Month: September 2010

In my book on Organisation Culture I ask the question "Can culture be measured?" Here's an extract from the chapter that deals with that question.

Edgar Schein, in The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, discusses several reasons "why culture surveys do not and cannot measure culture":

1. There is no way of knowing what cultural dimensions are important in any one organisation. Even so, the surveys make an assumption that the dimensions they pick up are the same for all organisations that take that survey. In the example above the cultural dimensions being asked about focus on behaviour and include people's relationship to the organisation's mission, vision, and/or values: the "mood" of the organisation, the activities of leaders, what people complain about most, the structure of people's relationships. Without doing a lot more digging for information it is not clear on what basis these behaviours (if they are behaviours) have been picked out.

2. There is little recognition, at least in off the shelf surveys that culture covers all aspects of a group's external tasks and internal integration processes the ways these interact, integrate, and endlessly recombine. This is likely to be because these dynamic factors cannot be adequately addressed in a survey.

3. There is no way of knowing what a respondent is reading into the questions. In the example above, is 'mood' being experienced in the same way by everyone? Are complaints across the organisation the same and why are there only five things to complain about?

4. There is no way of knowing what the individual interpretation of a question is (or, indeed, if the respondent is answering honestly or in good faith), it is a leap of faith to assume that individual responses can be aggregated into a perspective on the whole organisation's culture. In this regard, Warren Bennis made the point that "you can't just pop a culture in a microwave and out pops a McCulture"

5. There is an implication that if the survey results show issues or problems then something will happen to address these. However, there may not be a will to do anything about the issues, for example if there are "clusters of people who feel they have very little impact on how the organisation is run", so what? If the organisation is performing well although lack of impact may be of importance to the responders it may not be a material finding to their managers. (Which, in itself, says something about the culture of the organisation).

Beyond the five reasons discussed by Schein there are several others that contribute to the case that surveys 'do not and cannot measure culture' including:

6. They take a reductionist view of culture which attempts to isolate independent cultural variables (norms, attitudes, values, behaviours, management practices, etc.) and 'treat' them. The problem with this is that even if surveys had meaningful variables they are not independent. Every variable is dependent in some way on every other. The previous chapter has made the argument that taking this approach is like taking an element of the weather (e.g. hours of sunshine in a given period) and assuming that manipulating this as an independent variable (were it possible) would change the weather in a desirable direction.

7. They imply that 'fixing' a culture that's 'broken' or working out what is great about a culture and needs protection can be quick and painless. Neither is the case. (Chapter 7 discusses the question 'Can culture be changed?').

8. They assume, by using the same dimensions in the survey, that organisation culture is homogeneous and shared across all employees. Again this is not typically the case. In organisations of any size there are sub-cultures, counter cultures, and variations in culture (as in the day to day weather analogy described in Chapter 1).

9. They take the view that organisation culture is 'transmitted' through behaviors and actions of employees within an organisation. This does not allow for the complexity of the interplay between internal and external 'transmission' routes and the chaotic and dynamic nature of culture.

10. They purport to be more than a snapshot in a particular time period – over-riding the dynamic and constantly changing nature of culture.

The popular Dilbert cartoon series created by Scott Adams has generated the 'Dilbert Metric' that neatly and absurdly makes the point about trying to measure an organisation's culture using surveys.

"The Dilbert metric involves showing ten Dilbert cartoons selected at random to members of an organisation. Each member rates the cartoons on a scale of zero to ten. Zero means the cartoon is wholly applicable to the organisation while ten means the cartoon is not at all relevant. Each individual's score is totalled up and an average score of all the totals is taken. The resulting figure is an indication of the health of the organisation's morale and culture: the closer the figure to zero, the closer the organisation to the Dilbertesque, chaotic view of corporate life; the closer to one hundred, the better".

Peter Blocks's foreword to a recently released book on positive deviance (aka 'bright spots' in the Heath brother parlance), Inviting Everyone: Healing Healthcare through Positive Deviance makes the point that:

We all have a long tradition of thinking about individual transformation, but the question of how collectives or social systems are transformed by design is still open for discovery. We are familiar with how social systems can be disrupted by forces like technology, or shifts in markets, or political upheaval, but how to reform a social system growing out of the explicit intention of its own members is still cluttered with conventional practices that struggle to fulfill what they were designed to do.

