Author: naomiorgdesign

Like many organisations intent on using new (digital) technologies to improve business performance, we've got a strapline running that 'Transformation is a team sport'. The 'rules' of the sport include three that are particularly relevant to organisation design:

1. Working across silos: 'knowing that your customers care less about the different lines-of-business within your company; they simply care about a consistent user experience'. To get to this means structure, systems, process and measurement changes, not to mention associated cultural changes.
2. Leadership evolving to accompany transformation: this can be a stretch when leaders see nothing as 'broken', but have yet to be convinced that what they do see is anachronistic. To help leaders evolve means steering a careful course that avoids the sensitivities that something is 'wrong' instead offering a low risk suggestion that opportunities are being missed. It requires sets of subtle approaches and not a big bang transformation approach.
3. Recognising that 'business transformation is not just about use of mobile, social, cloud and analytics solutions, but also about the entire ecosystem of connections (systems and people), starting with employees'. This means involving employees in the transformation work a 'movement not mandate' approach that is counter-cultural in many organisations.

During the week I was working with a group discussing how we could act on the strapline and three questions each related to one of the rules above arose:

Working across silos: Perhaps predictably, we started on the question 'What is a team?' When we are thinking about 'transformation as a team sport' are we thinking of the whole organisation or are we thinking of multiple teams aka small work groups? Alan Mulally successfully created the concept of 'One Ford' and it's well worth reading the article on how during his tenure as CEO he transformed Ford into a successful company. Depending on the definition ot 'team' comes the ability – or not – to transform.

At one extreme, if we are thinking of 'team' as work groups whose performance is monitored by competitive league tables then we are not going to get transformation. At the other extreme if we are thinking of the whole organisation as one team a lot has to change, as Mulally recognised, to initiate, nurture and embed that concept.

Leadership evolution: Secondly, people wanted to know how we change the culture from one of leadership command and control to one of colleague autonomy and accountability. Here Margaret Heffernan offers some interesting views on social connectedness which involves activities aimed at exploring and acknowledging the interdependence of people in delivering a service and building the bonds that helped to make them willing to work together in search of better ideas and decisions.

Whole ecosystem: In connection with all the people within the ecosystem, came a question about the 'team sport' notion which they thought seems to reinforce stereotypes of winning and losing as well as stereotypes of who plays team sports (young and healthy people in uniform team clothing). Just to check on the stereotypes I googled images for 'team sports' – see what comes up when you do it. Organisations interested in diversity and inclusion may need to think carefully about the messages they maybe unwittingly giving when using sporting analogies. (I'm reading Iris Bohnet's book What Works: Gender Equality by Design that picks up on stereotypes and unconscious bias).

What's your view of the risks and opportunities inherent in the banner 'Transformation is a team sport'? Let me know.

Several conversations this past week have involved questions on when the 2020+ organisation design will be unveiled. What people appear to have in mind is a traditional organisation chart at 'now' complete with hierarchies, layers and spans, and role descriptions, etc. and then a chart at 2018 showing the transition with the same level of detail and then a third chart showing 2020+ chart, again with the same level of detail.

Trying to develop this model organisation chart for four years out requires all kinds of information – a lot of which is not currently available – to play into it. This includes having:

1. Clarity on the business strategy e.g. is it predominantly focused on customer segments, on service delivery via business lines, on regions, on partnerships with third parties, on efficiency gains
2. Agreement on the type of organisation we want to be e.g. 'one' organisation, multiple organisations down business lines each competing for resources, several devolved organisations with a central 'holding company' …
3. Agreement on the style of organisation we want to have e.g. is it non-hierarchical, collaborative, inclusive, expertise based
4. An assessment of the appetite to change things which are hard to change including policies, work flows, supplier contracts, performance metrics (organisational and individual) etc.
5. An assessment of the risk leaders are prepared to assume in any re-design for the future

