Author: naomiorgdesign

Over the past couple of weeks, in preparation for my TEDx slot on the future of work. I've been talking with various women in their early thirties. They've been talking about the difficult choices they feel they are having to make between:

• Looking for a long term committed relationship
• Having children which they believe will as one person said 'decelerate' their careers
• Accelerating their careers, or at least staying on a career path but sacrificing one or both of the committed long term relationship and children

All the women I spoke with are of the view that they can't 'have it all' in the way that men can have a committed relationship, children, and a career. For women both their future financial health and their work future is in the melting pot and will be shaped by these significant life decisions and choices. In the usual way of synchronicity the Economist last week had an article 'The Mommy Track' noting that 'Several factors hold women back at work'. Schumpeter's (the writer's) conclusion is that

The biggest obstacle (at least in most rich countries) is children. However organized you are, it is hard to combine family responsibilities with the ultra-long working hours of the 'anytime, anywhere' culture of senior corporate jobs.

The women in their thirties I've been talking with are single, married, with and without children. They are all of the view that having children is not compatible with maintaining a career track in corporate America/Europe. The Economist article provides a few figures around women in the thirties age-group in the US workforce.

America's biggest companies hire women to fill just over half of entry-level professional jobs. But those women fail to advance proportionally: they occupy only 28% of senior managerial posts, 14% of seats on executive committees, and just 3% of chief executive roles " and notes that "The figures are worse still at big European firms.

This bears thinking about more closely and a paper The changing impact of marriage and children on women's labor force participation from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics helps with this.This shows that:

The labor force participation rate of single mothers aged 25–44 years increased 9 percentage points between 1993 and 2000, while the rate for single women aged 25–44 years with children aged 5 years or younger jumped a full 14 percentage points over the same period. In contrast, the labor force participation rate for married women with children increased 1 percentage point, and the rate for married women with children aged 5 years or younger was flat. Even more interestingly, the negative impact of children on the labor force participation of married women increased.

The paper explains in more detail the research methodology and findings and makes the statement that:

The key contribution of the analysis presented in this article is to emphasize that focusing only on the effect of children on labor force participation provides an incomplete picture of the very different effect that the presence of children has on single women compared with married women.

The effect of marriages that also include children on the workforce is material and was a finding in a November 2007 McKinsey survey What Shapes Careers found that:

54% of the senior women executives surveyed were childless compared with 29% of the men (and a third were single, nearly double the proportion of partnerless men)."

From these two surveys one can take a view that married women with children are unable to progress through the corporate career ladder at the same pace as single women with or without children, or married women without children. So one view is that if you are a woman and want to keep your career path, but want to have children then have them as a single parent. Another is that if you want to have a career and also marry then do not have children.

This leads Schumpeter, of the Economist, to say that "It would be better if women could rise naturally to senior executive roles … But how can this be done when everything tried so far seems to have failed?"

One of the women I talked with – now married and the mother of a 2.5 year old observes that.

I feel like my own journey has been gratifying and successful, but nothing at all like what I imagined it being 10 years ago (when I was 22 or so). For context, I had just graduated college and was facing the post-2001 dot.com bust/recession AND the year after 9/11. As a 20 something with few female role models in the business or professional world (except for great teachers), I had a vague notion that I'd spend my years climbing the corporate ladder. I was determined to go as far as I could go, and had a few mentors who'd spent their lives with 1 or 2 major firms. Now, … being a mom. I think I have to carve out more room for all the roles I want to have versus the ones I'm given or offered.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, in her July/August 2012 Atlantic article Why Women Still Can't Have It All commenting on a talk she had given to a group of people in their mid-twenties said

Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.

This has been the pattern I came across in my discussions with women. Over these six statements emerged in relation to marriage and children.

• Men are not looking for long term committed relationships – they can get what they want from short term relationships.
• Men (in the US) are worried about marriage because they will become liable for the student loan debt of their wives
• Men are not willing work part time or leave the workforce fully in order to look after their children while their wives/partners work for career advancement
• The way work is perceived and organized in most corporates is skewed against women who want to have children and give some of their time to raising a family. (Childrearing is incompatible with standard career routes).
• The only way women will get equal access to career advancement is if men demand flexible work patterns that do not jeopardize their career advancement i.e. either parent should have the same ability to rear children and maintain equal parity in career advancement.
• Men should be as willing as women to decelerate their careers in order to help bring up children

So then I turned to conversations with men in their early thirties to see how they responded to these points.
They diverged on statements 1 -3 depending on personal perspective and experience, but on points 4 – 6 there was unanimity in their views that work as we currently conceive it, at least in the US, is skewed against childrearing – whether it is the man or woman who does this. One person put it eloquently when he said:

Only in America is something so beautiful and critical to our societal health and longevity viewed as an inconvenience and inadvertently discouraged through policy. We mistake efficiency and hours at work with productivity and progress. Women who prioritize children, and fathers who do so too for that matter, should be the rule and not the exception. Many corporations are still operating "business as usual" and thus become irrelevant, unworthy candidates to many of the world's best talent. '

All agree that men should seek, and get, flexible work patterns enabling them to parent to the same level as their partners. This, they felt was hard when much of corporate America is run by 'the ole boys' club'. Turning to self-employment is an option that is hard to carry through on when certain benefits (including medical) are tied to full-time employment. They weren't keen on the notion of anyone 'decelerating' careers but of thinking about careers differently. As one said

It's not about decelerating one's career, it's about accelerating one's LIFE. A desire for professional "domination" (ha, what all young boys think they are going to do… be rich, powerful, prolific…) is an epidemic occurrence of losing touch with what life truly has to offer in totality – professionally and finically, yes, but also relationally, socially, spiritually, educationally, experientially.

Thirty years ago when my children were infants I and my partner were in the same discussion. I wanted to work at least part-time, he wanted his children to have a full-time parent at home and felt that he wouldn't get back into the workforce if he took on this role. It was a very painful and difficult time for all of us as we worked this one through, and did not have any kind of storybook ending. It is very sad to see three decades later so little progress in the world of work and parenting. Do we want in 2042 to still be treading the same ground? What one thing could you do to design organizations to help men and women rear their children with fewer penalties than currently? Your thoughts welcome.

Last week I wrote about the TEDx talk that I've been invited to give. And this week I've been pursuing the topic, reading many articles and research papers. As I sort, order, and mull over these and the approach I should take with the intention of arriving at a cohesive, off the cuff sounding, funny talk that fulfills the TEDx requirements I wish I'd done the improv course that since I had a half-day taster session (years ago) I keep telling myself I should do.

