David Allen: "It’s really cools stuff, but there’s as much frustration with it now…"

Posted on 27/02/2012 by Graham Chastney

In this short video from Bloomberg Dave Allen talks about technology and productivity.

I know a number of people who blame technology for all sorts of problems, but Dave Allen has a different take:

The medium itself is neither good nor bad – it’s neutral.

It’s a message that many of us need to hear, to a certain extent, it’s not email that’s the problem, it’s how we use it. I say ‘to a certain extent’ because my own view is that email, as an example, is only neutral in the same way that alcohol is neutral. That might sound like quite a strong comparison to make, but the parallels that I am trying to draw out are these. Alcohol might be neutral until used, but it’s effect on people, once used, differs dramatically, and people aren’t always in control of their response. The same is true with email, and other technology media. Also, like alcohol, the effects aren’t always immediately evident and for the technology media we are a long way from understanding all of the impacts.

We need to do a much better job of helping people to understand what the impacts of their actions are when they use email, for instance, and to use it far more responsibly.

Things are changing and Dave Allen highlights this in the interview:

It’s all really cools stuff but there’s as much frustrations with it now as there is "wow this is neat".

The GTD methods that Dave Allen teaches, and other similar methodologies, are becoming very important.

The other day I read an interesting article when someone was paralleling the emerging Productivity Industry with the Diet Industry. It’s a similar parallel. (Annoyingly, for some reason, I didn’t bookmark it and now can’t find it.)

Google: Rules for a good (decision making) meeting

Posted on 15/02/2012 by Graham Chastney

In a recent article that talks about how Google is seeking to regain some of it’s start-up responsiveness while still growing Kristen Gil, Google’s VP of Operation explains some of the changes that they are making. One of the changes is in the way that they do meetings. Here is what she said:

One of our first observations was that many meetings weren’t working as well as they should. A well-run meeting is a great thing; it empowers people to make decisions, solve problems, and share information. But badly-run meetings are a demoralizing waste of time. We didn’t want our employees to waste either time or energy, so we gathered input and made some recommendations to help make meetings more effective.
For starters, we noted that every decision-oriented meeting should have a clear decision-maker, and if it didn’t, the meeting shouldn’t happen. Those meetings should ideally consist of no more than 10 people, and everyone who attends should provide input. If someone has no input to give, then perhaps they shouldn’t be there. That’s okay – attending meetings isn’t a badge of honor – but the people who are attending need to get there on time. Most importantly, decisions should never wait for a meeting. If it’s critical that a meeting take place before a decision is made, then that meeting needs to happen right away.
Start-up Speed

Common sense mostly, but there are many organisations where a rigorous applications of these kind of rules would make a massive difference. I certainly agree with the sentiments of good meetings being great and poor meetings being "a demoralising waste of time".

One of the ideas that is gaining traction where I work is the two pizza meeting. In other words the maximum size of a meeting is one that can be fed from by two pizzas. This is a follow on from something Jeff Bezos of Amazon instigated – the two pizza team.

Trust and Knowledge Networks

Posted on 07/02/2012 by Graham Chastney

One of the things that I’m known to say is this: "The informal organisation is much stronger than the formal one".

Sometimes when I say this people nod wholeheartedly, but others look puzzled. The ones who look puzzled are normally near the bottom of the formal organisation, people further up the organisation seem to understand this implicitly. Karen Stephenson (an expert in this area) quotes a Four Star General as saying "I can lead men and women into battle but I’m a prisoner of war in my own organisation" and I think that many senior people in organisations feel the same way.

Karen codifies these informal organisation structures as knowledge networks and trust networks. She then goes on to classify the different types of network:

