Author: naomiorgdesign

The strange thing about joining a new company is the strangeness of it. Everything is somewhat different from the known, but it is not completely unknown either. Some attributes of organizations tend to be present in all of them. Use of Microsoft Office is one example, having conference rooms, kitchen areas, photocopiers, and other office equipment is largely similar, so is the likelihood of enjoying a level of employee benefits. Similar organizational processes appear: a payroll system, expense and timesheet requirements, and phone numbers, business cards, and email addresses are part and parcel of most organizational life. But beyond these explicit and/or tangible aspects things are different, and it's getting to grips with those which are so fascinating.

I've just spent my first week on-site in the company I joined on April 2. So in this one there are some things that it seems I don't have to do:

• Log in to my computer with my ID/smart card
• Have my ID card on me to get into the building
• Have an ID card (or a list of more than 20 passwords to get into the various organizational websites. In this organization I just have 2 so far).
• Clear my desk in the evening (not that I have a desk because I'm going to be home based) but I'm just observing others who do have a desk on this one
• Work out who is who in the hierarchy and how they are going to play their position – there's very little observable hierarchy including no private offices

Here are some things I do have to do

• Use the company mugs of which there are hundreds in the kitchens to avoid disposable ones – the company is 'green' and appears to act on this rather than talk about it
• Follow the standard signature block on my emails – in my previous organization there was no standardization whatsoever on this
• Quickly learn to use the CRM system (totally new to me)
• Get to grips with the company language and what it means in practice. For example: markets, studios, core teams, market managers, first Thursdays, BDIR (!), workplace strategy, transition planning, and so on
• Start to attend various repeated meetings that are appearing in my calendar.
• Trawl the intranet for useful history, and current goings on. (And also to match names and faces).

There's a fun convention of naming the conference rooms after jazz albums. So one evening in the week when I felt pretty brain dead I got out the floor plan – which is a tremendously useful document and You Tubed each of the conference room names and listened to a snippet of the album. Lots of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk but some were totally new (Muriel Grossman) to me and very worth listening to.

I was reminded of my days at British Airways were conference rooms were named after locations so when someone said they would see me (or someone else) in 'Rome' people often didn't know whether they meant the conference room or actually Rome, Italy because BA people were constantly traveling.

Not only is there the company geography to get to know, there's the local geography to understand – coffee shops, lunch places, running routes, etc.

Of course beyond getting to grips with 'the way we do things round here' in an informal sense there's the getting to grips with the work. And that's where I'm in the position of what is known as 'eating your own dogfood'. This phrase comes from the computer world, "One of the most important rules in software is to eat your own dog food. The concept is simple: If you have confidence in your product, you use it". On mashable there's a post about Google's senior management staff not using Google+ pointing out that they are not eating their own dogfood. The post is a restatement of a different one that gives more details

Why am I aiming to eat my own dogfood? My PhD dissertation was on senior people joining a new organization – what made them succeed or fail even when they appeared to have the right technical skills, experience, and knowledge to do the job they were hired to do. The outcome of the several years of research was that senior/executive level new hires had to

a. fit in socially i.e. rapidly create networks, reputation, good impression, and community rapport
b. get on and prove they could meet – or preferably exceed performance expectations

Generally they had to meet these two objectives simultaneously and within a short window – three months – or they would leave the organization by being indirectly eased out or directly asked to leave. I came up with a series of management checklists – published by the Chartered Management Institute and available from them – and a methodology for minimizing the risk of these people failing as failure at this level is very expensive not just in money but in reputation, time, motivation, and so on.

So here I am looking at the checklists again. There are ten of them in the first series (and a further ten in a second series) so that's salutary for a start: ten things to think about on how to join an organization. I'm re-reading them. Do I know how to handle the politics? Have I got the job I think I've got? Can I adjust my style? They seem full of perfectly sound advice and useful suggestions that I'd do well to pay attention to. I'm wondering if I have it in me to use the lists and will they help me succeed? Well, I do think that eating one's own dog food is a good thing to do. So I'm giving it a go. I'll find out within three months whether it's an effective diet.

This past week has been about system conversions. In any design project they are fraught with difficulty. They've been brought to my attention in four different circumstances this week, two business and two personal:

a) The merger of United and Continental airlines
b) The trusted traveler program
c) The collapse of my personal laptop
d) My leaving one job to start another in a different organization.

First the merger of United and Continental: I fly United a lot and was interested to see how they would handle the merger with Continental when it was announced a couple of years ago. The main way I've experienced it is through their frequent flier program. So late last year I got a mailing saying my card that was due to expire in January, would be valid until the end of March. This mailing was sent to a prior address but it finally got to me. I checked to confirm that I had, in fact, changed the address in my passenger profile, which I had, so I don't know how that happened but put it down to merger glitches.

I liked the way that with this announcement came a little gold sticker, saying "valid until the end of March" that came with the instruction to stick it on the frequent flier card. I imagined a bunch of people trying to work out what the best method was of getting to this solution and wondered how much the gold stickers cost. What was the rationale for them? Couldn't they have instructed everyone that all cards expiring January 2012 would be valid till end March and saved on the stickers?

Next came an email saying all the frequent flier numbers were changing, this came with a set of instructions for logging on, resetting passwords, updating profile, etc. so I did all that. (Why wasn't it automatically imported?)

Then on Friday 3/30 I got an email "We want to keep you up to date following our recent conversion to a single passenger service system, a single website and a single loyalty program. We know that our customers have experienced various issues since our system conversion. We are working aggressively to resolve the remaining issues promptly. Here is a progress update on key subjects about which we've heard from our customers". There were four 'key subjects'. I imagined myself in the meetings led by the Senior Vice President, Customer Experience, United, the behind the scenes fury, the rows with the IT department, and the internally politicking going on to resource something that (I'm guessing) turns out to be much more complex, time consuming, and expensive, than it seemed during the due diligence phase of the merger negotiations.