6. Pointers on the trade-offs we would need to make e.g. is an efficiency gain more important than 'good enough' customer service or should we be providing excellent customer service that may be less efficient – but perhaps more effective?
7. Timelines on what new technology will be ready for use and when
8. Forecasts on the skills people will need to have to work with the new technologies including social media as well as business delivery technologies, and information on what skills they have now that could be developed/converted
9. Insights into how the social media technologies will change the organisational dynamics (both internally and externally). See 'Leader as Architect' for more on this
10. Support for recommendations on what work will become redundant as jobs change to exploit the technology
11. Confirmation of the funding availability for such things as new product/service development, maintenance of assets, investment in skills development

Without this information any chart we produced would be of no more value than a comfort blanket i.e. it would have an emotional value, but no practical value in terms of being either useful or usable, but maybe that's ok? However, I think not. (See one critique here of the well-worn story – in the absence of a map, any map will do – and another here).

Rather than giving in to the demand for a chart, and assuming leaders are willing to have a dialogue, listen and work jointly to achieve the goal there are at least three approaches likely to yield better results than the lines and boxes one:

• Agreeing that developing a 2020 organisation chart is not a sensible use of resource – better to offer a clear strategic direction by addressing points 1 – 6 above and then 'shepherding' all the ongoing local design in that direction. (See Five Questions Every Leader Should Ask About Organizational Design).
• Accepting that re-design is much more than the lines and boxes and (depending on answers to questions 1 – 6 above) developing a plan to get to a communicable (but not fixed) design that recognizes the elements outlined in the McKinsey article Getting Organizational Design Right.
• Developing a blueprint or framework that describes the intent using a business capability or similar approach – see Putting the Capability Model to Work and then do one or both of the previous two approaches.

Do you think you can chart the future? Let me know (how).

Last year (2015) the UK's Department for Work and Pensions reported that 'The employment rate for people aged 50 to 64 has grown from 55.4 to 69.6 per cent over the past 30 years, an increase of 14.2 percentage points. The employment rate for people aged 65 and over has doubled over the past 30 years, from 4.9 to 10.2 per cent, an increase of 5.3 percentage points.

Lots more in that age group, says another report, would like to find work but face a number of age-related barriers that: 'range from a lack of practical skills, such as IT proficiency and a limited ability to navigate job search and job applications online, to more emotive responses to employment, issue such as confidence, motivation and a belief that employers routinely discriminate against older jobseekers'.

The lack of practical skills is an interesting one and is relevant not just for older job seekers: the expectation that people will need to work for longer than in the past combined with impact that technology is having on the both work content and location mean that workers of whatever age need to keep their skills honed. But it could be much more valuable to keep your transferable skills honed than your expertise skills honed. Expertise can become redundant. Transferable skills less so.

Watch the video of Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott talking about their new book The 100 Year Life. They talk of a world of in which people are going to start work later [in life], take career breaks and spend time in their 60s and 70s acquiring new skills.

It's hard to predict what sort of skills will be necessary but one way of being prepared for new types of working life is to understand that 'There will be a major shift away from the thinking that we learn one profession, have one job and stay in it for decades'. (PWC)

I've always been intrigued by people who've gone for a radically different career like people – banker to patisserie chef, for example. But when you look at these closely you find that they are not as radical as they seem. The people have taken various skills and interests they've got and developed them in a different direction. Instead of extending specific expertise – see my blog on Utility Players – they've used their range of transferable skills to take them into a new direction and then developed their expertise.

Transferable skills are the general abilities you develop and are useful across a range of different jobs and industries. But I've found that people have difficulty recognizing what transferable skills they do have: some form of compartmentalization in thinking creeps in. Skills that you apply bringing up three children don't seem that applicable to becoming a trapeze artist. But think about it. How might they be? Bringing up three children requires skills in organisation, time management, teaching, being warm and caring, quick physical reactions and so on. See how they might transfer?

There are lots of ways of identifying your transferable skills. One I like is the Union Learn set of 'Value My Skills' cards developed by Hopson and Scally who wrote Build Your Own Rainbow. Richard Bolles author of What Color is Your Parachute has transferable skills self-assessment tools and searching on the term 'transferable skills inventory' give you more.