Six Varieties of Knowledge Networks
In any culture, says Karen Stephenson, there are at least six core layers of knowledge, each with its own informal network of people exchanging conversation. Everybody moves in all the networks, but different people play different roles in each; a hub in one may be a gatekeeper in another. The questions listed here are not the precise questions used in surveys. These vary on the basis of the needs of each workplace and other research considerations (“Don’t try this at home,” says Professor Stephenson), but they show the basic building blocks of an organization’s cultural makeup.
1. The Work Network. (With whom do you exchange information as part of your daily work routines?) The everyday contacts of routinized operations represent the habitual, mundane “resting pulse” of a culture. “The functions and dysfunctions; the favors and flaws always become evident here,” says Professor Stephenson.
2. The Social Network. (With whom do you “check in,” inside and outside the office, to find out what is going on?) This is important primarily as an indicator of the trust within a culture. Healthy organizations are those whose numbers fall within a normative range, with enough social “tensile strength” to withstand stress and uncertainty, but not so much that they are overdemanding of people’s personal time and invested social capital.
3. The Innovation Network. (With whom do you collaborate or kick around new ideas?) There is a guilelessness and childlike wonderment to conversations conducted in this network, as people talk openly about their perceptions, ideas, and experiments. For instance, “Why do we use four separate assembly lines where three would do?” Or, “Hey, let’s try it and see what happens!” Key people in this network take a dim view of tradition and may clash with the keepers of corporate lore and expertise, dismissing them as relics.
4. The Expert Knowledge Network. (To whom do you turn for expertise or advice?) Organizations have core networks whose key members hold the critical and established, yet tacit, knowledge of the enterprise. Like the Coca-Cola formula, this kind of knowledge is frequently kept secret. Key people in this network are often threatened by innovation; they’re likely to clash with innovators and think of them as “undisciplined.”
5. The Career Guidance or Strategic Network. (Whom do you go to for advice about the future?) If people tend to rely on others in the same company for mentoring and career guidance, then that in itself indicates a high level of trust. This network often directly influences corporate strategy; decisions about careers and strategic moves, after all, are both focused on the future.
6. The Learning Network. (Whom do you work with to improve existing processes or methods?) Key people in this network may end up as bridges between hubs in the expert and innovation networks, translating between the old guard and the new. Since most people are afraid of genuine change, this network tends to lie dormant until the change awakens a renewed sense of trust. “It takes a tough kind of love,” says Professor Stephenson, “to entrust people to tell you what they know about your established habits, rules, and practices.”
From Karen Stephenson’s Quantum Theory of Trust
There’s a PDF of this report available here

She also states that 80% of the knowledge in the organisation resides in these knowledge networks. That’s a powerful message for people who spend all of there time driving organisation change through the organisation hierarchy. It’s also a powerful message for those of us who live inside the networks and ignore their effect upon us and our influence over them.

If you prefer to watch there are a number of videos here.

Giving up on a goal: 1000 posts

Posted on 20/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

Back in September I set out on a process of writing less to write more. It looked then like there was just a possibility that I could get the end of the year and have written 1000 posts on this blog.

I need to set myself personal goals otherwise I get nothing done, it’s my way of focussing.

This is post number 907 and I’m clearly nowhere near the 1000 number. So I’ve decided to put the 1000 goal to one side. I’d rather focus on quality over quantity anyway, but sometimes it’s nice to have a target and quality targets are more difficult to set.

I like to reach a summit, but not at the expense of the view on the journey.

I also thought about adding up all of the other contributions that I’ve made on Twitter, Flickr, etc to come up with a view of my overall output this year. That got too scary so I decided to leave that one under the carpet.

Drifting Attention from Dilbert

Posted on 22/09/2011 by Graham Chastney

I have had this happen to me so many times that I’ve almost stopped noticing it happen:

It’s a sign of our times, and not a good one.

My normal response to it happening is to sit there and wait for the person to come back to me. I feel a bit like a teacher standing waiting for a class to be quiet.

Organisation Charts

Posted on 08/09/2011 by Graham Chastney

I love this cartoon from Bonkers World about different organisation structures:

I work in a large organisation that looks much more like a couple of these charts than others, and there are days when I’m not sure what it really looks like.

When people unfamiliar with the organisation ask how they get things done I regularly tell them that the informal organisation structure is much stronger than the formal one. So perhaps the diagram doesn’t matter too much anyway.

The connected world we now live in makes a whole set of new organisational shapes possible and great many of them will be successful.

At the end of the day it’s the people that matter though.

Hat tip to Seth Godin.

Telling Stories

Posted on 25/08/2011 by Graham Chastney

I’ve often thought that schools should spend much more time teaching people to tell stories.

Universities should, in my opinion, have story telling as a basic requirement for all courses.

I sit in so many meetings where someone stands up and talks through a set of slides. I use the word ‘set’ to describe a random collection of information.

The slides themselves aren’t coherent, the order of slides isn’t coherent, in short there is no story.

People connect with story, stories travel and live on beyond the event itself. Tell a story and you’ll be memorable.

One of the best lecturers I ever had at university was my ‘Stress’ tutor. He regularly started lectures with a broken component. He’d then tell the story of how this component got broken. This story would always be told with glint in the eye and an air of mystery.

Our job was to solve the mystery in order to complete the story. He’d then tell us the real end of the story. I still remember one of the stories about a tow bar component that had actually led to someone’s death – that’s nearly 25 years ago.