

For our service here, we have done, and are doing, a few things to neutralise the weakness of the cloud:

• Using web browser storage – providing offline availability of plans (for Professional users).
• Full export capability – it’s your data, you can always get it back, and you have it locally.
• Enhanced security and continuity procedures.
• New API for  developers and professional users (contact us for details)
• Broadest possible browser support (from the oldest versions of IE to the latest touch devices).

Of course there’s always more to do, but the cloud model of computing is actually a tried and tested one – used by the financial services industry, and many others, during the mainframe computing years. Cloud makes even more sense with today’s almost disposable devices – how long have you had your phone? When will you next replace it? How long until laptops – or tablets – get to that level?

Stephen Covey authored numerous best-selling books on productivity and leadership, and was named as one of America’s top 25 most influential people by Time magazine. If you have not yet read one of his books, I’d urge you, in the strongest terms, to at least read “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” if not all of his books. They are full of insights into being an effective leader, manager and team member. It speaks volumes that Stephen Covey passed his skills and passion on to a whole new generation.

In “4 Disciplines of Execution: Getting Strategy Done” Sean Covey, Stephen’s son, together with Chris McChesney and Jim Huling, speak to the need for prioritised goals in a business, and their important in achieving results. The book outlines how to get things done amid a ‘whirlwind of distractions.’ It advocates a team-based approach to the development of goals and methods of measuring them. “The best ideas come not from the leaders, but from the interaction of the leaders and the front line.” These are 4 disciplines are:

1 – Focus on the wildly important. (set clear goals)
2 – Create a compelling scorecard. (measure them)
3 – Translate lofty goals into specific actions. (break them down)
4 – Hold each other accountable – all of the time. (get them done)

Discipline 1

Focus on the wildly important (goals). Develop clear, measurable goals that are tied to a specific deadline, and are well understood. The goals, obviously, should link in to your overall strategy.

Discipline 2

Create a compelling scoreboard. “People play differently when they’re keeping score.” The scoreboard should reflect:

1. Where are we now
2. Where we want to be
3. When need to be there.

It should be visible and identify if things go off-track, so that corrective action can be taken.

Discipline 3

Translate lofty goals into specific actions. What do we do to achieve them? “To achieve goals you’ve never achieved before, you need to start doing things you’ve never done before.” It is Goal Breakdown Structure i.e. breaking the goals down to specific actions (we’d say Milestones and actions). We need to employ creative new and better thinking process to break goals into specific actions of weekly bite-size chunks, so that progress is made and measured.

Discipline 4

Hold each other (constantly) accountable. The level of mutual accountability, and knowing other are counting on you, raises your level of commitment. It requires that the team stays engaged and aware of results being achieved.

If you are already a Milestone Planner user, you can probably see how this plays out, and how it fits with the collaborative style of it. Set goals together, break them down into milestones and actions, then measure yourselves against them. Success isn’t just about good ideas, it is about executing on the best ideas.

• Support for sub actions, and sub sub actions, and even sub sub sub actions (or as far as you want to go).
• Local caching of plans in your browser, enabling you to view your plans offline…
• …and to use Milestone Planner on slow or intermittent connections, like mobile, or dreaded conference WiFi!
• Touch support for tablet devices, such as the iPad and Android devices (more on that soon).
• Optimised, adaptive layout. Milestone Planner now adapts to screensize, so that you can see more on the screen…
• …with out getting all crowded.

There is much more to come, but do give the new version a try and let us know what you like and what could be better. Our survey and dashboard products are going from strength to strength too, so if you’d like to know more about them, or have an app you think we could help you develop, then do get in touch – We love making things happen!

@TomChatfield

“Time is not something that can be measured with a pendule. Time is something that we build together within a tribe, a family, a region.”

“Someone who accepts every technology is not being technophilic, because this doesn’t require any reflection or choice.” Cory Doctorow

In short:

We don’t know what we don’t know! Many businesses are obsessed with information technology. However, information isn’t great for a business. Information needs context that can turn it into (actionable) knowledge, and more that that, it needs a generalised narrative that turns that knowledge into “wisdom” – knowledge that transcends specific contexts and gives staff the insight to make the right decisions in the new situations that constantly appear in today’s high speed business world.

