Author: naomiorgdesign

Think about a world where the first interaction a customer has with your organisation is via a small screen – smartphone, phablet, smartwatch or similar. How are you going to give, via that small entry point, an experience that is expansive, engaging, meaningful and rewarding – to your organisation and to the customer? That's the challenge that the 'digital transformation' strategists wrestle with. And reading between the lines of the Altimeter report The 2014 State of Digital Transformation it is not plain sailing. They define digital transformation as 'the realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital customers at every touchpoint in the customer experience lifecycle'. They surveyed 59 organizations on the topic and found that although 88% of respondents say they are digitally transforming 'the details of their efforts report the contrary … digital transformation as an integrated and official endeavor is something many strategists are truly just beginning to understand and pursue.'

What digital transformation seems to require is a totally rethought business model, focused on customer centricity and a 'frictionless customer experience', accompanied by a complete organization redesign that includes:

• improving processes
• updating websites and ecommerce programmes
• integrating all social, mobile, web, ecommerce, service efforts and investments
• updating customer-facing technology systems
• researching customer touch points, building competitive social media channels
• creating an executive sense of urgency that this is the way to go
• overhauling customer service.

I was reading the report when I realized I'd left at home a connector I need to connect my laptop to a monitor. I'm now away for the week: so an immediate test of John Lewis's multi-channel strategy. Could I buy the connector from them and get it next day? I chose John Lewis a) because I've read a lot about their digital strategy and b) because they have a Waitrose close to where I am so I could click and collect. They fell at the first post because they don't have a BlackBerry app to enter their portal. But maybe I should abandon my Q10 BlackBerry and get an app heavy competitor smartphone. I am continuously getting ribbed by colleagues on my customer loyalty. Getting side-tracked on this idea I saw T-Mobile tried to get customers to switch to an i-phone by offering a financial incentive. Back to the task and undaunted, I switched to my small screen tablet, entered the John Lewis website, ordered the item, gave my mobile phone number so I get an alert when it is ready to collect tomorrow, so all is well so far. Was it painless and seamless? Yes – assuming the connector arrives tomorrow as promised.

Looking at the John Lewis digital transformation history which began around 2008 it's clear that it has been a long and well thought through journey. They make the investments, line up the organization design behind the omni channel business model, and keep a close eye on their customers' buying patterns. They have seen a surge in on-line sales via the 'small screen'. Mark Lewis, online director at John Lewis in January 2014 reported that they 'had enjoyed a strong Christmas, with online sales up by 22.6% in the five weeks to the end of December. "Online now accounts for around 30% of overall sales, up from 25% in 2012," he said. "Two stand-out milestones for us were the 61.8% rise in Click & Collect orders and a shift to traffic from mobile devices making up over half of traffic to johnlewis.com.'

It is likely that buying through smartphones will continue to grow: as of January 2014 58% of American adults had a smartphone. In the UK it was 68% of adults with 32% of them each month making on-line purchases via the smartphone. Retailers that have a weak online/small screen presence are losing out to those who have a strong presence. Take a look at Morrisons, for example.

But what about non-retail organizations – should they work to the same premise that the way their customers, clients, patients, or whoever interact with them is through the small screen? The sensible answer to this is yes. A July 2014 report noted that 80% of consumers were open to healthcare interactions via smartphones, "The way health care organizations communicate with people is changing, as individuals become more and more sophisticated about using information technology to make health-related decisions," said Stuart Wells, FICO's chief product and technology officer. "People are especially interested in mobile services that can help them manage their personal health and shop for health care services. The leading health care providers are increasingly turning to mobile technologies to meet this demand, and to engage frequently and proactively with consumers."

Similarly the agriculture sector is a big user of smartphone apps to monitor farm performance and to get/give information. The Nosho Navi project in Japan is one such example: rice farmers feed information via smartphone and a cloud server to a research centre and get advice on how much water they should apply to the crop and when in order to improve yield and quality. Partnering in this enterprise is Fujitsu which is predicting a 'green future in cloud-based veggies'

You can see government interest in smartphone/mobile based interactions with citizens is also increasing rapidly. A recent article (July 31 2014) discusses the way US state and local government is getting to grips with it. And it's not an easy task. "All these different devices cause support issues, security issues, etc. It's moving faster than perhaps a lot of places can comprehend or manage. It's going to be a continually evolving process. But mobile is here to stay, and you have to work with it."

Given that smartphone and other mobile devices are here and the number of users is increasing daily (look at an infographic here) what should organisations do to keep up or catch up? Already mentioned are the three main things:

• Have a well thought through digital transformation strategy, remembering that 'small screen' is increasingly likely to be the first customer touch point
• Rethink your business model
• Redesign your organization to deliver the business model

Beyond that are a number of things that support the transformation effort: none of them, in my view, specific to digital, but all necessary if that's what you're aiming for. The more structural ones are neatly summarized in the MIT piece The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation while the more cultural ones are discussed in 10 Principles of Leading Change Management.

However, although in the work I'm involved in we're doing many of the things advocated in this type of guidance to get the organization digital, mobile and/or small screen, we are finding that alongside the orthodoxy of the 'how to' we are in practice, also muddling through the day to day challenges, balancing trade-offs, handling the politics, bridging the say-do disconnects, managing our own different perspectives, and so on. Someone suggested we write a handbook on the way it really is to get to digital transformation. We could even develop a small screen app for it. Would that be helpful? Let me know.

We've been having some discussion this week on organisation design governance. By this we mean how do we get oversight of all the different organisation design work going on in our large organisation? We want this in order to have confidence that the various design work is all headed in the same direction. It is all too easy to design within silos not taking into account that design in one part of the organisation could have unintended consequences in another part.

I've also had a mini-lesson this week in agile methodology, specifically about user stories. A user story is 'part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality.'

User stories are a short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or customer of the system. They typically follow a simple template:

As a type of user, I want some goal so that some reason.

That set me thinking about applying the concept of personas to developing the organisation design governance we're after: can we apply the concept of user stories to help us get to appropriate governance? I think purists in one of the many tribes of agile (or indeed of persona development) would have a view, but in the way of daily back-to-back meetings I didn't get a chance to find one of them to ask. Since I'm more of the pragmatic than purist bent I asked myself and replied that it's worth a go.

One of the first questions seems to be around who is the 'user' of the product/service, and who is the 'customer' of it. I'm not totally clear on the distinction. I think a user is the person who actually uses it and the customer is the person who buys it for the user. Apparently you need to develop a persona (*see para below) for each as they have different wants. (Forget that Steve Jobs didn't believe people know what they want.) Then you choose a primary persona for whom to design the product or service – or in our case, governance . I still need to learn how you make that choice but that must be in lesson two.