I was reminded of this during a meeting last week when a business unit head remarked that she expected 75% of her staff to leave rather than take on the extra 45 minutes each way on their commute that the office move to a new building imposed on them. Her anxiety was that there would be a total collapse of business continuity if this happened. But at the same time that she worries about three-quarters of her workforce leaving, she is also aware that the move will disrupt the existing social system enough to potentially bring in its wake transformative positive change and a much better way of operating the business.

So how can she use the move in a positive way to achieve that end rather than a decimated and angry workforce?

Block offers a way forward. He remarks that:

Social systems are human systems. They are complex systems, as mentioned in the book. Which means that they cannot be reasoned, persuaded, driven, engineered, or implemented into an alternative way of functioning. They have to be invited, enticed, seduced, engaged into participating in what could be called a self- inflicted wound. Real change in human systems has to be bought, it cannot be sold. The easy term for this is self-organizing or self-managing change.

Suppose we approached the move not from the point of persuasion or coercion but by enticement and seduction, in a way that doesn't scare people or provoke them to leave.

Block suggests some building blocks for how to do this:

The following seem to be the strategic elements that are associated with this idea of communal transformation:

Choice and Invitation. The thread in all reform movements is that they are initiated by choice and invitation.

The End of Ambition. At the most human level, these reforms are initiated by people at the stage of life where they have given up on ambition. They are often people in midlife, in age or spirit, who reached a point where they are ready to look far outside what they were conditioned and trained in to find meaning for what is to come.

Acts of Dissent. Healing and reform begins with an act of dissent. Jung said that all consciousness began with an act of disobedience.

Gifts and Capacities. Healing and reform is interested in the gifts and capacities of ordinary people. It is not interested in the gifts of extraordinary people-the world of celebrity, passing fame, and the meta message that this could not happen to you.

Community Is It. Healing and reform is all about a shift or renewal of the collective. Communal transformation. Individuals play a small role in reform. It is when a community, even if just three people, gets organized and determined that health and transformation show up.

Humanity Restored. Finally, reform efforts have to accept the fallibility in each of us. There is great respect for mistakes, which are essential for learning. There is a place for variability, sometimes called diversity. Real reform avoids the instinct for raising the bar, increasing controls, endless automation and the stress on performance. It reclaims and honors our humanity as the ultimate healer.

Translating these into action revolves around:

1. Looking for signs of health – where things are working well.

2. Listening. Most improvement efforts are about profound speaking. And if the message is not working, turn up the volume. This approach is only about the listening.

3. Choosing positive intent with each person. Acting on faith, rather than cynicism. Not talking about resistance to change, but catching people at their best. Holding the wisdom of people at every level in esteem. Authorizing people on the margin and lower levels to speak.

4. Having top leadership be tolerant and often playing a supportive but relatively minor role. (Not to discount their place or say the leaders did not matter, because of course they do). But avoiding the deference to position that is so common in most stories about "change management."

5. Learning through a peer-based process rather than an expert-based teaching process. Helping people discover what they already know.

6. Thinking in a holistic way. Integrating a common spirit from a wide variety of disciplines or fields of endeavor. Calling on the self-organizing wisdom of complexity theory and the large group methodology of organization development where we know the wisdom that is released when the social system is the focus of attention.

7. Developing and telling stories of community organizing: slow, persistent relationship building, awareness building, and celebration as we transform.

Next week the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development are publishing a change management toolkit I have written. More information on this will follow but meanwhile here is an extract from the introduction.

***
All organisations are in flux: changing their focuses, expanding or contracting their activities, and rethinking their products and services. Most organisations more than 10 years old look nothing like they did even five years ago. And it is likely that in the next year or two organisations will not look as they do today.

Emergent change is nothing new but feels more pressing and more urgent to deal with. Nowadays, organisations and their stakeholders are demanding increased accountability, there are concerns about sustainability and the environment, and a heightened emphasis on cost-effectiveness and quality improvement. These, and many other environmental factors, are putting pressure on organisations to be alert, flexible, and continuously responding to change.

Some types of change can be frightening. And, some can be extremely difficult. But no organisation can afford not to continuously change. Therefore, having proactive approaches for identifying new and better ways of doing things with the goal of improving organisational performance quality and efficiency are key.

As Benjamin Franklin observed, "When you're finished changing, you're finished". What follows gives you some techniques that keep your organisation effectively changing.

What is organisational change?
Typically, the phrase "organisational change" is about a significant change in the organisation, like restructure or adding a major new product or service. This is in contrast to more continuous changes, such as adopting a new computer procedure.

But organisational change can seem a vague phenomenon, so to clarify, think of it in terms of two things – rate of change and scope of change.