Current work trends around mean that developing transferable skills is as important as developing expertise. What are your tips for extending and developing your transferable skills and does your organisation support transferable skills development? Let me know.

I've read a couple of articles this week on a no-growth economy. One, for example, Stunted growth: the mystery of the UK's productivity crisis comments that 'global demographics are changing, with the supply of new workers set to slow and the older share of the population rising. The future is of course inherently unknowable, but the reasons for longer-term pessimism on economic growth are starting to stack up'.

Another, Exit from the Megamachine (thanks to Hannah B for this link) tells us 'In the twenty-first century, however, the five-hundred year-long expansion of the mega machine is reaching insurmountable limits'.

At the same time we read in the popular (UK) press this week that 'Retirement really COULD kill you: Researchers find those who work past 65 live longer'. (As an aside, I couldn't quite grasp the next statement that said: 'Working a year past 65 if healthy led to an 11% lower risk of death', I thought that everyone, regardless of health, is at risk of death).

However, all this about low growth and the aging workforce coincided with a discussion on work skills: specifically what do we need now and in the coming years: generalists or experts? If both what is the right balance of each? And can generalists become experts and do experts make good generalists? The argument is neatly summed up by Sandeep Gautam his blog. He concludes saying 'it is my contention that we have need for both specialists and generalists but the balance tilts in one direction or the other depending on the environment'.

I agree we need a mix of deep and broad expertise but I wouldn't call broad expertise 'generalist'. To me 'generalist' means one can successfully turn one's hand to anything. Talking about this distinction someone mentioned her rugby playing partner who is a 'utility back'. I'd never heard the term before but I looked it up. 'In sport, a utility player is one who can play several positions competently . ..in rugby and rugby league, it is commonly used by commentators to recognize a player's versatility. … [A utility back] is mostly a back who can cover at least two positions.

This utility player concept could be useful for both organisations – as a workforce planning approach – and for individuals looking to stay in work, find work or develop their careers. It suggests that you can be an expert and also play that expertise into a number of different roles. You can be a deep expert or a broad expert or both. To me it suggests that extending expertise through utility playing is a better bet than being a generalist. (Next week I will look at 'expertise' and how to extend it).

As I think about it I am a utility player. My roles, extended from my expertise, include blogger, author, organisation design consultant, teacher at a university, speaker at conferences, deliverer of training programmes, coach and mentor. Some I earn income from and others I just do but they could become alternative sources of income.

I think society will increasingly need utility players rather than generalists. Lower economic growth, potentially fewer or different jobs and more older workers make it very unlikely that people will be able to keep on doing exactly what they've always done, but they could extend what they know and are good at.

Having confidence in extending their expertise will enhance their ability to work well in a changing context. In baseball for example, 'the biggest reason [managers want a good utility guy] is because it gives them more versatility, more manoeuvrability and ability to sustain injuries.' So in organisations – even down to the 'injuries' caused by slashing budgets, competitive forces and market downturns.

What are your views on utility players v generalists? Let me know.

I repeatedly hear 3 phrases in my organisation: 'We've done that before', 'what's the problem we're trying to solve?', and 'who shall I ask?' I hear each of them several times a week and have tended to treat them as discrete items. But maybe I'd be better reflecting on them as a collective in order to tackle the challenge I have this coming week of facilitating a session on learning organisations.

A 2011 article on learning histories that states that 'The essence of a learning organization is that it actively identifies, creates, stores, shares, and uses knowledge to anticipate, adapt to, and maybe even shape a changing environment. The driving concern [in doing this] must be reflection, communication, and collective sense making for action across its personnel'. It seems obvious to suggest that if we are to achieve our target of 'business transformation' we need to become a learning organisation.

The learning organisation is not a new management studies concept: Peter Senge was the 'guru' of it when I first came across the ideas. In 1990 he published The Fifth Discipline explaining the term and the thinking behind it. At that point helping organisations becoming 'learning organisations' was taken up by any number of consultants. HBR had an early article on it in 1993 and published several over the next couple of decades. But then the idea seemed to fade from agendas.