Yesterday I tried to log on to check-in to my flight. The system did not recognize my new frequent flier number and/or password, neither could I get out of the loop of it asking me to answer a security question that I would never in a million years have chosen. ("What is your favorite sports team?"). First I asked 'Alex' the online FAQ 'person', and then rang customer service. No wait, and a very pleasant agent who asked what my password was and confirmed I was entering the correct one. She didn't know why the system wouldn't accept it. Resolution? She sent a link via email for me to reset it , this time with no questions about sports teams. I checked in with no further problem. So some things are working.

Also in the week, Tuesday, I went for my 'trusted traveler' interview. I'd applied for this status in order to avoid some of the waiting in the immigration line coming back into the US. (In my new job I'll be traveling a lot). I'd applied on line for it. The form was exceptionally detailed requiring a ton of information I'd previously given on both my green card, and nationality applications, as well as government job applications. I am not clear why there is no hook up between the government systems. There is a lot of talk (and work plus action) on levels of interoperability but in the day to day of my life I haven't seen it paying off. Anyway, I got to the interview, which came with some wonderful instructions to walk past the red phone on the right to the third door on the right. There's no reception area. The instruction is to knock on the door. I did this twice with no answer. Finally someone opened the door a crack and told me to come back in five minutes. Once I was admitted I gave my fingerprints. Again something I've done many, many times, even the agent interviewing me commented on the fact that there's no compatibility between systems. He told me my card would be with me within two weeks. Imagine my surprise when it arrived two days later, on Thursday.

Then there were the two personal things. First my laptop: the screen got a white 2" wide vertical bar down it with pulsating black horizontal lines within the bar, making it very hard to work on. I had to switch to a different laptop while mine goes for repair. This means a whole mass of system changes like:

a) buying 'Roboform everywhere', a password manager, I just had the desktop one – converting to the 'everywhere' involved several emails to the help desk regarding the compatibility of the different versions. All these were answered within minutes which I thought was impressive. It's now installed and seems to work
b) installing i-tunes with all the attendant frustration of authorizing and deauthorizing computers. They have a very difficult system of allowing up to five computers to be authorized but when you want to authorize a sixth you can't deauthorize one but have to deauthorize all five, essentially starting over. (Can that be right? I couldn't find otherwise)
c) then I tried to open an old Powerpoint – another impossibility and I spent at least an hour trying to find an answer. The best one seems to be installing a powerpoint viewer which I haven't got around to doing yet. Why doesn't Microsoft deal with the issues of opening older versions of their programs?

Second my job: I'm writing this on a flight to Seattle as I'm changing jobs. I'm going to work for NBBJ – an architect's company that was recently written up in the NY Times. For me this means a mass of system changes. I'm anticipating it will include the way I fill time sheets, new communication systems to learn, mastering the transport system of Seattle, the various systems of custom and practice in an organization culture new to me, and so on.

Reflecting on these experiences I conclude that there's no simple answer to system conversions. It's a question of one step at a time. So I was amused to find that today's Gratefulness.org quote for the day is: 'There is no large and difficult task that can't be divided into little easy tasks.' Yes, and for organization designers and developers the trick is to ensure the little easy tasks collectively and speedily end up addressing the original large difficult task i.e. smooth system conversion and not remain a fragmented set of achieved easy tasks along the way.

This past week various threads have come together that weave into a mouse-mat sized tapestry on one aspect of self-design or re design. During the week a friend sent me the link two TEDx talks by Brene Brown. One is on shame and one is on vulnerability. Brown 'studies human connection – our ability to empathize, belong, love.' In the talks she poses the questions: How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to recognize that we are enough – that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy?' Each talk is 20 minutes and worth the time investment.

Listening to the talks reminded me of a book I read years ago 'Women who run with the wolves'. I felt sure that it had a discussion of shame in it. It does, in fact, it has a whole chapter on shame which echoes much of what Brene Brown talks about, which may be because they are both in the Jungian camp. The author, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, suggests that personal stories associated with shame 'are like black gravel under the skin of the soul', and like Brown says that 'Keeping shame a secret is profoundly disturbing to the pysche', they both suggest that there is good news because there are ways of healing and rethinking (redesigning) oneself.

In Estes words 'choose to open the secret, speak of it to someone, write another ending, examine one's part in it and one's attributes in enduring it. She says that the learnings from this are equal parts pain and wisdom.' Brown talks of the swampland of shame. Her approach is about putting on galoshes and walking through the swampland looking at it and 'finding our way around'. She suggests that three things reinforce shame: secrecy, silence and judgment and, as Estes is, is firm in saying that talking about shame and showing empathy to oneself and others about shame loosens its hold and frees the spirit.
The word 'vulnerability' does not appear in the index of Estes book but themes of loss and vulnerability infuse it. Her language use is simply amazing. She talks of the 'song of the starved soul' and like Brown encourages people to un-numb (her equivalents of) vulnerability and live with the loss of control and wish to predict and simply believe that 'I'm enough'.

The messages from both are that shame and vulnerability become strengths if you confront and work with them. This notion of expressing weakness and showing vulnerability is one that comes up frequently in leadership discussions. One article I read several years ago and debated hotly with colleagues was 'Why Should Anyone be Led by You' by Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones. They too encourage leaders to be courageous enough to reveal their weaknesses, saying:

'When leaders reveal their weaknesses, they show us who they are—warts and all. This may mean admitting that they're irritable on Monday mornings, that they are somewhat disorganized, or even rather shy. Such admissions work because people need to see leaders own up to some flaw before they participate willingly in an endeavor. Exposing a weakness establishes trust and thus helps get folks on board. Indeed, if executives try to communicate that they're perfect at everything, there will be no need for anyone to help them with anything. They won't need followers. They'll signal that they can do it all themselves. … Sharing an imperfection is so effective because it underscores a human being's authenticity.'

