Self-directed innovator

Yesterday I sat in a presentation and heard the target group of Google’s products. They call it the self-directed innovator – the new class of workers that transformed out of the Knowledge Worker of the 1980s and the Office Worker of the 1950s. Some of the characteristics of self-directed innovator:

- Not process driven
- Collaborates with broad network of friends and colleagues
- Intermingled personal and work lives
- Needs information even when not at her desk
- Tends not to be patient

Basically, self-directed innovators want to get a job done. They don’t want to be busy, but productive. This is a great attitude, but it poses some problems for organizations. These are usually run from a central command structure and try to manage the landscape through processes. But this excactly frustrates this new class of worker: feeding an organizational hunger for reporting and compliance. Big organizations don’t seem to be a good place for self-directed innovators.

What would need to change? I think we need a shift along the axis of control & accountability. With the focus on processes, organizations tend to be high in control and low on accountability (you are responsible for compliance and business). If an organization could focus more on high accountability and low on control (responsible for outcomes and value), then it would really move towards a „network of brains“. Too often, initiative is tied to titles and stiffles the creativity and ownerhsip of employees beyond their own cubicle. Anyway, without being too much rock’n’roll here I think Google is on to something.

The making of an HR consultant

Today we sat in a meeting room from dawn to dusk and filled flip charts with too many thoughts for anyone to remember. At the end we called it a strategy and I was slightly discomforted with the amount of admin work that I see swamping my inbox. The whole conversation kept bringing up the tension in HR between wanting to be make an impact (aka adding value/being strategic) and having to do maintenance and admin. For the last year I have seen the only way forward to step up my own consulting skills and use the few chances that I get. So where do you learn the HR consulting skills you need? Here is what I came up with:

I have mentioned in a previous post that experience and standing is very important in impacting from an HR point. That takes time and, well experience. I was lucky to be linked to some experienced HR folks and tried to learn what I can from them.

Beyond that I have gotten together with some other HR peers that share my view and would like to look beyond. So we put together a CoachingOurselves set for HR. We followed Dave Ulrich’s framework on the role of HR and identified 15 topics that we would like to discuss. It works quiet nice and engages us in some good discussions.

Finally, I asked some business professors that I came across in our strategy trainings what they recommend. Besides coaching skills, they came up with the following reading list:

Peter Block – flawless consulting
This is a great book for the process of consulting and how to cover the various aspects of working as a contractor to solve problems. It took me quite a while to go through it and helped with good advice on various stages.

David Maister – the trusted advisor
This book addresses the various stages from a relationship angle and shows activities for each of them. It is a good resource for thinking through the various aspects of working with managers.

Barbara Minto – The pyramid principle
Most consultants recommended this book. It talks about how to structure thoughts, problems and presentations and has become invaluable to me. Also a slow read, but very helpful since people appreciate clear thoughts.

Peter Senge – the fifth discipline
I have avoided this one for long now. Too popular so I wondered how good it can be. When it was recommended in this context, people highlighted the systems thinking aspect. I am a big believer in this (“poets are the original system thinkers”) since most problems seem to me systemic in my daily experiences.

This is just a quick starter on the way. The tug between admin and consulting remains, but it might be time to build the skills since chance favors the prepared.

Output?

Every now and then a book keeps changing you long after you closed the cover on it. This summer I read Tim Ferriss’ The Four-Hour Workweek since I am up to anything that is wacky and gets a lot of links. Since then, it has continued to shift my GPS coordinates on how I approach my job and look at challenges: not the effort counts, but the output.

It seems sort of simple that output is more important than input. Somehow it slips the attention in most cases though that not all input is created equal. Some activities are huge on generating results and others are huge on effort with little connection to what you want to reach. The Pareto Principle is so common that most people ignore it, just like the picture of the kids on the fridge.

These days I am wondering why output-thinking is so rare, especially in HR. Is it that it takes the output is unclear? The first task might be to think through what would actually count. And since this is really non-trivial, people end up looking going with whatever inputs they find nice and fitting. So much HR KPIs I have seen are pure activity: number of transactions, number of calls handled, participation rates in whatever, feedback in a I-liked-it format.