We are drowning in information. We need to curate it, to create stories around it, to give it social context. Numbers don’t do anywhere near as much for managing the business as we’d like to think. It isn’t the spreadsheet that runs (or ruins) the business, it is the people, and the stories that they tell each other.

The social technologies that we use in our personal lives can be immensely useful in the business context. Social technology has made tagging things, mapping relationships, geo-tagging and adding metadata incredibly easy. These are all essential tools and techniques for curating business information.

Fish are the last to discover water.

Lastly, breaking the confines of our context is incredibly important. Only by getting outside of our day to day thinking do we ‘see’ what we are in the middle of. That’s why you should talk to people you have no ‘business’ talking to, it is why company boards and advisory boards are so important. It is also why you should read things that don’t interest you. It’s why you should get other people to look at your business.

Sometimes you need to get out of the safety of the tank to really understand what your business is about. Social software helps with that too. Expect some new products, unexpected conversations, and the occasional surprise from SocialOptic in the next few months…

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.

We’re used to hearing people describing social as revolutionary, but I agree with Andrew that if you are focusing on solving a real business problem you need to have some structure to it.

The implementation approach that Andrew advocated is a good one. He approached it as a grass roots implementation, focused on getting middle management buy-in first. Soon there were success stories demonstrating how socially enabled collaboration was shaving (very) valuable time from  Oil & Gas exploration & drilling projects. At that point, “Exec level” buy in became a no-brainer.

We see the same pattern with companies adopting SocialOptic’s collaboration technologies. Milestone Planner is a tool which helps collaborative organisations manage the complex, ever changing network of commitments between individuals. Our most successful customers typically follow a similar pattern to Andrew’s. A small group start using Milestone Planner, which then spreads through the business. It’s a cost effective way to try it out and build some hard evidence around how clearer management of commitments and deadlines drives better business execution. More about that very soon.

 David Stillwell, Science Director, Cambridge Personality Research
 Azeem Azhar, Founder & CEO, Peer Index
 Martin Talks, President, Digital, Draft FCB.
 Nathalie Nahai, Digital Strategy | Web Psychology, The Web Psychologist

It was a highly interactive session, becoming a trending topic on Twitter and ending up as one of the most talked about events of the week, with Nathalie Nahai winning speaker of the week award. Gabrielle Laine-Peters has curated an excellent storify of the event which gives an overview of what was covered, and the video of the session is now on YouTube:

David talked about the impact of personality type on our on-line behaviours,  Nathalie introduced neuroesthetics, Azeem shared insights from PeerIndex and Martin was our caveman-in-residence. With cognitive, experimental, applied and evolutionary psychology covered, I threw in some social psychology: Should we consider groups as a unit of influence, rather that individuals? We often think about influence as an end point, but we’re constantly influencing and being influenced. It is a networked effect, at least in what we see in the work we do here – a business is built of influences working together and against each other, shaping opinions, making things happen, blocking things. Messages flow across the network, spreading, branching and interrupting.

It was very interesting that the lean methodology came up during the session. Want to test a new product? Create a Minimum Viable Product, test it and adapt it. Even the experts find it very hard to predict behaviours. Sometimes a good old-fashioned experiment is the fastest way to find out what will work. Decision making is a complex process, involving emotional factors that lead to “evidence” gathering to  justify the decision rationally. The over riding evidence is that we aren’t as rational as we think we are (although not totally unpredictable)!

Nathalie has posted her slides and has a book coming out soon, and Martin has posted a podcast of interviews. And, if you missed it or want more, keep your eyes peeled – Chinwag has a longer half-day event in May – more details soon.

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!

We’re All Connected

People talk a lot about “social graphs” these days, at least we do here in the SocialOptic offices! Who is connected to who. We also talk about the “commitment graph” – how do all of the different commitments in the organisation link together, and how do you keep them together, with the constant juggling that happens in today’s world. That’s what we are here to help with, even when it’s complicated.

In the words of Paul Simon “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,” we often “back off” our commitments on to others, just as others are depending on us. You’re producing a report for the boss, and I’m creating a graph for your report. You’ll need my graph before you can submit your report. In planning terms, that’s a dependency, and it’s something that Milestone Planner has always handled.