What I got from Brown, Estes, and Goffee was the idea that once you come to terms with your shame and vulnerability and decide to confront it you are in the process of learning how to redesign yourself. Greg Smith, the guy who wrote the March 14 NY Times article 'Why I am leaving Goldman Sachs' may well be in that category. He doesn't explicitly use the word 'shame' in his article, but he does say "The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for" and "It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off." In this respect the article implies the shame he now admits, and many of the current 372 comments point out that in making himself vulnerable in the way he did took a great deal of courage. Brown's quote 'Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage' bears thinking about.

As any designer and re-designer knows it does take courage and persistence to get to a workable new design – Brown mentions Myshkin Ingawale who tried 32 times to design an anemia testing kit before it worked, and the Edison story of the 10,000 light bulbs is well known. (I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work). It's the same with organization design, and with self-design. Discuss the shame of a design not working. Expose the vulnerability inherent in even aiming to design. Take courage and walk into the unknown.

This past week I've been continuing with researching and writing chapter eight of my forthcoming book. As I said last week, it's on management fads and fashions, and it's been an interesting foray into my prejudices and experiences, the academic theory on the topic, and the popular writing about fads.

At this point I'm pondering all the information and trying to get it into a manageable format that will engage readers. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, all about 'that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire' has the engagement factor down pat. I started to re-read bits of his book, looking for the nuggets that I remembered from my first reading of it. Of course, that rather side-tracked me as I drifted off into remembering my own teenage years consorting with people wearing Hush Puppies (one of the fads he discusses) the first time they were a fashion fad.

There's a lot about management fads that has caused me to think more carefully about them. The term itself 'management fad' is rather dismissive as if something that is by many definitions (and there are lots) transitory, but enthusiastically pursued cannot be of value. Scott Adams in his book The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions illustrates the classic managerial response to the next big thing, 'last year it was quality circles . . . this year it will be zero inventories. The truth is, one more panacea and we will all go nuts', and consultants take the rap "Consultants will ultimately recommend that you do whatever you're not doing now. Centralize whatever is decentralized. Flatten whatever is vertical. … And consultants will rarely deal with the root cause of your company's problems, since that's probably the person who hired them.'

Nevertheless the weariness that greets 'another initiative' might be missing the point that fads are also about learning, innovation, progress, and change. Even if they don't yield expected results they do something. I remember in 2009 working for a company and suggesting that we allow engineers to communicate to each other via Twitter. I was firmly put in my place by the manager I was working for who a) had never heard of Twitter and b) said that even if he had it wasn't for them. An analyst commenting on Twitter, also in 2009 said much the same thing:

'Twitter — it's fun and useful finding out what friends, coworkers, and industry big-shots are reading and thinking. … But Twitter is still a fad, and according to a [recent] study, it looks like its popularity may soon fade.'

But three years later 'Twitter has become the pulse of a planet wide news organism, hosting the dialogue about everything from the Arab Spring to celebrity deaths'

Now look at the list below of things that have been described as fads. For those which you haven't adopted in your company ask the following questions:

How would you know whether to invest in it?
What criteria would you judge your potential investment by?
And will you be ok with the outcome if it turns out to be a flash in the pan that doesn't yield the expected results?

For those fads that you have adopted in some form or other answer these questions:

Why were they adopted?
What lifespan do you think they'll have?
How are you reviewing their value and at what intervals?
What evidence do you have that they are achieving what you wanted them to achieve?

Feel free to add to this list (and I'd love to have your additions). And if some of the items on the list are a mystery to you what would you do to find out more about them in order to answer the first set of questions?

• B corps.
• Behavioral analytics
• Big data
• Biomimicry
• Clean tech
• Collaborative work spaces
• Cradle to cradle
• Crowdsourcing
• Design thinking
• Gamification
• Green jobs
• Happiness, positive psychology, emotion as an investment category
• Neuro (marketing, economics …)
• No offices/hoteling
• Outsourcing
• Post PC era
• Prediction markets
• Results only work environment
• Self-managed teams/erosion of hierarchy/end of leadership
• Social advertising
• Social media
• Sustainability
• Virtual and remote working

After two weeks of work on the topic of management fads I'm thinking that they are not to be dismissed, but to be examined, thought through, and learned from. The piece I'm tackling now on them is the relationship between the supply and demand side of the fads. Where do they come from? Why? What is the relationship between the seller – usually the maligned consultant, and the buyer – the apparently long suffering manager? Clearly there is some form of collusion there. How long is a fad a fad before becoming either mainstream or dying? Some academics suggest that fads are adopted for a combination of socio-psychological and techno-economic reasons both internal and external to organizations and it seems that the adoption of Twitter for organizational use (a sample of one, I agree) falls into that thinking.

One way of deciding about whether or not to adopt a fad is to consider it as a field experiment. So in the case of determining whether, for example, to adopt Twitter for your organization you could follow the scientific method:

1. Make observations (about Twitter use in the general population and other organizations)
2. Formulate a hypothesis (about how will benefit or work in your organization)
3. Design and conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis – this is the part that is often missed out in organizations. There is no pilot test, just a blanket 'let's adopt this'.
4. Evaluate the results of the experiment – this is another step that is often left out in organizations.
5. Accept or reject the hypothesis
6. If necessary, make and test a new hypothesis.

Thus in the course of the time I've been working on this chapter I've ceased to think that fads are a necessary evil, and am on the verge of thinking they are a necessary good. We can learn from them, progress through them – even if not in the expected way, and ultimately, for the failed ones, laugh at our folly in thinking they would be worth the investment, and for the successful ones congratulate ourselves on our prescience. And remember that adoption of a fad is likely to affect the design of your organization.

On Sunday, March 11, yesterday, I started to write the final chapter of my new book. It's a great relief to see the index hoving into view after six months of sitting here at my laptop – the post PC era has overtaken me while I've been writing. If the post PC era has also overtaken you for the moment you can listen to Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist, talking about this in a TechCrunch interview. As soon as I finish the book I'll have to ditch my PC and get whatever the post PC era item is. Or will I be succumbing to a mere fad if I do that?