*Oh – but I've just discovered that there's a difference between a 'user description' and a 'persona'. So apologies for all who have read so far and are clear a) that the two nouns mean completely different things and are therefore irritated by my ignorance or b) that they have no idea that the two nouns are not synonymous and are enjoying the read. (You can see I am an agile beginner although tomorrow I am putting myself down for the agile awareness course – I hope it tackles 'user description' v 'personas').

However, I think I'm on reasonably safe ground if I say that for all five user titles listed below I have specific individuals in mind with whom I have had many conversations so they may fulfil the 'persona' definition – though I yet I haven't systematically or in a detailed way researched their want. Take it that they are part way between a 'user description' and a 'persona' for the rest of this piece, and I'll continue to use the terms synonymously.

Now I need to identify the user of organisation design governance. It seems that the persona must also be a single individual. It's not good enough to develop a persona for the split personality of the 'leadership team' (considered as one unit). For organisation design governance users might be:

• Organisational CEO: I want all organisation design work to be clearly aligned to deliver the goals of the business strategy so that I don't have to keep reminding people we are one organisation and not a bunch of autonomous units.
• Chief HR person: I want to feel confident that organisation designs pay close attention to the people elements so that so that we have the right people in the right place at the right time doing the right things.
• Chief auditor: I want to be convinced that each organisation design piece of work is effectively controlled and monitored so that I can identify any financial or other risks associated with it.
• Business owner of design project: I want my organisation design to be quick, efficient, affordable and deliver the intended benefits so that I can get on with running the business successfully.
• Organisation design consultant: I want information on all organisation design work to be available so that business leaders and other consultants can learn from each other's experience and the methodology can be continuously improved.

It's necessary to identify the primary user/customer in order to get a sufficiently focused product/servce. Identifying the customers of organisation design governance is not so straightforward. Who is buying it for the users? In this case the person 'buying' the governance could be the Board of the organisation but it could also be the CEO, but he/she is also a user of it. Additionally the governance process is usually being developed by the organisation design consultants who are also users of it. So there does seem to be a degree of split personality in these personas, or at least, as in real life, they play different roles. There's a helpful presentation on how to manage this complexity of handling a user who has multiple roles from Jeff Patton of Agile Product Design.

Noticeable about the persona/user types that I've skimmed through is that no-where have I seen a grumpy, negative one who firmly states what he/she doesn't want – on the lines of 'I don't want to spend time on non-value add governance stuff so (onerous) that I feel ready to throw in the towel.' (Explanation of that phrase here). Or 'I don't want hordes of people coming around poking their noses into the way I run my business so that I feel I've lost all accountability and choice.'

So I'll fill in the gap here. I think it's safe to say that what no user (or persona) wants is governance that is onerous, tightly controlling, and requires checklists, RAG ratings, audits, and other forms of assessment. We already have those 'up the Wazoo' as the saying goes. If you're not familiar with that phrase you can look it up here. (Meaning 2 in the entry). We want appropriate organisastion design governance – but we're not yet quite sure what that is.

However, we have an outline to discuss with each of our presumed users. (It is August's tool for the month). One way of developing the governance approach is the agile way of 'test and learn' through developing minimal viable product. But that's a topic to come.

Meanwhile – who do you think are the users of organisation design governance and how would you identify/choose your primary one? Let me know.

The lovely statement that, 'All models are wrong but some are useful', I first heard from one of my bosses when I was showing him a systems model that he wasn't impressed by. I later found out that the phrase is attributed not to him but to a statistician, George Box. So although the phrase was originally generated around statistical models, it is relevant to any abstraction of the real thing.

The phrase stuck with me – it's been one of the most useful tests to apply when being presented with a model. And over the last few weeks we've been working with a business design model: not the well- known Osterwalder Business Canvas Model but one developed by a consulting company. There are many business models to choose from (look at Google images) several from competitor companies to the one we're working with and many others from various sources.

Tim Kastelle in his blog Eight Models of Business Models, and Why They're Important has done a great job of picking out the key points on each of his chosen eight. He also summarizes from a couple of sources what the function of a business model is:
1. Describing different kinds and types of businesses: critical if we are trying to study them analytically.
2. Providing short-hand descriptions of how firms operate: the primary value here is that you can use the business model to ensure that you have strategic fit across activities.
3. Role modeling: you can use them to describe how you want your organisation to function.
4. Hypothesising about how your organisation might be able to create value for customers

Joan Margretta in her article Why Business Models Matter adds in another idea: business models are essentially about writing a new story one that 'represents a better way than the existing alternatives.' Perhaps it does this by offering more value to a discrete group of customers and/or by completely replacing the old way of doing things and becoming the standard for the next generation to beat.

I haven't done an exhaustive analysis of the various business models but I have used a variety of organisational systems models in my work. I've compared seven or so of them in my book, and I have others from the major consulting companies that I haven't compared in the book but have for my own purposes. Having this experience, I find that they are all equally 'wrong' and for the most part I find that some are, indeed, useful. So I'm going to assume that since a business model isn't a million miles from an organization model – in fact, I'm constantly being asked what the difference is – that they too are simultaneously 'wrong' and some are useful.

In the situation I am in it seems to me that the model we are working with is 'wrong' in three key aspects:

It is generating frustration. This is not, perhaps, the fault of the model but rather the way we are using it. If you consider the suggestion made in an excellent article from Harvard Business School Competing through Business Models that a business model consists of: (1) a set choices and (2) the set of consequences arising from those choices, then you can see that there could be an issue if a series of questions are posed around choices to be made without simultaneously including information about the consequences of the choices. The proposition on the table is that we present the set of choices – framed as questions. Those proposing this approach say that the consequences cannot be fully understood until the set of choices is made. An alternate view is that we cannot determine a business model until we know, at least at a high level, the consequences of the choices.

It is not explicit enough on the political/social/emotional relationships, interdependencies, and complexities inherent in the situation. It is fine to look at a sheet of paper with the model on it but essentially it shows concepts, for example 'capabilities', that entirely miss the human aspects of the business: both positive and negative and this to my mind is a significant gap. I'm reminded of the work around organisational network mapping that I discuss in my organisation design training. I show a traditional organisation chart and beside it the same set of people as a network mapped according to the information flows between them. The differences invariably result in prolonged and intrigued discussions on how this information could influence/impact on the organisation's design. A business model could/should include discussions and input on choices and consequences that include the human dynamics and interactions that propel the business operation.

