Observations on leadership - part 5

Leadership is about encouragement, not management

We had another planning session in Noosa. This was years ago when the mighty corporations cared about people and spent money on them. That’s another quality of a good leader it seems to me – you need to care about people. And interestingly it’s an organisational cultural attribute as well as a personal one. Maybe organisations don’t have cultures, maybe they have values. But whatever your philosophical standpoint, valuing people is really important. We’re often much quicker to tell someone he cocked it up and not quick enough to tell him that he did a good job. Validating people’s contribution is important: it doesn’t need money or a lot of time. Get a senior person to send an e-mail to a more junior person complimenting them on their performance. It takes you no time and it works every time.

But, anyway, back to Noosa. Simon Ensleigh had been in the Army and he had been chief of staff to some Minister or other in the early years of the Howard government. Realising that being chief of staff to a Minister rather limited the concept of work-life balance he opted to join us as a client executive. We had some free time at Noosa and Simon, two others I cannot recall and I decided to hire a motor scooter each and blast off into Noosa the town. Off we went. Riding these scooters was non-trivial and the trip was further than I thought. We kept having to stop and start. When we arrived at Noosa I realised that, as we had stopped and started and come to terms with our machines, the three of us had each been determined to arrive before the others. Simon on the other hand had been concerned that – as a group – we all got to Noosa OK. His Army leadership training was quite clear – success is about bring the team across the line and safely home.

Life is not a race. Running a business is not a race. What we do usually depends upon others’ efforts and we need everyone across the line to succeed. Two things strike me about this. The first is that teamwork is important but also that a good leader must facilitate that by delegating and then encouraging and supporting, never ever by micro-managing. The best delegators may know that they could do the job better but never let on – or they recognise that they certainly could not do it and leave well alone. The second leadership attribute is the ability to value each member of the team, to understand their strengths and weaknesses and work with them.

Observations on leadership - Part 4

A good leader knows her limitations

I remember Phyllis Hampton really well. I worked for Digital Equipment (DEC) in the 1980s and Phyl was my manager for the whole 5 years I was there. I joined DEC from ICI and it was an amazing change. Gone was bureaucracy, gone was hierarchy and gone was stability. DEC’s revenues were $4bn when I joined and over $12bn when I left. Change was the norm. Phyl’s boss was a man called Geoff Beacroft and Phyl had worked for Geoff for years, at Honeywell, at ICL and now at DEC. I remember Phyl saying to me that she did not want Geoff’s job, that she was a good number two. At the tender age of 33 I was flabbergasted. How could you only want to be a number two? It took me a long time to realise that Phyl was showing another quality of a good leader – and she was a good leader. She knew her limitations: she knew what she was good at and that’s what she was happy doing.

A good leader is committed to the cause

I didn’t really know Judith Maltby particularly well. She was an corporate vice president. The corporation in question was an odd entity – like a curate’s egg, good in parts. What it was not particularly good at was picking senior leaders who listened. I used often to think that when you were elevated to the senior ranks you would have your ears cut off. Perhaps the idea was that if you said something enough times it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy – though it would be more likely to be a self-licking ice-cream! Another weak feature of the culture was a tendency for the loudest voice to hold sway – you’re OK if your trumpet plays the loudest. Unfortunately that can disadvantage some people – and they’re often the people that you want to hear from.

One of the things that this corporation was perennially focussed on was account planning. All the big organisations I have worked for have done account plans – they get thought about, written up, sometimes reviewed by people who are too distant to have any useful idea about anything, and then put on a shelf. They get to a point where they’re useless not so much because they’re not used but because they are demanded purely as part of a process. Senior people expect them because ... well, just because. I used to facilitate these account planning sessions from time to time. Generally speaking there would be a senior person who would turn up, sound off and push off. Sometimes she or he would promise to return at some point – but rarely did.

At one such session Judith turned up ... and she stayed the entire time. When we broke for lunch she was back on time. She did not open her laptop or take a call. This was so unusual that I commented on it saying that when she was ready to go to ends of the earth I would go with her. Perhaps that was a rash statement but she showed commitment. And commitment is a really important trait in a leader. It’s no good saying you’re committed – you have to show it and that often requires some degree of sacrifice.