How do I know whether the post-PC era statements are a fad or a trend? What is the difference? You'll be able to find out when the book is published at the end of the year, because management fads and trends are the topic of Chapter 8 – the one I've spent the last day and a half working on. Well, some of the time I haven't been directly working on it. I've been 'researching' the various management jargon generators seeing if I can come up with a management fad of my own. The generators are great fun and there are lots of them. Just type into your search bar 'management jargon generator' and you'll get a list of them. Then you can spend quite a while feeling amused at things like "This is no time to bite the bullet with our parallel incremental contingencies" or "Our exploratory research points to knowledge-based management alignment," at least I felt amused until I then cast a critical eye over what I had written in the chapter and decided to go and get a cup of tea.

How do I know whether the post-PC era statements are a fad or a trend? What is the difference? You'll be able to find out when the book is published at the end of the year, because management fads and trends are the topic of Chapter 8 – the one I've spent the last day and a half working on. Well, some of the time I haven't been directly working on it. I've been 'researching' the various management jargon generators seeing if I can come up with a management fad of my own. The generators are great fun and there are lots of them. Just type into your search bar 'management jargon generator' and you'll get a list of them. Then you can spend quite a while feeling amused at things like "This is no time to bite the bullet with our parallel incremental contingencies" or "Our exploratory research points to knowledge-based management alignment," at least I felt amused until I then cast a critical eye over what I had written in the chapter and decided to go and get a cup of tea.

So back to the difference between a fad and a trend. According to the American College of Sports Medicine – who publish an annual survey on fitness trends, a trend is 'a general development or change in a situation or in the way that people are behaving', so in a trends survey it would be totally expected to see the same trends appearing for multiple years because the definition includes the phrase 'general development' as opposed to 'a fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period,' which is the definition of a fad.

You may, or may not be glad to hear that as far as fitness trends and fads go 'out of the top 20 were balance training, Pilates, and stability ball (or Swiss Ball). These three potential trends had shown remarkable strength in past years. Pilates was no. 9 on the list as recent as 2010 and appeared also as no. 7 in 2008 and 2009. Although Pilates had all of the characteristics of a trend in the industry, it may now be thought of as a fad (as supported by this current trend analysis)'. But Zumba has made it into the top 20. On this, the lead survey manager said, "While Zumba has experienced a rapid surge in popularity in the past year, future surveys will indicate if Zumba is truly a trend or simply a fad."

Sadly, this type of trend/fad survey does not exist for perplexed managers wondering whether what they are planning to make an investment decision about is a fad or a trend. Who is to know whether brainstorming, corporate social responsibility, customer relationship management, delayering, double-loop learning, empowerment, lean, learning organization, matrix management, outsourcing, process improvement, project management, quality circles, six sigma, succession planning, sustainability, total quality management, vertical integration and/or zero-based budgeting are trends to follow and worth the investment in, or fads to put in the bucket and forget about because they will not achieve what was expected from them?

Mulling this over I went back to re-read the recent Jonah Lehrer article in the New Yorker? It was called 'Groupthink: the brainstorming myth' which I found interesting. The punch line sentence is 'In the sixty years since then [1955], if the studies are right, brainstorming has achieved nothing—or, at least, less than would have been achieved by six decades' worth of brainstormers working quietly on their own,' which suggests three things to me

a) Brainstorming began life as a fad.
b) It became a trend and then mainstream (over the 60 years)
c) It has been superseded by research/experience that suggests other methods of idea generation, innovation and creativity might be more effective

So it may be that it is quite legitimate, and perhaps even sensible, to try what seems to be a fad and learn from it and not worry too much if it isn't a trend. One research article I read mentioned two opposing views of fads quoting a manager who stated: 'last year it was quality circles . . . this year it will be zero inventories. The truth is, one more panacea and we will all go nuts.' This researcher (Byrne 1981) felt that fads were counterproductive. 'Their bewildering array represented a serious distraction from the complex task of running a company'. He likened many modem managers to compulsive dieters, trying the latest craze for a few days, then moving relentlessly on. In contrast another researcher Lee (1971) was positive and congratulated American top management for its willingness to experiment … 'even though many such organisational experiments fail or offer questionable results'. The risks, he admitted, could be quite high. (The full article is called Explaining the Succession of Management Fads, by Andrzej A. Huczynski in The International Journal of Human Resource Management 4:2 May 1993)

So what is a manager to do? Take up the 'flavor of the month'? Or keep his/her head down and ignore the lures of consultants selling the latest seven point plan? If you're a Drucker fan, as I am, his advice is to understand that there are no magic bullets, or simple recipes for success – which is often what a beleaguered manager is looking for. He was of the view that "Thinking is very hard work. And management fashions are a substitute for thinking." What's your view? And if you have any contenders for management fads of 2012 let me know them.

This week the project that I'm working on has taken another turn. People are looking at office layout floor plans and realizing that, it's true, there are not going to be any private offices. Any space that looks like private offices i.e. one person in one room, is going to be shared and the room itself will be available for others to use if the designated occupants are off-site.

Lots of people are getting hot under the collar and wondering how they are going to get their jobs done. There are pleas for special consideration – usually to do with the nature of the work which seems reasonable to consider. The mitigating factors boil down to three: client demands, confidentiality requirements, and security (of documents, etc). However, all of these can be addressed without recourse to a private, single occupant office. Underlying this plea, and what may be driving it, is what is not stated. One reason for a private office that people don't talk about is that of position in the hierarchy. So, unspoken is the comment, 'I've worked n years, clawing my way up the corporate ladder, I'm at the top – or nearly – and I'm entitled to the corner office with the windows.'

Do people have a right to a private office space? Maybe if it is part of the formal employment contract. But that is not the case for most people. Lawyers are one group of professionals who know how to speak out (and defend) their desire for a private office each. An article in the ABA journal, Changing Spaces: Law firms (slowly) respond to egalitarian trends in office design, notes that law firms 'have traditionally allocated private office space to lawyers on the basis of hierarchy: secretaries in open pods, paralegals in cubicles, associates in offices by windows, partners in bigger offices, and senior partners in a large corner office.'