Take the case of 360°-Feedback. Why are you doing it? Couldn’t the most effects be reached with simple, frank conversations? What’s the point of spending countless hours placing clicks on unclear dimensions and hundreds of dollars just to find out you need to listen more?!

Sure, HR doesn’t have the single focus of a bottom line as sales does. It is real fuzzy and complicated to find your focus. But if you don’t know your output, you will fall back to activity focus which leads to ineffectiveness and a frustrating work experience. Translate: high cost, smart people go elsewhere.

So one of the first issues for HR is to figure out what the output is. This is actually the first issue of everything that needs to be done (for example for your blog and posts, or in coaching). If you don’t your GPS will stay focused on activity and Pareto will be your worst friend.

peoplesignals vs processsingals - the future of the people business

What will HR look like in 2015? Recently, I came across a small scenario exercise that predicted the future of HR will be determined by the combination of two factors:

• Dollars or people
• Outsourcing or not

With these two trends the authors sketched 4 scenarios for HR in 2015:

Scenario One: Say It with Numbers
Assumptions: Organizations are ruthless about demanding a return on their human capital investments. Only the most repetitive, non-value-added transactions are outsourced.

Scenario Two: The Ambassador
Assumptions: Organizations recognize relationships as critical to success. The company holds the reins of most HR functions, and outsourcing is minimal.

Scenario Three: Two Heads Are Better Than One
Assumptions: HR is under pressure to ensure that human capital investments provide a solid return. The use of HR outsourcing has risen significantly.

Scenario Four: Relationships Are a Risky Business
Assumptions: Organizations renew their efforts to capitalize on relationships, both within and external to the business. HR outsourcing is used widely to deliver HR services.

Now, all that sounds to me like a decision whether HR will be a champion of people or process. The processsignal-approach to HR is in search of The Mighty Dashboard, squeezes the dollar on human-ROI and centralizes as much as possible. Low costs are certainly a plus. The question is whether growth can be gained by minimizing costs. The peoplesignal-approach realizes the we live in a liquid world where the best solutions are local and growth is fueled by strategic people investments. It seems that in the last years there was a big emphasize on the process quality of HR. The problem with the Big Master Plan approach to HR was nicely put in a recent study on how to measure an HR strategy:

Every business has its own strategic priorities, with unique HR implications and requirements; we could not identify a meaningful universal “template” for measuring HR’s business contributions.

Why is there no meaningful universal template? Maybe because there can’t be one. HR played too long on the wrong side of the field, the field in search of universal solutions. If Talent Management is mainly seen as a process instead of a relationship then it is no wonder that companies get into a war for talent and can’t control their people costs. Maybe we listened too much to the wrong signals. Maybe it’s time to tune in to more peoplesignals.

the changing currency of work

A while ago I got an essay that a friend wrote in his business school course. In his fifites, it was a very autobiographical piece, dealing with his role in a large company with frentic changes. He was wondering: what am I doing? is it worth it?

I heard those questions quiet a bit recently. People seem a bit disillusioned at handling Excel and PowerPoint all day in order to excel in the company and powerup their career. It seems like the currency of what people look for is changing a bit. Big companies used to offer stability, variety, safety and options. With that comes a hefty dose of politics, reporting, inefficiencys, nonsense. Companies themselves seem to cancel some of the very reasons people work there: safety doesn’t hold anymore (jobs going east, struggling for survival) and stability is a joke (who has the same manager for more than a year these days?). Along with long hourse and a frustrating limited scope of what you actually can do, it is fair to ask: is it worth it? The new currency seems to be time and flexibilty. There are a number of books and articles taking up this thought.

Tim Ferriss - to live like a millionaire, you don’t need a lot of money

Tim’s book The Four-Hour Workweek beats the drum to escape 9-5 and fulfill your dreams. His assumption is that a lot of work is unnecessary, that it could be managed much better and that you can do a lot with little money. (Actually, the hard part is knowing what to do if you are not caught up in seemingly important work projects.) He calls for a liberation from the constraints of the office. If you are not at your desk, you can be more effective, or outsource your job altogether. That boots your options in time and location.