Change is about loss

Change is about loss. It’s surprising how often this comes up in my day to day life.

Of course, the first challenge of change is to get managers to focus on it at all. There’s no problem getting an executive to agree that change is important because “it’s important that we bring our people with us ion the journey”. But that rhetoric is sometimes – and sadly too often – as far as it gets. The rhetoric has to turn into dollars and it has to turn into the commitment of senior time and permission for others to spend time championing the change. All that is straightforward. But we often make a serious mistake when we are thinking about change.

Those involved in the creation of a vision or the description of some brave new world are – almost by definition – sold on its attractions and benefits. But for those who are about to be changed, that brave new world doesn’t look quite so brave. They are about to be asked to stop doing something that they are used to and that they feel comfortable with.

Change is about loss. Change is about giving something up. Sure, it may be about getting something new. But when faced with a new thing we often don’t have a frame of reference to evaluate the new. If we only create that frame of reference in terms of the new – which so many change agents try to do – we will not be successful. We must craft our story from the perspective of the targets of change. They need to be pushed as well as pulled!!

The big life events are about loss in some way – when we get married, have a baby, buy a house, retire – all these events involve loss. The future is an uncertain place and that’s what can make it scary.

As change agents we need to understand and articulate what people are giving up and craft our story of the future in those terms.

Observations on leadership - part 3

A good leader makes use of silence

Geoff Peterson smoked a pipe. Over thirty years ago he was my third line manager – I think that’s right, my boss’ boss’ boss. He had a goatee and he was a thinker. He would call you into his office because by talking to us people lower down the food chain he would find out what was going on. I worked for ICI – a company that was then more bureaucratic than any public service: you knew everyone’s grade and what the pay scales were and the increments each year were absolutely standard. And like a good hierarchy talking to your boss’ boss was a rare event indeed (talking to one’s own boss was sometimes hard).

Geoff would sit you down in his office and ask you a question. As he finished asking the question he would start filling his pipe. Now, pipe smoking isn’t really about smoking. It’s about all the boring and reaming of pipe and bowl. It’s about the challenge of getting the thing lit and then keeping it lit. So the process of kick-starting the pipe was a long one – and it was longer than the time it took you to answer Geoff’s question. Of course Geoff was too busy with his pipe to say anything so silence reigned. Now, silence is embarrassing ... but you sat there. And Geoff kept playing with his pipe.

Eventually fear would get the better of you and you would start babbling. And it was that babbling that Geoff was after – he wanted to hear the real stuff, not the stuff you trotted out for form’s sake. So you would end up talking yourself into a hole – but giving Geoff what he needed. He was, as a result, a man in a senior position in a very hierarchical organisation who was almost intimately connected with what we did and with our problems – and all because he said nothing. Leadership is not about talking: it’s about getting others to talk. If you have got others to talk then you cannot have the data you need to make a decision – to lead.

I used this trick years later. The government decided that it needed to do a review into something or other and A Great Man was commissioned to undertake this review. I was foolish enough to volunteer to write the corporate submission to this review (I will never do anything like that again!) and I ended up going along to meet The Great Man. I was supposed to be accompanying the regional CEO who was really the mouthpiece but he was taken sick so I was on my own. Not a problem – you get to a point in your life when you no longer worry about what people think if you!! I walked into a room full of bureaucrats sitting around a large table at whose head was The Great Man. We shook hands, sat down and he said “Well, what’s your first point?” Not much by way of ice-breaking but I trotted out the first message. I finished. He said nothing. I said nothing. Silence reigned for maybe 30 seconds (which is a long time) and the bureaucrats began to shuffle. He gave in first!! “What’s your next point?” he asked. I replied. Same process. Silence. Discomfort from the audience – but that was it. After that we had a really good conversation. I suppose it was a power play though for what purpose I don’t know. But, thank you Geoff Peterson!!