But pushed by various trends: nudges by clients to cut costs, need to attract and retain millennial generation workforce who expect a 'modern' office, collaboration, ubiquity of mobile technologies, and requests to offer flexible work patterns in response to employee demands lawyers are thinking again about their space. Eversheds, a UK law firm, has a new London Headquarters that successfully 'fosters a flexible workplace culture through what could prove to be potentially revolutionary architecture, design and technology.' The architects and designers created a physical workplace that stressed flexibility, openness and more team-oriented approaches to work. (See the full article here).

So even the most conservative of professions is willing to acknowledge that the various drivers pushing office space from traditional to mobile, may work towards not just savings on real estate costs and carbon footprint, but to increased employee health and well-being, enhanced knowledge sharing and collaboration between workforce members, easier involvement of other stakeholders (for example by opening up space for them to use), accelerated innovation, increased organizational flexibility, better attraction and retention of workers, breakdown of down hierarchies, clearer expression of organizational values and brand, and improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations.

But is this feeling of entitlement to a private office the only factor in play? Looking around the organization I work in I see that both private, single occupancy offices and assigned cubicles are reflections of their owners tastes, experiences, and personality – just like their own homes are. There are pictures, certificates, soft toys, plaques, mottos, plants, books, clothing, electrical appliances, and other things. The oddest artefact I have come across (not in my current organization) was someone who had a small goldfish tank in her cubicle – with water and fish – and every evening when she left she covered it with a crocheted cover that she had made for it.

One colleague calls all this stuff 'status armor'. It is a neutral term, not derogatory. He explains it as displaying the accoutrements of who you are and how you want to be seen in the organization. This whole thing about status armor is a topic discussed as we are trying to work out how important it is for people (it seems it is in our organization), and how to allow for it in an environment where there is shared occupancy, hoteling, and unassigned seating. I got an email about it from someone the other day:

'Quick question: how do you all handle award plaques and personal pictures people like to have at assigned desks? Pictures I figure may not be too big a deal to have people let go – but work project awards are supposed to be morale boosters and reminiscent of great work or team achievement. Will your folks take them home?'

Different organizations have different responses to this question. Some have community walls where people assigned to that 'neighborhood' put up their pictures, although I haven't seen achievement plaques there. Others suggest having a very small number of personal items that can be put away and taken out each morning – photos, etc. Others, like Google, who are not so concerned with reduction in real estate footprint embrace many aspects of open space and collaboration and simultaneously accede to 'the engineers demand [for] stationary offices that they could nest in and decorate like digital magpies.' (See article here).

Making this mental shift from 'my space' to 'our space' is probably akin to moving from a private home to a commune. The desire for a private, single occupancy office, and the questions about how to personalize space are two factors that illustrate that it is much harder for some people than others to make this shift. So it is important that they are helped in this. Backing up this statement, a research article published in Ergonomics in 2010 titled 'Can personal control over the physical environment ease distractions in office workplaces?' concludes 'The results showed that workers' sense of control over physical aspects of their work environment mediated the relationship between perceived distractions and perceived job performance. These results suggest that increasing perceptions of personal control over features of the physical work environment may serve to link work attitudes and work outcomes.'

One organization, Radio Shack, working with this in mind had an interesting approach to moving from traditional to open, collaborative offices that is described in their case study. Basically they invested $400,000 in a model office of the future that they called the Ideas Lab.

'Ultimately, every HQ RadioShack employee spent time in the Ideas Lab, either working, touring, or visiting. Every one of the 70 departments discussed which aspects of the Lab they wanted applied in their own neighborhoods. "Each group was able to get the right things, versus the cookie cutter approach of throwing the same cubes at everyone," The company estimates the Lab facility and processes saved $1.5 million by preventing application and design mistakes.'

Other ideas on how to help employees either discard their status armor or reduce its scale or acknowledge its place with innovative way of handling it (beyond giving into single occupancy assigned space) would be welcome.

Back in September 2011 a friend emailed me saying he was planning a new book that will be a collection of articles that follow the evolution of strategic workforce planning (SWP). It is to be divided it into a historical section that will trace the early development of SWP practices, a larger section that will deal with current practices within a cross section of leading organizations and a final section that will offer some thought leader perspectives on future directions for this whole prospect of resourcing workforce capabilities.

He asked me if I would be willing to contribute a piece, saying he was "open to ideas, but I initially had in mind something from you that would be in the future directions section — perhaps suggesting some ways that virtual organizations may pursue to deal with cultural challenges when organizations are loosely tethered networks."

So, ever unable to resist a challenge, I said ok then. Until about the end of November 2011 this commitment remained in the back of my mind. This was partly because I know not much about workforce planning. Indeed given the world as we know it I am rather skeptical about the notion but maybe that is the point of my contribution.

So I sent an email saying "I guess I'm no technical expert on workforce planning, but I think there are some concepts that could be explored around what is a workforce? The thought of planning is also worth scrutiny. Then there's the question of why do we need to plan and over what time frame? The concepts seem to be tied closely to external context i.e. what value workforce planning in the Japanese tsunami scenario, or the collapse of Lehmans, etc. On this one maybe there is value in scenario or contingency planning e.g. what would we do if all the world's engineers were airlifted to Mars and were unavailable to work on earth? This type of thing."

My friend emailed back saying "There's a Churchill quote about D-day that paraphrases as from the time we hit the beaches, our plans were for naught, but the planning connections enabled us to prevail," Curious, and after some effort, I managed to find a more-or-less matching quote but it was from Eisenhower "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." So I ploughed on in my search and finally found Churchill's speech on D-Day, recorded in Hansard, 6 June 1944, cols 1209-1210, where he states that

"The Commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan. And what a plan! This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever occurred. It involves tides, winds, waves, visibility, both from the air and the sea standpoint, and the combined employment of land, air and sea forces in the highest degree of intimacy and in contact with conditions which could not and cannot be fully foreseen."