Daniel Pink - free agent nation

Free Agent Nation was published 10 years ago - at the dawn of the bubble. Some statements sound very pre-bubblish, but the trend has being going for a while: why invest in a stale corporate environment when you have the smarts to be more flexible and work on what you want? “In free agency,” the beat of the free agents goes “people assume their own shape rather than fit the shape of some corporate box.”

Holm Friebe - digital bohemia

A German book (”wir nennen es Arbeit“) that shoots against fixed employement in favor of a digital lifestyle of small collaborative teams on the move. Sounds a bit Jack Kerouck-ish. Young people need their ideals and rebellion. But it does indicate a bigger point: why not be with the work I like at the time I like at the place I like?

The answer might be the paycheck. As any free agent finds that is not in demand - it kind of sucks to be out of money and options. Probably a lot of people who ventured off into the dreamland of doing their own thing came back to the comfort of a big corporation with company car, health insurance and days off for vacation.

I still think the trend is the quest for something more. Especially talented people are aware that the company needs them more than they need the company. With the limited budgets in the Western countries, you can’t forever raise the income of your stars (and btw: the middle 80% is what make the business tick). So what can companies do? What can HR offer? I think it would be worth a try to offer the benefits of a free-agent-lifestyle (like free location, free times) with the benefits of a corporation (paycheck, insurance, vacation). Focus on outputs and leave it up to the semi-free people to figure out how they get the work done. Sure, communication might be an issue, but is it not anyways? Which company does really have a no-waste meeting culture? Where can you really focus and get quality work done between 9 and 5?

Maybe it would be the brave new world of collaboration. In The Compensation Handbook by Berger & Berger they highligh a number of trends that affect compensation and fit within this vein: people are more open to risk and seek self-employment; people choose jobs to support personal development opportunities and to support their personal lifestyles; the invisible paycheck becomes more important than the visible; the global workforce move closer and collaborates. Maybe it’s time for HR to think through this.

HR Business Partner – what on earth are they here for?

For a couple of years I have been in this role of an HR Business Partner. “Keep line management from escalating and roll out stuff” were the general job descriptions. “Oh, and use your knowledge to solve problems”. I have come to like the job, but have never seen so much self-reflection and discussion on the own job profile. True, HR is prone to that. Maybe it’s the suspicion that we are overhead and overhead is bad. Or that we aren’t quantifiable and that is bad. So what on earth is the value of an HR Business Partner?

Realizing that great administrative processes are commodity, HR came to the conclusion that you need someone to sell the services to line management and solve local problems. So the HR Business Partner needs to earn the trust on local level and understand the pain points of his partners. A recent analysis of job descriptions by the Corporate Leadership Council points out words like: ambassador, implementation, align business and HR strategy. CLC says, usually HR folks are good experts, but not very good at the following crucial skills:

• Implementation skills (results focus, project management, change management, HR technology proficiency, and vendor management)
• Business skills (organisational understanding, business/finance/economics/statistics understanding, data analysis, and understanding of global environment impact business).

This whole strategy thing irks me somewhat. It sounds too much like a desperation cry of someone who doesn’t know what is going on. Well, maybe a become strategic. Whenever I see a good HR Business Partner it strikes me that they have a good standing with senior management (personality) and get things done for them (experience).

Dave Ulrich makes the point, that HR comes in as a big chunk of the intangible assets. People are not just a huge part of the payroll but they are what brings companies their income. HR should wear the peoplesignals hat: what is going on at the people side of things? What do we need to do to manage our people assets? The HR Business Partner is best suited to have the ear to the ground and get things done. They should bring the appropriate attention to peoplesignals and provide solutions that work. Most managers are caught up in their daily battle to get things done, so HR BPs bring a deBono-like hat to amplify the human side of things.