The rate of change is about the time scale of the changes i.e. continuous, intermittent, over a defined period. The scope of change is about its reach for example organisation-wide, or business unit, or team change and its type e.g. radical and transformational involving new knowledge, technologies, and processes. These two aspects of change are discussed below.

Rate of change
The rate of change can be continuous – for example, increasing motivation or engagement in the workforce, helping the organisation to become more proactive and less reactive, or addressing the ongoing need to be efficient and effective. Many of these ongoing changes do not have specific goals – they just 'are', so measuring progress can be challenging

Or the rate of change can be intermittent – a project that addresses a current, major problem or opportunity such as solving a quality issue, or introducing a new product line. It is often easier to determine the success of intermittent change than continuous change because during the lifecycle of the project which usually has a defined start/end date the problem or opportunity is either successfully addressed or not.

Scope of change
The scope of change can be organisation-wide, or business unit, or team change that is radical and transformational involving new knowledge, technologies, and processes. Things like this include, at an organisation level, a major restructuring and reshaping that dismantle an organisation's structure and culture, for example from the traditional top-down, hierarchical structure to a collaborative structure with self-directing teams. Equally the scope can be about increments or adaptations to existing knowledge, processes, and technologies, again at organisation-wide, or business unit, or team change.

Relationship between rate and scope of change
Looking rate and scope you'll see they are inter-related. You can have continuous change that is always incrementally adapting the current ways of operating. Equally you can have continuous change that is radical. In this case you are making ongoing significant changes to various parts of the organisation or its parts.

You can have intermittent change that makes adaptations for example, overhauling an existing process as a 'change project' over a given period of time. Or you can have intermittent change that is radical – that is you make transformational changes over a given period of time that fundamentally change the nature of the business or the ways of operating.

I will put on the link to the toolkit when it becomes available next week.

It's a 'well known fact' that it is very hard to measure knowledge worker productivity. This I found out when I was asked how the productivity of people in staff roles who were teleworking should be measured. By staff roles I mean functional jobs that do not have readily available quantitative outputs attached to them. An internal consultant is an example – how is his/her productivity measured?

This question has come into focus as we grapple with extending teleworking. One of the resistances to it is that managers fear they won't be able to tell whether an 'invisible' worker i.e. one not physically present in front of their eyes, is being productive. The teleworker feels that he/she cannot prove value add productivity if the work involves, say researching for an article, or planning a strategy.

Peter Drucker, in 1999, wrote that

Increasingly, the ability of organizations – and not only of businesses – to survive will come to depend on their "comparative advantage" in making the knowledge worker more productive.

More than ten years later there is little movement in the research or application field of how to measure productivity. Some people have put forward ideas.

One of the frequently cited articles is by Yuri Ramirez and David Nembhard "Measuring Knowledge Worker Productivity: A Taxonomy", published in 2004 in The Journal of Intellectual Capital (Vol 5, Issue 4). These researcher cover the field to that point and do a good job of presenting the methods people have tried using and the benefits and pitfalls of each. They conclude their paper saying

… overall, there is agreement that no generalized methods exist to measure knowledge worker productivity efficiently, partly because knowledge work is intangible and difficult to categorize in sub-groups. We note that there is a general belief that knowledge workers should be included in the efforts of deciding how to measure their productivity.

However, in one article by Riikka Antikainen & Antti Lonnqvist, of the Institute of Industrial Management Tampere University of Technology a knowledge worker productivity measurement instrument is offered. The authors say about this:

It is especially designed for measuring productivity in knowledge-intensive organisations. KWPA can be used to identify possible problems in factors of productivity as well as targets for development. It consists of a combination of a questionnaire and several employee interviews. The results of the questionnaire provide an overall description of various factors related to productivity while the interviews provide more in-depth information of specific issues.

The approach is a subjective one which is discussed as follows:

The fact that KWPA is based on subjective data can be seen both as a weakness and a benefit. The reliability of subjective data can be dubious, since they are exposed to false answers and respondents' biases. On the other hand, the fact that knowledge workers tend to care more about how they perceive their work than about the reality observed by someone else, speaks up for the subjective measurement. There practically is no other way to collect information about employees' conceptions of their productivity and the factors affecting it. This has also been the opinion of those organisations that have participated in the research.

Confronting the issue of knowledge worker productivity head on – by acknowledging that any measurement will be subjective seems like the best way to go. I think how my client group will address it will be by asking the knowledge workers as a workgroup how they would measure their productivity. Drucker suggests starting with a clear understanding of the task and proceeding from that point. The survey and interview of Antikainen and Lonnqvist starts from the premise that the knowledge worker is clear on what his/her task is.