Observations on leadership - part 2

A good leader inspires you

George Benson was a mathematician. He was a master at my school. As a young boy he was an enigmatic man who strode purposefully from A to B. His trousers were hitched up above his waist and his trouser legs flapped in the breeze as he walked. One of the features of our school was the Prefects’ Path. The Prefects’ Path was a short path that cut off a corner and saved its user perhaps 5 yards. It required the user to mount 2 steps. George never used the Prefects’ Path although as a Master he was so entitled. We young boys were sure that this brilliant man – and he was brilliant – had worked out that the energy required by the two steps outweighed the energy used by walking the extra 5 yards.

George only took sixth form classes – boys of 16 to 18 years of age. I took mathematics and George was what they called my Director of Studies. The story was that George had graduated from Cambridge a disappointed man. The Senior Wrangler is the top mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge, a position once regarded as the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain. George was reckoned to be in the running for Senior Wrangler. He missed out: he was the Second Wrangler. For George this was a bitter blow and he decided that he would spend his life teaching. Of course, you needed no teaching qualifications then and probably, if you had needed those qualifications, George would have failed. He never married and he was a brilliant Master (not that those two attributes are connected!!) No, he couldn’t teach but he could inspire you to learn. It’s not quite clear to me how he did this, possibly his sense of humour. “I like Handel’s Messiah’” he would say “when they don’t play it.” He had perfect pitch and couldn’t stand hearing anything played – he needed the notes on the paper!

“These University louts,” he opined, “if they hadn’t gone there, they’d be hooligans.”. It was these acerbic comments that enamoured George to us: through his wit he inspired us to do things that we might not have done – and he was wise enough to know when there was something that you shouldn’t do, and he would tell you. George was a leader – but he was a very strange sort of leader. He didn’t lead by dictat or by example, rather – somehow – he inspired us to be the best we could be.

Observations on leadership - part 1

A friend asked me today to talk about what I think makes a good leader. It’s not an easy question. Sure, there’s tons of stuff that Dr Google could tell you – but I kind of felt (with G B Shaw) that “those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach”. What I mean is that if I really knew what leadership was about I would be out there practising it and I wouldn’t have time to talk about it!

I rather lamely came up with the idea that the first attribute of a good leader is that she listens. I do think this is so but it’s not particularly helpful. But as I talked to my friend I realised that a piece I had been meaning to write for a long time would be a good way of thinking about leaders. That piece is a piece about the people in my life who have influenced me – the people who have made a difference to the way I am or the way I think and who I am.

Leadership is something that we all experience not only because we do it but also because we benefit from it – or not, of course, as the case may be. Leadership isn’t about being in charge but it is about making a difference. So this piece is about some of the people who have influenced me and why – and how I learnt about leadership – or what leadership means to me. Because leadership is personal: every leader leads in a different way – there is no magic formula. It’s about observation and practice.

Leadership is about other people – not about the leader

My first father-in-law (I have had several not all of whom I have met!!) was man called Jack Evans. He had taken a first in chemistry in the 1930s and had then decided that he would devote his life to teaching kids physics. Jack was a good sportsman in his younger days playing both rugby (union of course) and cricket for the University. When the captaincy of the cricket team was up for grabs there was a vote and Jack stood. He decided that the right thing to do was to vote for the other fellow and he lost by a vote!! Eccentricity was definitely a character trait!! When advised to wear orthotic socks that were available only in white he insisted on still wearing his customary black sock on the other foot.

He was in a reserved occupation in the war working in a munitions factory. When he was there, there was an explosion and a fire. Jack rescued some people and was recommended for the George Medal: he refused it.

When I knew Jack he would always leave the house at 6pm to go to the pub. His ambition was to drink as many pints of bitter as he could by 8pm. I never saw him drunk. I never saw him in a pub outside those hours. That’s an odd sort of discipline I know, but it’s a discipline nonetheless! Mind you, when he got home he would drink sherry with angostura bitters: as I say, eccentric. Jack got me into English literature. He would always say that he would die happy when he had read every book in world or when someone had told him where the first electron had come from. I guess he died unhappy.

