As another component of the Future of Work thinking I’ve been doing, one thing that strikes me is the question of what helps people  want to work, which I think pretty clearly will be important.  And I was reminded by my ITA colleague Jane Hart of the work of Dan Pink in his book Drive, where he isolates three components of what makes people engaged: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.  And I think this is a good list.

The idea is fairly straightforward: people want work that actually does something important, they want to be free to pursue that work, and they want to be developed in their ability to accomplish that work.   What work is appropriate for different people is part of the task of deciding who to hire, and who to assign to what.

And while I think autonomy and mastery are part of the picture, for sure, I want to focus on making work  meaningful.  OK, freeing up people from micromanaging is going to be a necessity going forward, but that’s part of the necessary move to agile organizations, and while that’s challenging, it has to happen for organizations to survive. And supporting people by giving them assignments that stretch their abilities, and coaching them through it is absolutely important, but flows out of the 70:20:10 model. Jane, in her valuable book  Modern Workplace Learning, gives very specific  guidance  about managers developing individual potential as part of the larger picture.  But the area that strikes me as something I haven’t developed my thoughts  about before is finding ways to characterize work so that it connects to people.

I think work has to be meaningful (just as I argue learning has to be meaningful). Here I mean something specific, in that people see the connection between what they’re doing and the impact on the world.  And that’s not always done, and certainly not systematically or well.  And yet I think it’s a service to the employees and part of a thriving organization.  Heck, it probably even leads to better employee engagement ;).

Seriously, it first takes an organization that has a clear focus on what it’s doing. There’re the old stories about ice companies losing out when refrigerators came in, and I think that’s part of it: a very clear focus on what purpose they serve. And this is important to align an organization, and make the strategy easier to focus on.  A secondary desirable component, to me, is to understand what contribution the organization is making to the world. I think the ‘b corp‘ notion is a great one here. (I may be an idealist, but that’s the world I  want to live in. ;).

Then, there needs to be a clear alignment between what the employee is doing and the overall organizational goal. I think that if there’s a clear purpose for the work, you have a greater likelihood for employees to be engaged.  No one likes busywork, after all, but even some drudge work that’s part of a bigger picture can be shouldered. And it also means that rote work, work that can be automated,  should be automated, leaving people free to do the important work.   Very much like learning needs to see how the learning connects to their work and the bigger picture, so too should their work connect to the bigger picture, within and outside the org.

Not to say this is easy. It requires clear communication (queue the Coherent Org), and a clear vision, but these are steps organizations need to do.  The recognition that this alignment, coupled with a ‘safe’ culture (i.e. not the Miranda Organization), is the necessity for going beyond survival to ‘thrival’ I think is the catalyst for change in meaningful work. And that’s a good place to go.

#itashare

As part of my thinking about the Future of Work, I’ve been thinking about how to make it safe to share, in the sense of an innovation culture (ala  the Learning Organization).  My ITA colleague, Charles Jennings, shared a very useful format to facilitate this, and I wanted to think out loud about it in terms of actionable items.

So, Charles advocates an approach to be taken in conversations with employees that involves a set of specific questions.  He’s developed even a little job aid  (aka the ‘3 Questions’ card). What’s nice is that the questions are open ended, positive, and facilitate reflection. It’s modeled after the After Action Reviews conducted in military situations, and has the following 3 questions:

1.Describe some of your recent challenges and successes

2.How would you respond differently to achieve better outcomes in the future?

3.What learning can you take away from these experiences?

The first one is designed to open discussion.  Of course, it has to be ‘safe’ to share these challenges and successes, but making a habit of asking about them and of course an individual’s assignments or projects should be known and shared.  It’s the followup questions that can help establish the safety to share.

Thus, the second question, doesn’t focus on mistakes, it focuses on  alternatives.  I might even be inclined to ask, instead: “what other ways could you have responded and what ways might you try to achieve better outcomes in the future”, exploring the space of possibilities a bit (to avoid being trapped in local maxima).  The point here is to consider a broad swath of possible approaches and focus on improvement.

Finally, the third questions focuses in on lessons.  What did an experience teach you, and how might you act differently on the basis of this.   The point is to look for the lesson.  I’d add that as part of learning out loud, sharing the lesson learned can be shared.

Charles noted to me that evidence suggests that 70% of manager/managed meetings is taken by the manager speaking. That’s not necessarily a good ratio; it would likely  be better 50/50 or even less!

You don’t want to celebrate mistakes, but you do want to make it safe to share.  In fact, a lovely story I heard once was from a small company that rang a bell in the middle of the office, not when the mistake was made, but when the lesson was learned. That way everyone else could learn not to make the same mistake!  It celebrated learning, and validated experimentation.

So while a good culture is the result of actions, scaffolding good actions through structure can help drive the culture forward.  Do you have tools you use to help make things productive?

