Author: naomiorgdesign

Each week brings a whole host of new stuff that I can incorporate into my work. Hardly any of it comes from a formal learning environment like a course, or webinar, most of it comes from chatting with people who then say 'have you read this?', or 'you might be interested in this', or 'give this a go'. So my Amazon wish list (for books) gets longer each week, my toolbox of things to use on client assignments gets bigger, my list of movies (films) to watch grows, and the You Tube things people suggest make me realize if I did no work whatsoever and simply worked through what people suggested I still wouldn't be able to cope with the flood of new info. This week was no exception, so here's what I've added.

Books:
Problem seeking: an architectural programming primer, by William Pena with Steven Parshall and Kevin Kelly. Someone lent me the third edition (1987) but I see it is now in a fifth edition. I got this recommendation when I was sitting with a bunch of architects and asked why every meeting I went to with them they seized 23 x 14 cm cards with a grid on one side and plain on the other. They don't seem able to have a meeting without these cards. But I learned that they originate from a problem seeking methodology (outlined in the book). They are kind of a pre-post note method of putting ideas down and then being able to re-arrange them. I haven't started to use the cards yet as I'm still reading the 'how to', but maybe when and if I do I will be fully oriented to working with architects and designers. This is one I am now three-quarters of the way through and have ordered version 5 to have a copy myself

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, Steve Coll. This was recommended by a friend who is a social impact assessor and we were discussing the social and political impacts of organizations on people and the environment. It followed an exercise I'd participated in during the week on helping a non-profit think through how they would extend the scope and scale of a breast-milk bank they had started in Africa and the relationship they (don't) have with Nestle. This is on my Amazon wish list.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, John Medina. This was given to me by someone who I was talking with about neuro marketing and the way people think and learn. We'd been discussing organization development and the various ways people approach change and learning. He had learned a lot from the book and thought it was worth my reading. This is on my Amazon wish list.

Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success , Art Kleiner. This came up when a group of us were talking about organizational network mapping and reflecting on the fact that an organization chart gives away very little if anything on the way work gets done in an organization. Standard organization design texts rarely tackle the tacit, unspoken, difficult to get at elements of an organization, focusing for the most parts on things that are explicit and relatively accessible in design terms. Yet it's the other stuff which makes or breaks the design. This is on my Amazon wish list.

Toolbox:
Three very useful tool sets were handed to me during the week. The first is one that draws on behavioral economics. Brains, Behavior & Design Toolkit features five tools to help designers apply findings from the field of behavioral economics to their practice in order to provide a head start on framing research as well as developing new strategies for solving user problems. This tool kit includes:

• Reference Cards: behavioral economics research findings organized and described
• Concept Ecosystem Poster: the relationships between concepts
• Irrational Situations Guides: when people act irrationally, what to look for and how to design for these situations
• Strategy Cards: ways to design for the irrational mind
• Loss/Gain Worksheet: understanding and designing for trade-offs

The loss/gain worksheets are particularly good fun focusing the mind on not only what's being lost in a change – which is the more usual tendency – but what is being gained in a change. Also great are the 'irrational situations guides'. Once I saw them I realized I could use them almost every waking hour – I'm sure mine isn't the only life that seems to lurch from one irrational situation to the next. However, it's the loss/gain worksheets I've printed off to use in a workshop next week.

The second is the Sustainable Facilities Tool – also available as an app. It's incredibly thorough in its treatment of sustainability providing guidance on building and workplace design to support sustainable practices and evaluate options for implementing them in the workplace. Search with the word 'people' on the site search bar and you get things ranging from flexibility, light, and asthma, to ergonomics.

This tool is being updated all the time and is well worth playing around with to see the wealth of data and useful tips that would add to any organization design work that is looking at the impact of space design on people's motivation and productivity. I have some information from here ready to share in the workshop I'm facilitating next week.

The third is the 3P lean tool which I hadn't seen in operation. There are a lot of books written about it but a handy one-pager that gives an overview is available here. Most of the writing about the tool relates to its use in a manufacturing situation but we were using it in a service delivery project. Being part of the lean suite of stuff you can do all kinds of certifications and development activity to become a master but I think (masters correct me if I'm wrong) that it is usable by an organization design/development person who grasps the basics of it. I'm holding it in reserve till I've talked with the expert and got more info.

Then there are the movies (films) people recommended during the week. This is a more eclectic collection that tended to crop up between the cracks of the earnest work discussions, but they all came up in the work context so must have some relevance (maybe?). So on my Netflix list I now have:

• Showboat: I can't remember who gave this to me or why this appeared and the brief description of it "The daughter of a riverboat captain falls in love with a charming gambler, but their fairytale romance is threatened when his luck turns sour ". only served to perplex me further.
• The Gravy Train Goes East: Which is about a "Newly-elected President of Slaka, romantic novelist Katya Pricip,who is determined to see her country in the EC, enjoying the fruits of the free market". I see the connection though with my work as I'm doing a small project with the EC.
• Buckaroo: described as "Jerome, a troubled gang member, is sent to work on a farm. Within the journey, he discovers there is more to him, and realizes the direction he must point his life to." I do know who gave me this title but again don't remember why. But it's the same person who also recommended
• Beginners: which is about "A young man [who] is rocked by two announcements from his elderly father: that he has terminal cancer, and that he has a young male lover". This may have a bearing as I have an elderly mother who has cancer [but not terminal] but as far as I am aware she does not have a young male lover – perhaps she wishes she does.

With all the above to do something with at some stage I was very relieved to get only two You Tube recommendations. The first – because I fly United Airlines a lot – is the United Airlines guitar song. It's only 4.5 minutes so I seized the moment and listened to it.

Then to combat my rampant optimism a colleague recommended that I listen to Alain de Botton talking about Pessimism. I listened and found it absolutely worth the 38 minutes. Having just finished reading Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder, about a Burundian who survived the genocide I think de Botton presents a great argument, even so I hope I remain a pragmatic optimist.

Between May 27 and June 10 (today) I've been in various cities: New York, Oxford, Brussels, Paris, Los Angeles, and today Chicago. I've been in Union Station (Washington DC), Penn Station (NY), Newark Airport, London Airport, Brussels Airport, a coach to Paris, the Dover-Calais ferry, Eurostar, Gare du Nord, St Pancras Station, and Oxford Station, LA Airport, Chicago Airport. I've been in several different hotel lobbies and public areas and countless cafes and restaurants.

I'm not writing this list to illustrate my current insane nomadic life but to ask a question. Why in all these places I am forced to listen to one or all of piped music, television broadcasts, and public service announcements? This noise is competing with people talking to each other (conversational pitch), on their cell phones (extra loud 'phone voices'), EMS and police sirens, traffic noise, additional noise from repair or construction work sites, and street buskers.