So far, what all this delving into the future of work has revealed is rather a lot of what might be kindly termed hot air. I'm reminded of the tarot card reading I once had where the reader advised me to take more notice of coincidences. It's an intriguing notion that comes to mind each time I'm in a 'coincidence situation' but it doesn't go anywhere. The future of work is the same as it's almost non-actionable. I can only go 'oh' or 'gosh' when, for example, I read from the World Future Society

Forecast #10:
The end of identity as we know it? It may become very easy to create a new identity (or many identities) for ourselves. All we will have to do is create new avatars in virtual reality. Those avatars will act on our behalf in real life to conduct such high-level tasks as performing intensive research, posting blog entries and Facebook updates, and managing businesses. The lines between ourselves and our virtual other selves will blur, to the point where most of us will, in essence, have multiple personalities.

What implications does this forecast have for the future of work? How will we know which of our multiple personalities is working on what? How do we design organizations for multiple personalities? (Although, perhaps, we already do and maybe that's the issue. I think many workers are familiar with the Jekyll and Hyde manager).

One reader of last week's piece suggested that I look at Robert Reich's book The Work of Nations, in which he discusses (Chapter 14) The Three Jobs of the Future. This chapter is definitely not hot air. Although it's 20 years old it's still on target – which was exactly what the reader had said about it. When the book was published in 1992 Reich suggested that 'three broad categories of work are emerging' both in America and in other nations. He calls these three types of work:

Routine production services: those repetitive tasks done over and over – "one step in a sequence of steps for producing finished products tradeable in world commerce", where people are paid by the number of hours worked, or the amount of work done. These jobs can be done anywhere in the world. Although the word 'robot' does not appear in the chapter these are exactly the types of jobs that are now going to robots as the NY Times article that came out last week New Wave of Deft Robots Is Changing Global Industry explains. The article opens saying

At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way. At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.

In-person services are jobs that Reich suggests are simple and repetitive too but the services must be provided person to person. He includes, among others, in this category restaurant serving staff, hotel workers, flight attendants, security guards, and physical therapists.

Symbolic-analytic services are those that include "all the problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic brokering activities". Intriguingly he discusses how symbolic analysts trade in the "manipulation of symbols – data, words, oral and visual representations." He gives a long list of workers in this category – investment bankers, architectural consultants and systems analysts among them. He explains that "They simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality.

What he describes in the next page or so is what in our twenty-year later jargon we might define as 'knowledge worker collaboration and innovation', and following this comes a very amusing discussion on the uselessness of traditional job classifications and categories (actually his words are 'not very helpful'), and for symbolic analysts at least, the irrelevance of standard corporate career ladders. Reich concludes the chapter saying 'The only true competitive advantage lies in skill in solving, identifying, and brokering new problems".

Having read a fair amount over the last ten days or so on the future of work it seems to me that Reich's assessment of three types of job hold good today (bearing in mind the technology advances that mean robots are increasingly doing aspects of the routine production services) and is rather more helpful than some of the other predictions and prescriptions I have read.

It's helpful because he implies the danger in sticking with the known ways of doing things (for example, setting up career paths, classifying jobs into specific categories, questioning the existing ways of working) when even current circumstances, let alone future circumstances, require radical shifts in systems and organization design.

This danger was brought home to me when later in the week I read a fascinating article in Vanity Fair on Microsoft. The employees the article talks about fall into the category of symbolic analysts and the article illustrates the dangers of inflexible and unreflected on systems on their ability to do good work:

"The story of Microsoft's lost decade could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success. For what began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things"

One of the systems that many of the people interviewed for the article commented on as driving the company towards this state of affairs was the "stack ranking"

"The system-—also referred to as "the performance model," "the bell curve," or just "the employee review"-—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. …. For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door."

And so the article proceeds. Thinking on the various readings this week reinforces my view that continuously reviewing, auditing, evaluating and measuring the value (or not) of organizational infrastructures of all types: systems, policies, reward structures etc. and adjusting them either in line with changing circumstances or to drive a change in circumstances is essential to keep an organization moving into the future with a chance of success. Peter Drucker's planned abandonment practice is still my favorite on this. (It's in the toolkit on my website).

If you know of any organizations that keep a close finger on the pulse and healthy contribution of their infrastructure I'd been interested in hearing why they think it is worth the investment when so many organizations appear not to.

In what retrospectively I feel was a fit of foolishness, a few weeks ago I agreed to do an 18 minute TEDX talk, in October, on the future of work. Since that agreement every time I have been for a run or a bike ride – i.e. those times that creativity and innovation people say spark the great idea – I've been wondering what I am going to talk about. The ingredients of all good TED talks seem to be vision, aspiration, touching personal story, comedy, memorable take away call to action, clever blend of fact, opinion, moments people can identify with, and sticking to the topic – all delivered with a gutsy charisma. It's a tall order.

The great idea has not struck as yet. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I can get by on the fact that the organizers wanted a woman to speak as they have a surfeit of male speakers. (I'm hoping that the future of work means more senior women in the workforce and that they are getting equal pay with the men).

And on Friday I got an email reminding me that I had to upload my photo and outline for my talk and thus the moment came for thought and planning. So rather than a single great idea, for the moment, I've come up with three different approaches outlined below.

Approach one: types of work future
In this approach I would talk about one (or maybe more than one) of the following possible work futures. Anyone of them could take the full 18 minutes.

The cataclysmic future where there is no work as we think of it – as in Cormac McCarthy's book 'The Road' or Margaret Atwood's book The Handmaid's Tale.

The reassuring technology enabled future of work captured in statements like "automation is leading to disruptions in the labor market, [but] as jobs are being destroyed more new industries and work opportunities are emerging.' This one from MIT's report "The Future of Work" from MIT which seems to imply everyone will be ok.

The prepare yourself for the future of work with advice like 'If you expect to live, and therefore work, for a long time, it will be worthwhile investing years getting yourself educated.' (From 'The World in 2050', HSBC). But looking at that sort of statement again – it has a lot of assumptions built in. Even with education (that in many countries is not freely available) work – as in paid employment – is an almost laughable concept in many countries, leading to a possible focus on:

The inequality of future work opportunities. As the International Labor Office noted in July 2011
"There are some 81 million officially unemployed young workers worldwide – the highest level recorded. Many more are discouraged from even seeking a job. Young people are nearly three times more likely than adults to be unemployed while in some countries the situation is even worse. And more than a quarter of all young workers in the world – or 152 million – are poor workers who earn less than 1.25 dollars per day," which is not going to change quickly in even the rosiest of work futures.

The precarious nature of work even for those in the 'developed' nations. A quick glance at the mass layoff statistics for the US, June 2012's figures tell us that "Employers took 1,317 mass layoff actions in June involving 131,406 workers … each mass layoff involved at least 50 workers from a single employer." – then bear in mind that we cannot predict very easily things like tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, internet outages, recessions, and so on that have a significant interruptive effect on work flows and our thinking about work.