There is not clarity on what the business model's primary function is in our situation. Are we using it to tell a new story? Hypothesize? Role model? Compare current model with a possible future model? Provide a description of where we have/haven't got strategic fit in the current a/or future state? This lack of clarity may be why we are seemingly getting bogged down in repeated 'go-rounds' or 'laps' of the work as each person we talk with has a different perspective and a relevant viewpoint.

However, the model is also useful in three aspects:

It is challenging the current way of doing things by raising the difficult questions that need reflective and considered answers. But in this challenge comes the protection of sacred cows, the need to work through/with legacy systems and structures that pose insurmountable difficulties in dismantling (or is that just a perception?) and the fear of slings and arrows from various quarters. There is a lot of work going on with collective and individual members of the leadership group to encourage and develop the discussion of an appropriate business model for the context of the ongoing efficiency, effectiveness, 'do more with less' requirement that we are charged to meet now and onwards.

It is highlighting 'leadership alignment' variability at all levels in the organisation. The question is how to find all the stuff going on that is connected to a new/different business model then find out which of this various people hold dear and cling on to, and then think of ways of encouraging them to relinquish their pet whatever to get some kind of whole organisation coherence and simplicity. (I'm contemplating a Christmas carol blog in an organisational 'Partridge in a Pear Tree' vein which will include verses on 8 target operating models, 7 cultural challenges, 6 ways we do things, 5 core values, 4 customer promises, etc.) So still some way to go on leadership alignment and 'buy-in' but it's definitely a requirement if we want to implement a new business model.

It is revealing data issues. Although we are swimming in governance structures, reporting mechanisms, risk ratings, oversight bodies, and other control systems the ability to share meaningful data across the whole organisation is limited – the data that feeds into the control systems is collected in different ways for different purposes through different means which makes it hard to get a useful whole system 'dashboard' of organisational metrics that will give good insight into the various consequences of the business model choices we face. Good data sharing that could produce a single clear set of cross-organisation performance metrics would make all the difference to our ability to assess the consequences of the business model choices we make.

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If any of the above sounds familiar then you may be asking yourself the question: business models are they wrong and are some useful? Let me know.

Resources
Long Range Planning (Special issue with 19 articles + editorial on business models)
Volume 43, Issues 2–3, Pages 143-462 (April–June 2010)
Business Models

Analyzing the Flow of Knowledge with Sociometric Badges
Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences
Volume 2, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 6389–6397
The 1st Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference

Related blogs
Change your business model
Creative capitalism business models

The West Acre Summer Fete yesterday featured 'the usual attractions for young and old – welly wanging, duck and ferret racing, craft activities, etc. Price of entry – £1 for big people and 50p for little people (5-16 years)'. I didn't see the welly wanging but enjoyed watching the little people win on the coconut shy, throwing a ball through a small hoop, and keeping their hand steady as they tried to move a loop along an electric wire bent into a complex path to the end without incurring a penalty beep if the hand wobbled and the wire was touched.

Beyond that, the even more enjoyable thing I found was watching the big people interact with the little people. With some exceptions they applauded the little people's achievements, gave them a helping hand along the way, encouraged them to have another go if things went awry, and guided trade-offs like is it better to spend the remaining 50p of the financial budget on a ferret bet or a piece of flapjack? The exceptions to those positive responses tended to be social norm reinforcement like 'put your clothes on NOW', yelling at the kid and escalating things at volume, with both parties ending up furious and frustrated.

What was great about the 'little people' was that many of the ones I saw were terrific at specific things: one – a ball through hoop throwing expert – showed his grandparents exactly how to stand to get the ball through the hoop, the arm movements and so on. Another won three coconuts in three shots. Others were good at bringing their friends along to have a go at something.

The village fete showed up in my mind as an organisational metaphor where the little people represented staff and the big people positional leaders. The 'little people' were better at some things than the 'big people', but the 'big people' were willing to learn from the 'little people' and at the same time be positive, encouraging, and supportive. Things went wrong when the 'big people' exerted power over the 'little people' . Things went well when both sets of people treated each other with respect and understood the requirements.

So all this became a backdrop to the stuff I'd been thinking of writing about this week: 'leadership is a quality not a grade' as it seems to be the topic of the moment in the organisation I'm working with. It's hot topic for five reasons:

1. It's an organisation with 11 grades of hierarchy which are not going to disappear in the immediate or even medium/long term future.
2. Typically people progress through the grades – they don't jump any. Progression is less about technical ability or expertise and more about …. This is a bit of a question mark but let's say it's about displaying management skills.
3. Decisions get made by going up through the ranks and then back down. It's rather hard for a low grade person to feel confident about making a decision.
4. There's a certain fear about stepping outside the parameters of 'my job'. It's not nearly as pronounced as the 'I'll have to ask my supervisor', responses that are culturally ingrained in many US organisations I've worked with but it is still evident.
5. The organisation operates in silos which isn't efficient or effective unless you're in an individual competition like the ferret race I watched. The ferrets start at the same gated line (as in a horse race) but the gate leads into a drain pipe so they tear down the drain pipe – without being able to see the each of the other racers – and one emerges the winner. The ultimate in siloed competition! As we're not ferrets, encouraging cross organisation working would help improve organisational performance in a number of ways.
6. Positional leaders are doing less leading and more operational stuff than is a good use of their time.

Since the organisation is aiming to become more of a 'social'/digital business – explained well in the white paper Building a Digital Culture – it has to change from a command and control bias to a collaborative, collective responsibility, and distributed leadership bias which does not sit well with a traditional hierarchy.

But, believing that the existing grading system will provide too great an obstacle to getting to distributed leadership is defeatist. Assuming that the grades and hierarchies will remain in the structure the task is to think innovatively about working through and within in it. Part of this (and perhaps the biggest challenge) is for everyone to believe and act as if they think, as I do, that leadership is a quality not a grade. This goes for the positional leaders at the top of the hierarchy and the lowest graded staff at the bottom of the hierarchy and for everyone in between.

There's a danger in interpreting 'leadership is a quality not a grade' as resulting in some form of anarchy in just the same way that the currently popular phrase 'everyone a leader' is incurring comments ranging from unequivocal support for the notion to total derision.