I have a particular fury with piped music which seems to be everywhere except the quiet coach of the Amtrak, the Eurostar, and an aircraft once it has taken off. The effect of having to shout my coffee order to a barista because she cannot hear above the music has now led me to write my regular order on a card and hand it to my server.

So it was serendipity that during this particularly noisy week or so in my life I was alert to several items about noise. Questions about noise are one of the most frequently asked by people who are going to move from private office space to shared open space. The article someone sent me from the NY Times From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz makes the point that

"The walls have come tumbling down in offices everywhere, but the cubicle dwellers keep putting up new ones. They barricade themselves behind file cabinets. They fortify their partitions with towers of books and papers. Or they follow an "evolving law of technology etiquette," as articulated by Raj Udeshi at the open office he shares with fellow software entrepreneurs in downtown Manhattan. "Headphones are the new wall," he said, pointing to the covered ears of his neighbors. "

I sent the article to a former co-worker who used headphones. Here's his approach to their use:

I use the headphones mostly early in the day – it's my most productive time of the day, and having music in the background allows me to stay focused on what I am working on. Type of music depends on the day – more hard driving if I am tired, more laid back if I just want background noise. I don't notice an issue with lyrics – but I tend to gloss over those even when listening normally. I can't use noise cancelling – JUST white noise, I find, is more distracting than a mix.

As the day goes on, it typically gets more collaborative – meetings, impromptu discussions, etc, so I'll typically take the earphones out. But then if I need to jump back into a heads down mode, I can pop them back in. I am lucky in that I think I can concentrate in almost all types of environments

The 181 people who commented on the NY Times article almost without exception comment on, or imply, the loss of concentration and productivity experienced by noise pollution. The question is whether headphones are a good enough solution to enable heads down work as my colleague feels they are, or whether working in a location away from noise is a better solution – but where? As I've said, I haven't been in any public space that doesn't have loud levels of ambient noise.

A piece of noise research I came across during the week appeared in Science Daily helps on this. The researchers found that:

"a moderate-level of ambient noise (about 70 decibels, equivalent to a passenger car traveling on a highway) enhances performance on creative tasks and increases the likelihood of consumers purchasing innovative products. Similarly, the researchers also studied how a high level of noise (85 decibels, equivalent to traffic noise on a major road) hurts creativity by reducing information processing."

This is useful information if you happen to have a decibel counter on you because the researchers also note that

"Our findings imply that instead of burying oneself in a quiet room trying to figure out a solution, walking outside of one's comfort zone and getting into a relatively noisy environment like a cafe may actually trigger the brain to think abstractly, and thus generate creative ideas. [But only if the decibel level is about 70]."

I think this is may be material to the design of workspaces and collaborative spaces. Co-workers who talk loudly, or ambient noise that is above 70 decibels interferes with productivity and creativity. A very useful GSA booklet Sound Matters, explores these concepts further and explodes some myths around noise pollution. The authors make the point that:

as organizations transition to greater density and less private enclosure for economic and organizational reasons, acoustic performance will need to transition from a "side issue" to a "core issue."

Individuals have very different tolerances for and attitudes to noise. Personally I never voluntarily listen to music of any description, I don't have a television, and I rarely switch on my radio. I do have an i-pod which I listen to podcasts on. So imagine my delight this week when I found that the latest in the 'On Being' series that I listen to was an interview with 'acoustic ecologist' Gordon Hempton. He says that

Silence is an endangered species. He defines real quiet as presence -— not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise. The Earth, as he knows it, is a "solar-powered jukebox." Quiet is a "think tank of the soul."

Following this learning about acoustic ecology I listened to Dan Pink's podcast Office Hours Tom Peters – author of "In Search of Excellence" was the guest for the hour. He talked at some length about a book – now on my Amazon wish list – called Choosing Civility by P.M. Forni.

This seemed connected to my musings on noise pollution (piped music), acoustics, headphone use and the general link between office design, acoustics and productivity. Encouraging people to choose civility in their deployment of noise could be helpful. Civility would mean keeping piped music at a certain decibel level in public spaces, and not having piped music when people can't move away from it but where they could opt to listen to their own choice of noise through personal headphones, e.g. in a coach from Oxford to Paris, or in an open space office.

Choosing civility seems relevant to office life. I was a little surprised in an office (open plan) I was in during my week's travels to have to listen to an intense and angry call by one of the employees. My inclination would have been to make the call in a private phone room – but that could be an organizational design issue. I don't know whether the caller needed to be looking at his (desktop) computer as he talked, and whether there were any private phone rooms available. To have private phone conversations means mobile devices on which to view information you are talking about and designated rooms for having the conversations in.

Similarly another office I went to during the same week a person was sitting at her desk participating in a conference call via her laptop computer. She did not have headphones so people in her immediate vicinity (including me) by default listened in to the conference call and her participation in it. I asked her why she didn't use headphones and she said they weren't provided by the company. I asked her why she didn't buy her own and she tartly responded with 'Why should I?'

Perhaps choosing civility particularly in relation to noise is a necessary organizational capability that needs to be developed to make for effective and productive office and public environments. Your comments on this would be welcome.

Meanwhile an interesting read – and one that was also recommended this week to me is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. I dipped into it while I was in Chicago Public Library looking at the design of the space (no music playing there).

Last week I was facilitating an organization development program. We started off discussing three definitions of organization development, and what their similarities and differences were. The three we considered were.

• Organization Development is a dynamic values-based approach to systems change in organizations and communities; it strives to build the capacity to achieve and sustain a new desired state that benefits the organization or community and the world around them. Organization Development Network
• It is the systematic application of behavioral science principles and practices to understand how people and organizations function and how to get them to function better within a clear value base. It is shamelessly humanistic and has strong value drivers. Linda Holbeche, Organization Development – What's in a name?
• OD is the activities engaged in by stakeholders in order to build and maintain the health of an organization as a total system. It is characterized by a focus on behavioral processes and humanistic values. It seeks to develop problem solving ability and explore opportunities for growth. Roffey Park

People homed in on the values of OD. Look at the definitions and you'll see the phrases "OD is a dynamic values-based approach", it is about functioning with "a clear value base. It is shamelessly humanistic and has strong value drivers." "It is characterized by a focus on … humanistic values."

Participants were interested in three things:

1. What exactly are these "humanistic values"?
2. How do you operate "humanistic values" if these are at odds with the organizational values or you are having to implement something in line with the business strategy e.g. a 10% downsize in a participatory "humanistic values" based way?
3. How does a group of OD consultants in one organization develop a set of shared values?

These were excellent questions that I felt deserved more attention than we had time to give them in the course of the day. So here is a continuation of the discussion: Comments welcome

What exactly are these 'humanistic values'?
There are many thoughts on what constitute 'humanistic values' but the UK Humanist Society suggests the following twelve that, regardless of a consultant's religious beliefs, seem to be exactly what organization development consultants should role model.