Approach two: The nature of work and its future
But maybe none of the above is appropriate. Maybe in a different approach, I should be asking some questions of the TEDX audience (and putting some suggestions). For example, I could discuss one or more of the following:

What is work? It means different things to different people. Kahlil Gibran thought of work as "love made visible" and wrote a piece stating that "if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy." The cynic in me (part of my British heritage) wonders what, for example, the waste pickers in India and other nations would think of this suggestion or those enslaved by human traffickers

Is 'work' always about 'pay' or income generation? Philip Larkin's poem on work called Toads implies that it is. He asks "Why should I let the toad work squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils with its sickening poison – Just for paying a few bills" But can work be valued in other ways?

Can we get to what the ILO calls 'Decent Work' for all across the globe, and if so, how? They explain that
"Decent work sums up the aspirations of people in their working lives. It involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for families, better prospects for personal development and social integration, freedom for people to express their concerns, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives and equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men." To me this currently seems a Utopian but worth pursuing vision.

What types of work might emerge in the future? Will there be very different forms of work from those in evidence today and if so, what impact would this have on traditional employing organizations? There are some evident trends around this which imply more self-employment, piece work, co-operatives, temporary and contract work, off-shoring, and partnering/alliances, volunteering, etc.

Who needs to be interested in the future of work? I think of the stakeholders in the future of, at least paid/income generation work, as six main groups. Let me know if you see a glaring omission here.

• Governments and policy makers
• Educators (schools, universities, parents)
• Organizations who employee people (for profit, non-profit)
• Potential workforce members
• Unions and workers' rights organizations
• Investors of all type

All of these have an individual and collective stake in the future of work and are not that great at meshing interests for the betterment of all.

Approach three: my work, past, current, future.

A third approach is to use my own working life as a kind of backdrop story to some thoughts and opinions on the future of work and I could talk about both paid and unpaid. One amusing factor (to me anyway) is the fact that I am in that baby boomer group that is supposed to be contemplating 'retirement', whatever that is, so in some respects it is ironic that I have been asked to talk about the future of work. However, as one of my goals is to be nominated (forty years or so from now if I live to be 100) as one of America's oldest workers I can claim a vested interest in the future of work.

And people I tell my working life story to seem to find it interesting. In fact I got an email the other day from an ex-colleague who said, "Just on a call with J and we were talking about your new job and saying how amazing and inspirational you are." So maybe there's a story in My Brilliant Career to date and where I see it going in the future. NOTE that this is not me boasting – heaven forbid – but the title of a book by Miles Franklin that I read years ago and thoroughly enjoyed. The title has stuck with me through the ups and downs of my career and makes me smile in the darker moments.

So – three main approaches and a host of ideas! My next task is to transform them into something that meets the first four commandments of TED talks:

1. Dream big. Strive to create the best talk you have ever given. Reveal something never seen before. Do something the audience will remember forever. Share an idea that could change the world.
2. Show us the real you. Share your passions, your dreams … and also your fears. Be vulnerable. Speak of failure as well as success.
3. Make the complex plain. Don't try to dazzle intellectually. Don't speak in abstractions. Explain! Give examples. Tell stories. Be specific.
4. Connect with people's emotions. Make us laugh! Make us cry!

Let me know what you think the focus should be.

Building employee trust is something that many organizations say they want to do. A leader will say something like 'I want to build a culture of trust'. This sort of statement makes me curious and I tend to follow up such a statement with a series of questions: What do you mean by trust? What outcome would you expect to see in a 'culture of trust' that you don't have currently? What do you think 'trust' would feel like in your day to day operation if you were able to build it? And so on.

In my experience 'trust' is one of those often ill-defined concepts that people intuitively feel would improve organizational performance. They believe it is within the standard remit of an organization development consultant to help with building trust. And they wonder if it could (perhaps) be designed into the organization.

In some respect their intuition is correct. There's a certain amount of evidence that people are more productive and motivated if they are treated respectfully, honestly, and fairly by their supervisors, and have an open and supportive relationships with both supervisors and colleagues. Leader member exchange theory is one that supports this perspective. (See Leader-Member Exchange Theory and Research: Accomplishments and Future Challenges, Leadership August, 2006 2: 295-316). These concepts of fair treatment and so on are close to some of the many definitions and expressions of trust.

The reason why trust is top of my mind right now is that I am working with a couple of clients who are debating whether to devolve accountability for certain aspects of the workforce lifecycle from a central function to business units – recruitment is one, the hierarchical profile of the unit aka organization chart is another. They are wondering whether they can trust the business unit heads to ensure diversity, to not create higher level jobs in order to promote indiscriminately, and to structure their organizations in a way that would enable lateral movement across the business units.

This is an interesting organization design and development situation because the 'trust' they are talking about is the opposite of 'office politics' where one group wants to control another, and is not about employee expectations that are a form of trust – like getting paid for work done, or having a safe working environment. (Although this is not an across the globe expectation that is met and perhaps development of trust begins with these basic hygiene factors). Trust is about the ongoing endeavor of relationship building and as the various stories about children and broken vases illustrate trust is something that is hard to develop and easy to lose. ( My daughters' favorite on this when they were children was The Berenstain Bears and the Truth)

This type of children's story illustrates the concept of trust as a dynamic social practice that has to be learned. Robert Solomon and Fernando Flores in their book Building Trust, in business, politics, relationships and life are clear that "Trust is dynamic. It is part of the vitality … of relationships. It involves personal responsibility, commitment and change and is characterized by sincerity, authenticity, integrity, virtue, and honor (matters of ethics"). From this perspective trust could be viewed as part of the portfolio of 'humanistic values' that inform organizational development work. Almost certainly the opposite of trust – what Solomon and Flores describe as 'cordial hypocrisy' is not going to result in a motivated and energetic workforce.

In a useful article Trust in Management and Performance: Who Minds The Shop While The Employees Watch The Boss? Roger C. Mayer and Mark B. Gavin, The Academy of Management Journal Vol. 48, No. 5 (Oct., 2005), pp. 874-888, the authors report that "Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) defined trust as the willingness to be vulnerable to another party when that party cannot be controlled or monitored. "

In the organizational cases I mentioned earlier, devolving accountability to local business units from a centralized 'authority', does not necessarily mean that the central authority will be giving up control or monitoring and this is where the design aspect of trust development could come into play. For example, one way of handling this issue of whether to trust business unit heads to take accountability for their workforce is for the central authority to work with the business unit heads to develop a system that progressively

a) builds trust between the parties at an individual relationship level
b) enables monitoring across the organization so that patterns, themes, and any red flags, can be assessed
c) works towards the minimal level of monitoring and the maximum amount of trusted local autonomy for effective overall organizational performance

Designing an accountability and monitoring governance structure with the involvement of all stakeholders itself would start to build trust amongst the parties. Although people can often see the value in this approach they are not always able or willing to take the step of opening themselves to risk and vulnerability. Rather, they 'guard their patch' as Annette Simmons in her book Territorial Games: Understanding and Ending Turf Wars at Work so tellingly speaks of.