I Know You’re Depending on Me

We have made juggling commitments even more powerful, and hopefully simpler too. Let’s go back to that report we were working on together. Create a milestone for the report, then set the date. Next, create an action in the milestone for me. You’ll notice that the action picks up the date of the milestone. What is new is that you can see that the action is currently ‘not planned’, but that it is expected by the date you set. When I next come in to Milestone Planner, I’ll see the new action on my dashboard. It starts as ‘provisional’, so the first thing I do is ‘accept’ it. Now, I can leave the date as it is, or I can plan when I will do it.

Simply Done

That’s it. Now you can go back to the action any time and see when I’m planning to have the report to you. You can even add a comment to the action if you want, by clicking on the speech bubble.

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.

Yes, we’re thinking about new features for Milestone Planner. A timely post on brain pickings caught my attention :-  A Brief History of the To-Do List and the Psychology of Its Success. The whole post is a great little read, but a couple of nuggets stood out to me:

• Firstly, the pivotal role of to do lists in the relationship between habits and goals. Benjamin Franklin’s personal battles, focused around lists and virtues, may be familiar to some of you. It is something that comes up again and again in his writings. There is something inescapable about the need for them.
• Secondly, at good reminder that our brain appears to be wired to nag us about unfinished work. I’m sure you’ve had that experience of a random reminder popping into your brain at the most inopportune moments. It’s call the Zeigarnik effect.

To quote:

“It turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan.”

It’s a view we’ve held for a long time: If something is bothering your brain, record an action, or a milestone, or even a couple of actions, that detail the next steps. It puts your mind at rest, and then next time you sit down to review your plans or to do list, it’ll be right there.

Much of the post is based around the John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister book: Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, and the place of lists:

“The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists”

As Umberto Eco puts it: ” We like lists because we don’t want to die.” – Lists are often seen as draining and disempowering, but they can be motivating, empowering and releasing. Capturing the niggling commitments in our heads, and placing them into a trusted, curated system. Doing so frees your mind from fussing, and let’s you get on with the good stuff you are doing right now. Marking things off of that list lets you see real progress, and when the list is against and milestone or goal, it connects you with your purpose. Yes, lists can be infinite (hence Eco’s comment about their links to mortality) – but capturing them makes then finite. We can tick things off, or remove them.

Milestone Planner started its life as a ‘top down’ planning tool – set goals, then break them into milestones and actions. We are increasingly blending that with the ‘bottom up’ – groups of actions that form into pursuits, that emerge as goals. There are many places where that kind of emergent planning makes good sense. By combining top-down and bottom-up approaches, a highly agile, purposeful type of planning emerges. We’ll be blogging more about that over the next few releases.

In the meantime, when something pops into your head, pop it into your plan. It’s just the Zeigarnik effect nudging you into doing a little planning!

Last year’s FranklinkCovey survey of the top 10 New Year’s resolutions is little changed from the previous year, with most of us still circling around the same things. Specially, the top 5 last year was:

1. Become more physically fit
2. Improve financial condition
3. Improve health
4. Lose weight
5. Read more

So, what’s the plan? We’ve got an app for that… Milestone Planner is free for a single plan, which is all you need for tracking your personal goals (although if you want to treat yourself to the Professional Edition that would make our day, and it won’t break the bank!).

Create a ‘workstream‘ for each of your goals (or New Year’s resolutions), then set milestones in each stream that track your progress towards that goal. Breaking it down into specific steps, with a deadline for each step (which is what a milestone really is) is a great way to chunk your goal down into manageable bit. Later, you can come back to the plan and on the dashboard, milestone or ‘do‘ pages, break things down even further by adding actions (specific tasks) against each milestone. If you don’t check in our your plan for a while, and a milestone is due, we’ll send you a gentle nudge. If your plans change, just click and drag the milestone to a new date.

If you are familiar with GTD, you are essentially asking yourself “What’s the next action?” towards achieving each milestone. You’ll end up with what seems like lots of milestones and actions, but you’ll have spread them over time to make them achievable. The review feature graphs your progress, and you can export your plan, or share it with other people if you want.