Thomas just kicked off a series of show-yourself-HR articles pointing out HR hate, pleading for statistics and asked for risk coverage (others have responded). There seems to be two streams in the arguments:

• HR, learn statistics so you can prove your point
• HR, just understand the business and get peoplethings done

While the statistics case is compelling with an air of objectivity, I have not seen enough in action to believe. So an executive sees that pay-per-employee is rising, what now? Time to fill positions too high, action please! I have the feeling this peoplesignals business doesn’t work well when aggregated on an HR-KPI dashboard. Executives like their dashboards, but most actions following a problem on HR-KPIs turn out to be silly KPI-tweaking exercises. Maybe we need smarter KPIs. That would certainly help.
It seems that HR gets more street credit by thinking business and coming up with peoplesolutions that work (not that benchmarked me-too thingy). Lisa Brummel at Microsoft seems to be such a case. Again: credibility and experience. Jack Welch weighs in on this case:

Look, HR should be every company’s “killer app”. What could possibly be more important than who gets hired, developed, promoted or moved out the door? After all, business is a game, and as with all games, the team who puts the best people on the field and gets them playing together, wins. It’s that simple.
Leaders need to put their money where their mouths are and let HR do its real job: elevating people management to the same level of professionalism and integrity as financial management.

HR departments that plan picnics, put out the plant newsletter and generally drive everyone crazy by enforcing rules and regulations that appear to have no purpose other than to increase bureaucracy. They derive the little power they have by being the “You-can’t-do-that” police. So how do leaders fix this mess? It all starts with the people they should be hiring to run HR: not kingmakers or cops but big-leaguers, people with real stature and credibility.

Trust and judgment are really the operative words here. Those traits are what being a great HR practitioner is all about. To be truly effective in any HR leadership role, people in the organization must believe you have unfailing integrity.

HR needs to be the Business Partner to amplify the peoplesignals on the company agenda. If they do, the benefits will be beyond KPIs.

What kills prediction markets

Recently I have been amazed again at the accuracy of prediction markets – and at their uselessness and irrelevance.

In the last weeks we had a few major decision coming up in Germany. The first one was who will win the soccer Bundesliga; the second who will be Germany’s Next Topmodel. Both competitions were very tight calls and had huge media attention. It was no suprise then that there were numerous polls on who will win these races. In the first case, it has been the closest race in recent Bundesliga history. Two games before the end, there were 3 teams that were in close reach and could all win one of Germany’s most important trophies. In the leading spot was Schalke 04, the team with the biggest budget of the three and close runner-ups in recent years. Second came VFB Stuttgart, the surprise team of the season with young players, relatively small budget and not a cup in 15 years. Third came Werder Bremen, the team that dominated the first half of the season and also the Bundesliga champ in recent years. Close match, open outcome. What would the masses predict?

Germany’s biggest newspaper (Bild Zeitung) opened a poll on who would come in first. As people voted they seemed to favor the underdog: VFB Stuttgart. Two weeks later, Germany had a new national champion – the young, inexperienced players from Stuttgart. Wow! That was a great call – no clarity in that decision and the masses were correct. James Surowiecki must have liked that.

The second show-down came with the casting show of Germany’s Next Topmodel. Heidi Klum took the Tyra-Banks role and eliminated a beautiful ambitious girl each week. The final was made up of three hopefuls: Hana (the dark-haired czech with Angelina-lips and previous model experience), Ani (the blonde who worked in her parents boutique) and Barbara (the redhead studying math in Bavaria). Who would wear the crown at the end of this competition?

Again, Bild set up a poll. To my suprise (and some other bloggers as I have read), the predicted Barbara as the winner. Last weeks show came down then with a big suprise: Barbara won the competition. Another Surowiecki-moment!

Both calls have been sort of odd to me. There was nothing clear in any of those calls. But both times the masses trumped the experts. There were two additional observations though that kind of killed the Surowiecki-glory of those polls:

What lacked in both polls was the number of participants. In the Bundesliga draw there were 2000 people engaged and in the Topmodel vote about 1000. That is almost nothing. The Bundesliga is followed closely by maybe 20% of the populiation (would result in 15 million individuals). .The Bild Zeitung is the biggest daily publication in Germany and is filled with Bundesliga news daily. Of all those people only 2000 voted. I am too lazy to do the math, but it doesn’t strike me as a lot.