1. The encouragement of free-thinking and the spirit of enquiry that seeks to describe the nature of the universe and of the diversity of life on earth.
2. An openness to new knowledge and the acceptance of uncertainty.
3. Self-reliance and independence of thought within the recognition of the ultimate interdependence of humanity.
4. Concern for the well-being of the whole of humankind. Compassion and concern for all humans who, in varying degrees, are deprived of the opportunity for self-fulfillment.
5. Respect for all humans, for other species, and for the environment. The promotion and preservation of an ecological balance.
6. An approach which seeks to understand the beliefs and values of others.
7. A co-operative and problem- solving approach to conflicts of interest. Reasoned argument as opposed to dogmatic assertion
8. An approach to morals and ethics which takes account of the complexities of modern living and has as its starting point that moral and ethical behaviour is that which, except in self-defense, does no harm to the well-being of others. In situations of moral dilemma, the choosing of solutions which do least harm to the participants.
9. The concept of the democratic ideal. Impartiality towards, and equal treatment of, individuals and groups whatever their … beliefs.
10. Social attitudes which militate against the exploitation, or physical or psychological abuse, of humans by humans. A society which educates its members in tolerant, co-operative living.
11. A humane approach to all actions affecting members of the non-human living world.
12. The creative and artistic potential of human nature. The capacity of the arts, literature, and recreational activities for expanding perceptions, for increasing the awareness of self, and for illuminating the human condition. All those circumstances that enable humans to be free to experience the physical and mental joys of living.

How do you operate "humanistic values" if these are at odds with the organizational values or you are having to implement something in line with the business strategy e.g. a 10% downsize in a participatory "humanistic values" based way?

This is a particularly difficult question that I don't have a ready answer to. There are schools of thought that hold that organizational development is manipulative and that organization development consultants 'engage in self-deception'. There is an excellent article by Marie McKendall on this topic The Tyranny of Change: Organization Development Revisited. This article, which I came across several years ago gave me pause for thought. In one consulting organization where I was employed being rebuked by a young consultant for agreeing to do consulting work for a tobacco company. He said he would never do that. The interesting thing was that he found out about my tobacco company work because I asked him to compile a briefing book on the company – which he compiled.

We had a good discussion on this including his reasons for compiling the briefing book despite his misgivings. This discussion seeded us running a whole office lunch and learn when all levels of consultants – including partners – joined a debate on the morals and ethics of working for particular clients. People described specific instances of moral dilemmas, their personal values, and the kind of judgments they made individually and organizationally.

I don't smoke and never have, and am in theory entirely opposed to companies making money from promoting a product that provokes terminal lung cancer amongst other life shortening illnesses. In practice I was willing to do the piece of work and justified this by saying I would find out how such a company operates and be able to speak about it with knowledge rather than assumption, was this self-deception? Should I have refused to do it? I am still not sure.

On the down-sizing topic – having been laid off myself (more than once) I've experienced better and worse ways of this being handled. I prefer the ways that mirror the values listed rather than the brutal 'pack up your stuff and leave now' approach. In my experience people understand the reality of organizational life and prefer the human values approach that treats people with respect in this difficult situation.

How does a group of OD consultants in one organization develop a set of shared values?

On this one I feel on stronger ground. Some form of action learning would go a long way towards generating the shared values. It could comprise, for example:

• Regular discussions on articles that present a point of view e.g. Marie McKendall's or the thirteen values presented above
• Case assessment e.g. how would you deal with a project offered by a tobacco company
• Peer to peer coaching and review on specific organizational issues
• Tracking of the path towards a shared value set and gradual 'codification' (if appropriate)

The question is whether this can work cross culturally or in a culture which is not intrinsically leaning towards "humanistic values'. Scratching my head on this I came across The Humanistic Management Network and a book edited by their key people Humanism in Business, Perspectives on Responsible Business in Society, published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press and then found the Journal of Human Values, which dipping into the reviews, contents pages, and so on seems to tackle some of this.
The burble for the journal says that it "provides an understanding of how in order for individuals, organizations and societies to endure and function effectively, it is essential that an individual's positive exalting forces be rediscovered and revitalized. [It] addresses the impact of human values along a variety of dimensions: the relevance of human values in today's world; human values at the organizational level; and the culture-specificity of human values."

Certainly I found enough articles in its archives to point out to me that as with anything I decide to investigate there a treasure trove of avenues for learning. Having been asked the questions was a good prod to me to do more than demonstrate (I hope) my own intrinsic humanistic value set be more prepared to point people in the direction of the many ways they can learn more on the topic.

An astonishing number of people I have meetings with seem to have no idea how to either hold or run a meeting that has a clear purpose and a desired outcome, or outcomes. Sometimes it's completely understandable – if the meeting owner is inexperienced, or hasn't been trained in running meetings – sometimes it's baffling. I've been in various forms of meeting over the course of the last week involving from three people to over twenty. None of them has been as productive as they might have been if they had had good meetings discipline, meetings protocols, and in some cases common courtesy. As a result, this past week I felt myself grow increasingly testy as I attended the various meetings. This was not good. So I took time to step back to think about meetings, but not entirely successfully as I came up with a list of questions that suggested to me that I was still feeling irritable. Here are the questions:

1. Can organizations be designed so that they become meetingless?
2. Would an organization development consultant add megabucks to the bottom line if all they ever did was facilitate effective meetings (forget talent management, etc)?
3. Is it productive to suggest meeting participants develop meeting protocols and stick to them or does that just earmark one as being a fool?
4. Are face to face meetings better run than meetings where participants are remote from each other?
5. Are meetings where all participants are remote from each other better run than face to face meetings?
6. Is technology an enabler or disabler of productive meetings? (Some clues on this "Sorry, the call dropped." "No I can't see your screen." "You're very faint, can you speak up." "Ha ha ha I like/don't like your yellow wallpaper." "I'm just going to plug in the other phone".)

I toyed with the idea of turning the questions into a quiz where the answers could be along the lines of either 'yes/no', or on a scale of 1 – 5, or a set of statements like 'don't interrupt I'm in a meeting.' In my dour mood I felt that it would reveal that most meetings are considered at best a marginal waste of time and at worst a complete waste of time. (Some of the scoring would be dependent on whether the respondent has been able to do other things while in the meeting, like eating lunch, sending emails, or reading the news on his/her i-pad).

I recounted some of my more frustrating meeting moments to friends this morning. Actually, it was a book club meeting but we are allowed about 15 minutes before the book discussion to catch up and have a laugh. (Maybe that's 'community building'?).