Another way of approaching the building of trust is to look at applying an appropriate trust based model. An easy to read start-point on this is the (downloadable) paper Trust in Business: The Core Concepts, by Charles H Green, who is one of the co-authors with David Maister of The Trusted Advisor. Green lays out three models

1. The Trust Equation: a deconstructive, analytical model of the components of trustworthiness;
2. The Trust Creation Process: a process model of trust creation through personal interaction-—mainly conversations;
3. The Trust Principles: four principles, or values, which serve as guides to decision-making and conduct to increase trust.

In the case of my particular clients acting as a facilitator of the Trust Creation Process is another way that offers potential. This would involve:

1. Engaging the stakeholders in an open discussion about issues that are key to them;
2. Listening to what is important and real to the stakeholders; earning the right to offer solutions;
3. Framing the true root issue, without the language of blame, via caveats, problem statements and hypotheses; taking personal risks to explore sensitive issues-—articulating a point of view; creating by giving away;
4. Encouraging them to envision an alternate reality, including win-win specific descriptions of outcomes and results, including emotional and political states; clarifying benefits-—making clear what's at stake; being tangible about future states;
5. Inviting them to commit to actionable next steps that imply significant commitment and movement on the part of each party.

As Green points out "The order in which these sentences occur in a conversation has as much impact as the sentences themselves. That is, you could do a wonderful job on framing the issue or on the commitment to action-—but if you do them before you do listening, then the trust process breaks down, or freezes. "

Sidebar: On Green's website there's a "Trust Quotient Quiz" that invites you to see how trustworthy you are which is irresistible but also I thought would be very easy to trick into saying one is completely trustworthy – the irony of this being that if you're going to trick a trust quotient quiz then maybe you're not trustworthy.

As I mull over how to advise on the issue of whether or not to devolve accountability, and how to go about it I'd be interested to hear your tips for building trust in your organization and whether you think trust is necessary for high organizational performance?

PS – just after I'd written and posted this I found that on the same day the NY Times had an article Trust: Ill-Advised in a Digital Age. It's a good read on trusting (or not) technologies.

At long last a 10 hour flight gave me the time to get out Nicolay Worren's book, Organisation Design: Redefining Complex Systems, and read it from cover to cover. He'd sent it to me a couple of months ago asking me to review it and on the mistaken assumption that I'd have the discipline to turn off my laptop and read a book I'd agreed. My technique to ensure this finally happened was to pack my laptop in my checked baggage, hoping it would arrive (which it did).

The book is well worth reading and, as I discovered, although it is a 'build' i.e. it would be better to read it from start to finish than to dip into it Nicolay has organized it so that the time constrained people can get good insights from the beginning and end of each chapter.

Each chapter opens with a brief bullet list overview giving background, challenges, the chapter's key question, a proposed approach to answering the question. And each ends with a conclusion (sometimes headed instead 'summary and discussion' or 'discussion and conclusion'), the framework he has presented during the chapter for answering the key question, some review questions, some research questions, notes, case study and the references.

Just looking at the key question at the start of each chapter is thought provoking. Chapter 3, for example sets out to answer the question "How can we manage to re-design processes in a manner that allows us to align the organization with the strategy, create coherent designs, while building trust among key stakeholders (including employees affected by the change)?" This is a question I am constantly seeking to answer in the work that I do so it was interesting to note the approach Nicolay took. He suggests a 9-step sequence of activities starting with 'Setting the Agenda', and one of the actions in this step is to facilitate a discussion with managers on the gap between current and potential performance. By looking at the summary at the end of the chapter you can get the nine steps but only by reading the chapter do you get the suggested activities and the full discussion.

There are activities in each chapter, several of which I am tempted to try out in my next design project. Chapter 7, for example, tackles configuring interdependencies which is something people have a hard time thinking through. Five types of interdependencies are discussed: activity, commitment, governance, resource, and social networks. There is a good exercise to go with the commitment interdependency and the discussion Worren has on governance and trust could be turned into another very valuable exercise. Indeed, the discussion is one I am having with a current client and this section gave me an idea on how configure an exercise in my next meeting with them.

Beyond the organization of the book, the thought provoking questions, and the number of exercises that could be used in day to day organization design work, a further strength of it, for me anyway, is the attitude of the author that what he is presenting is open to testing, feedback, and improvement. Unlike a 'seven steps to success' approach Worren is inviting people to delve deeper, question, check assumptions, and so on. And I enjoyed many of his almost side comments – clearly taken from experience – that people don't agree on the what the organization is there to do, they are unable to draw boundaries between their team and other in terms of work load/processes/outputs, and some don't know who they report to. His approach, predominantly via a structural i.e. organization chart lens, to taking out the complexity that contributes to this form of confusion is the essence of the book.

However, the approach will not suit every reader because the book is definitely 'technical', and focused on structures – that is the 'box relationships'. As it says on the back cover 'This book equips the reader with advanced tools and frameworks…'. In many respects it is not an easy read. There are a lot of acronyms and one improvement would be a list of these. His discussion of axiomatic theory took me a couple of goes to wrap my head around, here's an example of why (perhaps unfair as you don't have the full context but you should get the idea):

"Third, the approach encourages the creation of coherent designs if one ensures that the lower-lever FRs collectively satisfy the FR at the higher level. Finally by mapping the FRs against the DPs in a so-called design matrix (as illustrated in Table 1.2) one may evaluate the correspondence between FRs and DPs more systematically."

Once I understood functional requirements (FRs) I realized that the activities related to identifying these are useful and could stand in place of the workflow mapping that I do at this point – which I think get to much the same end, but that is open to challenge.

For a person new to organization design the academic concepts and approaches presented might be overwhelming, but for an organization theory researcher there are a number of great questions that would form the basis for a dissertation topic. (And his suggestion that Elliott Jaques' work on Requisite Organization is worth another look is one that is definitely worth exploring).

Another limitation of the book that came to mind as I was reading is that although there are many examples and case studies there are no government or non-profit examples to draw on. One of my current clients, a government, would love to be able to reduce the layers of hierarchy to five – as Worren almost suggests is optimal in most organizations – or at least a lesser number than the current 21, but legislation and various obstacles mean redesigns have to work around this. Neither are there any non-western culture organizations that I could identify. It would be good in a second edition of the book to have a wider range of cases and examples.

A further area that a second edition could pick up on is the social media and information and communication technology one. There are a couple of instances where Worren notes that software can help with organization design work, but there is no mention of Rob Cross's work on organization network mapping, or of MITs work on sociometric badges, for example. I couldn't find many recent (last five years) references and in this fast moving field the time lag between writing and now means things have moved on.