I might be biased, but I think it’s great for tracking goals and making sure you follow up on those new year’s resolutions.

You might also want to read Simon Jordan’s post on making a plan. Which encourages you to think of the big picture:

• VISION
• MISSION
• OBJECTIVES
• STRATEGY
• PLANS

Where do you want to get to? That’s your vision. How are you going to get there, what’s the journey, why are you taking it? That’s your mission. The objectives are the markers you set, so that you know you are on your way – click to start creating milestones now.

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.

The short answer to the question is that the transitions happen badly today. The keyboard still remains the primary interface for converting off-line conversations into on-line knowledge. Of course, it isn’t really the keyboard, ultimately it’s the human that makes the conversion between the two worlds take place. That brings a good deal of fallibility to the process, but it is also what makes it inherently personal, human and social, and what makes social software so well suited to tackling the issue.

Blogs and Wikis have long been used to capture the essence of meetings and events, to make them more broadly available to the organisation – although I continue to be shocked by how few meetings are minuted, or even have actions recorded (as Penny was). Milestone Planner has made that process a habit for me – typing a line of text and clicking on an avatar is all it takes to record an action. The simple act of creating a digital record of the off-line event has a dramatic impact on the likelihood that it will be followed up and actually happen. When that action is ‘socially’ accountable – by being made visible on-line to others – the likelihood goes up even further (that’s one of the main concepts behind Milestone Planner).

The interface between on-line to off-line data has also been a narrow one. The office printer is still the main way that digital assets get back into the physical world. There is the occasional nod to the meeting room projector, that makes our PowerPoint creations appear as a fleeting flash of light, but the piles of printed paper that seem to gather by any office printer bear testament to the device’s dominant role in creating ‘real’ things from our digital machinations.

The narrow paths between on-line and off-line in the business world seem ridiculous when you look at the technology we actually have at our finger tips: Phones to capture pictures and video, or even audio, conference call systems that can record and transcribe speech, virtual world environments, speech to text software, augmented reality, … the list goes on. Many business folks are already using these tools – mostly the ones that move in social media circles I note! – but they are a tiny minority in a sea of literal monotony.

Mobile devices, be they phones or tablets, have a central role to play in smoothing the transition between the on-line and off-line lives of business data. That is partly due to the amount of technology they pack into one space, but it is one of the things to fall out of the inherently personally nature of the interface between the two worlds: Mobiles are inherently personal, privatised and individual. We keep them with us, much more than laptops, and they have a much better sense of our place and identity, through features such as GPS, and their ability to create and store video and photos that represent our daily experiences.

Unsuprisingly then, mobile devices have lead the charge in enabling better ways of switching between the two worlds. Possibly one of the most clunky ways this is happening is in the use of QR codes, little square of digital magic that can be printed, then viewed by reader software and used to jump to a web page. Though many question their usefulness, 14 million Americans in the month of July used a QR code – that’s a lot of interactions. Where do they fit into the business process? How about putting a QR code on a meeting room door, with a link to the on-line booking system, or adding them to your meeting documents to give attendees a link back to the project plan or documentation? Although they are effectively a progression from bar codes, they don’t have to be boring. The built in error correction allows marketers and designers a lot of creative freedom.

QR Codes are just one way that the divide is being bridged, there are plenty more exciting ones. On one side, virtual reality systems have been building out from the virtual world, on the other, augmented reality systems have been building out from the physical world. The main thrust of a recent Digital Surrey event at CSC’s offices was that the two will become increasingly blurred. Businesses like Layar have be creating digital layers of information over the physical world, so that you can interact with information around physical objects. You might already have seed the Arcade Fire video, that has a great example of using video and HTML 5 to create a personalised video that draws in the physical world. Another example is Blue Mars Lite, a 3D virtual world platform that draws on Google’s street view data. It enables you to gather people into a virtual space, based on a real world environment, and chat and explore that space online.