The types of meetings I was in during the week comprised:

1. Telephone (voice only) calls with individuals in different locations each using either a cell phone, softphones, or headset. i.e. one speaker one device
2. Telephone via speaker phone with people meeting face to face in a room somewhere i.e. some people remote on individual devices, others meeting in a room together with the individual devices piped through one device.
3. Calls piped through Lync. SIDEBAR "Microsoft Lync is an enterprise-ready unified communications platform. With Lync, users can keep track of their contacts' availability; send an IM; start or join an audio, video, or web conference; or make a phone call-—all through a consistent, familiar interface."
4. Face to face meetings with no remote call in people

Some of the types 1 – 3 used Webex or similar to show or share documents, some of them have employed fast and furious emailing of the documents we are all supposed to be looking at. This happens when the Webex (or Webex lookalike) technology fails or the instigator of the meeting is not skilled with Webex. Or if some of the people are participating through their smartphones with no laptop. (I haven't yet mastered the art of speaking on the phone and simultaneously opening and reading a document on it.)

In my Xerox days I thought their meetings management was a little over the top. It involved timekeeping, a tight agenda, knowing what we were to do with each agenda item (discuss, decide, etc), and how long we should spend on it. At the end of the meeting we had to allow time for a red/green assessment – what worked well in the meeting and what we would improve for next time around. Now I think most of this approach is very sensible, and probably essential.

There are a ton of hints and tips on meetings management (which somehow fail to make it to the meetings) but I'm going to offer some here too. However, I'm going to concentrate on meeting type 2. That is some people remote and some people in a room together. If you're reading this while you're in a meeting stop reading now. Participate in the meeting instead.

Ten tips for meeting owners

1 Know who owns the meeting. If it's you ensure that you a) have an agenda and b) circulate it preferably ahead of time – at least the one you want to reveal. Participants are usually left to work out the hidden agenda but it's much better not to have one. The agenda should include the purpose of the meeting in specific terms and the desired outcomes of it.
2 If you're using technology start it at least 5 minutes ahead of the meeting and get the documents on screen. Consider using webcams or video so everyone can see each other.
3 Start the meeting on time. Invite each of the participants to state his/her name so everyone knows who is on the call. Remind people to say their names when they start to speak. For people new to the meeting or listening remotely it is not easy to pick up who is speaking.
4 Actively engage people who are remote. It is very difficult as a remote meeting participant to jump into the conversation when people in the room are all talking to each other. Active engagement means saying things like 'What's your view …?', or "Have you anything you'd like to add?" specifically addressed to a named remote participant.
5 Encourage remote people to use the Webex or similar tools to engage in the discussion – the chat box, and the raised hand, for example. But make sure you are looking to see if these are being activated.
6 Ensure only one person speaks at a time in room and on phone. It is very hard to follow multiple conversations from a phone (as it is in the room but that doesn't seem to deter people).
7 Be aware of cultural differences – some people are not happy yelling over others to make their point but others seem to have no such concerns. Everyone should have adequate airtime and be attentively listened to.
8 Stick to the agenda and the timings. Have someone taking notes on each item which, if using Webex or similar, appear on screen as they are being taken.
9 Ask speakers to pause at intervals so people can add comments. Keep an on-screen note of 'parking lot' items.
10. Finish the meeting on time. Follow up the meeting with a note of meeting minutes, decisions, action items with delivery dates, and action owners.

Following these tips will go some way towards a productive, inclusive meeting. Try it out. If it doesn't improve the meeting outcomes don't go back to the old way. Try a different form of improvement.

Additional tip sheets that I like:
Communicate Virtually Anything

Virtual Meetings Are Like Broccoli: 8 Tips for Better Virtual Project Meetings

3 Tips for Holding Non-Agonizing Virtual Meetings

Sitting in a meeting on redesigning some government office space other day I tried to make sense of a number of phrases which, I'm assuming, are common in the world I am learning to inhabit. So, I heard block and stack, density ratios, lift and shift, fit factor (not physical fitness of people), finishings, and then various things about HVAC systems, fan coils and so on. We meeting participants all looked at floor plans of office layouts with 'innovation hubs', 'huddle rooms', and other space descriptors.

What I did not hear was anything about the people (not just the numbers of them) who are going to work in the space, the work they will do, the technology they will use, and the adaptations to business processes the move opportunity offers that could result in a transformed business: on that offers higher value for less cost than currently. This seems to me a missed opportunity. Surely organizations should be as aware of the indirect costs and opportunities of moving employees to a new or refurbished office or other workplace as they are of the direct costs and opportunities of the physical bricks, finishings, and furnishings?

If organizational leaders took a holistic, strategic and integrated approach to workplace design: an approach that included consideration of business processes, people's modes of working together, and better use of available technology. The end result would deliver much more than what is implied in the 'lift and shift' approach.

So this was in my mind as I tackled another task on my 'to do' list – writing a piece about frugal innovation. Two books have come out on it recently: 'Reverse Innovation' by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, and 'Jugaad Innovation' by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja. From what I can gather, the latter has got the more write-ups but that may not mean it is a better book, and as yet I have not read either but have put both on my Amazon wish list.

The various articles, blogs, videos and things which I did explore all point to India as the main illustrator of examples of frugal innovation in action. The most frequently mentioned products associated with frugal innovation include the $800 electrocardiogram (GE), the $24 water filter (Tata Chemicals), the $2,500 car – the Tata Nano, the $12 solar lamp (SELCO). There are also numerous healthcare services examples based on the frugal model – Aravind, an eye hospital crops up a lot, but also banking and telecoms appear as examples of frugal innovation.

There seems to be a fairly commonly held definition of what frugal innovation is. This is a welcome change from other phrases like 'organization development' that have multiple definitions. So, frugal innovation is the application of a combination of attitudes and practices. These include mastering the ability to seek opportunity in adversity and/or scarcity, doing more with less, thinking and acting flexibly, keeping things simple, generating buzz, and improvising with what's available. Adrian Wooldridge in his blog piece suggests three ways of frugally innovating:

• Contract out ever more work
• Use existing technology in imaginative new ways
• Apply mass-production techniques in new and unexpected areas

These themes also appear in a provocative report on applying frugal innovation approaches to government services. Frugal Innovation, Learning from Social Entrepreneurs in India is published by the Serco Institute. The report makes the point that

"The traditional model of public service delivery in developed economies is under siege. The provision of high-quality and universal services in a uniform way is fast becoming unaffordable as governments are coming under greater pressure to cut costs and reduce deficits. At the same time, citizens expect more from governments, whether it is health care for older people or education for their children. … Within Western economies, bureaucracy has impeded public service design over the last 20 years. … The public sector is one of the most heavily regulated and scrutinized parts of the economy, and a powerful group of stakeholders (policymakers, professionals and their associations, workers and their unions and beneficiaries and the organisations that represent them) have both the interest and the influence to argue against radically different business models that might require them to change.'