Later in November, having just come back from China, where the 'War for Talent', is in full play this came to mind and I emailed again saying, "Over the past couple of years I've been working in China with HR people who work for mainly US based multinationals and are very interested in workforce planning which has a whole lot of challenges for them. One of the Chinese HR people's frustrations is that their US HR colleagues don't sufficiently understand the Chinese context. Would a Chinese perspective be of any interest to you/the readers of the book? " He replied that it would. Thus, this week I have been working on that piece.

A quick glance at some facts and figures about China give the barest impression of the challenges and opportunities that face HR professionals and business people as they grapple with business strategies for growth in a country that many outsiders define as a single, comprehensible 'China' but what is, in fact, a country of vivid differences that almost defies definition. As James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, points out in his book Postcards from Tomorrow Square:

'The huge and widening gap between China's haves and have-nots … is only one of countless important cleavages within the country – by region, by generation, by level of schooling, by rural versus urban perspective, even by level of rainfall, which determines how many people a given area of land can support.'

Nevertheless some facts and figures serve the purpose of painting an impression of the scale of the country:
Population: 1.3 billion (2010 census)
Area: 9.6 million km2 (3.7 million sq. mi)
Capital: Beijing (largest city: Shanghai)
Economy: USD 10.885 trillion (2010 estimate) compare with USA: USD 14.624 trillion
Per capita: USD 7,518 (PPP) compare with USA: USD 47,123 (PPP)
GDP CAGR 1980-2010: 10% compare with USA: 3%
Cars per 1,000 capita: 128 (2008 estimates) compare with USA 779
50% of consumed crude oil is imported (42bn gallons in 2005)
China has 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities and is the world's largest CO2 emitter
Sources: Wikipedia, World Bank

Beyond the facts and figures, an Economist Intelligence Unit report notes that 'in many sectors, China is now an emerged, rather than an emerging, market. It is the world's largest market for cars, air conditioners and LCD-TVs, to name just a few products. No doubt, China will soon be the greatest consumer of a whole host of other goods from medicines to designer handbags.'

For many non-Chinese multinationals (MNCs) China is an important market but not an easy one to enter or work in. 'China is making greater demands – especially on foreign companies with proprietary knowhow and cutting-edge technologies. Competition is already brutal. To build a winning business in China, foreign multinationals must now plan even more meticulously – as well as make tangible contributions to the host country's continued economic development.'

In this kind of situation the concept of 'workforce planning' defined as the process of getting the right people, with the right skills in the right jobs at the right time is almost laughable. The plan won't work. There is no way that HR staff can follow a systematic route to:

• Identify current and future numbers of employees required to deliver new and improved products and services.
• Analyze the present workforce in relation to these needs.
• Compare the present workforce and the desired future workforce to highlight shortages, surpluses and competency gaps.
• Plan how to address the gaps
• Address the gaps

But maybe the planning is worthwhile. So this past week I've been talking with seven Chinese HR Directors about (to quote Churchill) "conditions which could not and cannot be fully foreseen" in relation to their workforce challenges and how they think things will move forward. These are not on the scale of World War 2 but there is some resonance in reworking Churchill's statement. It is true to say that Chinese HR practitioners are involved in a "vast operation [which] is undoubtedly [one of] the most complicated and difficult that has ever occurred [in recent HR circles]. "

More on this when I have fully assessed and interpreted the responses.

During the past week someone asked me if I would come and teach an internal consulting skills course to her team. Simultaneously I had to submit an article for publication. (I am a regular columnist to the Chinese publication HR Value). What better synergy than spending time working on a consulting skills proposal, an article on consulting skills and then a blog piece on the same topic?

From a writer's perspective this is actually three totally different pieces of work as the audience is different, and thus the style, tone and content have to be different. Nevertheless the basic ideas are the same so there is marginal time saving in sticking to one topic. In fact this could be a good idea anyway. I came across a blogger who only ever writes about simplicity and earns his keep by consulting on simplicity. So the question I ask myself is "is singular focus better than scattergun?" But that is not to answer here.

Before looking specifically at consulting skills and the reasons for developing them let's answer the question "what is consulting?" Briefly, it is a method of exploring with a client an issue, problem, or question that he or she has, and then working with the client to develop a method of addressing the situation and together implementing the agreed solution. It is a relationship of collaboration and partnership and not one of command and control.

For HR professionals their 'client' is usually a line manager or operational business person. Traditionally an HR professional supplies technical expertise related to all aspects of the employee lifecycle. This includes recruitment and selection, training, career development, performance management, reward and recognition, succession planning, and employee law. In doing this transactional work HR staff are usually:

a. Firefighting in this arena. For example, many companies have very high employee turnover sometimes an average of 30% a year. Keeping the pipeline of new employees flowing to ensure business continuity in this situation is a challenging HR matter.
b. Being reactive to issues and problems as they arise. This usually results in HR staff deploying a 'solutions' based approach which may get the desired result but does not allow for other, perhaps better, results.

An alternative approach to the fire-fighting or reactive one is the consulting approach. Taking a consulting approach is more likely to result in the right solution to the issue. So how would an HR professional with consulting skills handle the line manager's request for a new performance evaluation process?

Take this example. A line manager emails his HR business partner saying "I want a new performance evaluation process. This one doesn't work." The HR business partner goes to see the line manager who says that his staff are not as productive as he wants them to be. He says that he wants the new process to include more levels of performance, higher rewards for high productivity, and penalties for low productivity. But the HR business partner does not go ahead and design a new process. Instead she asks a series of open questions, in four categories, to find out more about the situation.

Category 1: To get the background and context to this presenting problem. In this case the presenting problem is low productivity. So the HR consultant could ask questions like:

• What do you think contributes to low productivity? What stands in the way of getting to high productivity?
• How long has low productivity been an issue?
• What would a highly productive employing be doing?
• How do you recognize and measure productivity?

