Month: June 2016

We all know that the UK population voted on its view of community on Thursday, about which I am not going to comment, except for noting that whatever the size of 'community', there are certain things that identify a group of people as being a community:

• Feelings of membership: feelings of belonging to, and identifying with, the community.
• Feelings of influence: feelings of having influence on, and being influenced by, the community.
• Integration and fulfilment of needs: feelings of being supported by others in the community while also supporting them.
• Shared emotional connection: feelings of relationships, shared history, and a "spirit" of community.

But as two people contacted me last week with questions about 'community' I thought I'd be topical – and give them a response. They asked:

• 'What I am looking for is anything that would stimulate the debate about is there a transformation leadership community, if there is who are they and what distinguishes them as a community and how do we create that?'
• 'We are keen to start a conversation with the wider organisation design community about next steps in building our community and developing our collective capacity – can you give us your views on this?'

What struck me about the two requests I got were the statements about 'stimulate the debate' and 'start a conversation' about creating/building a community around a specific interest or identity – in these cases 'transformation leadership' and 'organisation design'.

There seemed to be an implied assumption that a 'community' is a good thing and that one can be created or constructed, which, I think, are assumptions worth testing. My experience is that to create a community involves energy, enthusiasm, commitment from a 'prime-mover', time, money, leadership and organisation. In an organisation that is jockeying for resources you'd have to show that the effort of creating and maintaining the community was adding some type of value. I've found they need a lot of support and co-ordination to set up and run successfully.

If you want to create an organisational community of interest or identity, the professional field of community organising is one to look at and learn from. Trained community organisers tend to take the view that the task is one of 'engaging' people in supporting something specific e.g. creating a community garden and they have a number of tools and techniques for generating that engagement.

Take a look at the community planning toolkit guide on Community Engagement. And for ideas on engaging an on-line community Bang the Table has 100 in downloadable format.

There also a Scottish National Standard for Community Engagement that can stimulate ideas and gives pointers that would be useful for anyone in an organisation hoping to create a community of interest.

What are your experiences of creating a community of interest? Have you got tips to share? Let me know.

The other day I read something about a broom that someone had used for 20 years and during the period it had needed 7 new handles and 8 new heads. The question was 'Is it the same broom as it was when it was bought?' Apparently this is a variant of the philosophical paradox the 'Ship of Theseus'. (90 second explanation here. 8 minute explanation here).

It seemed relevant as I'm gearing myself up to write the 3rd edition of my book Organisation Design: Engaging with Change. The first edition was published in 2004 and the second in 2014. Although I'd promised myself and my family I'd never write another book after that second edition I let myself be persuaded by the editor who assured me that 'I would expect updating for a third edition to be a smaller job than it was previously. The jump from first to second edition saw a big overhaul of the text (given that almost a decade had passed), while I imagine that the crucial changes this time around would be more manageable.'

The editor asked me to suggest what I would do differently in a third edition – which was the easy bit – and then sent these ideas + a copy of the second edition to 5 reviewers asking whether a third edition should go ahead.

Now comes the hard bit, because I've just thoroughly read the reviews and although I see that the reviewers feel a 3rd edition is a good idea this is caveated by statements on the lines of 'If substantially revised.' So it seems that 2 years is the new 10 years in terms of organisation design.

The suggestions on the substantial revisions seem to boil down to:

a) Be clearer about the target audience – am I writing for a student on a business studies/organisation design course who needs more of a text book or for an OD practitioner who needs more of the practical application and tools?

b)In either case reviewers felt the book would benefit from a connection 'to the fundamental conceptual building blocks of organisation design and the underlying theories as well as current [evidence based] research in the field'.

c) Include less on the UK and more on international and global organisations – with an emphasis on: innovative forms of organising, disruptive industries, new business development and market shifts, the 24/7/365 organisation, organisation design technology, use of big data/analytics, neuro-science and behavioural economics. Some of these I had on my list already but additional to the reviewers suggestions I think I need to add or introduce info on:

• Business strategy, target operating models and business capabilities
• The role of leaders in organisation design work
• Designing ethical, diverse and inclusive organisations. (There's very little on ethics in org design or how to, for example, design gender parity into orgs)
• Evaluating the success of org design activity

c) Underplay the 5-stage model for organisation design that organises the chapters in the 2nd edition book in favour of an approach that recognises 'the inevitability of the need for adaptation and customisation' and the interdependence of organisation design and organisation development.

Most helpfully 2 reviewers gave extensive chapter-by-chapter suggestions on how to make these revisions and the others made less extensive but equally useful suggestions. But I'm left thinking why did I agree to do this? Writing the third edition now seems akin to the task of replacing a great deal more planks on the Ship of Theseus than I thought. Will it still be the original book or will I be writing a new book (with the level of effort that involves?) Let me know?

I spent last week walking the Great Glen Way in Scotland. It's a glorious route and we were lucky with both the weather and the lack of midges. If I believe all the research then I should be back at work this week more productive, thinking more positively, being more creative, and with a fresh perspective.

Not only that, walking is supposed to have miracle benefits too so, in theory, I will be well able to deal with whatever has happened in my week off but I can't tell yet as I am writing this on Sunday evening, before I switch on my work laptop to find out what has been going on. I'm taking comfort in the statement that '[Work] life won't fall apart if you take two weeks off -— in fact your work might actually improve'. (I wonder, does it hold if you only take one week off?)