What I'm talking about is not 'leader' as a title, as in 'team leader' nor do I think that everyone is inherently a leader as in being able to lead a project or a team or an organisation. I am talking about leadership as a set of qualities seen in those organisational contexts that give people freedom to operate within a sensible framework, few barriers within the framework, more responsibility than is typically seen in a command and control organisation, and the space to manage themselves and how they do their job. (See a blog post that this paragraph draws on)

This means that people, whatever their grade, are able to use the day to day leadership skills they use outside of work – the sort of skills I saw in operation at the fete demonstrating that leadership as a quality not a grade is much 'less about position and more about disposition. It is not so much about superiority but about service in the area of our strengths. It has less to do with a set of behaviors and more to do with a perspective with which we view life.' (Source here).

So how could this context where people can learn and use leadership qualities at all levels be introduced into a traditional hierarchical organization? Here are five ideas we are working on and I'd be interested to hear others:

1. Encouraging the 'good rebels' at all levels to challenge, initiate experiments, and push for change
2. Finding people who have leadership skills and abilities that they are using outside the organisation that they feel they can't use inside the organisation and learning why this is and what needs to change so they can
3. Publicising stories of leadership qualities in action at various levels/roles in the organisation
4. Looking at the reward, recognition, and development systems that could foster leadership qualities at all levels
5. Provoking conversations with hierarchical leaders about 'letting go', the downside and opportunity risks inherent in this, and the role modeling they could do to help develop the transformed organisation they say they want

If you listen to the Radio 4 programme The Leadership Gap you'll hear lots more ideas for changing organisations from ones with command and control (authoritarian) leaders to a more distributed model of recognizing and using leadership qualities at all levels. And if you're enjoying Pimms with strawberries and cream at the local fete on a sunny summer day look around and you'll see the world of positive and, less likely, negative leadership qualities in action.

True or false: everyone has a leadership obligation, no matter who they are and what they do? What do you think? Let me know.

In the organization I'm working with we've reached the point when the word 'digital' has joined the banned word list. People don't like it: it implies technology, and difficult things and learning new stuff, and replacing face to face contact with 'machines', and changing ways of working, integrating new and legacy systems, rethinking internal policies and financing arrangements and a whole host of stuff that is difficult to do. It might even imply losing some jobs (but gaining others – which might mean learning new skills …)

So I'm wondering if this attitude to the 'D' word is a definitional issue or a Luddite response, or a sensible questioning of something we don't know how to address but feel we should because the whole world is moving to digital, or a feeling that the digital tribe are aliens who must be resisted, or a general exhaustion with the latest word that people feel will go the way of six sigma, lean, TQM, and so on and is thus not worth paying attention to.

One way of finding that out is to agree and clarify what we mean by 'digital'. There are hundreds of interpretations and uses of the word. I enjoyed reading a blog post on this which ultimately proposes a 'definition of "digital" as not a technology, device, or channel, but instead as "the collection of habits and expectations of modern users." An example of a habit: most people Google things online, whether they're advanced or novice users. An example of an expectation: these users want the right answer right away.'

The thing about 'digital' whether defined as technologies, channels, habits or expectations, is that to become a 'digital organization' or build a 'digital culture' requires fundamental changes to the business model which is why so many long established organisations are struggling with it. One that isn't is John Lewis, a retailer, which recently celebrated 150 years in business. I was talking with a couple of their 'partners' (all employees have a stake in the company and are known as partners). They have an 'omni-channel' digital strategy which clearly changes their business model. And their digital strategy is, in turn, based on a long-term business strategy which is what MD Andy Street says is the most important thing to becoming digital. In his view, '"The most important thing is to have a long-term business strategy. The [business] model on its own isn't sufficient. You've got to have a real clear view about where you compete. For us, we compete on products and service and that fits our business model. The key thing for every business is to decide what you really stand for.'

It is striking that universities, which tend have a clear view of where they compete but may lack a good business strategy for doing so, are having a hard time adjusting their business models to include or at least to co-exist with digital education offered through MOOCS. A recent article gives some reasons for this among them fear from the academics of staffing cuts, the speed with which non-elite universities could change their business model (very slowly), and the difficulties of integrating MOOCS into their traditional programmes, which would require changes in financing and accreditation systems.

Similarly governments, despite best efforts, run the risk of failing at being digital. In the UK Mark Thompson, university lecturer in information systems at Cambridge Business School, says that the government "doesn't get" digital, which is causing old problems to re-emerge within the public sector and threatening to end the digital strategy. In his view, "As shareholders in government we need to wake up to the fact our board members don't get it, that they're not even listening and that our employees are going to resist digital reinvention at every turn … Digital is fundamentally not about new interfaces in the system, it's actually about fundamental business model change.'

While in Australia although 'there have been pockets of success, few [government] agencies have managed to position themselves to reap the full benefits of digitisation. All too often their efforts are undermined by internal resistance, from employees and stakeholders.'

So what is it about universities and governments that creates difficulties in moving from analogue to digital beyond the lack of a business strategy, the ability to quickly change their business model and the lack of a digital strategy tied to the business strategy? I think there are three specific things that need to be addressed in tandem with developing the strategies and model. John Lewis's operation tackles all these three.

The first is the organizational culture. As the writer of the Australian piece said, 'It is not sufficient to just adopt digital processes and systems. Digitisation requires everyone within an agency to adopt a new way of working. It requires an agency to develop a culture that not just tolerates digitisation but embraces it.'

I've had good discussions on this by showing the graphic in his article. It encourages people to think about the things they would have to do to, for example, move from a strong hierarchy (analogue organization) to a flat hierarchy (digital organization). This has led us to starting experiments on this and other aspects of the dimensions he presents. For further ideas look too at Building a Digital Culture or Spotify's squad culture. This also picks up elements of workplace design that help change the culture as does the white paper 'Designing the Digital Culture'

The second is the organization structure. There are great pointers for digital structures in an SSIR piece Four Models for Managing Digital at Your Organization that discusses four models for structuring digital work: 'informal, centralized, independent, and hybrid. The first is typically a legacy of a poorly managed institution, the second and third get closer to what we think institutions need to sustain cultures of innovation, but it is really the fourth that can most consistently produce the integrated, customer-centric digital experience across all channels that is the holy grail of excellence in today's world'.

I love the hybrid model they advocate but it comes with a warning label: it requires 'open leadership' i.e. 'service oriented, highly collaborative, hyper-connected listeners, who also have the technical and content expertise to be high-value strategists. They take on leadership of high-leverage or high-risk projects themselves, but leave space for others to lead on their own initiatives. It's actually unclear whether this model can actually exist if the rest of the institution is highly silo-ized, politicized, and competitive.' So that may rule out governments and universities? But I remain hopeful and will keep you posted!