Three case studies are outlined in this paper but one issue with it is that it is undated. I have emailed the authors to see if there is any further information they have collected since the article was written (I'm guessing it was about 2005 or 2006 as they have cited works published in 2005). Meanwhile I will continue working on the knotty problem of how to satisfy managers that the productivity of knowledge workers is measurable. Any help on this would be welcomed.

NOTE: After I posted this I received a reply to my email from Antti Lonnqvist, saying, "The paper has been published in a conference: Antikainen, R. & Lonnqvist, A. 2005. Knowledge Worker Productivity Assessment. 3rd Conference on Performance Measurement and Management, Nice, France, September 2005. Other publications by myself and my colleagues can be found at http://www.tut.fi/pmteam/en ==>“ Publications." Thank you Antti.

Yesterday I was in a meeting where people were discussing the setting up of 'hoteling' in their office. Hoteling is the office management strategy that considers certain office resources, such as workspaces and equipment, to be shared assets, rather than assets 'owned' by specific individuals within the company. By sharing assets between employees, an organization can optimize the efficiency of their office, reduce their real estate costs by employing more people in the same space, and increase employee satisfaction and retention by giving them access to workspaces and resources whenever and wherever they need them. Hoteling is typically characterized by reservation and check-in processes, and includes telephone switching functionality.

Hoteling is different from hot desking or free addressing in which the office is considered to be like a parking lot – workspace available on a first come, first serve basis. There is no advance reservation capability, no check-in ability, and phones are typically forwarded instead of switched.

The discussion centered on what protocols should people adopt when working in this way. Things that have come up during the course of the various discussions that I've had on this topic over the last few weeks cover all the following topics as people start to visualize what it will be like moving from a situation in which they 'own' a desk and a certain space around it, to one where they will be using in exactly the same way they would use a hotel room.

• Maintaining business continuity
• Managing customer expectations
• Handling sensitive information in the open areas
• Storage space usage
• Supplies (provision and use of)
• Common use areas
• Use of wall spaces
• Use of empty offices
• Scents and perfumes
• Food – smells, cooking, spills
• Radios, headphones
• Phone rings
• Conversations
• Cleaning/sanitizing equipment e.g. phones, chairs
• Clean desk .i.e. not leaving any papers, empty soda cans, etc.
• Booking the space (using it when booked, cancelling it if not going to use it, not turning up and just sitting in space someone may have booked)
• Staying connected with colleagues
• Printer and copier use (e.g. cover sheets on documents or not)
• Knowing when someone doesn't want to be interrupted

There is a lot of information available on what the organizational benefits are from instituting hoteling type arrangements. These mainly center on the real estate and carbon emissions savings. There is less on the practicalities of what it is like for individuals to actually work in this way although I did come across a useful white paper from Haworth which does discuss some of the aspects above. The author also makes the suggestion that

"To better support distributed workers, it's important to check the usability of alternative office spaces from the standpoint of someone just arriving for the first time. Are supply cabinets labeled? Is there a map to meeting rooms? Are the rules about check-in and check-out procedures written down? Is it easy to quickly feel at home in the space or is the visiting worker made to feel like an alien?"

Another useful section in the white paper is headed "Assumptions and Realities". This discusses the differing workstyles of people, different views of what 'courtesy' is and the value of social interactions. These aspects also came up in the meeting yesterday. Given that, in the case I am working on, this is all a very different way to work it clearly requires detailed planning, someone (perhaps permanently) in charge of making things run smoothly from both practical and emotional perspectives, and a lot of good will from the people hoteling.

As the Haworth paper notes:

The odds of a first-pass effort at hoteling, or any alternative office concept, being immediately perfect are slim. Evolving work groups and projects may also be forcing changes in the original program, regardless of how successful it may have been.

Watch closely and listen to workers using these experimental workstyles. See where they need them to go. Timely adjustments to officing strategies and spaces are key to productive work amid evolving global markets and continuous change.

Over the next few weeks work groups will be hashing out these issues ready to begin their hoteling experiements before year end. Given the track record of the group I'm working with it will be very successful.

In this month's World Future Society email newsletter that I get I read that foresight is the single most critical skill for the 21st century. Here's why:

Foresight is critical to achievement in all areas of your life, including your major life decisions. People who lack foresight are likely to find themselves unemployed when jobs are unexpectedly lost to new technologies, competition from overseas, or shifts in consumer tastes. Foresight is the key to survival in a world of disruptive innovation.