Maybe Jack wasn’t a leader but he was a teacher and he helped make others leaders: he was basically selfless. I don’t think good leadership is always about the leader – it’s about the people that she leads. It’s about bringing out the best in people – and that’s what Jack did for me. I would never have been the reader (and I mean reader here – and perhaps also leader) that I am had it not been for Jack. And I wouldn’t have realised the importance of a pint of bitter in the great scheme of life! A leader understands balance – not everyone has the same view of what’s important as everyone else.

Technology and changing work practices

Two words to avoid

As management consultant I get the opportunity to observe what’s going on around me, to look at what’s changing and to relate those changes to the situations I find in the clients I service. It’s the opportunity to be student of organisational change that fascinates me most about what I do. After 40 years I sometimes doubt what I have learned but I always come back to two things: when it comes to providing advice about business change there are two words that should enter the lexicon: the one is “never” and the other is “always”.

After the first flight of the Boeing 247 in 1933, a twin-engine plane that held ten people, a Boeing engineer remarked that there would never be a bigger plane built. More amusing – and typically English I suppose – is the comment attributed to Sir William Preece the Chief Engineer of the Post Office, who said in 1876 that “the Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys”. The point about these quotations is less to be amusing than it is to point out that predictions are dangerous.

So I am not going to predict anything, rather I am going to retreat to what I have practised for all these years. I am simply going to observe and then make some comments. My intent in doing this, however, is to cause you to think, to get you to do the predicting!! The topic I was given, or perhaps I negotiated, is “Technology and work practices”. There’s not a lot to say about technology that we can’t read in the papers – it’s all getting faster, smaller, cheaper and, most important, everywhere. The technology is not what’s really interesting. What interests me is what opportunities it presents and, most importantly, in what way we seize those opportunities. It’s what we do with it. It’s a feature of the human condition that we seem to be infinitely flexible!!

Three technology forces for change

What I want to do is to outline three technology forces for change that seem to me to be important. Each of these three forces is happening today and each will make a big difference to the way we think and to the way we are and to the way we interact with each other.

Technology force for change #1: social media

One of the critical things that is changing about technology is not to do with computer processing. Even as late as a decade ago we would see adverts for laptops that told us how many megahertz their processors ran at. What we were supposed to do with that information is beyond me. We don’t see that anymore. A decade ago there was no Facebook or Twitter, and the words “social” and “media” would not be seen together in polite company!! The critical feature of technology today is its ability to connect. Communication is the new computing if you like. It is the growth of social media – notwithstanding the much-publicised stumbling of the Facebook float – that is one major technological force for change in the workplace. It’s not the only one. But faster, cheaper (often free), more reliable and increasingly accessible communications is my first force for change.

The opportunities presented by social media are significant but there are dangers. These may be summarised as:

¨          Persistence: With social computing, information can exist indefinitely. If you say something online, it may last longer than you expected it to;

¨          Speed: Anything communicated digitally can quickly go viral. This can have positive or negative repercussions; and

¨          Discoverability: Even a casual comment in a seemingly private online forum can be found much more quickly and easily than the same comment made at an offline social event.

Obviously there’s an upside and a downside here. Social media – as the Government has seen – is a force for good or not depending upon the user. And we have seen how difficult it is to control.

There’s one more dilemma inherent in improvement on-line communication. We’re connected 24 hours a day but we not connected face-to-face. What difference will this make? I have heard it said that people prefer to get information from other people. Is that true in this age of connectedness or are we happy with information from a machine that is representing a person?

Technology force for change #2: big data

Watson[1] is an artificial intelligence computer system developed by IBM and capable of answering questions posed in natural language. In February 2011 Watson competed in the quiz show Jeopardy against two human Jeopardy champions – and won. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content amounting to four terabytes of disk storage (including the full text of Wikipedia) but was not connected to the Internet during the game. The press had a field day but in one sense it’s not that surprising. A fast computer has access to a lot of data. Computers are faster than people – game over!! But that’s not the point: answering a question requires interpretation, the answers require some analysis and assessment on the basis of probability. There’s something required here other than speed.