The third area I'm working on is leadership. That's not the positional power leaders specifically but all the informal leaders found at all levels in the organization. These latter can have immense influence on the success or otherwise of changes to the business strategy and model. Recently, I came across Rebels at Work an organisation started by researcher Lois Kelly and Carmen Medina retired deputy director of intelligence for the CIA. I instantly signed up for the regular email and had a good laugh (or was it cry) reading some of the blog pieces. Posted on their site and also worth looking at is Free Your Rebel Thinkers – a slideshare.

What are you doing to move your organization from analogue to digital? Let me know.

"Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose," says Eckhart Tolle, a teacher and author of The Power of Now. I agree with this statement and I'm wondering how to change what I observe as a 'culture of worry' in the organisation I'm working with. It's endemic. I've been tallying the number of times in the week I've heard from across the enterprise phrases of worry, including 'my worry is … 'I'll put it on my worry list'. 'Aren't you worried that ….?' 'I'm worried about'. Maybe I've sensitized myself but I'm almost tempted to take photos of all the worried furrowed brows I've noticed in meetings and conversations or find out whether 'being an ace worrier' is a recruitment criteria but neither would be productive or problem solving.

Googling 'organisational culture of worry' turned up nothing – the first time I've ever achieved that in a Google search! Maybe I've stumbled on a potentially completely new research field? It's good in a way because I'm about to start revising my book on Organisational Culture for a second edition so now I might have a new topic to talk about in it with a case study waiting in the wings.

More immediately I'm investigating a couple of things: what is the impact of this observed level of worry on organisational performance, and if the impact is a negative one – as Tolle's statement implies – then what actions can be taken to address it?

There's reams of stuff about the effect of worrying on individuals summed up by one psychologist in the statement that 'Chronic worrying is often driven by a need to worry to "make sure things will all be OK", it will affect your mood; it will also have detrimental effects on your relationships, your work productivity, and your social life.' Not only that, another psychologist notes, 'the list of physical damage that worry can do, because of the biology of stress, is long and scary. Which means that not worrying more than we have to may be the best thing we can do for our health.'

Individually people worry because 'they think something bad will happen or could happen, so they activate a hypervigilant strategy of worry and think that if I worry I can prevent this bad thing from happening or catch it early'. It's associated with threat and negative risk. How often does anyone worry that they might win the lottery or meet the person of their dreams?

So, if worrying is potentially harmful to an individual's health, and people worry as a tactic aimed at avoiding threat and risk can we assume that a culture of worry is detrimental to the health and performance of the organisation? I think so. Individually worry is voiced with (I'm assuming) the best of intentions. But I've noticed that it seems to come into sharp relief when something new or different from the status quo is proposed. When aggregated, it forms a kind of collective worrying that verges on a difficult to breach defensive barrier.

Worrying looks helpful in that it raises perhaps legitimate concerns and anxieties that bear examination. But in many cases voicing a worry seems to stand instead of being curious about how to think things through and take action. It enables people to 'sit around and admire the problem' – another organisational phrase I've heard many times – rather than acting to solve it. The cumulative effect is a lack of energy and action around problem solving, taking decisions, accepting risks, and innovating.

Organisations intent on transforming will not do so by accepting high levels of individual and/or collective worrying. Unless we can convert the worry into more fearless mindset there will be organisational paralysis, and a clinging to the status quo. So what to do?

It's possible that by encouraging and pushing we could change the worry and get to positive action. On this, Christopher Logue's lovely poem says it all.

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
and we pushed,
And they flew.

But pushing people over the edge is not acceptable in organisations – think charges of bullying, claims to industrial tribunals and similar. So what else is possible for organisations that want to transform but have to redirect the culture of worry that resists change? I wonder whether some of the techniques offered to individual worriers could be usable to reduce collective worrying. Here are three that are worth investigating:

Avoid 'What-if' thinking and remember that it's never as bad as you think it will be' – this a tip that repeats across several pieces that I read for individual worriers. But remember that 'What ifs' are the stuff of scenarios so maybe one way of changing the worry is to take a closer look the organisational situations people are worrying about. Let's act them out in scenarios and see what could happen and how much risk is involved and whether the perceived threats are really there and/or unmanageable. From this they may discover that the outcome might be completely different from the one they'd conjured up through worrying. 'It might even be wonderful, and surprising'. Link to the blog on this here.

Another common tip is to just let go and be in the moment. Interestingly mindfulness training that helps people stay in the moment is increasingly being offered in organisations, Google, and P & G among them and there is a fair amount of research showing how mindfuness practice reduces anxiety.

A third common tip is to 'voice the worry' which is not an issue in most organisations. Probably the issue is that the voice of worry is not heard, or acknowledged sufficiently. It may be that worriers have good points to make but don't express them in a way that is helpful. One suggestion offered on this is for the worriers to turn their worry into a problem to be solved. 'How can I/we tackle the issue effectively …. ?' And/or for the people listening to the expressed worry not to turn off but to really hear the questions behind the worry and engage the worrier in questions like 'What type of action would alleviate the worry?'

Beyond these three ideas there are many books offering advice on the topic of worrying. In fact, 3,216 are listed on Amazon.co.uk. But rather than plough through them let me know if you work in a culture of worry, and if so, what actions you can take to change it. I'd love to hear your stories.

PS: If you're feeling worried right now listen to this Bob Marley song

Frequently asked questions about moving office space tend to fall into four categories: the IT implications, flexible working, 'results only work environment' (if you're changing traditional performance measures) and a list on the workspace itself. In the work that I'm doing at the moment it's the final list – on workspace – that we're focused on. Below are some of the questions I've collected in the various pieces of work I've done on recently that people are now asking in the current work.

1. Where will I sit? Will everyone have a workspace?
2. How much space will I have to work in?
3. Will there be space for various types of meeting
4. How much storage space will I have? Is it private and lockable? What about my pedestal?
5. Where will I hang my coat?
6. Will the noise and light levels be different?
7. What do I do if I need to have a private conversation?
8. Exactly when will we move?
9. Do contractors get the same amount of space as employees?
10.How frequently can the floor layout be changed and how easy is it to do?
11.What is the document storage available? (Beyond personal storage)
12.What about confidential information?

I've found that by working with people who are moving offices or moving to a new space within the existing office or generally re-locating it's a whole lot easier for them if they help answer the questions they're asking.