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I’ve been thinking about some of the talk around the Future of Work, and in addition to the free flow of information I recently posted about  from the Coherent Organization, I think working out loud is another component.  Inspired by a post from my colleague ITA Harold Jarche,  this is how I see it, in actionable terms.  (And I expect this is also part of Jane Bozarth’s Show Your Work, but I’ve yet to get my mitts on a copy, mea culpa.)

The point is to make your work visible.  There’re two points: showing the actual goals, progress and status of your work, and showing the thinking that’s going on behind it.  And there are two dimensions: within the organization, and outside the organization.  Pragmatically, this yields some concrete and actionable elements.

First, there have to be mechanisms to share.  Ideally, you don’t have to work and then separately post it, but instead your tools automatically share.  This really means collaborative work tools, because you want people to be able to engage: at least commenting, and of course sometimes (maybe most of the time) you’ll be working in a team. Also tools that track contributions and changes.  And there may have to be permissions: so some people can edit, some can only comment, etc.

And I wouldn’t assume folks know what it means to ‘narrate your work‘ (aka learn out loud).  Here, I mean exposing the underlying elements.  This includes the context, assumptions, considerations, experiments, and reflections.  In User Interface Design, it was called Design Rationale, and it’s showing not only the current state, but how you got there.  Benefits include others’ experiences, not revising early decisions when new team members are added, and more.  The typical techniques of being explicit, modeling, evangelizing, promoting, etc, play a role here.

Then of course it has to be ‘safe’ to share, you can’t be working in a Miranda organization.  If your work will be held against  you in any way, you won’t want to share.  This means culture and policies and more. Basically, you need to be working in a Learning Organization, where the elements are aligned to facilitate optimal engagement.  This includes the practices about how to work out loud and learn out loud.

Another   issue is how far to share.  What can you share outside the organization?  Harold talks about the essential requirement of sharing outside the workplace, and that can be a big concern.  Obviously, proprietary work needs to be protected until it’s not business vulnerable. This means policies about what’s safe to share, and when.  Certainly, ‘sanitized’ work, where critical details are obscured but the thinking is shown should be supported in going out to communities of practice.  And the end result, when the business advantage isn’t threatened, could and should be shared through articles or webinars or conference presentations.

At the end, it’s a risk/reward tradeoff for any project at any time. What’s the benefit of getting feedback to improve versus what’s the downside of information getting out to competitors or exposing regulated data?  At any point, with any particular version of ‘anonymizing’, the balance may tip one way or another.   But the point is to be open to the benefit, and take advantage of it when and where you can.  Getting systematic at making it a regular part of any project is likely to be key.

It’s what I do here, and I encourage you to work out loud as much as you can.  So, any feedback so far?

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One of the things to do with models is use them as the basis to explain and predict.  And right now I’m working with the Coherent Organization model (which emerged from the work of the ITA) and looking at the implications for decisions.  How does this model map to choices you make in the organization?

There are three layers: work teams composed of members from different communities of practice, that are connected outward to broader social networks.  An important element is the flow of information within the model; ensuring that there are no barriers to making effective choices.

At the work team level, you want people to be able to communicate with one another effectively, and collaborate to find answers.  While this can occur face to face, you don’t want geography or chronology to be a barrier. So  you want good tools that can represent and support shared understandings. You might also want ways for the team members to find out more about each other, via profiles.  The members of the teams should be bringing in their understandings from their communities, but also be free to ask questions of their community in case their understandings aren’t sufficient. And of course they should share their learnings back with the community.

This latter naturally implies good communication and collaboration tools as well, but here the community is not only within the organization, but outside as well.  There certainly will be internal sites for the community with proprietary information and tools, but there also needs to be participation in the broader discussion. Just as you (should) go to conferences to share with colleagues not in your workplace, so too should you be participating in online communities. The learning should be ongoing.  This also implies that there needs to be an effective way to go beyond the intranet. You get security concerns here, but you need to find a balance, or you’re cutting off half of the organizational brain!  Team members should be asking questions of the internal and external communities (as appropriate, and policies about what’s allowed to be discussed, even if it’s just “don’t be an idiot”are fair enough), and answering them in turn.

And, of course, the community should be observing related communities of practice inside and out, and sharing their own learnings.  For example for learning design there’s a need to track developments in fields like software engineering (e.g. ‘agile methods’), design in general and specific design like game, graphic, interface, etc, sociology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and more.

Decisions, then, are about how to facilitate the most optimal flow of information without compromising organizational integrity.  Realize, of course, that except in extreme cases, these folks will have mobile devices, so in some sense you can’t really block their queries, but you really don’t want to anyway.  Yes, you lock up the data you have to protect, by law or  responsibility, but other than that you try to support communication that can advance the organization.  It’s about policies and technologies  (and of course culture, but that’s another story).

As always, so what am I forgetting?

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