Watson is able to do something that is a major current focus for the software industry. That something is called big data analytics. Even in technology terms it’s relatively new. This is my second major technology force for change. One of the most inappropriate software terms that has come into vogue over the last decade is “business intelligence”. Those of who have experienced “BI” will know it’s anything but intelligent. It’s a fancy name for reporting. Let’s call it “descriptive analytics”. We can use the word “analytics” because there is some analysis going on. But it’s descriptive – no more than that – because it works on what is known, it works on historical data.

There is, nonetheless, some change going on here. Because there are instruments everywhere recording what is going on, what is in the past may be as recent as a millisecond ago.  That in itself is a challenge. So descriptive analytics will tell me the results of all the horse races at Doncaster over the last 10 years. It’ll present me with facts or fact-based interpretations and inferences. That analysis still relies on me to decide whether to bet on the 2:30 tomorrow.

Predictive analytics is the major development that might help reduce the need for a human agent. In predictive analytics, the objective is to use advanced mathematical techniques on that past data to understand the underlying relationship between data inputs, outputs and outcomes. IBM used predictive analytics during Wimbledon 2012 with its SlamTracker technology™.

The problem with predictive analytics[2] is that it does not work well when a decision maker is faced with thousands or millions of options. Nor does it work well when a decision is needed just seconds after the data inputs are received. This is where prescriptive analytics comes into play. This third category of analytics, prescriptive analytics, uses mathematical optimisation to take into account a multitude of data inputs and constraints related to an objective. The formulae sift through potentially millions of possible decisions to prescribe the actions that will maximise the user’s objectives.

There are four things about – or characteristics of – prescriptive analytics that we need to remember. These are the four Vs: volume (that is the size of the database in terabytes, petabytes, or whatever), velocity (that is how fast the data arrives), variety (that is, what sort of data you have – structured data, unstructured text, voice, or video), and veracity (the degree to which data is accurate and can be trusted). These four things have important implications for the impact of prescriptive analytics on what we do and how we do it.

Knowledge management and big data

We might, at this point, make a small detour into knowledge management. When we talk about vast quantities of information we are often seduced into thinking that we are talking about knowledge management or KM. KM was in vogue perhaps 20 years ago, knowledge systems were touted, investments were made and, well, not a lot eventuated. Much was attempted but KM is essentially a human activity, it should not be confused with Big Data. In principle with big data analytics we can retrieve all relevant information and we can process it all. But ultimately, and certainly for sensitive decisions, big data analytics will not draw a conclusion; it can only present probabilities.

With KM I like to think of three rules[3]. First, I know more than I can say. Second, I can say more than I can write down. Finally, knowledge cannot be conscripted. It is in the third of these rules that the essential difference between KM and big data analytics lies: in principle I can conscript information from a massive database – no latter how massive. I cannot do that with a human mind.

A knowledge worker is someone who works with knowledge. Knowledge implies, for course, that there is information but it implies also that there is a context within which that information is interpreted and that there is an experiential base for that interpretation. When we look at the fourth of the Vs, veracity, we can tell the difference. The Watson machine can work out probabilities but only in the abstract. Unless and until a human contextualises those probabilities, there is no knowledge.

My second force for change is Big Data Analytics – I have spent more time on this because I think it’s the one of my three technology forces for change that we understand the least and that we may be the least prepared for.

As with my technology first force for change there is a dilemma inherent in Big Data. Given that there is so much information available, are we likely to become a race of skimmers? Will we breed people who can concentrate on one thing for the time it takes to draw deep conclusions?

Technology force for change #3: ubiquity

Many years ago, I think it was 1977 give or take a year, when I was a young Personnel Officer at ICI (they had not invented the term human resources at that time I think!!) I was sent off on a course to learn how to write queries to obtain management information. Together with a bunch of other young Personnel Officers we were taught to use a report generator called Mark IV to interrogate an IBM 360 to get all sorts of information about our people. This was achieved by filling in a form in a precise and particular way, the form was then processed mysteriously and eventually an answer appeared on that wonderful green-and-white computer paper. I recall waxing lyrical about the potential of computers to such an extent that one of my colleagues said “Do you have a computer in your bedroom?” This caused great mirth. I do not know what this fellow is doing now but if I ever met him again I would be able to say “Yes, in fact, I do!”.