What strikes me about the three questions I hear is that:
a) it's very hard to find answers to the question on what has been learned from a past experience of doing whatever is proposed now, there's no collective knowledge capture, no 'lessons learned' database and people involved have moved on. We are not storing or sharing knowledge.
b) in constantly looking for a 'problem' it is possible (likely) that opportunities for learning get missed – surely learning organisations should be on the alert – looking curiously, anticipating, thinking ahead. I don't think a mind-set of only problem solving is sufficient for learning and adapting. We need to do more reflection and collective sense-making.
c) looking for someone to ask also seems to me to be a recipe for non-learning as it shows a cultural risk averseness. Most organisations will talk about learning from failure, but as Rita Gunther McGrath has noticed 'Strangely, we don't design organizations to manage, mitigate, and learn from failures…. . Executives hide mistakes or pretend they were always part of the master plan. Failures become undiscussable, and people grow so afraid of hurting their career prospects that they eventually stop taking risks.'

I wonder if the concept of a 'learning organisation' is unrealisable in practice as some of the research shows (and the fact that it faded from the agenda suggests) and that in thinking we can become one we are setting off on a fool's errand. But rather than being defeatist could we view the three questions and statements/questions that I think mitigate against us becoming a learning organisation as a cultural transmission challenge on the lines of malaria and measure success when we hadn't heard them for three years? (The length of time to be declared malaria free from the last reported case).

I prefer the latter approach. We'll aim for eradication of the conditions that encourage being a non-learning rather than a learning organisation. How do we do that? Well 10 ideas are put forward in an excellent paper 'Working with Barriers to Organisational Learning'. In the same way that mosquitoes are being used in the drive to eradicate malaria the authors explain that 'barriers that seem to limit quality of learning … are worthy of attention, as their existence may explain some of the 'stuckness' around organisational learning. A deeper appreciation of these barriers and defences and some initial pointers for how to work with them, may free up energy for the 'radically different approach' that is called for.'

I have circulated the barriers paper and look forward to seeing if the tips in it help unstick us. What are your tips for becoming a learning organisation? Let me know.

My balcony currently has no plants on it but I have a vision of a small green jewel that I can look out on, sit on, smell bee-loving plants on and generally enjoy in any spare moment I happen to have.

With this end in mind I contacted various people listed by the Society of Garden Designers but as I don't have 200 acres for landscaping they wouldn't help. So I called in on spec to the local flower shop and asked if they knew anyone as I have no clue as to how to convert my empty open-fronted box into a green jewel. John turned up and suggested trellising and various types of evergreen vines. With this idea, and thanks to ready access to the web, I started to investigate.

That same day I read the following: "Imagining today minus the Net is as content-free an exercise as imagining London in the 1840s with no steam power, New York in the 1930s with no elevators, or L.A. in the 1970s with no cars. After a while, the trellis so shapes the vine that you can't separate the two." Clay Shirky, who studies the Internet.

This made me think. Here I am able to find potential balcony vine and trellis info, do rapid research, buy stuff for more or less immediate delivery – my behaviour is being shaped by the structure of the internet.

Take the trellis/vine metaphor into organisations and you get the idea of the trellis being the infrastructures like policies, protocols, processes, procedures, technologies, and the vines being the relationships and behaviours of the people in the organisation and their interdependencies with the organisational trellises.

Trellis trains, shapes and supports the vine for a specific purpose. For example, 'The first step in getting peas started is to build a trellis. There's been recent research that shows peas grow more fruit if they're supported. Results show a 30-60 percent higher yield, or amount of fruit grown, on trellised plants'. Not a bridge too far to see that support mechanisms – pay, performance management, RAG ratings, and other trellises of organisations are intended to drive productivity.

What we need to be aware of is that organisational trellises can mitigate against the inclusion and diversity that organisations also say they crave and that some say is a business imperative. (See a recent article here).