So this is where the two thoughts came together. Maybe we could radically improve governments (and other moribund service organizations) by using a workplace and organization design approach to force new thinking about services provision. The Serco report suggests seven ways that government services could be approached that would lead towards frugal innovation:

• Smarter use of people
• Economies of scale
• Technological innovation
• Scaling up
• Finding a niche
• Tiered pricing
• Alternate sources of revenue

So in the meeting mentioned in the opening paragraph, instead of only considering the physical space we would be asking, and answering questions related to people that included:

• What is being done to assess the work that the new teams will be doing, is it the same as now or can it be done differently, better?
• How are we getting information that will enable the space design to meet the business purpose of the service teams?
• What is being done to involve people in thinking about changes in role and ways of offering the services?
• What are the risks of not preparing people for a change in role, a change in the way they work, and a change in the way they work in the space?

In relation to business process we would be asking

• What business processes could and should change?
• How are the work processes going to be accommodated in the new space? E.g. shared document filing (either physical or on-line), printing, etc.?
• What work processes will be dropped, contracted out, etc?

About technology we would be asking

• Will the technology enable worker mobility?
• Will the technology be able to accommodate any new/changed business processes?
• What is being planned to train people in mobility/changes to business processes?
• How will the space and technology encourage mobility? (Is mobility a desired outcome? If so, why?)

About the costs we would be considering not just direct costs but also
• Opportunity costs of moving towards a frugal innovation model (and what this would mean in practice)
• Productivity losses/gains in using space differently
• Staff turnover costs (if people are not adequately prepared to work in the new environment/way)

Seizing the opportunity of space reburbishment or re-building to force discussion on the ways citizen services are provided would make good business sense. Any ideas on how to sell this potential gain via facilities managers and traditional ways of redoing office space would be much appreciated It will help us move away from the 'lift and shift' mentality towards a frugal innovation mindset that could benefit all citizens.

Sidebar: Read the UK Government's white paper 'Open Public Services' and the comments received on this for one government's thinking on different service models.

Running a session this week on organization design led to the participant group raising questions and then discussing the differences and similarities between workplace design, workplace strategy, workplace design strategy, and organization design.

There was no real conclusion except that semantics matter, and in order not to confuse our clients and ourselves we need to clarify the terms, or stick with one agreed short description that covers the range.

Attempting to clarify this for myself I found an article by Eric Olsen, Workplace Design Strategy: An Alternative View. In this he compares Galbraith's Five Star model with Hurst's soft bubble model. He does this in the context of discussing a paper, Solving the Right Problem: A Strategic Approach to Designing Today's Workplace, written by Arnold Craig Levin in the Spring 2007 issue of the Design Management Review.

Levin's paper builds on a previous one he published Changing the role of workplace design within the business organisation: A model for linking workplace design solutions to business strategies published in the Journal of Facilities Management in 2005. In the abstract Levin notes that:

"With the continuous changing nature of work and increasing demands on business organisations to remain competitive and to continually innovate, while controlling ever increasing real estate costs, the role of the workplace remains the battle ground between an organisation's cost savings strategy, its efforts to retain the status quo, serve as a facilitator of change and stand as a visual statement of the brand. While organisations continue to build facilities that range from newer adaptations of their previous model to what some may deem radical departures with the goal of creating new ways of working, the selection of what course of planning direction to take is still often left to a methodology that is removed from the long-term strategic objectives of the organisation."

Levin uses Galbraith's Star Model – commonly used by the organization design people in the field that I work in – as a foundation for arguing that space (workplace) and the organizational elements of Galbraith's model i.e. strategy, structure, process, people, and rewards must be considered collectively to develop workplaces that allow work to be done by people in a way that optimizes business performance.

He implies that traditionally office facilities have been designed and built predominantly from a brief drawn up by the organization's senior leadership team and facilities managers. This is unlikely to improve business performance as much as facilities conceived jointly by anthropologists, sociologists, other experts (e.g. IT), organization behaviorists, employees, managers, and organizational customers.

He is right to do this. Workplace – the physical and virtual space in which people work – is not part of the realm of traditional organization designers and should be and thus the argument runs two ways. Designers and architects need to include what is traditionally the sphere of organization design in their work and organization designers need to include what is traditionally the sphere of architects and designers in their work. This is starting to happen – Levin is one in the vanguard, and other architects and designers have increasingly over the last few years been entering the 'designing business' field, see for example Roger Martin's book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage.

So now that there is a movement to consider space design and use as integral to organization performance it is becoming increasingly urgent to do two things:

First to help professional architects/space people and organizational development people see their common ground and pool the skills that both bring to bear on organizational performance rather than both believe that they can do the other's work.

Galbraith's original 5-star model is insufficient to help with this as it reflects a period when organizations were theorized as closed mechanistic systems. He has since adapted it towards a more open systems model but it stills fall short of a models based on more current organizational theories drawn from chaos, and complexity which conceive of organizations as organic, shifting networks. This seems to be the thought underpinning the Hurst model (though I see this was developed almost thirty years ago in 1984 which perhaps puts it in era of theories of organizations as open systems).

The effects of this evolving theoretical change in perception of organizations may coincidentally be giving rise architecturally to interiors offering collaboration spaces, huddle rooms, touch down spots, and so on. Such workplaces are further enabled by evolving technologies that offers collaboration possibilities, mobile/remote working, and very different ways of operating business processes. And it is here that the Hurst soft bubble model comes into play.

I had not come across this model but reading the Olsen article realized that, generally speaking, it reflects the playing field of organizational development, while Galbraith's model reflects the playing field of organizational design. Discarding for the moment my earlier comment that they are rooted in an older version of systems thinking looking at them side by side presents a nice visual illustrating that organizations thinking of changing their space and/or space layouts need expertise and input from architects/designers, organizational designers, and organizational developers. (Not to mention from the employees and customers who are actually going to be working in and using the space).

The expertise from organizational designers, and organizational developers is necessary because all too often there is little conscious or substantial, in the way of developing employees – who have largely been trained to work in a traditional organizational model – to consider new work processes and to develop the skills to work in a way that reflects the opportunities the new types of space and technologies offer. For example, managers lack confidence to manage remote and virtual workers, performance management is often rooted in the conventional appraisal system, employees worry about loss of visual status symbols like private offices, and the effects on their productivity of working in space that might be noisy and where it is easy to be distracted, work processes may continue as if in the old space, and so on.

Second then, if space layouts are being changed then some work must be done to specifically and consciously enable people to look again at the way they do work and build their confidence and capability to realign their work processes and systems in order to work in a new way. Not doing this is a missed opportunity to have a significantly positive impact on business performance

Architects and designers are not equipped to take on the business and employee capability development role in the same way that organization designers and developers are not equipped to take on the architect's role although unfortunately some in both camps think they can. (Though it says something that an organizational developer would have difficulty joining the AIA as an architect, but it would be a lot easier for an architect to join the OD Network as an organization developer).