Indeed we all have computers everywhere. And what is more they are all connected. We are living with an Internet of Things. There are small devices everywhere: in your electricity grid, hospitals, traffic systems and your homes. Each of these devices can collect information and send it off to the great database in the sky (or at least the cloud!) where our prescriptive analytics can make sense of it. The crucial point here is that the computer – or at least computing – is not going to go away. It has redefined the way we are and it will continue to do so. These devices will get smaller and more ubiquitous and, perhaps, increasingly pervasive. Because of developments such as free Wi-Fi in cafes and cloud computing, the devices we carry are smaller. So when you look at your desktop computer you have to be asking: “What does all that do? Why does it need to be so big?” Well, of course it doesn’t have to be that big and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t or couldn’t carry it around.

Summary

So, my three technology forces for change are improved communication, big data-analytics and an Internet of small and ubiquitous things. If I put these together then I can see that in the future information pathways are going to be less predictable than they have been in the past, not the least because there are so many of them and so many nodes at the end of each pathway. None of my three forces stands alone – each is connected to and overlaps the other two – and they are not, of course, a complete set of changes.

Changing work practices

On 24 January 1933 the following letter appeared in the letters page of the London Times:

“Sir

It may be of interest to record that, in walking through St James’s Park today, I noticed a grey wagtail running about on the now temporarily dry bed of the lake, near the dam below the bridge, and occasionally picking small insects out of the cracks in the dam.

Probably the occurrence of this bird in the heart of London has been recorded before, but I have not previously noted it in the Park.”

There was a post-script:

“For the purposes of removing doubts, as we say in the House of Commons, I should perhaps add that I mean a grey wagtail and not a pied.”

Note the date: 24 January 1933. A week later Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Our writer was Neville Chamberlain, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I like this letter because it says so many things about what has changed since then. He walked to work. No security detail!! He knew what was the difference between a grey and a pied wagtail. He had time to write – probably with a fountain pen – to the Editor of The Times. Presumably, then, he turned his mind to affairs of State!!

Three things occur to me as I reflect on Chamberlain’s letter. These things seem to me to be invariant in a working practice context: safety and security, knowledge and talent, time. Each of these is embedded in the points I want to make about my three technology forces for change. Of course technology will affect the workforce and we can see those effects now. Some of them sit uncomfortably with a structured workforce but some do not.

The impacts of technology on work practices are not all about speed. The thing about technology is not that it does things faster. The one thing that I have learned in my role as a student of organisational behaviour is that every time I hear an executive say that a new system will really only speed up what goes on I am anticipating an executive who will be caught out by the transformation that the new system enables.

We need to think about transformative changes. I am going to propose five possible shifts. Perhaps these are less shifts than accelerating trends – in many ways there is nothing new about these things but, in my day-to-day work, I see scant attention being paid to them.

Workplace change #1: time and place will be irrelevant

I have a 23 year-old working on one of the projects I am managing at present. I told him I was giving this talk and asked him what he thought was changing for him. His answer is related to my communication force for change. In the same way that communications can improve transparency of task, it can also allow opacity. He can use technology in such a way that I have no idea when he did something, when he opened the e-mail, when he wrote his reply and when he sent it. He can mask all that. With smaller devices there will be no need for fixed workstations. Supervision will not be driven by what we see but by the output we receive. Work will become something we do not a place we go.

One thing I have noticed about Gen Y – and I hesitate to do the sweeping generalisation – is that they are unimpressed with technology. For a long while as recruiters we would say that young recruits expected technology: I think now that this is a statement made by a boomer or a Gen X: the idea of expectation no more enters their heads than that fact that we drive cars enters mine. What Gen Y does with technology is that they use it, and they expect to use it anywhere – and with immediate effect.

Greater networking brings with it new challenges of security and on-line safety. We read in the press about changing attitudes toward privacy. With social computing, information can exist indefinitely. If you say something online, it may last longer than you expected it to last. These are factors that need to be considered in any discussion on changing workforce practices.