Again we can look to the gardening column for insight. In How to Choose Trellises and Supports for Climbing Plants the advice is 'think about what kinds of plants you want to grow. A climbing rose requires a different type of support than a sweet pea; pole beans need a different support from a tomato or cucumber plant. To learn more about which types of supports suit which types of plants, read How Plants Climb'.

So I turned to How Plants Climb and discover that there are several types of climbers and they 'climb in particular ways: some wrap, some adhere, and some curl'. There is a typology of climbers – tendrils, twiners, scramblers, adherers, and clingers. (Unfortunately not nine or we would have a good substitute for the labels in the 9-box grid). They need different types of trellising and support.

However , in most organisations the trellising is fairly uniform i.e. the same pay structures, the same policies, the same measures and incentives. It doesn't allow for the natural differences inherent in the different people we employ and say we want to employ.

To get to diversity and inclusion don't we have to be much more reflective about choosing and providing the right types of trellising that will allow the diverse types of people we want to include to climb and flourish?

Let me know.

(Meanwhile listen to the Flanders and Swan tragic song about the love of two young vines, the right-handed honeysuckle and the left-handed bindweed).

During my body pump class yesterday I was mulling over the discussion we had at work last week on resistance to change. The body pump class works on The Rep Effect … 'In a typical BODYPUMP class you'll perform 800 reps.' It is 'a breakthrough in resistance training that helps create long, lean muscles and a toned, strong physique'. Hmm – is the rep effect adaptable to organisations?

It's definitely worth exploring adapting 'The Rep Effect' for organisational use as we want our organisation to be toned, lean and strong. Even better, The Rep Effect 'is proven to deliver a total body transformation' and like many other organisations we want our organisation to be transformed. We even have a Business Transformation function. There might be a blockbuster management book in this idea.

Shall I write the book? No. I'm already resisting writing the 3rd edition of my book Organisation Design: Engaging with Change, that the publisher has asked if I will do. Will I have to perform 800 repetitions of the word 'no' to convince her? Or is she going to convince me by the 800 reasons why writing a third edition is a good idea?

Oh – just a minute, in repeating 'no' aren't I using a different technique I learned years ago in assertiveness training classes called 'broken record', that's when you are trying to resist persuasion: you 'simply repeat the same words of refusal. You may have to do this a number of times, but eventually they will get the message'.

I guess the publisher will be trying the opposite technique. In this method you keep repeating the same words of persuasion until eventually the person you are trying to persuade gets the message. I've just found twenty-one principles of persuasion and see that one of them is 'Persistence Pays', 'the person who is willing to keep asking for what they want, and keeps demonstrating value, is ultimately the most persuasive'.

So we are each using techniques endemic to protagonists/antagonists in the organisation change arena. And now I've found a list of 65 (yes 65!) 'resistance techniques that can be used to slow down the proceedings and hold your own (and for persuaders, these are just a few of the things you may face)'. With these in use can we hope to transform the organisation and make it slim, trim, and dynamic?

In our bid to transform the organisation do we have a stand-off? We have 65 ways of resistance, and 21 ways of persuading (but if you assume that the persuasion is 3 times as powerful as the resistance you end up with pretty much 65 ways of persuading too).

So, for each transformation suggestion we could face off a resistor and a persuader against each other in 800 rounds of metaphorical arm wrestling, maybe over 65 days with appropriate selection processes to match competitors, and with milestones, gateways, governance on proceeding to the next round and so on. (Hang on – I think some of these could be viewed by the resistors as legitimate for fair competition and by the persuaders as obfuscating process).

But surely having a competitive challenge isn't the best way to get to transformation? Actually, in my experience both resistors and persuaders have legitimate points of view. Maybe instead we could do what happens in Body Pump – the resistant muscles work with the persuasive mind and together get to the transformed body. Should we work out how change resistors and change persuaders can together orchestrate organisational transformation? Let me know.

I still haven't cracked the issue that when managers talk about organisation design or structure, for the most part, what they have in mind is a traditional organisation chart. They want to know who will report to whom in their 'territory' and they want to know that in the next couple of days.