A better approach is for any space design or build project to have alongside the architects/designers on the team people with expertise in organization design and development, IT, HR, facilities, and business process development. Additionally employee representatives are a must. This diversity of perspective is likely to result in the conscious engagement and development of employees and confirmation that IT systems will work and business process be aligned and the new space potential realized.

This suggestion doesn't yet sort out the semantic differences and similarities between workplace design, organization design, etc that I am still grappling with but I am moving towards the notion that workplace is more about the space, while organization is more about the people, process, and technology, and therefore the phrase 'workplace and organization' would neatly cover both, and lead to project phasing along the lines of: Business strategy confirmation, workplace and organization design strategy, development, planning, implementation, and review.

If you have any neat definitions that would work to cover both workplace and design in a straightforward way let me know.

Somewhere along the line I got the phrase 'All models are wrong. Some models are useful.' This has come to top of mind during the week when models of all types have entered my consciousness. This week I've been walking round a full size cardboard mock-up of new office space and furniture that the intended occupants are walking around and through, making comments on its viability and suggesting improvements. It's great fun seeing the ease with which the cardboard can be picked up and re-sited with no difficulty. Cardboard boxes piled one on top of the other represent standing work stations, and flip chart paper the computer monitor. Intended occupants are assessing light levels, asking questions about noise, and so on.

This exercise was followed by a trip to an office furniture showroom where the same people now experienced the type of furniture that would go in the spaces. So where we had the cardboard mock-up of six people sitting at what is called benching (essentially akin to a long rectangular dining table that in the café chain, Le Pain Quotidien, is called 'our communal table' and has a little spiel associated with it ) in the office showrooms we went to they were sitting at the real thing and thoroughly enjoying it. But again the showrooms are just a model. We don't know what the real thing will actually be like, and that's where the phrase sprang to mind, because people are fearful that the model is useful in theory but could be wrong in practice.

Sidebar 1: There is a tremendous amount being written about these new ways of working. A Harvard Business Review article (July 2011) 'Who moved my cube' is one that explores some of the pros and cons in a fairly succinct and neutral way.

The thought that "All models are wrong. Some models are useful" has come up differently as some of my colleagues and I try to agree what organizational systems model we should develop, adopt, or adapt to explain the need to align organizational elements. Personally I am not wedded to any one systems model and there are many of them – Burke Litwin, Nadler and Tushman, Galbraith's Five Star, McKinsey 7-S, are just a few well known ones, and I have developed several different ones with clients that match their own organization's language and style. The point of a model is that it should be useful, and in my view they are all 'wrong' i.e. there is no 'right' model for all situations.

Sidebar 2: In my book The Guide to Organization Design I compare a number of the common systems models and have put up the comparison as the May 2012 tool of the month on my website.

A systems model is useful in helping to explain that organizationally things can go wrong, or less well than they might, if you focus on one organizational element neglecting others. So, for example, if we go down a route of introducing benching, then in one scenario the technology has to be available to support a constant turnover of users – fixed desktop computers and monitors would defeat the object of a 'communal table' – if we were going down the flexible working option that implies a turnover of 'guests' at the table. In the benching scenario 2 where we do have fixed monitors because each worker is to be assigned a seat at the table, then we would have to be cognizant of the personality issues that might surface if people were assigned space next to someone they didn't get on with. (As anyone who has been to a dinner and has sat marooned next to someone they couldn't get along with will know. Read the Dylan Jones piece if you've never been in that situation.

Systems models help you work out some of the key things that need to be considered – but the models can never factor in everything you might come up against.

A third occasion this week which brought to mind 'all models are wrong, some models are useful' was today when I was having a conversation today with a business man working in Sudan. We were talking about models of succession planning and talent management and wondering whether the traditional western model (US/UK predominantly) of these would be workable in Sudan? We agreed that what he termed the 'copy and paste' approach would be inappropriate. Any models have to be developed and tested with the purpose and context in mind. But then I'm not sure how easy it is to develop a model that isn't overwhelmed by one's own experience and knowledge of specific models. I'm reminded of a quote and have no idea where I got it that reads "Education and experience both conspire against us when it comes to predicting the future potential of a new idea. Each acts as a funnel narrowing our field of vision so tightly that eventually we only see what's already behind us." (I see I quoted this in one of my blog pieces in 2009 – oh, the power of Google).

One of my all time favorite books is a sci-fi by an astronomer called Fred Hoyle – the book is "The Black Cloud" which I read when I was a teenager and found a recentish review of. The reviewer doesn't mention what I took as the abiding learning from the book which was that the knowledge transfer that took place between the omniscient alien being and the UK scientist should have taken place between the omniscient being and the mentally challenged gardener (who essentially had a 'blank slate' mind). The mental models of the omniscient being caused such conflict in the brain of the super intelligent scientist that he dropped dead (sorry about the spoiler). This serves as a guide point that models are only useful up to a point, and it should be constantly borne in mind that they may be wrong and/or lead you to the inability of being able to accept any others.

At the Organization Design Forum Conference in Atlanta earlier in the week Shoshana Zuboff, the now retired Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, at Harvard Business School was the hit of the event. Unfortunately I missed her as I was traveling but I took a look at a couple of You Tube clips of her talking. Her seven minutes on design flaws in organizational structure resonated.

She talks of 'chapters of capitalism' and asks how we realign our commercial operations with new needs. Which she suggests is very difficult. I guess much of her video clip is drawn from her book The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism as she proposes a new chapter of capitalism based on serving the new needs of customers that are grounded in personal empowerment and expression. I haven't read the book yet – although when I went to put in on my Amazon wish list after the conference I discovered that it was already on my list. 'Amazon' politely told me that since I was trying to put it on my list again it would move it to the top. I've now ordered the book from my local library.

Then I noticed that the clip I was listening to was an extract from one of the MLab events Management design flaws and radical remedies that took place in 2009 and I wended my way to the original site where I found that the event was reported as "bringing together a "Renegade Brigade" that included many of the world's most progressive thinkers on management and organization. Each participant was asked to identify a key barrier that prevents organizations from being adaptable, innovative, or an inspiring place to work; and then to propose a potential solution."

There are thirty-four video clips from a range of academics, venture capitalists, and CEOs who all identified their views of the critical flaws of "management-as-usual" and posited innovative solutions. The suggestions included:

David Wolfe who suggests replacing the machine metaphor for organizing business with a biological system metaphor. (Amazing what happens in 3 years as this is now a standard suggestion).

James Surowiecki who speaks about the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of executives, especially the CEO. He proposes the systematic aggregation and sharing of collective knowledge to improve decision making. I think this is a development on his book The Wisdom of Crowds or maybe on crowdsourcing.

Keith Sawyer speaks about the bounded nature of the corporation, and proposes designing mechanisms to exploit "collaborative webs" of skills beyond the boundaries of the corporation, including customers and business partners.