Foresight enables you to see opportunities, avoid threats, and chart the fastest path to your goals. The key to success is seizing opportunity when it arises. But you need to see the opportunity and be prepared to take action. That's why foresight gives you power and agility to achieve any goal you want to achieve.

So that's good to know. What happens next in the newsletter is the presentation of seven points that aim to help you 'spot tomorrow's trends today', as follows:

1. Scan the Media to Identify Trends-Futurists often conduct an ongoing and systematic surveys of news media and research institutes. These surveys help spot significant trends and technology breakthroughs. Futurists call this environmental scanning.

2. Analyze and Extrapolate Trends-After the trends are identified, the next step is to plot the trends to show their direction and development into the future. Trend analysis and extrapolation can show the nature, causes, speed, and potential impacts of trends.

3. Develop Scenarios-Futurists often describe the future development of a trend, a strategy, or a wild-card event in story form. These scenarios can paint a vivid picture that can help you visualize possible future developments and show how you can prepare effectively for future risks and opportunities. Scenarios help you to blend what you know about the future with imagination about the uncertain. Scenarios help you move from dreaming to planning and then to accomplishment.

4. Ask Groups of Experts-Futurists also conduct "Delphi Polls" which are carefully structured surveys of experts. Polling a wide range of experts in a given field can yield accurate forecasts and suggestions for action.

5. Use Computer Modeling-Futurists often use computer models to simulate the behavior of a complex system under a variety of conditions. For example, a model of the U.S. economy might show the effects of a 10 percent increase in taxes.

6. Explore Possibilities with Simulations-Futurists create simulations of real-world situations by means of humans playing different roles. For example, in war games, generals test out tactics they may later use on the battlefield, or corporate executives can explore the possible results of competitive strategies.

7. Create the Vision-Futurists help organizations and individuals systematically develop visions of a desirable future. Visioning creates the big picture of the possibilities and prepares the way for goal setting and planning
.
These are standard ideas for trend spotting, and one could quarrel with several of them as sensible things to do, so I didn't learn much new from this list, but what I did begin to ask myself is "What is the link between 'foresight' and 'spotting tomorrow's trends today'." So far, I'm not sure that there is one. In pondering this I found Dublin City University's website. It explains that:

Foresight is the process of preparing for the future. By understanding what changes and developments may define and shape the future, organisations are better prepared to capitalise on the potential of the future and to reduce the risks and threats it may present.

The futures tools and techniques which contribute to foresight enable organisations to shape their own futures; to make best use of their resources; to benefit all their stakeholders; to adapt, innovate and thrive; to make more informed decisions and develop more robust strategies.

This took me scurrying back to the report on Ireland's economy that I'd just read:

By the time the recession ended earlier this year, [Irelan's] GDP was 15% below its peak, unemployment had reached 13% and the cost of rescuing Ireland's banks had soared beyond initial estimates.

Maybe I'm feeling skeptical today but on a single example it seems that even if someone has the ability to trend spot, they may not have the foresight to know what to do about the trend. If the foresight program offered by DCU was really up to snuff would the Irish economy be in the state it's in now? I haven't checked to see if faculty members or students on the program were sending warnings to government, or businesses, and maybe they were (if so not heeding the warnings shows lack of foresight too).

At this point I haven't drawn any conclusions and I'm still 'noodling' the connection, if any, between trend spotting and foresight, if only because I want to know if my belief that 'trend spotting' is organizationally a good thing to do – has any connection with whether organizational members need to be skilled in 'foresight' to know what to to with the trend they's spotted.

Two related pieces caught my eye over the weekend. One was called Ruses to cut printing costs, in September 2, Technology Quarterly, (Economist). And the other was on the environmental costs of business travel including conferences.

The first piece notes that "In Europe, meanwhile, each worker prints an average of 31 pages a day, seven of which were not even wanted, according to recent research by Lexmark, a printer manufacturer." It goes on to describe an idea which is totally obvious when explained

'The cost of all that paper, toner and ink quickly adds up. Which is why, earlier this year, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay adopted a novel strategy to save money on print supplies: it changed its fonts. Programs like Microsoft Outlook default to Arial, but a thinner-lined typeface such as Century Gothic requires less toner or ink to form its characters. A study in 2009 showed that switching to Century Gothic could save businesses as much as $80 per printer per year. The university predicts that this year it will reduce its $100,000 print-supplies bill by around 10% by making this simple change.'