Category 2: To surface and challenge assumptions. In this category the HR professional asks questions like:

• What beliefs/values shaped your assumptions about the causes of low productivity?
• What assumptions contributed to the situation of low productivity arising in the first place?
• What do you assume encourages high productivity?

Category 3: To explore and imagine other possibilities. Here the HR professional might ask the line manager what are other ways of tackling low productivity beyond changing the performance evaluation process.

• What alternative ways can you think of that would encourage high productivity beyond a new performance evaluation system?
• What makes you think a new performance evaluation system will solve the problem of low productivity?

Category 4: To reflect on what's been discussed and to decide what to do as the next step. Sample questions here include:

• What aspects of this situation require the most careful attention?
• Having decided something is wrong/happening, what is the best response?
• Of the possible actions which are most reasonable? Why are the others not as reasonable?

These sorts of open questions may well lead to an effective solution to low productivity that does not require a new performance evaluation process. Think of all the possible reasons for low productivity and you'll understand why it is important not to agree immediately to one possible solution but instead to find out more and to thoughtfully challenge in order to get to a better solution.

Coming to a good understanding of the current situation is the first step in the consulting process. Subsequent steps are action planning, implementation, and reviewing. To work through the four steps with your client requires two sets of skills (additional to the technical HR skills):

• An operational skill set required to take the company forward as it develops its market reach, scope, and scale. This includes the skills of project management, facilitation, and evaluation.
• A personal skill set that includes critical thinking and questioning, probing and challenging assumptions (the HR practitioner's own and their clients'), influencing and negotiating, developing and presenting options, demonstrating business savvy, emotional intelligence, and taking accountability for acting.

Equipped with consulting skills and being confident in the consulting approach enables HR professionals to act as a proactive advisors providing critical input into the strategic initiatives of the organization and to become increasingly involved in the implementation of strategies. And this is what HR professionals should be doing – becoming strategic partners in the business – especially as many of the transactional and traditional areas of HR work can be outsourced.

If you want to develop in your HR career build up your consulting skills capability. There are several ways of doing this. You can:

• Take a consulting skills short course
• Train to be a Certified Management Consultant (see the UK's Chartered Management Institute qualification route
• Read books on the topic – two good ones are High-Performance Consulting Skills: The Internal Consultant's Guide to Value-Added Performance by Mark Thomas, and Flawless Consulting by Peter Block
• Join the Institute of Management Consultants which has global affiliates and a consultants competency framework that is worth looking at.
• Develop some of the competencies and skills that contribute to a consultant's toolkit – facilitation and project management are two of these.

Changing your focus from HR 'doer' to HR 'thinker' takes courage and skills development but it does open up opportunities for betterment to you and your organization.

So this week I sent off to the editor Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book on organizational health and started to plan out Chapter 6 which is on healthy technologies. (The book is coming out in December this year).

People ask me how I write. By this they seem to mean what is the process I go through to get words on a page. Do I plan things out? Do I just begin? How do I know what I want to say? The answer is that I have a rough idea of what I want to say – it feels rather like a lump of clay that I put on a potter's wheel with the idea that I will make a vase. Then as I begin turning the words something completely different emerges. I have the ability to knock it down and start again or shape it differently. And this is how I began Chapter 6. I know I want to write about healthy technologies – but what specifically?

Part of my writing process is that once I have roughed out the book contents I then open a folder for each chapter and put into the folder any articles I come across that I think will be relevant to that chapter. Additionally I boldly open a word document with the chapter number and title and just drop into it anything that could be useful when I come to writing that chapter. Thus in determining to begin actually writing Chapter 6 I looked through the articles I had for it, and at the random stuff in my Chapter 6 word document.

One of the random items was a piece that read "workers distracted by phone calls, emails, and text messages, suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana." This I'd got from the notes section of a book, Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, that came free with The Observer, a UK Sunday newspaper on January 29 2012. and I thought it would be a good introduction to the chapter.

It had a website link attached to the quote, and because I invariably look for the source of the quotes I looked up the link. In this I found reference to Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, who had apparently done the research so I looked him up to see if I could find the original work. What I found was a nice piece by him saying "This study was widely misrepresented in the media", and giving the reasons why. The upshot of this digging around – which took a good 30 minutes was that I had to start again with my chapter opening since I don't want to give credence to something that isn't the case.

Thus I turned to the articles in my Chapter 6 folder and found one by Lucy Kellaway, a Financial Times columnist, You've got mail but you need to get your life back . This looked promising and I started down the road of investigating the source of her article. She mentioned TED Conferences, Chris Anderson so I looked him up. Yes, indeed he has created an email charter, "in response to widespread acknowledgement that email is getting out of hand for many people". It started out as a blog post which then metamorphosed in a three part thing: The problem, the solution and the charter itself which is actually on the home page so you read the charter before the problem and the solution. However, the charter makes some sense and readers are asked to sign it and share it – though I'm not totally clear what happens after that. Maybe a flood of emails from the charter originators? Click on their link "Join our Mailing List".

Right – so now I have the possibility of working up something about email health so I read more of the Chris Anderson stuff and find out:

"If you're not careful, it [email] can gobble up most of your working week. Then you've become a reactive robot responding to other people's requests, instead of a proactive agent addressing your own true priorities. This is not good.

This phenomenon can be thought of as a potent modern tragedy of the commons. The commons in question here is the world's pool of attention. Email makes it just a little too easy to grab a piece of that attention."

At this point, instead of starting to write the chapter my attention is grabbed by the hyperlink to 'tragedy of the commons' and I can't resist going to that to find out more. Within seconds I find myself reading the "influential article titled "The Tragedy of the Commons", written by ecologist Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968." This is not good either. I am supposed to be writing a chapter.

I pause to reflect on what I'm doing, or in this case not doing. I've found that one of the characteristics of my scheduled writing time is that much of it is spent on a) locating the primary source of stuff that looks interesting and b) then getting sidetracked by all the bits and bobs that this first activity puts in my path. But I rationalize in this instance by thinking that maybe the Garrett Hardin article (now in my articles folder) will come in handy someday if only I can remember it is there.