So my first workplace implication is that technology will make time and place disappear. We will need to learn to forget about how something is done, perhaps even when it is done and who does it. We will need to focus on quality of output and, yes, deadlines.

Workplace change #2: efficiency will derive from systems of people

In the early days of process automation and improvement, the ability to conceptualise, measure and optimise all the processes within the enterprise was the game changer. Today, as our focus shifts towards the human capital supply chains, the ability to do the same with people-centric processes, to conceptualise, measure and optimise will be the source of new value.

We have got most of the benefits we can reasonably expect out of fiddling around with business process reengineering. Tomorrow’s benefits will come from optimising the ways people work together. There are some aspects of human behaviour that we cannot change. A system of people depends upon people sharing knowledge and information and, if information is power then why would I ever share it?

Here we need to harness the power of big data analytics and incorporate capabilities that adapt content for situations and needs, and enhance communication across diverse pools of talent. This is relatively easy to understand in principle. Let’s consider the trends in social media. We tend to think of these trends in terms of our leisure activities – after all it’s our kids who use Facebook and who Twitters anyway? But these examples of social applications are just better known than many others. Systems of people are social networks: a company or a government agency works with such networks. Technology will enable adaptive social platforms that not only facilitate but also record and analyse business activity. And that analysis can be used to effect performance improvement. Managers will be able to examine throughput, queues, waiting times and results and dynamically adjust the system as a whole.

Lest this sounds a little big-brotherish there is another side to the coin. The type of leader required to take advantage of transparent network effectiveness will be a different type of leader than that we have today. Leading from the network is a different concept to leading from the front.

Workplace change #3: your success depends upon talent management

If working with Systems of People is about working with connections then talent management is about ensuring that the node at the end of each connection is optimally effective. As talent becomes more and more difficult to hire from outside, managers are increasingly looking to develop from within[4]. The Public Service has typically defaulted to internal development so on the face of it talent management should be a natural act. What’s changing of course is what those talents are and how they are made up.

Effective talent management develops organisational capabilities through each person’s skills, experiences, preferences, and digital reputation in a structured way, so that those capabilities can be used to run the business. The whole is the sum of the parts. Career development is an important mechanism of talent management. Unfortunately I often see career development processes that are too time-consuming and too bureaucratic to be effective. I have seen people leave an organisation because it is easier to be re-hired than to go through the promotion process.

An important input to talent management is learning and development. When you’re a consultant it’s pretty easy to be dismayed about the decisions that managers make. Eventually one becomes inured to it – they must have their reasons. But the pace of change is now so fast that it is not only technology that changes – it’s also skills. We have been talking about life-long learning for a few decades now and yet so often I see training being a low-hanging fruit for operation cost cutting. We need people who are adaptable not because they will be producing different things but because the tools, attitude and outlooks that they’ll need to succeed will be different. We also need to recognise and value diversity in the capabilities and experiences in the workforce: diversity of skills, ideas, personalities and genders. We need to ask whether there is a threat to diversity from connectedness.

Workplace change #4: virtual structures will replace physical structure

We have seen and continue to see some significant changes to the ways in which companies are structured. No organisation is immune to these changes and they will continue. Business models always change in response to market shifts, demographic change, trade sanctions and so on. Perhaps the major shift in the last small number of decades has been the shift away from performing activities that are peripheral to core business. We can already see private sector organisations (and some public) moving non-core activities to cheaper, offshore sources of labour. None of that has particularly changed the physical structure of the business: we can still write down an organisational structure.

As the pace of change continues to accelerate and talent becomes scarcer, the need to respond to that change will increasingly mean the creation of project teams to address particular problems. This approach to doing business is not new to firms in construction, consulting and health but it is new to a number of traditional industries. Organisational models that are built around ephemeral teams will become the norm. What is more is that the ability to form these teams depends absolutely on talent management to ensure that talent is available and to find out where it is.