Julian Birkinshaw's flaw amused me. Rightly he said that organizations are predominantly discussed from a manager or leader perspective and rarely from an employee perspective. Paradoxically nearly all the speakers could also have put the employee perspective. Birkinshaw works in the London Business School (or did at the time of the event) and I remember from my own life as a higher education employee enjoying the lampooning of academic organizational life delightfully portrayed in books by David Lodge, among others.

But I am slightly uneasy on the line-up in that they are all what one of my bosses called 'the usual suspects' – in this case predominantly US/UK educated and speaking from that Anglo-Saxon orientation. This is because earlier in the week I was speaking at a European Commission event and put up a history of organization development in terms of 'leaders' in the field – Lewin, Trist, Argyris, Beckhard, , and so on.

One of the participants thought it was a subjective history because it was so US/UK centric. However, I was hard pushed to come up with other globally recognized 'leaders' in the organization development (or design) field – and so were other participants. Any suggestions on this would be welcome.

Going back to Zuboff's point about the changing nature of capitalism I was interested to read in the Economist of April 21 (just catching up on this after a couple of weeks away) the pull-out 'A third industrial revolution' largely discussing digital manufacturing. In the leader introducing the pull-out the observation is made that the lines between manufacturing and services are blurring and that governments should adjust their inclination to protect industries and companies. If this were to happen it may go some way towards Zuboff's suggestion.

Now returning to the MLab event, Keith Sawyer's piece is particularly interesting as he has a view that suggests designing organizations as networks and webs of multiple others – a no-borders organization. I like this because this is a view I share (I am typically human in that I have more difficulty accepting an opposing view than an affirming view). I am not sure how this develops a 1998 book The Boundaryless Organization by Ron Ashkenas and others. that I did read years ago but have forgotten (unless it was the one that gave me my view that organizations are not bounded entities). But Sawyer's suggestion was apparent in many of the presentations given at the ODF conference.

Chris Worley, for example, talked of examples from his new book (2011) Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness which is much more focused on webs and networks. And others mentioned the fact that a lot of the networking notions have been made possible by advances in technologies. Rob Cross among others is well advanced in the field of organizational network mapping.

What all of these ideas lack relate back to is a question that Birkinshaw did not ask. The question is "How do you design organizations as networks and webs in a way that makes sense to an individual employee and/or is employee centric." In my experience employees are much less interested in academic (or leadership) notions of organization effectiveness via networks or whatever, and much more interested in stuff like where can they hang their coat in an open plan office. My challenge is involving employees in designing effective networks of organizations that work in the day to day to produce results. I'm working on it. Help welcome.

Organization design and development in the public sector has been to front of mind this past week. I was running a public CIPD course in organization design with a mix of private and public sector organizations. I then went to speak at a city council conference on emerging trends in organization design, and then on to run an organization development Master class for a government department. The common thread through the public sector employees was the question of how to deliver value in extremely challenging and very fast moving contexts.

A year or so ago there was an article in the Economist The Gods that Have Failed – so far, that muses on a similar question 'Could technology and good management bring the public-sector up to scratch?' In the article bringing the public sector 'up to scratch' requires seizing two opportunities: a) changing what the state does; and b) changing its structure. The article then goes on to outline why seizing the opportunities is a whole lot more difficult that it might seem to be. Various reasons for pessimism are discussed:

• "Productivity in government is difficult to measure and statisticians have generally stopped trying to come up with precise figures".
• The public sector has experienced the Baumol Effect (involving a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth).
• Public sector organizations do not have to respond to competitive pressures in the same way that private sector organizations do.
• Bringing skilled business people into the public sector world does not seem to produce the hoped for results.
• There's an interesting statement that "There are even ideological reasons why liberals in particular should want to keep the state relatively inefficient."

Changing what the state does could be relatively simple but there are the vested interests that make changing things like farm subsidies or pension arrangements very difficult. Changing the structure of public sector organizations is suggested to be easier to tackle in the long run, and this discussion was at the nub of the work I was doing during the week. However, having worked in a government agency myself over the past two years I've learned that changing the structure and modus operandi is no piece of cake either.

So in preparation for the week's sessions I read a book that has just come out 'Managing Local Governments: Designing Management Control Systems that Deliver Value' by Emanuele Padovani and David Young. This book opens with the brave statement that it does not 'purport to describe, or even support, business as usual. Instead we argue that local governments in general are poorly managed and do not provide anywhere near as much value to their citizens as they could by making some (often relatively minor) changes in how they conduct their affairs.' The chapters that resonated for me in terms of organization design and development work were the one 'Barriers to Effective Management Control in Local Governments', and 'The structure for management control'. I was talking about this book to a participants in one of the session and he recommended two other books, this time by Mark Moore, on the topic. One published in 1997, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, and the other a more recent one (2011) Public Value: Theory and Practice by John Benington and Mark Moore. . So I've now added these to my Amazon wish list ready for the next spare moment.

On a side note I belong to a reading group and we take it in turns to suggest a book from each of our 'pile of books to read'. We can't read anything which doesn't deplete someone's pile. So it makes for an eclectic selection as we plough through the birthday and Christmas gifts of each other's relatives.

In the various sessions I facilitated during the week four areas for discussion on changing the structure of local government came into play: better/different use of technology, the reduction in office space, the streamlining of processes (and retirement of redundant ones), and doing work in different ways – through mobile working, new business models, different service offerings etc. In practice these four dimensions inter-relate. Reducing office space, for example, means teaching people to mobile work, requires the technology that they can do so, and usually involves the 'leaning' of processes.

The notion of 'value' came into the discussions. How, for example, would participants in any one of the sessions be able to explain the 'value' to the taxpayer of their attendance? I had come across a blog by Seth Kahan a few weeks ago and in one of them he presented the notion of four types of value.

Latent Value
This is value that is latent, waiting to be found and exploited. It is like an underground reservoir, sitting there unnoticed, dormant, and ripe for discovery.
More Value
Here you increase the worth of current, established value. You achieve this one of three way

• Decrease the required investment and provide the same benefit
• Keep the investment the same and provide a greater return
• A combination of 1 and 2.

Increases and decreases can happen either incrementally, in linear steps, or in multiples by scale.
Better Value
This uses existing benefits but increases impact, intensity, or application.
Impact is the consequence, effect or influence of a given benefit.
Intensity refers to the strength, power, or potency of a benefit.
Application means that the same benefits can now be transferred to a wider variety of uses.
New Value
When some new benefit that has not existed before is mid-wifed, you have new value. Many people will tell you this cannot be done. They are most often doing one of two things when they say this: (a) referring to the emotional state of the person you are satisfying, implying that our emotional states are known and finite, or (b) abstracting so much that the value they describe becomes relatively useless in application.