The picture fort he Topmodel-competition is similar. In pre-final episodes they had a market share of 25%, which is around 3 million people. Of all those media-savvy young people who blog and youtube about this event, on 1000 cast their vote in prediciting the outcome. These marginal percentages in participation are similar to what I have witnessed with the pilot at our company. At ouf the 125 people signed up for the market, only 4-5 really traded. This is a lowsy participation.

It is all the more striking since the accuracy proves so true. Also at the internal market, the active people were quiet good and the returns were nice. People genuienly like the idea of bottom-up information gathering and no-bullshit predicitons. But then no one participated. If I look on the web at prediction scenarios, they don’t look much better: bizpredict is lame etc. So even though the results are beautiful, they are obviously of no use to the people.

Which brings me to the final killer on the use of prediciton markets: irrelevance. What could Werder Bremen do about being traded as a non-winner? What could Schalke or Hana do about it? In a company we might say that these information can filter in to the correction process or uncover problems early. May be. But so far the prediciton markets don’t have a mechanism to feed up the right ideas to address a loosing trade in the market. And that is a problem. A big one. Transparency only helps if it can trigger some correction actions. And if the masses are not involved in solving the problem then the ball is back in the hand of the few experts.

While Surowiecki seems relevant to our thoughts on how to gather information and our ideology of the positive effect of involving people, the reality shows that it is no easy step to do what matters most in business: being useful and relevant.

coaching ourselves: business learning 2.0

I recently stumbled across an interview with Phil LeNir about “coaching ourselves”. This whole peer-coaching and learning-from-each-other always seemed interesting to me. Big companies spend big bucks on big training programs that often don’t have a big return. Sure, they evaluate right after the training how people liked it etc. While these figure might make for a nice PowerPoint-justification of the budget, I often have the feeling that the Dollars are not really turned into value as they should.

Part of the problem might be the unreal setting of those workshop-programs. Away from the people I work with. Concepts that don’t easily fit my reality. Little follow-up after these sessions. Maybe it is not so much concepts that need to be taught but rather attitudes, behaviors and approaches. It is telling that most companies don’t track the impact of a training some months after the trainings. That might be too revealing, so you measure where it still looks good. So why go do companies keep going with this kind of training? I suspect that they don’t have any better alternatives.

But maybe there is a better alternative. In these web2.0-days of openness, collaboration and bottom-up intelligence, it seems time for a change in the training departments. Here are a number of these approaches that point in the direction of learning2.0:

Workout – this approach to problem solving was developed at General Electric under Jack Welch and is well documented. Basically, you bring a big group of people together (20-200), state the problem to them, let them come up with specific recommendations and then decide on what to implement. I have worked with this: very bottom-up-ish, very effective and very empowering. 

Wiki & Crowdsourcing – the idea of having an open everyone-contribute encyclopedia seemed very edgy a few years ago. These days wiki sites are amongst the first in almost any Google search and many people rely on its information. Crowdsourcing takes this idea to how work gets done in a company and opens it for the undefined crowds. iStockphoto is an example: people upload their photos and they are sold through iStockphoto with the money being split. What used to be a specialists job (shooting great images) is now up to the crowd.

Open Source Car – the OScar project is a very interesting consequence of this open approach. The idea is to create a car based on the open source principles with the hope of designing breakthroughs in mobility. There are a few basic specs, but the rest is open to everyone with no patents or legal limitations. The current version is at 0.2 but we will see if this approach works.

Omidyar Network - eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar, set up a foundation that tries to enable individuals to improve the quality of life. They invest in people with ideas in areas such as microfinance, participatory media, open innovation, open source and transparency in government. They have an interesting set of projects they founded. What is interesting though is the decentralized nature of their venture. Not some hired researches that crank out great ideas, but funding of the most promising results of the network.