I haul myself back to reflect on healthy use of email. What's helpful to me in thinking about the chapter is that Anderson and his co-creators of the charter make the point that email overload is stressful, and they don't mean the healthy stress but the unhealthy " how am I supposed to deal with this?" kind of stress. And to relieve my own stress at the thought of tackling the work emails that have built up while I've been traveling the last few days I go back and read the comments on the Email Charter which made me laugh a lot. (Laugher is a stress reliever, as you may know).

To spend less time on email (thus reducing stress) was the suggestion that you can/should be terse in your responses – which is my style anyway, so now I can justify it. There's even the idea that people put a link in their signature block with one of two tag-lines: Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org or Too brief? Here's why! http://emailcharter.org.

So now I've done enough background research on email stress to give me some ideas and I'm going to start writing the chapter. But, oh, I've just remembered a good quote for the next time someone asks me about how I write: "Writing Is Easy; You Just Open a Vein and Bleed" I wonder where that came from? Maybe I'll look it up. It won't take a minute.

This week I got this question: "I wondered if you know, or have seen on your travels any great examples of specific organization structures for Innovation Labs?" The writer goes on, "In our view this is a specific environment where people are brought in to innovate the way in which we produce and sell our products and services. This will be separate to the business and will involve some new hires and some employees rotated out of the business. Have you seen any principles on structures to facilitate innovation?"

What's interesting about this is that current thinking appears to converge around the notion that innovation is best developed through business ecosystems. That is a form of intentional development of communities of economic co-ordination where multiple parties join forces to "coordinate innovation across complementary contributions arising within multiple markets and hierarchies," from this, if things go well, the business ecosystems co-evolve and adapt to continuously changing contexts. You can read more about this aspect in James F. Moore's paper Business ecosystems and the view from the firm.

One company that is clear about the value of innovation through collaboration is P & G which has established a program 'Connect + Develop' to foster innovation:

In 2001, P&G was in a period of declining growth. A company where the solution is always innovation, P&G knew it needed to accelerate its innovation development and increase its rate of innovation success. And leadership predicted, with the world continually getting smaller and moving faster, sustaining solutions would be found in collaboration, not in isolation. P&G launched Connect+Develop, a systemic, company-wide open innovation program charged with bringing the outside in, and taking the inside out.

There is a lot of information on the value of the business ecosystem for driving innovation, and there is some information on ecosystem business models, but further exploration yields very little in the way of how you structure them for success. This example is fairly typical of the findings in the field.

In fact, inclusive business ecosystems have been critical enablers in some, if not all, of the inclusive business models that have reached scale. One of the most famous cases is Aravind Eye Care in southern India. Aravind treats 2.5 million patients and performs 300,000 eye operations every year. Even though many of its patients are unable to pay, the hospital has a solid profit margin. That margin could only be achieved by strengthening the ecosystem around the core business to enable extreme efficiency and overcome barriers to scale. That ecosystem includes a lens manufacturing joint venture, research and training institutes, and civil society groups that organize patient screening events in rural areas.

So far, most practical guidance for companies has focused on inclusive business models. Relatively little is known so far about the concrete strategies and structures companies can use to build better-performing inclusive business ecosystems. Each member of the ecosystem has its own perspective, capabilities, goals, and incentives. How can they be encouraged and enabled to act in ways that pave the way for inclusive business models to succeed?

The downloadable report Tackling Barriers to Scale: From Inclusive Business Models to Inclusive Business Ecosystems from the Harvard Kennedy Business School develops the ideas in this extract, and has an excellent listing of relevant articles to follow up on.

What can we take from the business ecosystems discussions that might be relevant to structuring for R & D lab innovation? Well clues and possibilities that center around four aspects of the organization: space, people, process, and technology.

Space: design maximum room for collaboration – small meeting spaces, coffee areas, casual contact possibilities, and ability to reconfigure the space on an as needed basis allowing for what the urban theorist Jane Jacobs calls 'knowledge spillovers'.

People: whilst designing space for collaboration simultaneously recognize that much innovation is drawn from individuals thinking in isolation about a problem and solving it themselves. (Think Archimedes and 'Eureka'). Two recent popular articles Groupthink the brainstorming myth, by Jonah Lehrer and The rise of the new groupthink by Susan Cain, have come out strongly critical of putting team innovation interventions like brainstorming, and open plan offices above an individual's ability to innovate.

But as Reckitt Benckiser, developer of household products, has found structuring around teams and networks with diverse member enables strong innovation:

'We work in groups all the time, so team spirit is also very much part of our culture. We firmly believe that by having people from different backgrounds we get new ideas on the table much quicker than other companies. We have a very strong multi-national team and what we have accomplished is a team effort. If I have ten people with different backgrounds in a room they're not going to agree. As long as I have constructive conflict, by the end of the discussion they're going to come up with a perspective which is very different. That's what I want.'

Process: Structuring around work processes makes sense in an R & D setting (and most other settings).
See the work by Henry Chesbrough who argues that open innovation in products and services is the way forward. In Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era he explaings that by open innovation he means moving outside an organization's boundaries to innovate – for example by involving customers in innovation requires processes that support this kind of initiative, with the surrounding structures acting as support. See too the writings of Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School including The Innovator's Dilemma.

Technology: Keeping up to date with evolving technology is both an innovation enabler and an innovation requirement. Netflix, with known as a great innovator, (albeit with a recent mis-step on their business model) continues to evolve their business model by staying on top of the technology wave and using new technologies to enable their future success. In the past they successfully embarked on an experiment to show streaming movies via electronic devices, like their Roku digital player. Now they are experimenting with Webkit in your living room. See their tech blog if you are technically minded. Their organizational structures allow for the ongoing adoption of technology advances.

So while there may not be much specific information on structures for R & D labs there is a lot to draw on from the fields of innovation, collaboration, and business ecosystems. If you know of anything more specific please let me know.