The discussion around types of value that they could bring to their individual roles and then onwards to the citizens seemed to appeal to people participating in the sessions as a concept worth exploring. Sadly, many of the participants seemed exhausted and demoralized by their situations. The will to do things differently was hedged by the various pessimisms. Wondering about this collective state of mind (this is a generalization) I was led then to an article by Yves Emery 'Identities of Public Sector Employees as a Source of Inspiration for Differentiating HRM practices' on the typologies of public sector employees.

He describes four 'distinct conceptions of motivation to take up employment in the public sector: Samaritans, communitarians, patriots, and humanitarians'. Reading the typologies I wondered if governments are unlikely to change because they attract people whose concepts of value are rooted in a different form of value from ones associated with 'doing more with less' on a financial construct. I wonder if there are any comparisons of public sector employee motivations with private sector employees motivations. Let me know if you come across any.

Last week I started to get to grips with being a fully remote worker for my new company. I am one of the very few (only?) employees who is not tied to an office but is home based and also mobile. Also this past week I facilitated a webinar on managing mobile workers for my previous organization, and so it seems like I am eating more dog food (see previous post on eating dogfood) but this week's is about mobile/remote working. The session I facilitated was the first in a series of monthly sessions targeted at managers in one organization. Each month there will be

A one hour input webinar for managers on a specific topic with hints and tips, guidance, ideas to apply
A guest speaker from an external organization giving a case on how they are tackling the topic, also an hour

Topics for the next 12 months are:

• Overview of managing a mobile workforce
• Setting up your team for success
• Setting and managing performance expectations
• Managing effective communication across mobile and on-site team members
• Introducing new employees to your mobile environment
• Building trust among and between mobile workers, managers, customers, etc.
• Managing the work flow
• Managing customer expectations
• Managing employee issues with the mobile environment
• Managing employee stress in an 'always-on' environment
• Developing your team members skills for mobility
• Support for you as a manager of a mobile workforce

This first webinar drew around 70 people from all across the organization's US offices and my part was to:

• Give some background into the factors which are now enabling mobile working
• Explain why organizations are interested in developing a body of skilled mobile workers
• Discuss the reasons why managers are often cited as a barrier to the introduction of mobile working

As I've spent the last two years working in this arena this was fairly straightforward. The interesting things were doing it by webinar (practicing what we are preaching), and opening up the discussion with managers on why they are seen as a barrier to the spread of mobile working.

One of the skills in a webinar (in our case Webex) is about encouraging people to speak, but how do you do that so people are not all trying to speak at once? We've tried asking them to raise their (on-line) hand to speak, putting their point in the chat box then the facilitator calls on the person to talk more about the point, asking one of the participants by name to speak, all of which have varied success.

We've also been learning things about the various ways the polling feature can be used to encourage participation, and the importance of putting some Webex protocols at the start of each session (e.g. put yourself on mute, change your phone number to your name on the list of participants, listen attentively, speak clearly and start by giving your name, and so on).

The piece about the managers being perceived as barrier to the extension of mobile working we vested in the things we've heard employees say about their managers, for example:

• He won't promote me if I'm not on site meeting him daily.
• She doesn't believe I'm really working when I'm teleworking.
• He won't support my case for a home printer.
• She thinks we'll get isolated and the team spirit will go.
• He isn't comfortable using the collaborative technologies.

This we translated into organizational issues that managers need to develop the skills and confidence to address and resulted in a lively discussion around

• Career development which is a concern for people
• Measuring productivity and tracking progress that can cause challenges
• The various policies and practices that can make supporting teleworking an issue e.g. whether or not a stipend will be given towards equipment
• Employee motivation, connecting, and engagement that all need paying attention to
• Interacting with teleworkers which requires good IT skills and being deliberate in managerial your actions

We concluded the session by focusing on what managers can do to develop their skills in managing a mobile workforce, the outcome of which was a short list of key points

• Prove people wrong: show how you've learned to embrace mobility
• Model new ways of managing: command and control gives way to cultivate and collaborate
• Build on-line/on-site community with your teams: the collaborative platforms help
• Develop protocols for keeping track of performance and productivity
• Interact and communicate using a variety of media channels

Many of these topics are developed in the materials available from the Telework Research Network (US) and Fexibility.co.uk .

A useful article on remote worker teambuilding (of the multitudes available) is Rethinking team building in geographically dispersed teams: One message at a time by Rama Kaye Hart, Poppy Lauretta Mcleod Organizational Dynamics (2003). Volume: 31, Issue: 4. Here's the abstract:

This article focuses on how virtual teams build relationships among members based on the early communication that transpire within such teams. Prior work on team building has discussed the importance of focusing on relationship building in teams prior to working on tasks. The authors present evidence, at least with the virtual teams examined in this study, that a task focus in early conversations may be equally important to the development of virtual teams. The authors discuss the lessons learned in building virtual teams.

Two Linked-in communities which also cover the new ways of working are Big Bold Shift, and New Ways of Working/Impact

As mentioned, this past week was also my second week in the new job and the first week of being a totally remote/mobile worker – nearest office from me (in Washington DC) is New York. So as I was facilitating the webinar on mobile working I was reflecting on my own experience. The first thing to notice is the amount of equipment needed to be mobile working. My list currently reads – USB ports extension, mouse, external hard drive, headset and softphone, BlackBerry, laptop, USB flash drive, chargers x 2 (BB and laptop), power socket converter for international travel, spare batteries. So far so good. (I'm writing this in the UK now. I arrived here this morning).

But I'm also noticing the slightly adrift feeling – I need to find a better photocopier, scanner, how do I build community with my on-site co-workers who are 3000 (this week 6000) miles away? What should do on my business card – home address? What area code do I want my cell-phone/business phone number to be? In fact, several hours in the week were spent on setting up my phone system. In my new company on the softphone if you make a call out of the area code on the phone it is counted as 'long distance' and needs a project code before it will go through – this means call forwarding is problematic, etc. etc. Anyway, thanks to the incredible patience of the phone help desk person, and the ability to change phone numbers relatively easily while we experimented with the best set up I think it is all now working.

Next comes the task of helping colleagues help me e.g. on Webex and teleconferences by saying their names when they are speaking on a conference call, by encouraging them to remember that people on the call can't hear the introductory chatter going on in the room, or see the powerpoint being circulated, or eat the cup-cakes (no that was a joke – there were no cup-cakes last week as far as I know), and by following up with the follow ups because we won't be meeting randomly in the coffee area, and by using IM in lieu of the random meet-ups in the hallways, etc.

So last week I was giving the low-down on managing mobile workers and getting to grips with being truly mobile/remote myself in a new company. Is a week enough of face to face before going it alone? I think it could be particularly as I'm used to doing it over many years albeit with the safety net of an office within striking distance by bike. However, I'm reserving judgment for the moment. Meanwhile I'm calling the truly mobile/remote person I worked with in my previous organization for her helpful tips.