The rest of the article describes several ways of making fonts more printer economical, saving paper, and cutting the cost of printing ink/cartridges.

The second piece is about business travel, and ways to track greenhouse gas emissions and control travel in a way that reduces emissions. Last week I saw a very interesting demo of a conference module designed to reduce the environmental impact of conferences. Briefly it works to recommend a conference destination that is the most emissions friendly based, among many other factors, on the originating destination of all the people who are invited to attend. It's very clever.

Both these are clearly sensible thing to try and that's where I got interested because both pieces noted some hurdles to overcome the travel piece noting that "culture is a strong inhibitor to changes in transit behaviors and reducing business travel." And the fonts piece making the point that

Citigroup once estimated that it could save $700,000 a year and eliminate 76 tonnes of solid waste if every employee saved only one sheet of paper per week by using duplex printing or copying. Duplex printing is a common feature on modern printers and copiers. But when was the last time you used it? The real challenge, as the EU guide notes dryly, is persuading people to "actually use the duplex function".

So both pieces recongize that reaping any benefit from the good ideas and technology requires people to change attitudes and behaviors. Neither go on to explore what stops them. Motivation theorists are likely to come up with ideas on this as are the neuroeconomists but for someone charged with managing the printing or travel budget with no background in this theories – how are they going to tackle the challenge of changing behaviors. Spurred by the fact that I am working on a program that requires us to meet both the challenge of printing costs and of travel costs in relation to (yet to be determined) emissions targets I have come up with the following suggestions:

Carrot suggestions

• Set targets and encourage competition between teams and departments to cut printing costs and reduce travel and conference emissions.
• Communicate extensively about the 'what's in it for me' of the reduction of emissions by personal behavior. (This falls down a bit because what is in it beyond a warm glow or an adherence to values?)
• Make it fun to save emissions. There's a lovely YouTube clip on encouraging people to take the stairs rather than the escalator by converting the stair treads into a piano style keyboard that plays as people walk up or jump on them.

Stick suggestions

• Make the targets very clear so on business travel give each department head the instruction that travel will not be approved or budget for conferences forthcoming until there he/she shows that the emissions software has been used to determine the location.
• Give people a personal stock of paper, for example a ream a quarter, and fix the printers and copies so people have to put in their own paper. If they exceed their paper allocation they have to get approval from some higher up.
• Make managers and individuals accountable for saving carbon emissions and reduce any performance bonuses or pay rises if they can't show what they have done. (Agree personal emissions reduction targets with them).

I'm guessing that some of these carrot and stick things are happening already. Let me know if they are working or if you have other suggestions.

Someone just sent me a Gartner report called Introducing Hybrid Thinking for Transformation, Innovation and Strategy that offers the view that:

Hybrid thinking integrates the increasingly popular business concept of design thinking with other ways of thinking in order to take on "wicked problems" in business transformation, innovation and strategy. Design thinking's fundamental emphasis on creating meaningful, human-centered experiences provides the core for hybrid thinking, which is an emerging "discipline of disciplines." Hybrid thinking goes beyond design thinking by integrating other forms of creative thinking to take on the most ambiguous, contradictory and complex problems.

Thinking this way is not is particularly new but it is rapdily gaining ground and does offer intriguing possibilities for thinking about work differently. What's useful about the Gartner piece is the argument that there aren't 'solutions' to problems. There are just various ways of taking on problems that will result in a more successful outcome for the organization than not taking it on.

The concept of 'wicked problems' is central to the authors' arguments and this led me to ask myself of what exactly is a wicked problem? As usual, Wikipedia provided some information on the topic. The term first appeared in a social planning setting, and then transferred to become more widely used in business and organizations.

Wikipedia notes that Jeff Conklin who wrote Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems .

"Seeking to generalize the concept of problem wickedness to areas other than planning and policy, Conklin identifies the following as defining characteristics of wicked problems:

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation'
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions."

Incidentally the cover of the first chapter of the book available from the Cognexus website – has the delightful quote "Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them." Laurence J. Peter

According to Gartner, wicked problems are tackled by hybrid thinking, defined as

… more than just the binary integration of design thinking with a single complementary discipline (for example, design thinking plus Six Sigma thinking or design thinking plus war-fighter thinking). It is the integration, over time, of many disparate disciplines into a unified discipline of disciplines (see Figure 2). In this regard, hybrid thinking is like "scientific thinking," which unifies and integrates a diverse range of disciplines – from physics to psychology.

Towards the end of the paper is an example of a wicked problem – in this instance resolving the financial crisis of 2008/2009 – addressed by hybrid thinking.