Social technology, and the developments around it, can blend on and offline, easing business processes and making them both more human, and less fallible. So much valuable business information is still transient and offline – corridor conversations, customer meetings, conference calls. The majority of that information is undiscoverable , unsearchable, and ultimately lost - those who couldn’t be right there, right then, loose the benefit of the interactions, often resulting in repeated conversations and decisions made with inaccurate or out of date knowledge. To paraphrase an old sci-fi programme: We have the technology to fix this, we can rebuild it. The barriers are not the technology any more, they are resistance to change, and a lack of application.

There is a lovely video from Microsoft doing the rounds, which paints a picture of better ways of interacting with devices:

I have to admit to being a bit disappointed to see a QWERTY keyboard in the video, but other than that, it is an exciting vision.  As Steve commented during the event “Providing a friction free way for teams to collaborate significantly increases likelihood that they will do so.” - We are already starting to experiment with the ways touch can be used to create better business applications, and in the next few weeks we’ll be adding QR code support to aspects of what we do here. There is much to be done!

Not everyone is a Social Software enthusiast. In fact, some people are down right hostile to it, for all sorts of reasons. The word ‘social’ has baggage, we have to deal with that. The telephone received many of the same objections…

• “Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires. Even if it were, it would be of no practical value.” – Boston Post, 1865
• “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” Western Union internal memo, 1876
• “Why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to a local telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?” report to the President of Western Union written by the committee charged with investigating potential purchase of Bell’s telephone patent for $100,000

Many IT roll outs fail simply because people stopped believing in the project. Not convinced? Try spreading a rumour that your current favourite project isn’t going so well, and watch how quickly support for it gets dropped, and how hard getting it done becomes! Visible buy in from the leadership team is essential in the long run.

Image by kind permission of James Poutler.

The way that we interact with knowledge has, and is, changing dramatically. It is often framed in terms of the “digital natives” – a new generation growing up who are as at home with technology as fish in water. However, it’s really not that straight forward. Personally I’m not comfortable with the term “digital native”, even though I am probably one of the oldest of them around.

My father had the vision to see how important computers would be, and I so I by the time the 1980′s arrived I had a computer at home, was writing code and dialling into on-line communities. So, I might have been one of the first Digital natives. But they are not what we think they are, or even what they think they are! Individual differences between each of us dwarf the differences between the generations. No one of us is average – there is no such thing as the average person, and we miss understand people if we try to squeeze them into a statistical box.

We are, however, a generation who do wonder more about “what we think that they think” than any generation before us. We are highly socially conscious, though the mass media and through social media. We are the “we” generation. Knowledge is now socially centred and digitally curated, with a new generation of highly networked tools.

The We Generation

Research doesn’t support the commonly held idea of digital natives. The fact is there are probably as many young people baffled by Facebook as there are grandmas and granddads, and indeed mums and dads, who are gurus. To say that IT literacy is the preserve of one generation and not another flies in the face of all the statistics we have. The social web is spread across age and agenda. It is everyone’s web, or at least almost everyone who wants. The ‘me’ generation is giving way to the ‘we’ generation, a generation that is intensely aware of what their peers are doing, even thinking.

Harder Better Faster Strong

However we are not our parents’ generation. Each successful wave of technology has hit harder and faster than the last. Video recorders were adopted faster than TVs. Mobile phones even faster still, and as for the Internet, well… Each wave reaches majority penetration in a fraction of the time of the last. We adopted and embed the technology into our lives with ever increasing speed.

Digitally Immersed

The next generation are the first generation to have never experienced information scarcity. We live ‘under the graph’ of phones, computers and the Internet. There are things that now encompass all that we do. A new generation is just starting to experience information over abundance, the very people that have never experienced information scarcity. Information hasn’t just escaped from the libraries, it has breeding in the streets, living rooms and offices of the entire western world, and is overflowing down the digital drains at the sides of the information super highway. We’re drowning in it! The next generation will bring new demands into the work place. They have new expectations about technology and the ability to access information. Information Techonlogy is not longer a business tool, it is instrumental to our personal lifestyles.

Like fish in the sea, we are barely consciously aware of how we live off of the digital water that is constantly flowing around us. Try this experiment: Go without your mobile phone, and without the Internet, for a week. Feeling nervous? When you are a fish, surviving in air isn’t so easy! We are so surrounded by technology, just as a fish is not conscious of the water, we aren’t conscious of the digital air around us. Until it is taken away of course.