The trouble with this request is that it doesn't factor in anything about organisations as a complex system with multiple interactions, feedback loops, and components which affect and are affected by the behaviour of others. In this form of systems thinking the structure might 'include the hierarchy and process flows, but it also includes attitudes and perceptions, the quality of products, the ways in which decisions are made, and hundreds of other factors.' These 'systemic structures' are not, as authors of the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook point out, necessarily built consciously. They are also built unconsciously out of the choices people make over time.

I'm trying various ways of tackling this perception that the 'chart' is the structure (design). Some of them are personal, some of them are with colleagues in my team, some of them are with experimentation in the work we are doing.

Personal: What I'm doing is revisiting my knowledge of systems theory including re-reading the books I have on it: The Fifth Discipline and the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook I mentioned are two. I'm trying to work out how I can help clients understand, for example, 6 precepts they need to bear in mind as they re-design. (Again from the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook): There are no right answers, they won't be able to divide their elephant in half, cause and effect will not be closely related in time and space, they can have their cake and it eat too – but not all at once, the easiest way out will lead back in, behaviour will grow worse before it grows better.

I've just completed the futurelearn course on Global systems science and policy which has reminded me of systems dynamics and the various archetypes that we frequently meet in organisation design work. One that I'm working with now is the accidental adversaries.

Working with my team to develop a common understanding of systems theory and how we can apply it into our organisation design work without being theoretical or too zany, and simultaneously delivering something that the client values even if it is not an immediate organisation chart. We've been recommended the Systems Thinking Playbook. This combined with systems theory articles for discussion in our about-to -start study group makes me think we're going to learn and have fun.

We are experimenting in adapting and applying some of the agile techniques into our design work. We've just have an involving process of 'discovery' taking a systems approach and have done a 'test and learn' exercise with some colleagues in a specific and evolving job role. These iterative approaches start to encourage people into collectively discussing the systemic issues. We're also seeing if we can jog discussion by putting up posters and inviting responses. One example is the habits of a systems thinker that I have in my book on Organisational Health (in the chapter on systems and processes) and another is from Delta 7 change.

How do you work to help clients see beyond the organisation chart into the whole system and design it from there? Let me know.

Sitting on the London Underground the other day was a gloomy experience for me. Everyone on the platform and in my very crowded carriage was wearing a black coat or jacket (including me). These, paired with either black trousers or dark denim resulted in my buying bright red hat and bag in Kings Cross Station: anything to ward off the gloom and add a splash of colour to the uniform darkness.

Similarly a work colleague arrived and we started the usual 'commute journey' tale. Hers was different from the normal 'delayed on the Northern Line'. She said she'd seen a person in her carriage in a bright yellow coat. She had been instantly cheered by that single splash of colour in the sea of black.

At the Big Bang Data exhibition, I saw the visualization Colours in Cultures. It's a wonderful expression of the characteristics that colours are associated with in 10 broad-banded cultures (Western/American, African, etc). In only two of the ten – Western/American and Japanese – is black associated with anything other than evil, death, bad-luck, anger, unhappiness, penance and mourning. In those two cultures it is a colour of style albeit paradoxically also associated with death, mourning, etc. Is England a drab and gloomy culture that reflects in the black clothing? (There was a British sitcom called The Glums). Or is everyone thinking they look stylish in their black uniform?

Remembering these experiences led me to thinking about colour in organisations. What are the cultural colours of your organisation? How do they reflect in the colours people wear, the choices of paint and furnishings, the logo colours, and so on. Does colour choice have an impact on what people do and their productivity levels?

Think of the way people responded to Yahoo's purple logo. It was panned. 'Purple is a distinctive, vivid, and fun color; it's also chronically under-represented in the depressingly blue palette of Internet branding (look at Facebook, Twitter, and, to a lesser extent, Google). But for thousands of years, we've been culturally associating purple with wealthy, out-of-touch dynasties'.

Are the people in Yahoo out of touch? Maybe, if the stories circulating about its being bought are anything to go by. Would a different colour logo have influenced its history differently? (Both Twitter and Facebook have blue and clearly Google is hedging its bets). Do the colours of the logos reflect or inspire the cultural colours of the organisation?