One way of doing this is through space experiments i.e. trying out stuff in their current set-up, learning from this, and feeding the info to the workplace designers. We're about to start this activity in a part of an organization I'm working with. We've come up with eleven experiments for teams to try out in the weeks leading up to their move. The general idea is that each team chooses one experiment per week. Each week they will report back to all on how they got on, what they learned that they can feed to the workplace designers, and whether or not they will change their current ways of working and adopt the new ways or a variation. They then choose another experiment. At the end of the experiment period we'll re-group and come up with the way of working in the new space. Here's the list:

1. Instead of having meetings sitting down in a meeting room try standing up round a high table or try walking meetings.
2. Push all the under desktop pedestals against a wall and practice working without your pedestal to hand. (In the new design people will have lockers not their own pedestals).
3. Each day for a week swap desks with a different person in your team or in the district of your work to see what it feels like if we move into completely flexible desking.
4. Give up email and communicate by some other method. (Twitter, Yammer, Huddle, phone, face to face, text, IM, etc). We will provide training on those that you don't know.
5. Collectively agree to make some of the current space a 'quiet train coach' space where no talking is allowed and people cannot be disturbed if they are in it.
6. Have a day in the week when you run a team effort to clear out your desks and surrounding areas. Make it fun – prizes for the oldest object found, the most dustbin/trash sacks filled by one person of their stuff, etc.
7. Move some of the furniture in the existing configuration to a different configuration e.g. filing cabinets, shelving, etc to create a new space layout.
8. Find some small round tables and suitable chairs to place at the end of/between the current rows of desks so people can informally meet around them.
9. Set up some standing desks to try standing as you work.
10. Remove the items that personalize your current desk and have a display wall in the kitchen or in a common area that shows something about you.
11. Set up a photo wall of everyone who works in the space with their names. Go and talk to someone you haven't met before. See if you each have something that you're working on that is relevant to the other.
12. Post the organizational values and as a team consciously live them for a week thinking how they will show up positively in the new office layout.
13. Try out a clear desk policy.
14. Re-organize yourselves into districts and neighborhoods according to work flow not reporting line.
15. Add one thing to this list and try it out.

The way I've done this in the past is to have an eight week run up to the move where these activities are promoted, tracked and co-ordinated and there is someone in each team who is working with people to iron out (and note) all the stuff that happens in the course of the week.

What space experiments have you tried out as you redesign your physical offices. Let me know.

NOTES: An article about an office layout is here.
Related blogs: Plants in the office, Hotdesking experiment week 1

My American colleagues were very taken by my use of the word 'shambles', or sometimes 'shambolic'. Apparently they are not words in common US usage (neither is 'donkeys years' fyi). I'm wondering if this is because America is so rules bound and regulated that a shambles couldn't occur or is it because US culture makes the notion of a shambles outside their conceptual thinking? By the way if you're wondering, a shambles is a state of total disorder. Here's are recent examples of the words in use.

• Labour have attacked the government's response to a backlog of up to 30,000 passport applications as "shambolic".
• Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper demanded Mrs May apologise to thousands of people whose travel plans have been thrown into doubt. She said: "This has been a sorry shambles from a sorry department and a Home Secretary who can't even bring herself to say the word.
• Remember the 2012 Olympics in the UK? There was much talk of chaos and disorder in the offing as preparations proceeded and indeed there was one potential derailer around the security contract (awarded to G4S) for the event which ultimately led to the CEO, of G4S Nick Buckles, resigning. He 'told MPs that he regrets ever signing the Olympic security contract that has turned into "a humiliating shambles" that has left his company's reputation in tatters.'

But this shambles was an outlier not the norm. To everyone's amazement the Olympics were a triumph of organization and, in management-speak, 'achievement of desired outcomes'. The report on this in the Daily Beast 'Take a Bow London' is a delight to read while the more sober report on transport arrangements presented to Parliament after the event in November 2012 notes, with characteristic British understatement, that

Before the event there was a great deal of concern about the ability of London's transport network to cope with the higher than expected passenger levels associated with the Games and to deliver athletes, officials and spectators to and from events around the capital in a timely and efficient manner.

In the event, the Games passed off without a transport hitch and figures indicate that over the whole period of London 2012 over 100 million journeys were made on the Tube; 11 million on the DLR; 10.5 million on London Overground; the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme saw a million hires; buses travelled 40 million km; and there was an average ten per cent reduction in traffic on the Olympic Route Network during peak hours.

This success was achieved by the establishment of an Olympic Transport Authority (OTA), tasked with the responsibility for transport within the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA). The OTA oversaw the programme management of related infrastructure projects and was responsible for the delivery of real-time integrated coordination and control of transport during the Games".

Note the reference in the above to 'programme management'. It turns out that the Olympics were organized using the Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) methodology. A succinct case study from the Association of Project Managers outlines how this was used across the Olympic Games as a whole.

One of the features of MSP is the set of governance themes that underpin it. Typically a steering group is established to steer the project to success and mitigate the risk of anything with a hint of the shambolic happening and there is no shortage of guidance on the roles, responsibilities and benefits of governance bodies like these. For example(s), a 108 page report from the IMF discussing governance is firm that good governance leads to trust, confidence, and economic development i.e. no shambles.

Unfortunately, however, even with governance frameworks the shambolic can happen. Regardless of structure and process heading off a shambles is akin to the proverbial herding of cats and almost all big public change programmes are pilloried for achieving the shambolic. A wonderful exception is this pulling off of the London Olympics. This is attributed to:

• The emphasis placed on the formalities of programme management: bringing structure to the programme, pulling together high-level plans, ensuring cross-programme and/or integration risks were managed effectively, tracking issues and progress, updating the programme brief, continuously clarifying the aims, organizations and governance arrangements across the programme, reviewing the effectiveness of governance structures and adjusting them to meet changing circumstances and to evolve with the lifecycle of the programme, learning from previous programme experience to spot where things may be falling through the gaps, identifying scope gaps and overlaps in good time thus avoiding a more expensive and difficult to manage situation if left unaddressed, staying alert and responding to changing contexts and environment and responding flexibly to these.
• And more importantly, attending to the often neglected human aspects of programme management. On this, Heather Sinclair, Programme Assurance Manager said, 'It's important to establish good working relationships, to ensure challenges and problems can be resolved quickly.' She also says it's vital to take a pragmatic approach – dealing with so many different organizations, both public and private sector and both large and small, means that a 'one size fits all' approach isn't always going to work. 'In fact with the best will in the world it's never going to work. So it's important to have a thorough understanding of everyone's roles and who is responsible for what – and not be afraid to let people get on with their jobs. A flexible approach and being able to communicate your aims effectively is crucial to get people on side, build cooperation and get things done,' she says.