A further change in the structure of larger processing organisations, including the insurance industry and some public service enterprises, will be increasing ability of systems to make decisions about risk. This ability of systems will remove the need for many jobs, with a resulting economic impact of course. Organisations will get smaller and this may be a challenge for managers who still measure their abilities and contribution on the number of people they manage rather than on the outputs they produce.

Workplace change #5: leadership must be transparent

Lastly, we come to the hardy perennial: leadership. Leadership, and the values that constitute it, has been and continues to be the subject of more papers and speeches than you can count. No doubt that will continue. What we are interested in is how technology change will affect leadership and in particular how my three technology forces for change will change the characteristics required of a good leader.

Improved technological communications provides leaders with a challenge. Traditionally leaders have tended to be been visible, inspiring people who lead from the front and who create followers. Our organisation of the future is likely to be distributed and physically separate, it may be based on rapidly engaging and disengaging teams to tackle particular problems. Where is the leader in this networked world? As I said before, leading from the network may be different to leading from the front.

The Public Service Commission has, not surprisingly, recognised the important of leadership. “Ahead of the Game: The Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government Administration”[5] identifies a requirement to enhance leadership development. The APS Leadership Development Strategy[6] is built on the need for adaptability, collaboration, comfort with complexity and ambiguity, and aligning skills to tasks.

I am indebted to a colleague for putting me right on leadership. Even if it’s true that leading from the network is different than leading from the front, we will do well to remember that leadership is about relating to people – whatever the changes in technology. Technology change underlines the need to lead people and not things.

We must avoid being distracted by all those people out there advocating some hot new leadership fad. At the end of the day, it all boils down to a simple philosophy – ‘it’s about them, not me”. It’s about having an understanding (and caring about) the impact your behaviour has on others. It’s about really knowing the people you’re interacting with as a leader and adjusting your behaviour to suit the situation and the person. This perspective helps to transcend the hundreds of leadership perspectives, where one day we’re talking about “leading different generations”, then talking about “leading in complex times”, then “leading across cultures”, then “leadership in the digital age”, and so on. Surely all of these have a common theme: make sure you know and understand the changing nature of the followers and engage appropriately with them. A good leader is transparent: we can see through him or her to the goal we need to achieve – digital age or not!

Conclusion

My three forces for change are:

¨          Technology is now about improved, or at least different, communication possibilities. There’s nothing wonderful about social media but it is here to stay and we had better get to grips with it;

¨          Big data analytics is a significant shift in systemic analytic ability but its promise may be rather greater than its ability to deliver – and it will not replace knowledge and talent; and

¨          The Internet of Things means that on-line access is not something we will need to look for. Because we carry our access about we are, in principle, always available. What is the distinction between work and life?

In thinking about the areas of impact on work practices I identified three constants:

¨          Safety and security;

¨          Knowledge and talent; and

¨          Time.

I described five areas where technology change may impact working practices. These areas are not new in themselves but the three technology forces may change that way that they are realised:

¨          Time and place will be irrelevant;

¨          Efficiency will derive from systems of people;

¨          Your success depends upon talent management;

¨          Virtual structures will replace physical structure; and

¨          Leadership must be transparent.

How will you need to change to incorporate all this?

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[1]                 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer), accessed 10 August 2012

[2]                 http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2012/08/advancing_analytics.html, accessed 13 August 2012

[3]                 I am indebted to David Snowden on the Cynefin Institute for these three rules (see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin, accessed 13 August 2012). They are not quite what he says (he has more rules) but they are close enough.

[4]                 There is a significant body of literature that bemoans the skills or talent shortage. One Australian source is the Australian Human Resources Institute’s people@work/2020 – The Future of Work and the Changing Workplace:  Challenges and Issues for Australian HR Practitioners at http://www.ahri.com.au/MMSDocuments/profdevelopment/research/research_papers/fow_white_paper.pdf, accessed 14 August 2012.

[5]                 http://www.dpmc.gov.au/publications/aga_reform/aga_reform_blueprint/docs/APS_reform_blueprint.pdf, accessed 14 August 2012.

[6]                 http://www.apsc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/1350/leadershipdevelopmentdtrategy.pdf, accessed 14 August 2012.