Simple things like meeting up with friends or a business meeting, which would previously have been planned in detail, are now planned on the fly. We have become co-dependent with the tools of the digital information age, we feed them, and they inform and steer our every move – from where to meet our friends, to which books or films to buy or see.

A New Kind of Execution

The ‘new way’ of ‘doing things’ is also reshaping the work place.”Barely planned behaviour” has become our modus operandi. Rich and available communication channels have switched our ‘planned behaviours’ into new emergent one:. We phone when we get there to sort the finer details of where to meet, or fire up a map on arrival to get directions. The addition of location awareness to our digital devices is pushing things even further. With new services like Foursquare, we swarm to where our friends are. Decisions evolve through an emergent social consensus, rather than one individual’s logic. SMS powered teenagers text their way to a new kind social behaviour, planning without a plan. Increasingly a night out and a day in the office are planned in the same way. An interactive network of micro-decisions, rather than a lock-step turning point. It is collaborative – building a consensus and moving on is fast incredibly fast, compared to traditional business. We are no longer dealing with information at rest, we are dealing with information on the move. An yet many businesses are still run as if knowledge is locked up in filing cabinets, and decisions are taken once a quarter.

While there are both good and bad sides to this emergent planning, it is a fact of business today. We do have to respond in real-time to real-time changes to remain competitive in a dynamic, 24×7, global economy. We are just at the start of a transition in the way that we interact with knowledge. Location aware applications are but the first of a new generation of context aware technology. Traditional, static applications, will need to become real-time and social.

Before the event, we surveyed some of the participants using our on-line survey tool. Here are some highlights of what we found, taken directly from the survey report:

length of time on twitter

Whilst the majority of people there had been using twitter for over 3 years – almost as long as it has been around, there was also a significant spread of newer users, including some who were very, very new to Twitter. The range of experience lead to a very broad range of discussions, from the basics of how to use Twitter, to in-depth discussions about how it has changed as it has grown.

Hoping to meet someone in real life

Emphasising the way in which connections on Twitter have a habit of moving into the ‘real world’, three quarter’s of the attendees said that they hoped that tweetcamp would allow them to say ‘Hi’ to someone in real life that they already knew through twitter, and there seemed to be plenty of opportunity to do that during the course of the day, with a large open area and sessions in 8 or 9 breakout rooms. There were conversations everywhere.

What do you want to talk about?

People came with a massive range of things to talk about, as evidenced by this word cloud from the answers to one of the survey questions.

The thing I took away from this Tweetcamp, much like the first one in 2009, is how much services like Twitter are changing the way we work and live. The immediacy, the fact that everyone can now have their own platform to shout from, the speed at which news travels, and just how connected we all are, all add up to a rapidly changing world that the attendees at Tweetcamp were keen to discuss and debate. Today’s web is both real-time, and personal.

A burn down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do versus time. The outstanding work (or backlog) is often on the vertical axis, with time along the horizontal.

John Rusk describes how they work in his post – Agile Charts - which is over 6 years old, but still up to date today. Now, not everyone likes burn down graphs - they do have some very definite limitations. In Milestone Planner, Milestones have a status beyond just completed or open, and as we are tracking an entire project, so we have to deal with things like changes in scope (adding and removing milestones), and down the line, we also want to show the earned-value in the project (see “Earned-value and Burn Charts” by Alistair Cockburn).

Burn-up charts are the mirror image of burn-down charts, and are much better suited for charting the progress of an entire project. As the name implies, they are line an upside down version of a burn-down graph. Being the other way up let’s them display different types of status, and any changes in scope show up as changes on the top line. If you are interested, you can get more of an idea about how they compare by reading David Anderson’s “Managing with Cumulative Flow Diagrams“, or see how burn-up charts can be used to show bottlenecks in  Juurgen Appelo’s take. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is an example of a burn-up graph from Milestone Planner (we call it a progress graph – didn’t wan’t to get the health and safety folk all hot under the collar with talk of fires):

But the image is only part of the picture, as it were (not doing so well with metaphors today). From left to right, we can see how the project suddenly grows in scope (number of milestones) half way through, and we can see a steady difference between work completed, in blue, and the target completion, shown as ‘missed’ in light blue. But because we track the full history of the plan, we can also show how these estimates have changed over the course of the project. Watch this video from Jim to see what we mean:

Slightly mind bending stuff, but we hope, after a little explanation, that it makes sense. As ever, the best way is to dive in and try it for yourself. You’ll need to run your project for a few weeks to really see how the progress graph works. We hope that it gives you a better view of how your project is going, and helps you stay on track!