One way London 2012 approached essential relationship building was to form networks across organizations to bring together people with similar remits to enable communication and sharing of best practice. These networks ranged from informal knowledge sharing forums, to more structured and focused decision-making groups. Janette Lissaman, 2012 Programme Office Manager said, 'A paper report does not mean you know what is really happening. What you need is for people to be open and honest with you and good communication is key. We have to deal face to face with stakeholders too.'

Her colleague agreed: 'Winning over the hearts and minds of your colleagues is just as important as the process. The ability to manage successfully relies on collaboration and creating a programme management family. Constituent parts of the programme are massive programmes in their own right.'

That's good advice to take on the human aspects of programme management and there's more. The 2012 Olympics avoided dropping into shambolic by:

• Securing united leadership support from the outset
• Breaking down organizational silos and bringing together different people by theme rather than by function,
• Using various cross-cutting approaches to issues to build relationships across departments and organizations
• Preparing people for working in the new environment when issues would need to be identified and resolved quickly by those with the expertise, authority and experience
• Developing skills in dealing with unpredicted situations appropriately and efficiently
• Using the senior levels of governance to focus on preparations and setting strategic direction (not delving into the detail).

In my experience selecting the right Steering Group members is critical to getting the technical and the human aspects of a programme right. I liked the list of selection criteria from one local authority's practical workbook introducing people to the specifics of a programme steering group. The suggestion is that steering group members should have the time, inclination and clout to be able to:

• Do things (not just sit there)
• Make positive proposals (when ideas are needed)
• Ask questions (if information is needed)
• Offer alternatives (to create agreement)
• Build on proposals (to cement group vision)
• Test ideas (not reject them out of hand)
• Explain opposition (not just flat rejection)
• Help others (to cement solidarity)

I'd add in that if someone is a Steering Group member that it should be clearly stated as one of their performance objectives, that a sufficient amount of time is allocated to the role – it's part of the day job, and not something to be squeezed in around it, and that they are measured on their contribution to the effectiveness of the programme.

If you take all the steps outlined above you will have taken the right steps to head off a programme shambles. What tips have you got on this topic? Let me know.

Can leadership (style/approach etc.) be designed as part of an organization design project? I read this question on the Organization Design Forum Linkedin group discussion board. There are 13 comments on it mainly saying 'no'. Just as a point of interest the same question is on the European Organization Design Forum group discussion board with no comments. Why is this? (A different blog topic maybe).

The question set me thinking. In a piece of work I did last year in the US we were looking at moving people out of their private offices and into open plan working. Many of the positional leaders (i.e. those graded as in senior roles) were horrified. They wanted to know – my paraphrase – how people would know they were 'important'.

The symbols of power or status (think red carpet) were part and parcel of their leadership role. And they felt they owned them and were entitled to them. It was part of the leadership culture. It's still somewhat like that. The US Federal Government, for example, allocates "The greatest amount of workspace at the executive levels (300 USF per person) and the least amount of workspace at the support staff levels (64 USF per person)." In the report quoting those figures are other figures from 9 benchmarked organizations. All but one allocates far more space to executives than to junior staff this, in spite of the fact that senior people are more likely to be out of the office than support staff.

There are some in a positional power position who enjoy the trappings that tend to go with it, and others that reject them. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, is well known in the city as a regular cyclist rather than a luxury car driver, as he said … 'I love cycling. I cycle every day.' I wonder whether those leaders who reject the symbols of power are more effective leaders? A few notably effective social/political change leaders immediately spring to mind: Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela (not that he had a lot of choice), the Dalai Lama. Business leaders in that category of rejecting power and status symbols don't immediately spring to mind. Let me know if you can think of some.

However, I do know of some business leaders who reject these leadership symbols as a kind of inverse power play. So I was intrigued to see this report – with good summary infographc – on executive air travel that states: "The most senior executives are much less stressed by flying in economy-class seats; it is lower-ranking managers who are bothered. The authors suggest this is because GMs and CEOs often set travel policies and therefore wear their economy-class membership as an emblem of shareholder value." And presumably thereby hope to show what effective leaders they are.

So back to the question 'Can leadership (style/approach etc) be designed as part of an organization design project?' Stuart Wigham, who asked the question, elaborates on it saying:

I guess my thoughts are centered around can you fundamentally change an organization leadership approach without changing who the leaders are within a hierarchy (assuming a conventional/traditional organization). I've seen organizations change but I am not convinced I've witnessed this change without shifts in who the leaders are as well as the approach they take. I guess it comes down to the question of can individuals change? My immediate response to this is yes of course, in fact attitudes and behaviors tend to be fleeting and contextually bound so we're changing all the time even if we do not acknowledge it. So it then comes down to a question of underlying belief systems which tend to be more fixed, and in this sense I wonder even if I can shift someone's behavior through manipulation of the environment. (My bolding)

Manipulation of the environment could involve taking away the explicit symbols of leadership including the private offices. It could mean relaxing the dress code – have you noticed that in many organizations the male executives tend to wear suits and ties and the lower graded staff don't, or if lower graded staff do then people think they are acting above their station? For a delightful blog on the symbolism of office clothing read this.

With the idea of symbols in mind I went into a meeting of senior leaders last week in which they spent time talking around the point that 'if we are going to transform the business then we need to change the culture'. What they didn't seem to have a great handle on was that they colluded in the current culture by tacitly adopting and endorsing the symbols of it. I wondered if they would be able to recognise that and then maybe decide to change the symbols.

So, on the spur of the moment I asked all the men in the room to take off their ties. There were about 15 men – only one of whom wasn't wearing a tie at the time (the tech guy which speaks volumes!). So that left 14 people with ties. The most senior person present instantly rose to the challenge and took off his tie. For a brief moment I wondered what would happen if he had refused to. One person did say he wasn't going to, the rest did. One put his back on later in the meeting but the others stuck with tielessness. Later in the afternoon I saw one of the men in another meeting still without his tie and I remarked on it to the person I was with. She said she'd never seen him without a tie before.

The point of this exercise, and because it wasn't planned there wasn't time for any real exploration, was to suggest the idea that culture change and business transformation/redesign could be aided through leaders and others consciously recognizing, changing or removing symbols. Each organization has cultural symbols specific to it. In a previous blog post I mentioned the doors of the building I worked in. They opened by a push button, not by pushing the door. Once the button is pushed the door very, very slowly opens. I think this is an unintended symbol but to me it represents a very powerful cultural indicator.