Although I can't tell whether my productivity and positive thinking has improved I can talk about the fresh perspectives. I came home with three:

1. In a second-hand bookshop in Inverness I bought Midges in Scotland. (It's a best-seller!) I learned that:

   'Without a sound understanding of how and why midges behave the way they do, then all the chemical sprayings, repellents, and biological controls in the world become a waste of effort and money … this simple message has not always been appreciated. … [people] want action and want it now. The trigger on finger on the chemical spray gun gets very twitchy. .. [the] almost instinctive urge to reach for the spraygun has proved, time after time, to be a costly mistake.'

   Reading this made me laugh: the urge to action (usually change the org chart) over sound understanding (what's going on the system) that I meet every day at work is paralleled in people's responses. The scientist author proposes several routes to understanding midge behaviour in order to discover better ways of managing them: field trials, open discussion, co-ordinated cross-discipline research and learning, evaluating the extent and cost of the current situation, determining where focused effort would yield the highest pay-back, providing better data for forecasting, etc. These techniques are discipline neutral and I realised that each/all could bring new perspectives to organisation design work.

2. My walk companion was an architect who saw completely different things from me as we walked the route. He marvelled at the design of some of the wooden bridges we crossed, down to the use of a particular type of screw. I looked at all the galvanized steel gates through his eyes as he explained their significantly different designs and design purposes. He was alert to the many gravel types that we crunched over – how it was laid why that type had been chosen, and he loved the specific shade of blue of the sign posting and the way it was used to unify different forms of signage.

   Seeing his landscape which I was unnoticing of till he pointed it out reminded me of the value of inviting and valuing different perspectives on a problem, plan, situation or intervention.

3. Although I'd determined not to look at any newspaper or news bulletin for the week there were eerie echoes of what is going in the world right now. Along the route are numerous, very well produced interpretive panels giving information on the history related to the particular stretch. There was nothing that isn't current today: on the downside – land and settlement clearances, people being forced to flee in boats, livelihoods lost through war, clan rivalry and bitter feuding (lasting 350 years in one case) bringing ferocious loss of life, huge income disparity, resources tightly controlled by a few in power, and some overbearing chiefs. And on the upside some sparks of innovation e.g. in lock design and instances of courage and dedication.

Getting this historical perspective made me wonder about repeating patterns – are we all in a fractal universe? How could fractal and chaos theories be applied to the way we do organisation design?

What new perspectives have you got from a work break that could inform your organisation design work? Let me know.

If I'd started by reading the last chapter of Iris Bohnet's book, What Works: Gender Equality by Design first instead of beginning at the first chapter and working my way through to the end, I would have found out that

a) we can reduce gender inequality rapidly if we are 'armed with data'
b) 'a good leader is a behavioral designer'
c) she would offer 'thirty-six research-grounded design suggestions' to help the good leaders reduce gender inequality.

I might have been sceptical of the first two assertions, and dubious about the efficacy of thirty-six suggestions. (Thus demonstrating some of the cognitive biases she talks about). As it was, I started at the beginning and was immediately hooked into her persuasive arguments on how to rapidly reduce gender inequality, backed up by research studies and masses of examples. I noted pages to revisit. The list is long. The book is full of nuggets of interest to explore further. As I read I was looking for stuff that was immediately practical, that we could try out in our organisation and that might have a positive impact on gender equality. (In 2013 we had a total workforce that was 68.9% female and 31.1% male, but at the highest levels the numbers reverse to 39.5% female and 60.5% male).

Bohnet presents some intriguing information, I'll pick out three examples – out of many – that alerted me to things that might be going on in the organisation I work in.

1. Diversity training including unconscious bias training is 'unlikely to change attitudes, let alone behavior, if they set out only to make employees aware of their biases' (which most do). In fact there is some evidence to show that 'diversity training programs were associated with a small drop in the likelihood that under-represented groups became managers'.

2. Leadership training programs are not providing women with the support and capacity building that they need to close the gender gap – see a McKinsey article Why leadership development programs fail which Bohnet refers to. She discusses how leadership development programs underestimate the strength of existing mindsets and also how there is often a failure to evaluate carefully whether there is any behavioral change attributable to the program.

3. Gendered wording in job advertisements and role descriptions have an impact on how applicants perceive the jobs, and thus whether they think it is worth applying for them. Equally other organisational messaging and day to day language use is often gender biased. Think of the predominantly male sporting analogies in many organisations or in bureaucracies the language of 'brigading', 'in your command', and military terms more frequently associated with men than women.

Her many suggestions for tackling the continuing gender inequality all based in the behavioural sciences are equally thought provoking. For example:

• Find sponsors for women and not mentors for them. Then tie some of the sponsor's performance pay to the progress her/his 'sponsee' has made.
• 'When forming diverse teams make sure every sub-group is represented by at least three people or makes up about a third of the total. … Creating token members is in nobody's interest'
• 'Male resistance to interventions favoring women is real'. Bohnet talks of 'norm entrepreneurs' (a term coined by Cass Sunstein in his paper Social Norms and Social Rules) helping to change these types of norms.

What I learned from the book was that I could (and should) be much more conscious of the potential impact organisation design has on gender equality. So that's a start – next step is to get cracking to help reduce gender inequality. What are you doing on this? Let me know.