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.

Switching Plans is now easier. You’ll see an ‘Active Plans’ Tab at the top of the page. Clicking on this will pull down a list of all of your active plans which you can then choose from.

We’ve added a ‘Review Page’ which contains two useful reports which look back at the history of your project over the last week.

New Report Page

The Status report is designed to be helpful input to team meetings. It will show you all of the milestones which are overdue; all of the milestones that were supposed to be completed in the last seven days and all of the milestones your team has committed to completing over the next seven days. You can download it as a pdf to send around to your team and form the agenda for your weekly team progress updates.

The Activity report does what it says on the tin. It shows you all of the activity that has happened on your project over the last week, which actions have been assigned, started or completed and which milestones have changed.

Improved Search

Our professional users will notice we’ve moved the search box to the top right hand corner of the screen, but as well as this we have improved it. It now shows plans, workstreams, milestones, and actions as you type, making it super-easy to find the thing you are looking for.

In addition we’ve made lots of small tweaks to the look and feel – see if you can spot them. As always we’re really happy to hear your feedback on the changes – just click the feedback button at the bottom of the screen

There are a few different ways to add a Milestone Planner calendar, but here is one example… Sign in to your Google Calendar. On the left hand side you’ll see that you can add other calendars. Click add, then click add by URL (yes, it is a little bit tucked away in there!).

Next, sign in to Milestone Planner and head to the projects / plans page. You will see a feed icon and a calendar icon by each project. Click on the calendar icon and copy the url that comes up (or depending on your browser, right click and select ‘copy this link’). Pop back over to Google Calendar and paste than link in and confirm adding the new calendar. That’s it, you’re done. Now, whenever the plan is updated (and a milestone moves), the milestone will change automatically in your calendar.

By the way, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of project updates in Google Reader as well. The updates feed gives a step by step account of changes to the plan, as they happen.

Happy planning!

Milestones, sorted

Firstly, the milestones page now has a lot more functionality: you can sort milestones by date (as you always could), by status (blue, green, etc…), by owner, by workstream, or by the date that they were last updated. And, of course, you can still filter by the owner and milestone status. Its pretty nippy, and very, very mobile web browser friendly. You can now slice and dice your project in all sorts of ways – sometimes a different perspective helps you see the way to move things along.

Now you see it, now you don’t

Sometimes you love to have the activity stream, and other times you don’t need it. The activity stream gives you another way to navigate around your project plan, and also allows you to see the history of each item, but sometimes you don’t need that. Now you have a choice of having it hidden or showing, by using the little tag at the top to hide it or make it re-appear. When you click to the next page, it will stay hidden or showing. You should find this useful if you are doing your planning on a smaller screen or on a tablet device.

A bit of a tidy

We’ve tidied up the layout of milestones and actions, to make them a bit easier to read, as well as fixing which actions get displayed under a milestone, according to who you are focussed on. We’ve tidied other aspects of the layout to allow it to work on smaller screens in the desktop world too.

Kanban can do

The action kanban is now also much more dynamic and shows the full set of actions, in the Professional Editon. You can view actions by person, and focus the view of actions down to a certain number of days.

Over to you…

We very much hope you enjoy the changes, and welcome your feedback and suggestions as always! Milestone Planner is now in the Google Chrome store, so if you are a Chrome user, please do leave us a review! Don’t forget to explore Milestone Planner’s other features – have you checked out the activity and status reports in the plans view, or tried the RSS and Calendar feeds?

David Thornton from RIM very kindly gave me an overview and demonstration of the device – I like what I heard and saw!

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.