Coaching Ourselves – coming back to the learning issue in organizations. This approach works by getting a small group of learners together, meeting once a week for 90 min and discussing their experience and some relevant concept. No authority is present that teaches and no pre-readings, ppts, actions plans are used. Just one basic theme that is discussed in the group. The premise is that people learn best from their experience. Reflection and relevance are the two ingredients that fuel discussion and learning.

I also like the focus of these sessions. By using the five minds of managers from Henry Mintzberg (the reflective mindset; the analytic mindset; the worldly mindset; the collaborative mindset; the action mindset), the approach tries to keep a balance and not become one-sided. So not just people management, not just strategy, but a balance between the managerial mindsets.

I am just running pilots with this program in a management team. They love it so far. Finally, something non-fluffy and real. Other groups are interested and we want to extend it to non-managers. It is too early to tell, but from the reactions I see in learners and my own assumptions of how to learn best, this might be just the right idea at the right time. Being cost-effective, learning-effective and scalable this might be the better alternative that is currently missing.

The (un)wisdom of prediction markets

We are just on the verge of launching a first prediction market in my area at work. I have been infected with the idea of swarm intelligence by reading Wisdom of the crowds. The premise seems great: many people are smarter than the smartes. The promise is: this tacit knowledge can be made visible through a stock-market mechanism. So I researched a bit and found that companies use this for different purposes: Google predicts the launch date of new products; Microsoft the numer of bugs in a software; HP looks at sales volumes and GE judges innovative idea. These are all nice, but the more I deal with it, the more I hear the question: so what?

My standard reply is something around: gathering people, sharing the process, making intangible knowledge transparent, bringing focus to a topic. What draws me to prediction markets is the potential as an organizational tool. It involves the grassroots people who are doing the work and makes decisions transparent and accountable. If the market works correctly and suppliers are judged by their customers, then it could even involve something like an internal supplier-customer-rating that might work better than silo-focused MBOs. Anyway, that is a bit further away. Still, I wonder myself: so what?

What happens if your market shows that the product won’t launch on time? Who has a benefit from that knowledge? I realize that many people don’t even want to know. Not that they don’t want to face the truth – the know already – but they are not comfortable with having it black on white and for other to see. Also: what happens if the market predicts a no-show for a product? Is there any mechanism for judging the reason or suggestion alternatives? That would certainly be nice: use swarm intelligence to suggest improvements and have the market collectively judge the best ones.

Similiar thing with bugs in a software. Nice to know that this might be not up to standards, but even nicer to have a market that predicts (and pre-selects) the most promising levers for chaning it. Sales volums is similar, just as innovation.

It seems to me that the prediction market suffers from a criteria it has to be matched against. The value of the stocks being traded is tied directly to the criteria being defined. The markets don’t allow collective problem-solving, impact estimation or decision-influencing. It reflects what people think about the future. Currently, I haven’t see a way that it enables an organization to shape the future with collective intelligence. With that it might really answer the question of so what. It would be a tool for improvement and collective participation. Now, that is a stock I would buy.

How to get people to work together and change

I had a big aha-moment reading a recent Harvard Business Review article. In this text, Clayton Christensen and colleagues discuss that there are different tools to get people to work together and change behaviors. Most change books are about the one method you can use to change organizations. But they actually highlight that there are different ways to drive change depending on the context factors. So they propose to look on the agreement along two dimensions: what people want and how the envision it happen.

Depending on where you are along these axes, different tools are important to support collaboration or change. Especially this cause-and-effect axis is very interesting. I have repeatedly observed that in an intense group there is high agreement on what is wanted, but not so much on the means. The tools they propose are helpful to navigate in this system. The message is that there is simply not just one way to bring about collaboration. You need an understanding on where you are and then what tools you use to drive that. Or as they say it so well themselves:

“One of the rarest managerial skills is the ability to understand which tools will work in a given situation—and not to waste energy or risk credibility using tools that won’t.”

Good stuff!