Symbols are one of the elements examined in The Cultural Web, a well-known approach for looking at an organization's culture, developed by Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes in 1992, (see a more recent discussion of this here). They mention car parking spaces as well as office space and layout, other obvious visual symbols are name badges (do they have job titles on or not), uniforms, notice boards, signage, artwork, and so on. (The other cultural elements they discuss are stories, rituals and routines, power and organisational structures, and control systems).

It's often newcomers who notice the organisational symbols because they have to make choices about whether to participate in their meaning. (Should I wear a tie or not?) But longer serving people who've ceased noticing the symbols can bring them into the spotlight to examine their power. I remember an exercise I once did, taken from The Artist's Way at Work which involved photographing my workday. It was fascinating to walk around with a camera really looking at the context and environment through a camera lens, the visual symbols at least became very obvious and thus easier to work with.

So here's a suggestion for you. One workday take photos of all the leadership symbols in your organisation. Consider whether by adding, changing or removing these you or the organizational leaders themselves could redesign their leadership style and approach. I think symbols are a part of what can be consciously designed into an organization and have the potential to change leadership style and approach. What do you think? Let me know.

In World Future Society special report 20 Forecasts for 2014 – 2030 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.

And then come some hefty claims:

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.

Over-ruling my sceptic meter (on high at this point) I learned of the seven ways to 'Spot Tomorrow's Trends Today'. OK, since I have some interest in both achieving personal goals and supporting organizations in achieving business goals I read on to find that one of the seven ways of gaining foresight is to:

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.

Hearing that the Oxford Futures Forum holds regular conferences around scenarios I investigated. This year's aimed 'to join two established communities of thought and practice – the design research community and the scenario planning practice and research community … to enable generative dialogue, productive collaboration and deep reflection on the connections between scenario thinking and practice and design.' You can read more about the intention of the meeting here

I successfully applied to be invited and I've just spent two days with seventy or so people working in scenarios and/or design. I've come away a lot of learning/questions/resources to think about, explore and develop in organization design work. So conference organizers goals achieved – at least as far as I'm concerned. What stands out for me:

Organization design the 'agile' way. I was glad to meet people also interested in agile, iterative, open-ended, and unfolding methods of design. I'm newish to the field of agile methodology and intrigued by its potential application to organization design. Take a look at this introduction to Open Unified Process. The four principles it is based on: Collaborate to align interests and share understanding, balance competing priorities to maximize stakeholder value, focus on the architecture early to minimize risks and organize development, evolve to continuously obtain feedback and improve could well be adapted for use in organization design work.

The only problematic word in these principles is 'architecture' which some might take to mean the organization chart. But 'architecture' in software is much more encompassing. Some definitions are here. For organization designers substituting the words 'whole system' for 'architecture' would work.

I talked with people who are applying agile techniques into government policy making – the work of Christian Bason, of Mindlab in Denmark is particularly interesting. He's got a book coming out later this year on Design for Policy. We had good discussions on the challenges posed by trying to introduce open and agile approaches into traditionally organized governmental systems.

What's missing? One group in this evolving conference (no presentations, just self-organization and self-direction in 90 minute slots) came up with some terrific notions on what is missing/ choreographed/removed/airbrushed out from scenarios and design development in general. In one session they developed an embryonic toolbox that put in the richness and reality that could be in scenarios.

They did this by taking a starter office photo – of the type that designers show to clients – and applied other pictures and artefacts to answer the question 'What important things are missing/left out of the bubbles of design futures visualizations? (e.g. risks of environmental futures, disabled, stereotypes, gender norms, value of people's data, broken technologies, design frictions, clutter, continuity of mundane, religion, flags, expression of values). Everyone present instantly wanted to buy the toolbox! Maybe it will appear on Kickstarter.

They went on to suggest that we didn't talk about the propaganda/politics in scenarios, asking who's creating them for what purpose? They wondered whether scenario designers should be credited, and what transparency of scenario construction could mean.

Risk and uncertainty in design and scenarios – this was a fascinating if esoteric and at points struggling discussion as we wrestled with the question that someone put forward about whether we were designing for mitigating risk or handling uncertainty or both/neither. There were lots of illustrative stories – mainly about procurement of stuff where it was impossible to state exactly what would be delivered by when, (uncertainty) but the outcome was that the 'fit for purpose' product would be delivered in the time frame (low risk). (I vividly remember on one project we were bidding for the request for me to state the numbers, dates and content of all the change management workshops I would deliver into the project before I'd even met the client or knew anything about the situation. I thought it was an insane thing to ask but it was a procurement process requirement). Anyway, out of this discussion ultimately came a testable method for designing via unfolding scenarios – unfortunately we didn't get as far as working out how to change procurement processes and requirements.

Language: One of the joys of this interdisciplinary gathering was making sense of each other's' specialized vocabulary, learning new phrases and finding different interpretations of commonly used ones. What's the difference between narrative and story? Is 'narrative' too academic a word for day to day managers? What do we mean by 'turbulent environments'? Are use cases the same as personas? Do concepts like 'high concept pitch' and 'boundary objects' have a place in scenarios and design work? People 'showed and told' their favourite phrases 'tacit to touch it', and 'economy of line' were two that I Iiked. I'm wondering what new words/concepts I've absorbed that will enter my speech.

Muddles and models: emerged in a session on iterative policy development. The 'muddle' bit was credited to Matt Andrews, not at the conference but at Harvard Kennedy School. He talks about introducing reforms in a complex environment not by doing lots of assessment studies but by iteratively capability building via feedback to solve problems that people care about. "In a sense, this is like saying that you need to muddle through the sea of icebergs in your context, ensuring that every step helps you navigate better in future".

Context and design: aspects of context were referred to all the time in the sessions I went to. Nobody in these thought you could design anything, including scenarios, free from context. But the question was how does context make design and how does design make context? Someone quoted from the Stuart Brand book How Buildings Learn: What happens after they're built? and I remembered the Winston Churchill quote 'We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us'. So a nice reminder in this that as the context is constantly changing so should our designs.

Resources: these were decks of cards to aid the design process that people brought to the 'Deck-head' session
Mindlabs Method Cards
Systems mythology toolkit
The Thing from the Future

So a worthwhile 2 days, I learned new things to try out, met great people, and developed and changed some perspectives. Whether I developed foresight I have yet to find out.

What are your methods for developing your scenario, design and foresight skills? Let me know.