Two nitpicks niggled at me. The first to do with editing carefully: Chapter 7, for example, talks throughout of 'interdependencies' but is headed 'Configuring interfaces'. There are several missed typing and grammar errors, but I am particularly sensitive to this sort of thing as I frequently miss my own. The second is nothing to do with Nicolay Worren but the field of organization design. Looking at the lengthy list of references at the end of each chapter I noted that virtually none were women. Given the research that suggests that companies with a reasonable proportion of women on the board and at senior positions perform better than those that are largely male dominated I wondered whether organization design concepts and theories would evolve differently if more women were in the field?

These cavils aside, I got a lot from the book: thought provoking questions, ne activities to try out, confirmation of some of the ways I approach organization design, and a few new avenues for investigation. I certainly recommend the book to others.

This week I was in Lisbon facilitating a one-day discussion on organization culture at the Instituto Superior de Ciencias Sociais e Politicos .

The group of fifteen participants were variously PhD students, corporate employees – for the most part in HR Departments, and independent consultants so it made for a diversity of views that was delightful, and we had a lot of fun weaving our way through the nuances of culture. And just at a practical level there were differences in how we approached things.

Time is one of the cultural dimensions that we had some discussion of. The other two facilitators (we each facilitated different days of the week) had the same attitude and expectations to time that I have. We all thought that programs like this begin at the time stated (9:30 a.m.) and finish at the time stated, and the breaks are an agreed length that the participants will stick to. So the facilitators had some discussions about why this was very hard to put into practice – except for the finish time! Every day the program began later than intended – participants appearing up to 30 minutes late – and it seemed pointless beginning with only a handful of the registered people, and each break was almost twice as long as the agreed break. So what to do?

Well, in the case of my session, it provided a platform for a discussion on the value of time in different cultures, both organizational cultures and national cultures. The Portuguese participants warned me that were I to go to Brazil I would find the Brazilian attitude to time was even more relaxed than theirs. But here's a bit of a paradox because for the most part the flights, trains, and buses, run to the published schedule, and shops open (the bigger ones anyway) at the advertised opening time, so what is it about meetings both formal and informal that makes time attitudes different?

The discussion on time continued in my head after the event. I wondered if individual attitudes to time and the value people attach to it are part of a cultural identity that impacts the way organizations run and which are not really malleable. Can you change attitudes to time? What sprang to mind here was an incident I witnessed in a shop the other day (in the US) when one of the assistants walked in about 20 minutes after the shop had opened, the other two assistants exchanged looks and I asked if the assistant who'd just come in was late. We all heard a loud exchange in the office behind the counter. The late comer was from a non-US culture.

Pursuing this line of thought, I found a thought provoking article called Your Pace or Mine: Culture Time and Negotiation written by Ian McDuff who heads the Centre for Dispute Resolution, Singapore Management University the article (downloadable from the site)

"explores the impact that different perceptions of time may have on cross-cultural negotiations. Beyond obvious issues of punctuality and timekeeping, differences may occur in the value placed on the uses of time and the priorities given to past, present, or future orientations. The role of time in negotiations involves two key dimensions: differing perceptions and values of time, and the management of time. Both dimensions, the author suggests, need to be on the negotiation table."

McDuff leads into the article with a quote that bears thinking about when it comes to culture change:

"All practice creates time and the varying combinations of time within a social formation create a temporal structure or style. However, I believe that we should not merely say that social formations have their own temporal styles, but to go a step further and characterize social formations primarily in terms of their temporal styles of life" (Gosden 1994:187,McDuff emphasis added).

As I read through the article (and I recommend it for anyone interested on another slant on culture) I came across the word 'chronemics' which I had never heard before (neither has my Microsoft spell checker which is underlining it in red).

So off I went to find out a bit more, and lo and behold I discover an entire well-established theory and practice of chronemics that confirms once again that little boxes and silo mentalities are evident in all kinds of different ways. How have I not come across chronemics before I wonder?

Anyway, "chronemics is an important aspect of nonverbal communication in an intercultural setting. It studies the way people handle and structure their use of time when communicating. The way we perceive and structure our time, and react to it is a powerful communication tool, which helps set the stage for the communication process. Across cultures, time perception plays a significant role in the nonverbal communication process. Time perceptions include punctuality, willingness to wait, and interactions. The use of time can affect lifestyles, daily agendas, speed of speech, movements, and how long people are willing to listen."

Exploring a bit more I find that chronemics is often linked with proxemics. This latter is concerned with the use of space and spatial orientation in interactions which again people have different attitudes and values towards. This could have some interesting linkage to the way offices are designed. How much, I wonder do architects and designers study proxemics? It may be material as we design for people to form communities, collaborate effectively, and relate to each other. I got a quick lecture on the topic from Dr Caleb Carr of the University of Oklahoma. (No time to look for more info!)

Thus, my one day session led me into a whole new avenue of thinking and learning about both time and culture and proximity in the design of office space – all material in my day to day work. On a side note, the course organizer – a Portuguese psychologist – who sat in on the program was also amused by my asking participants to discuss topics and do various collaborative exercises at points but I only gave them a certain amount of time to do this – I was keen to get through the day's agenda. I stopped them in mid-table group discussions by ringing a bell (that was given to me once by a US client who wanted to make sure that the group got through the day's work and didn't spend too much time 'chatting'). The psychologist watched and heard the group's reaction to this – they couldn't understand why I didn't let them continue talking on the topic but pushed them on. He felt that it was good for them to experience different approaches to things – a learning opportunity, and also said that if I was able to come back next year he would allocate two days for me to cover the same amount of content..

What is your experience of time and spatial distance in different cultures and do you think they should be considered as integral to any culture change intervention?

HRM systems and processes are a significant part of enabling an organization to achieve a successful IPO. Not just pre-IPO but also post. But what I've found in my looking into this topic over the last couple of weeks is that there isn't much in the way of useful, practical information to draw on and tracking it down has been time consuming. However, some of what I've turned up has been useful and interesting so collected here is a small selection of the stuff that I've found most helpful in preparing the report I was writing.

I located a 1999 research article by Theresa Welbourne and Linda Cyr called The Human Resource Executive Effect in Initial Public Offering Firms that is available through Cornell's Digital Commons. Although it is 13 years since it was written it proved an excellent start point as the researchers

"By applying organizational inertia concepts, studied whether having a senior HRM executive, reporting to the CEO, affects firm performance in a sample of initial public offering (IPO) firms. Results indicate that smaller and fast-growth IPOs experience the most gain from having a senior human resource executive."

The company I am working with does not have a senior HR executive but is thinking about recruiting one so I contacted Dr Welbourne who is now at the Center for Effective Organizations to find out if she is still pursuing this line of research and the answer is yes.

Her 2010 report HRM in IPOs "provides critical information for firms planning to go public and those going through high rates of change. Based on several empirical studies and case study work done over the last 20 years, the research finds that the key to survival, stock price growth and earnings growth is structural cohesion, which is an employee‐generated synergy that propels a company forward in the direction needed to respond to change. When structural cohesion is high, firms can withstand change and thrive; when low, they go out of business."