One of the most profound paradigm shifts represented by hybrid thinking (when compared with other business and IT disciplines) is the shift toward a primarily biological and ecological paradigm of transformation, innovation and strategy, and away from a predominantly engineering paradigm. This is because wicked problems are more like biological or ecological problems than they are like engineering problems.

A good example of this shift can be found in a recent paper presented by Andrew Haldane, executive director of financial stability for the Bank of England, entitled "Rethinking the Financial Network":
[The financial crises resulted from] the behavior under stress of a complex, adaptive network. Complex because these networks were a cat's-cradle of interconnections, financial and nonfinancial. Adaptive because behavior in these networks was driven by interactions between optimizing, but confused, agents. Seizures in the electricity grid, degradation of ecosystems, the spread of epidemics and the disintegration of the financial system – each is essentially a different branch of the same network family tree. This paper considers the financial system as a complex adaptive system. It applies some of the lessons from other network disciplines – such as ecology, epidemiology, biology and engineering – to the financial sphere.

This paper is one of a series Gartner is producing on the theme of hybrid thinking. If others are as thought provoking it will be easy to make the time to read them.

I was talking to someone yesterday who is considering taking a new job, but is has doubts about his capacity to do it. I remembered that a few years ago I wrote a series of checklists for new leaders one of which was New Leader: Manager Your Doubts. What follows is an extract from it.

Doubts can be healthy tools of learning and decision making, but they can also be paralyzing. You can get tied up in the anxieties your doubts create and then make no decisions or wrong decisions. You can jeopardize your leadership position by being tentative or by struggling alone with either professional or personal doubts. Your challenge is to acknowledge your doubts and then to manage them competently and confidently to your benefit and your organization's. In their article Why Should Anyone be Led by You? Goffee and Jones describe the way that Richard Branson (CEO Virgin) is not good at being interviewed, but is disarming in his approach to revealing his doubts about interviews and his ability to handle them. Here are some pointers to help you manage your doubts.

Be kind to yourself
Handled badly, having doubts can be an energy drainer, a time waster, and an opportunity risk. Handled well they can be the opposite – energizing, a good time investment, and an opportunity enabler. It depends how you think of them. If you get caught in a negative spiral – going over and over the doubts in your mind with no way out then you're not doing yourself justice. Recognize that doubts are healthy, they are inevitable, and they can be used wisely. Ask yourself questions that help turn the negative downwards spiral to a positive upwards spiral.

Frame your doubt as a question
Doubts arise if you have too little information, or too much information. In a new role you are likely to have too little information. You are playing without the full deck of cards. This is confusing because you don't know how to make the right choices and decisions. To help manage your doubts look for information that will help you resolve them. Information comes from a wide variety of sources. Frame your doubts as questions and search out information that will help you answer the questions.

Listen to your intuition
Doubts are useful checking devices so don't ignore them. Often they come out of listening to your intuition. You realize that 'you don't like the sound of that', or 'something smells fishy'. Use your doubts together with your intuition. Practice the skill of listening to your 'inner voice'. It may surface legitimate doubts or it may provide answers to irrational doubts. One caveat – use your intuition but use it thoughtfully. Leading your organization based on intuition alone is unwise. Back up your intuition with research and verification.

Check your information
Having access to good information goes a long way towards helping you managing professional and organizational doubts. But don't accept information blindly. Check the information you're receiving and the reliability of the sources. Ineffective or mis-information is of little value. The information you work with must be valid, reliable, and current. This means knowing how information flows in the organization and who or what a trustworthy source to provide it is. If your doubts are personal – am I up to the job? – then look for feedback again from reliable and trustworthy people.

Ask questions
Doubts bring questions. Use a variety of questions – open ended, redirecting, playback, leading, prompting, floating an idea – to frame your doubts as questions. Then look for the answers. Suspend judgment on the answers until you are confident that you have a full set of options and ways forward. Resist the temptation to jump into action as soon as you have your first question answered. Remember your doubts are best resolved by knowing the whole playing field. When you are confident that you have sight of this make some considered choices on how to work with resolving the doubts.

Avoid assumptions
Doubts can be triggered by false assumptions. As a new leader you'll be scanning your environment with close attention looking at systems, strategies, staff, customers, etc. You'll have a tendency to try to match the new situation to similar previous ones. Before you take any actions check that you are not making interpreting information incorrectly. Your assumptions may be wrong. You may have leapt to a conclusion. Stay alive to other options for what you're feeling or seeing that's giving rise to your doubts.

