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?
[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.