The authors define "structural cohesion" as an "employee generated synergy that propels the company forward." Motion, energy, momentum and sense of urgency were all factors studied in the research. The finding was that employees going forward in the same direction and on a path that fits strategic goals drives positive financial performance and long-term survival.

The research also found that the higher the rate of change, the more important the HR factors. Paradoxically this did not mean that as rate of change goes up, more HR is needed. In fact, in some ways, as rate of change goes up it was found that less HR, or perhaps "lighter and faster" HRM was the key to making a positive impact in the firm. The author of the research notes that:

"When it comes to specific HR practices, our research began to find that putting in heavy HR systems can backfire and have negative effects on structural cohesion and the firm's ability to move forward".

This too was helpful as the company I'm working with is busy putting in heavy duty prescribed HR systems and processes across its various business units – which flies both counter to Dr Welbourne's research and to arguments by various others. David Clutterbuck, for example, wrote a provoking article Don't Be Blinded by HR Bling. In it he notes that

"In recent decades, HR has accumulated a fearsome array of processes and procedures, all meant to make it more effective in supporting organisations and more respected for doing so. New methodologies are embraced enthusiastically, imported into the HR catalogue and imposed on increasingly wary line managers.

Like bling, many (perhaps most) of these processes look shiny, but do they actually achieve anything? Or are they the equivalent of the fake Rolex – flashy but worthless?

In my recent researches, I have been encouraged by how many thinking HR professionals have started to question the value of the processes they use. What, they ask, is the evidence that they work? And they feel a sense of relief when they realise that, where credible evidence exists, they don't work."

Discussed as some of the non-working processes are leadership competences, succession planning, and annual appraisals.

Following up the performance management points the hack (does anyone know the difference between a hack and a blog?) The end of performance management (as we know it) by Bjarte Bogsnes, Performance Management Development, at Statoil tells how that company has gone down the route of 'self regulation' rather than 'control' of various aspects of performance. Similarly to Welbourne and Clutterbuck Bogsnes says that

"Traditional performance management easily becomes a medicine with side effects so serious that they completely outweigh the benefits. We might feel we get "control", although a closer examination will probably reveal that much of it is only an illusion of control."

And asks the qustions: "Do detailed job descriptions really ensure that talent, competence and resources are fully utilised? Do thick procedure manuals cover every possible situation that can occur? Do detailed variance analyses of actual vs. budget secure that we now are safely back on track? Does actual cost coming in spot on for every single budget item prove that we spent our resources in the most optimal way? Does "hitting the number" represent great performance if our path is covered by casualties, if there was strong and unexpected tailwind, if we were completely outperformed by peers?"

In answer, he presents the view that "We need to create a new and different framework for teams and people to perform within, with different and wider boundaries but also with new rules of the game. This requires something new, but also just as much dismantling of the old, all the stuff that work more as barriers than support for great performance. There are significant implications for how we define performance and set targets, how we forecast, how we allocate resources and how we evaluate and reward performance."

So how does one do this? Well there are hosts of companies willing to demonstrate that they can help. Workday is one technology company that looks interesting. It "gathers all your workforce, talent, and spend data in one system, giving you visibility into trends that make a difference." And has a white paper that explains "why your current HR systems hold you back".

SAP has a similar white paper which is stashed with the wonderful management jargon that Lucy Kellaway, a columnist on the Financial Times, would poke fun at. It is called IPO Readiness: Preparing Your Company for a Liquidity Event: Maximize Valuations and Aftermarket Performance, but even so it managed to ask some helpful questions. The one that caught my attention was "Do we have the right HR structure in place, given our company's growth trajectory?" This went back to the discussion about whether to appoint a senior HR executive and what the relationship is between HR at a corporate level and HR within the business units that the company I'm working with is exploring.

PWC's Roadmap for an IPO has disappointingly little in its 104 pages of the guide to going public on HR matters, merely saying that "

Research suggests that proactively addressing an organization's human resource issues in the context of an initial public offering can increase the likelihood of a successful offering. Executive compensation and making sure the organization has an appropriate depth of talent are examples of two key areas of focus.

Eepulse is a consulting and research company (Theresa Welbourne, mentioned earlier is President of this) that provides consulting and research on "Fast HRM" . This company (teamed with Mercer) is "working to speed up HRM process and tools to meet the needs of the managers who are their clients and the pace of change in the business world."

What have I got from this, and other information on HR and IPOs? Some consistent messaging on reducing traditional HR oversight and control using prescriptive processes and systems, maintaining compliance via enabling local self-regulation within guidelines (Bogsnes talks tells the story of a traffic regulation experiment which is fun to read). Having a senior HR executive in post, and doing a lot of preparation work prior to the IPO and, more importantly, continuing that post IPO.

Any experience you have on the role of HR in IPO work would be welcome.

Last week I mentioned an interview with Ivor Southwood. In it he brought up the notion of workplaces as 'non-places' which, as I started to think about that, and look around the places I was in, became an intriguing idea to explore further. In the interview Southwood says that:

"Non-places is a term I came across in a book by the anthropologist Mark Augé. He was talking about transitional places, in particular places like airports, supermarkets, and motorways, etc. These, I suppose, are part of the architecture of neoliberal capitalism, in that they seem frictionless although, of course, they aren't. People with long commutes to work, for example, are always coming across glitches.

We're spending more and more time in 'non-places'. People are commuting for longer and longer times. What kind of time is that? It's sort of non-time, in a way. It's time in a non-place. What can you actually do? Who are you with? You're not with your colleagues or with your friends. You're on your own with passengers who are not talking to each other. Non-places are places of solitude and also places where your identity is suspended."

Another aspect of non-places is amnesia. They kind of resist remembering. That possibly applies to a lot of work now. You finish one assignment and then you erase it and go on to the next one."

This whole notion of workplace as non-place is worth considering as corporate real estate people, architects, interior designers and others rush down the route of hoteling, hot desking, desk sharing, open plan, huddle spaces, and other types of layouts which aim to reflect the mobile working pattern that technology advances now encourage, and simultaneously reduce real estate footprint. Are we, in fact, creating 'non-places' that alienate people and have the opposite effect than the stated intention – of supporting collaboration, community, and shared knowledge (rather than only reducing real estate footprint)?

As inevitably happens, two related pieces crossed my path as I was thinking over this 'place or non-place' question. The first was another interview this one with David Sloan-Williams, Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in New York. He's got some very interesting perspectives on biological evolution and design. His book The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time sounds like a fascinating odyssey into what makes places rather than non-places. (Another one for my Amazon wish list).

In the interview he explains how he and his research team have been able to "derive a list of designed features that cause just about any group to function well" He makes the point that

"This is based a lot on the work of Elinor Ostrom who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. Her contribution was to show how groups of people attempting to manage their common resources, such as farmers or fishermen or forestry people managing forests, how they're capable of managing their affairs pretty well, but only if certain conditions are met. Those conditions are very conciliant with what we know from an evolutionary perspective about pro-sociality and cooperation."