Learn from your doubts
Doubts are a strong source of learning. Once you've stopped thinking negatively about doubting and started to ask questions about what the doubts mean and how you can make sense of them to improve your performance then you'll be in a position to learn from them. Learning is essential to you as a new leader (indeed for any leader). If you stop learning you stop understanding, stop getting new ideas, and stop being able to meet new situations. Use doubts as a learning vehicle for both your personal and professional development.

Reveal your doubts
Leaders who judiciously admit their vulnerabilities, doubts, and weaknesses paradoxically demonstrate leadership strength. Done carefully showing that you're human gives transparency to your colleagues and co-workers. Your open-ness will set the tone for open-ness which is helpful in organizational cultures that aim to develop collaboration, participation, and co-operation.

So far, this week my meetings have centered around extending and encouraging the use of telework amongst the workforce, and the associated discussions of converting workspace to free addressing and hoteling. (I noted that all of these discussions have been face to face).

Although none of these are new concepts in many settings – consultancies in particular have been working in this way for several years. For example Accenture three years ago (2007) was reported as follows:

For Accenture, teleworking is an essential component of its corporate strategy. The company has more than 3,000 employees based in the region. Total seat capacity in its Reston
offices is 1,200, and, on average, 1,100 people come to the office daily, meaning that nearly two-thirds of the company's regionally based workforce telecommute on any given day.

What is less available is the nitty gritty of how do you deal with the anxieties of people being asked to telework when they haven't done it before. There are plenty of seven steps to telework success but there are none that deal with the anxious questions that I'm meeting.

Yesterday I was looking at the floorplan of an office. The workforce is moving there in less than six weeks. The current way of working is: each person has a designated workspace or office, they have all their things around them that make the space feel like home from home, including in some of the offices, refrigerators, coffee machines, and table lamps. Many smaller workspaces are cluttered with assorted gadgets, photos, pictures, plants, flags, radios, plagues, memorabilia, and general stuff. One person was amazed to find she had 12 pairs of shoes under her desk. She'd no idea till she looked.

Additionally very few of this workforce teleworks, and several managers are very resistant to the idea of not being able to see the physical presence of 'their' people.

The floor plan, and the unit head, decree no assigned space, only one under surface pedestal unit and one coat locker per person, with limited shared filing space. No electrical items can be brought to the new office, and no personal items that can't be packed and stored in the pedestal or locker.

Further, the unit head wants as many people as possible to telework so that he can release space back to other parts of the organization.

There are thousands of question being asked ranging from 'what about my chair?' and 'can I keep my special keyboard?' To 'how will my manager know I'm working if I'm not in the office?" I get the impression that people feel they are being evacuated with no idea how to survive in the wilderness of a new office with just their work tools (computer, BB, shared printers, VOIP phones) to hang on to.

In some ways this is understandable – people do like the security blanket of personalization. Even going to a hotel room people will bring items that help them feel at home – their own alarm clock, or special pillow. But I'm not clear why there's such anxiety about the hygiene factor of chair sharing. Do people not go to restaurants, ride buses, sit on bar stools? I've not yet seen in any of those situations people taking out sanitizing wipes and spray cans of disinfectant to clean the chair before sitting on it – which people are suggesting in the current situation is the only way they will contemplate sitting in an office chair that is not 'theirs'.

Planning in this somewhat fraught situation means answering questions like:

• How do we reduce the chair anxiety? (One response is to suggest they try out teleworking)

• Where will people's two crates be delivered – to an assigned seat – which then may become 'theirs' or to a numbered locker?'

• What happens on day 1? Do we give people a seat saying this is for day 1 only. On day two they will have to book a seat? (Assuming the book system is alive and kicking)?

• Do people to telework from day 1 so that a proportion don't physically turn up on the first day?

• Do we assign people to a 'neighborhood' on the floorplate?

• What protocols do we need to suggest around real or virtual availability e.g. core hours? Notifying people where you are, etc.

• Do we need a slow ramp up or a cold turkey approach?

Today's meetings will start to iron all of these issues out. For many colleagues who've worked for years in other organizations that are well advanced down the teleworking what they're seeing in those that haven't is entirely amazing. One person said to me he used, fairly regularly, to get an email saying something on the lines of 'you're moving office on Monday, please leave your crates packed in the loading area and they'll be in floor area A when you next come into the office.' However, for people who have never moved offices this is a sea change, and if you're not used to swimming and are being thrown in at the deep end it's not totally surprising that it's alarming.