We know that people are affected by colour and have strong preferences when making personal choices related to it. The choices 'are deeply rooted emotional responses that seem to lack any rational basis, yet the powerful influence of color rules our choices in everything from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to the cars we buy'.

Colour is said to be important in healing therapies and choices of hospital decor although a review of the literature makes the point that 'most color guidelines for healthcare design are nothing more than affective value judgments whose direct applicability to the Architecture and interior design of healthcare settings seems oddly inconclusive and nonspecific … Analysis of color in any environment means respecting other kinds of processing forces such as culture, time, and location.'

Colour in office design is also subject to pronouncements. Is it really true that 'people are more likely to lose their temper in yellow rooms, which might make it a bad choice for conference rooms'? Nancy Kwallek, whose research informs this 2015 Fast Company piece, as far as I can tell last published in 2007. She may be right and her findings may still hold although in a 2012 piece she apparently says there's no clear answer to what colour works best. Again it depends on individual experiences and preferences.

Do you associate your organisation with a colour either literally or metaphorically? What colour would you like the culture of your organisation to be – do you think it would make a difference? Let me know.

We have a cohort of new, young, management trainee joiners starting work with us in a month or so. They are with us for around six months before they move to their next placement. They won't be working closely with each other but dispersed through the organisation but we think (to be tested), that there's value in them developing a 'strong community'.

What we're looking to establish is a network of people who work collectively in the interests of the whole organisation while they are with us, give ideas and support to each other during the six months, and who will feel drawn to return at the end of their training programme. We're in a market where we are competing for good people and what we have to offer is less of the high salary and glossy kit, and more of the social value and being able to influence and create major organisational transformation through creative, co-operative and collective approaches.

We had a go trying to create the strong community that would create the change we are interested in with the previous cohort but not successfully: hopefully we've learned something so undaunted we are giving it another go. We think we learned three things:

• The cohort didn't have the skills or incentive to self-organise into a strong community
• We didn't give them enough (any) guidance on what we were hoping for, our expectations of them and what they could expect from us
• We didn't intervene to generate activity but waited to see what happened (nothing)

So this time we're being more hands on and directive. (The opposite of what we read millennials want from managers).

But there's still the issue of what makes for a 'strong community' and can they be consciously designed? There's lots of stuff around urban planning that suggests the answer is yes – but that's due, in part, to the way the built environment is configured. We're talking for the most part about a virtual environment but with some face to face meetings.

I thought the American Red Cross example in how they designed a strong virtual community was interesting. The five steps could be relevant if we substituted 'management trainees' for 'public' and 'organisation' for 'company'.

1. Commitment – How the public views a company's willingness to commit time and resources to building relationships online
2. Control mutuality – Two-way interaction and control (the company/brand does not have all the control)
3. Communality – Sharing a concern for one another and similar values, beliefs, and interests
4. Trust – A company should be seen as believable, competent, reliable, and consistent
5. Satisfaction – How a company meets its community's needs and exceeds expectations

Another thought provoking blog with good graphics distinguishes between online social networks and online communities arguing that:

The single most important feature that distinguishes a social network from a community is how people are held together on these sites. In a social network, people are held together by pre-established interpersonal relationships, such as kinship, friendship, classmates, colleagues, business partners, etc. The connections are built one at a time (i.e. you connect directly with another user). The primary reason that people join a social networking site is to maintain old relationships and establish new ones to expand their network.

Unlike social networks, communities (both online and offline) are more interesting from a social anthropological perspective, because they often consist of people from all walks of life that seem to have no relationship at all. Yet, as we've learned from history, communities are very robust social structures. So what is it that holds these communities together?

Communities are held together by common interest. It may be a hobby, something the community members are passionate about, a common goal, a common project, or merely the preference for a similar lifestyle, geographical location, or profession.

Various reading around the ideas on strong communities has given us some things to try out and I think we can make a better go at establishing a strong community. Do you have any tips for doing so? Let me know.