What's so interesting about the list is that it is perfectly applicable to organization and workplace design of place, rather than non-place. Here's the list:

• Number one: There has to be a strong group identity and a sense of purpose for the group. So a person has to think that they're a member of a group and that group has to be a purpose that's clear to everyone.
• Number two: a proportional cost in benefits. It cannot be the case that some people do all the work and some people get all the benefits. There has to be some sense in which the benefits are scaled to what you do for the group.
• Number three: consensus decision-making. People hate being bossed around and told what to do, but they'll work hard to implement a consensus decision.
• Number four: monitoring. Most people are cooperative, but some people misbehave. Unless you can monitor that, then the group will not function well.
• Number five: graduated sanctions. If someone does misbehave, you don't bring the hammer down immediately. You correct them in a nice friendly fashion, but you also must be prepared to escalate.
• Number six: fast, fair conflict resolution. If there is a conflict, it must be resolved quickly and in a manner that's regarded as fair by all parties.
• Number seven: local autonomy. In order for the group to do the previous things, they must have the ability to make their own decisions and to organize their group their way in order to make those decisions.
• Number eight: polycentric governance. When groups are nested within larger groups, then there must be coordination among groups which mirrors the same principles.

And finally to promote learning he suggests providing a safe and secure environment which promotes a playful, relaxed mood. And makes the point that learning in any species does not take place when all of the costs are in the present and all the benefits are in the future. As he is quoted as saying in the book, "We merely need to do what is manifestly good for us."

The second piece my brother sent me. It's part of an article on responsive web design (which raises a different question for another blog piece about the consumer/employee interaction with a company's physical and virtual space) by Ethan Marcotte. But in this Marcotte points out that:

"Recently, an emergent discipline called "responsive architecture" has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds approach them. Motion sensors can be paired with climate control systems to adjust a room's temperature and ambient lighting as it fills with people. Companies have already produced "smart glass technology" that can automatically become opaque when a room's occupants reach a certain density threshold, giving them an additional layer of privacy."

He continues by saying " In their book Interactive Architecture, Michael Fox and Miles Kemp described this more adaptive approach as

"a multiple-loop system in which one enters into a conversation; a continual and constructive information exchange." Emphasis mine, as I think that's a subtle yet powerful distinction: rather than creating immutable, unchanging spaces that define a particular experience, they suggest inhabitant and structure can-—and should-—mutually influence each other."

This seems to be another take on designing places rather than non-places. So as we think about designing workplaces what can we do to make them places and not non-places? Do you agree that that's what needs to happen or are non-places ok to work in? Are we designing places or non-places? Your views welcome.

As happens once something interesting comes my way then there seem to be several more supporting or similar things. There's a particular phrase on this 'reticular activation', which points to the phenomenon that it's brain activity (by the reticular activating system) and not happenstance that leads to being alerted and suddenly paying attention to what is already there. In normal circumstances according to a Sherlock Holmes aphorism 'You see but you do not observe'. Once alerted, in my experience, the observation follows.

The things that formed a pattern this week are all to do with work and power. In the first instance it was actual electrical power. Washington DC, where I live, and several adjacent states suffered a severe storm on Friday June 29 that resulted in a power cut (outage) including, for some, cut off of internet and phone connections. I was out of the country at the time so unaffected but now I am back and traveling down to visit a friend in Southern Virginia who today, July 8, still has no power or water and very intermittent phone and internet. (The water is pumped from a well).

Hearing this I started to think about how most knowledge work cannot get done without access to electrical power or internet availability. A friend told me a story of how when the internet went down in her house one evening at 9:00 p.m. the five residents (who were all on their individual laptops at the time) decided that there was nothing else to do but go to bed.

I find myself in much that mindset. Without internet access and ability to charge my laptop and other devices I am handicapped. So I've been contingency planning in case there's no power the week I am visiting. But that has led me to wonder:

• Why I'm so dependent on being in the 'always on world'
• How much individual power I have to design my life with less dependence on being 'always on'
• The power organizations have to expect or demand that knowledge workers are always on

So I read with some interest the articles and blogs that came my way that touched on these topics this week. In my case, there's no doubt that I am in the 'always on' world. I am a knowledge worker, working across multiple time-zones, teaching in an on-line university, writing books that require on-line research and interactions with people in other locations.

The Dell/Intel research on the evolving workforce puts the case that this ability to be constantly busy is a benefit saying that:

"Rapid developments in technology have empowered the workforce to adopt new ways of working. We're already experiencing the benefits of today's technology in our personal lives – on the go access at the tips of our fingers, the latest gadgets which connect our home and work devices. We simply want to extend these benefits into the professional realm and, in the current environment, expect employers to provide the capability. This expectation and sense of entitlement will only become more commonplace as younger generations of 'digital nomads,' who have grown up with technology all their lives, enter the workforce."

Notice the words "empowerment" and "sense of entitlement" [to the latest gadgets]. But other writers – obviously not those from the technology companies – are more circumspect on the 'benefits' of a world of informational torrent. They point to the fact that many individuals may have difficulty designing a life that doesn't involve being always available. Partly this is to do with showing that by keeping up by rapidly responding you are 'hard-working'.

Oscar Berg's piece takes this view. He notes that:

"A heavy workload and the feeling of information overload make many people think no further than the number of unread items in their inboxes. For them, getting things done is about the number of emails they answer, the number of meetings they attend, and the number of documents they write or review. In such a work environment, a large number of unread emails in the inbox, a calendar filled with meetings, and a large collection of documents are symbols of hard-working people".

Tim Kreider in his NY Times blog piece The Busy Trap suggests that

"The present [busyness] hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it's something we've chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it."

The use of the word "acquiescence" raised questions in my mind. In my own case how much am I acquiescing to the explicit or implicit demands of my work either self-imposed or employer/client imposed without consciously choosing or even reflecting on, other ways of approaching what I do? Could I design my work and leisure differently, and why would I want to reduce my dependence on the 'always on world'?

Undoubtedly I could reduce my always on-ness as I am fortunate in having alternate choices available – as Tim Kreider clearly does. I know I could choose not to do some of what I do and would not suffer financially. But I choose not to do less or differently. And I smiled when I found out this week from a CNN blog by Thom Patternson, that I am now leading a 'weisure' life having "abandoned the 9-to-5 workday for the 24-7 life of weisure."

Apparently, this is the next step in the evolving work-life culture according to New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, who coined the word. "[Weisure] makes their (the members of the creative class) work a source of meaning and fun to them, and thus the work-all-the-time mentality is partly driven by choice and desire."

OK, good. So Kreider and I have the wherewithal and circumstances to make healthy or at least informed choices. But what about those people who have fewer or more restricted choices? Neither Patterson nor Kreider talk about workers who feel pressured to be constantly available and always on because they fear losing their job and fear that they won't get another, who have families to support and worry about financial instabilty. I am thinking of those who have little in the way of resource or positional power, on minimum or low wages. Although still knowledge workers and part of the 'always on' economy they don't have the same choices as the people Kreider seems to be talking about (although he does mention those who feel constant anxiety and guilt if they are not responsive to the instant demands made possible by technology).

Not for these is the benefit of reflective time or idleness that Kreider talks about in his piece, saying:

"Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration -— it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done."

And this brings me to the third aspect of work and power which came my way this week. It is the politico-economic-social system and the relationship this brings to bear on what used to be called the 'psychological contract' between employers and employees. (Is it still called that?) This politico-economic-social system aspect was addressed when into my email came a message from someone who'd been discussing Ivor Southwood's book, Non-Stop Inertia. He uses the term 'precarity' that he explains, in an interview, as coming

"out of the transition to post-Fordist ways of working – out of the period of Fordism and stability. People were sold an idea that they were being unchained from industry and having a boring job for life, and that they would be endlessly mobile, aspiring characters. But it seems to me that the price for all of that is a constant nagging insecurity. The idea of precarity is this sort of machinery of anxiety. It's a sort of a technology in the workplace and in culture, which has been introduced and extended, and allows us to keep on functioning."

I haven't read enough of the book, or the work of others writing and researching in this specific field to comment confidently, but I but it does seem that the 'always on' world means a very different dynamic of what is being 'sold' to workers of every level by technology companies, by companies, by governments, and by social media protocols. So now I am busy asking myself questions on what this means for organization designers. Any thoughts would be most welcome.

A regular part of organizational life are those events called 'off-sites', 'retreats', 'teambuilding' or sometimes 'jollies'. I've been on my fair share of them ranging from outdoor experiential stuff in Dorset where we had to build rafts, scale walls, wade through water and so on to indoor hotel conference rooms, in places close to airports, with no daylight where we indulged in co-counselling and revealing our innermost thoughts to team members while sitting in a circle.

The Dorset thing was fairly early on in my career. I was a novice at that stage and when the trainer asked what activity we would least like to do given a choice of things like potholing, rock climbing, and white water rafting I naively said 'potholing' thinking we would be allocated to something we would like to do. Not the case. I spent a long terrifying day crawling underground in the darkness through wet mud. The trainer thought it would help me face my fears. I've never been near a pothole again.

One of the sitting in circle ones I remember, also early in my career, was where the trainer chain smoked throughout the day. (You can tell how long ago that was). As the room filled with smoke I asked him if he would stop smoking or smoke outside. He lashed out at me for stepping on his 'rights' and said if I didn't like him smoking I could leave the course. So much for a 'safe environment'.

What I learned from these early career experiences was to treat teambuilding events with a certain skepticism. I don't think that was the intention of them. But I was never quite clear what the intention of them was.

This is one of the difficulties with teambuilding events. Getting to some reliable assessment of their value or any return on investment is extremely difficult. This may be because the objectives and intended outcomes are not spelled out in a way that then facilitates effective measurement. This problem came to mind a couple of weeks ago when I was a participant in a two day off-site with my colleagues. This was an event designed to promote … what?

Well there were laudable words 'enhancing rapport and relationships between team members', 'building trust', 'developing joint problem solving capability', 'knowledge sharing', ' improving team communication' and 'increasing collaboration', and Day Two which was working with a non-profit on a particular issue they were trying to address seemed designed to achieve the intent of the words. But still a doubt remains in my mind. How will we know that the two days was a good return on investment? Day One, in case you're wondering was spent in one of the office conference rooms – with windows – discussing meeting protocols, marketing collateral and other operational stuff.

The direct costs of the two days included flights for some team members, hotel accommodation, and a couple of team dinners. I don't know what the exact dollar amount for this was. Then there were the indirect costs of the whole team being unbillable for two days (or maybe more if flying/travel time is factored in).

Of course, having asked the question – how will we know if the return on the two days was worth the investment I got the task of finding out how we would find out! But I can't say this was an unexpected assignment and two team members are joining me in the adventure of finding a response that few academics and/or practitioners have been able to answer satisfactorily.

There is very little research or guidance that really tackles return on these types of teambuilding events in terms of improved business performance. There are some frameworks that point a direction. Kirkpatrick's well used model of training evaluation – that some have dismissed as 'magical thinking' – describes four levels of outcomes:

1. Reaction: trainees' perceptions of the quality and value of training
2. Learning: whether trainees have learned the skills, knowledge, or attitudes that were intended
3. Behavior: whether the acquired skills, knowledge, or attitudes, affected behavior on the job
4. Results: the impact of the training on business results, for example productivity, quality, or customer satisfaction

Charles Jennings, in a thought provoking blog around the standard models of training evaluation makes the point that a lot of planned learning activity is "sub-optimal to the extent that it provides little value to participants and their organizations" and suggests five barriers to effective learning.

But both Kirkpatrick and Jennings make reference to the point that training and development activity – including teambuilding events – need to have a positive and measurable impact on business performance. However, there is just no really satisfactory way to make the cause-effect link although some experiments have shown that there is some relationship between behavior changes and business results: for example, Level 3 behavior change like better leadership, higher team cohesiveness, better interpersonal communication, better problem solving and higher levels of trust (though it is not mentioned how these are measured) leads to Level 4 results – lower employee turnover, lower absenteeism, higher productivity, higher quality, better overall job performance

Having briefly discussed methods of evaluation we have decided to pick up more or less at the Level 4 and take a different tack. My colleagues and I are considering using a balanced business scorecard approach as our framework for measuring the benefits of the teambuilding event we participated in last week. We think we could usefully measure in the four quadrants of

Customers, Business Processes, Financials and Learning. (The standard four), but it will probably behoove us to real the primer by Paul Niven Balanced Scorecard Step-by-Step: Maximizing Performance and Maintaining Results before launching into an evaluation process. However, this will be a bit of a retrofit as the subject of evaluation came up after the event and so wasn't a front of mind consideration in the original design. (Should it have been? Would the evaluation outcome be more or less valuable if we had thought of evaluation as part of the design?)

Anyway, here are my first suggestions on the measures we could consider:

• Customers: The non-profit we worked with implement some of our suggestions and measure their own business performance improvement as a result of this implementation.
• Business process: We action our talk on the marketing process and collateral, send it to potential customers, win business as a direct response to this marketing and measure the value of the win
• Learning: We use what we have learned about each other to develop a new service offering that draws on our collectivity of skill sets. We successfully sell this to one or more clients in the coming year (and it measurably improves their business performance as well as ours).
• Financials: We tot up the direct and indirect financial costs of the two days. Knowing these and also knowing the financial benefit of winning business and improving the performance.

Any further thoughts on how to measure the business value and ROI of teambuilding events would be most welcome. Do you use the Kirkpatrick model, business scorecard, or some other method?