Naomi Stanford

Last week I tried a megabus trip . It was a kind of comparison test with the Greyhound http://www.greyhound.com bus trip that I'd recently been on. There were a number of organizational differences in the outbound experience:

• The Greyhound you pickup a physical ticket from the bus station. The megabus operates from a parking lot with no office so you just take your on-line booking reservation number

• The Greyhound bus station is a building with bay numbers with arrivals/departures information and some sense of organization of passengers by destination. The megabus has none of this. Some buses were parked in the DC parking lot but an attempt to ask the drivers where they were heading for was met by a stinging rebuke 'wait till you are called'. In the absence of any information on departures passengers asked each other.

• Both trips started with the bus leaving roughly on time: Greyhound 15 minutes late, megabus 10 minutes late. The megabus has wi-fi and the Greyhound doesn't.

• The Greyhound was full (a second bus had to be laid on) and the megabus had 5 passengers. (It was a new route which may explain that). Both arrived roughly on time.

The inbound experience was utterly different. The Greyhound showed up, and the megabus didn't. And here's how a pop up community got organized. The bus was due to depart the parking lot at 1:35. It was bitterly cold and when we arrived around 1:15 there were several cars with people in them who we judged to be waiting for the bus. The bus was coming in from Knoxville, Tennessee. 20 minutes after the bus was supposed to have departed there was no sign of it arriving. People started to get out of their cars and tap on each other's windows.

Gradually it transpired that people were each trying to call megabus to get information. Several of us had got through to the ticketing department and had received different information. I had got "call back when the bus is 30 minutes late", someone else had got "it will be there in 15 minutes", a third person had been told "we don't have any advisories on this bus", and a fourth had been told to ring a different number because the ticketing department didn't hold information on bus locations, but the customer service department in each region did.

My second shot at the ticketing department number yielded the same information about the customer service number in the region. I rang that. Looking from my car window I could see most people on their phones too. Discussion revealed that no-one got through to a live agent on the customer service number. (One person held for 40 minutes). We all got the same recorded message that we were highly valued and the next available agent would be with us as soon as possible.

About an hour into the wait people started to emerge from their cars and swap speculations on the non arrival. Possibilities explored were: a) the driver had forgotten that he had to make the new stop and had just gone straight from Tennessee to DC. b) there was a big accident and the bus was delayed in that c) there had been some weather problems en route causing traffic delay d) the driver had pulled in early because there was no traffic delay and he/she had been able to make good time and then decided not to wait to the scheduled departure time but just set off anyway. Someone told the story of one megabus driver doing just that on a different route. e) The bus had never left Tennessee because the driver had faild to report for duty.

About 45 minutes into the wait I was working out my fall back plan. This was to drive to the nearest airport and get a one-way rental car (at vast expense!) I set about finding people who might want to ride up which meant knocking on all the car windows and asking if anyone was interested. Seeing this activity people started to get out of their cars and share reasons why it was/was not imperative for them to have got that bus, and why they were willing or not to wait for it to show up, or wait for the next one at 5:30 p.m. and why they were or were not interested in a one way car rental.

One person was going to Benin and had a plane to catch, two others (plus myself) had to be at work in the morning. Two didn't care when they got to DC so were prepared to wait, etc. etc. in fact they went off for lunch. Long story short, and after several conversations with the various waiting people, and after waiting a full two-hours my friend drove the 30 miles to the nearest airport with me + one of the people waiting for the megabus. Another person was driven by his friend to the airport. (We were wanting two more people to make a car load of 5 but that proved difficult to organize, as the logistics of getting two more people to the airport didn't work out). So three of us set off in the one way rental. By this stage the ten or so people in the parking lot had formed an instant community of experience and we were waved goodbye.

What I learned from this? Have a back up plan at the ready. Have the tools to orchestrate the back up plan – I was able to reserve a car on my BlackBerry, and be prepared to lead other people into a new idea. What I'm still wondering is at what point do you decide to give up on one course of action and take the other (cut your losses). I don't know if the megabus ever showed up. I'm also curious at the way lack of information leads to speculation which is much more difficult to make judgments against. Had I know the bus was going to arrive 2 hours 5 minutes late would I have decided to get a one-way rental? (I left after two hours). If I knew the reliability record of megabus would I have chosen that transport method in the first place, etc. Why was I happy to drive a car 300 miles with two strangers I'd just met in the parking lot? (Partly because I'd shared several short bursts of conversation with them during the two hour wait period). What causes a community to gel in a very short space of time – it seems the shared experience is key. A great novel on this topic of is Bel Canto by Anne Patchett.

At this time of any year I notice the word 'reflection' coming into play. People start reflecting on the year past, setting goals for the year coming, and generally developing some kind of internal balance sheet of their efforts.

So this week Joy Costa of the Human Capital Institute makes the point that:

you may be reflecting on how you personally did meeting your goals this year, how your team and department did and how your organization did on this year's big hairy audacious goals. Equally important is reflecting on why, and even more important is drafting the right goals across the board for next year, to confidently predict desired business and personal performance.

At the same time Paul Carder of the Performance Innovation Network (LinkedIn community) that I participate posted a piece saying:

Many of you will be starting to consider your 'annual performance plan' … Hopefully you and your 'boss' … will agree on a number of key tasks for the year ahead – 2011.

But, I can place a safe bet that none of your plans include a section on THINKING TIME – 10%. That's half a day per week.

This post prompted a whole flurry of responses on why thinking and reflection is an organizationally useful capability to display. It was taken for granted that this is the case, with not much in the way of why this is so. What is the outcome of an organization that is reflectively led? What does 'reflective' mean anyway – aren't all actions preceded by thought, however brief that may be, and many organizations suffer from an excess of checks and balances requiring them to think before acting (risk assessments, peformance reviews, and business case development, are all examples of organizational reflective practices).

Thinking about this, into my inbox popped the Life Trek Provision, Attitude Matters. Bob Tschannen Moran who wrote that

Leaders are called to engage in continuous, positive self-monitoring. Continuous means that we are aware of our attitude not only after the fact – "reflection on action" – but also during the fact – "reflection in action." Positive means that we notice when our energy is life-giving and up-lifting. Self-monitoring means that we do this as a matter of habit, on our own, without external pressure or duress.

This, I think is the direction for organizational reflection – it's about the mechanisms and forums for conscious organizational-monitoring as things are going on and being alert and open to possibilities and opportunities as well as signs of dysfunction or distress.

Beyond these it's about thoughtful decision making and here Peter Drucker was good on reflective attitudes and questions. In an interview with him as she was preparing to write 'The Definitive Drucker', Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, talked to him about reflective decision making. He cited four questions to ask:

1. Have you built in time to focus on the critical decisions? While most CEOs should be making fewer decisions, "taking the time to do justice to" those decisions that are his or her responsibility "cannot be understated," he told Edersheim, who agreed that "the importance of intuition and judgment (human perception) has never been greater."

2. Does your culture and organization support making the right decision, with ready contingency plans? Edersheim explains that Drucker's goal with this question is to assess whether the organization has values that help people understand how to make tradeoffs that are not just financial. Does the organization reward some risk and recognize that it's not going to know everything and that there always has to be a backup? Have you heard ideas and perspectives on all sides?

3. Is the organization willing to commit to the decision once it's made? …
"All of us second-guess decisions all the time. What's important is that an organization supports decisions, sets them up to be successful, and-by the way, when they're not-pulls back then and reevaluates why not. But it's not every day, all the time."

4. As those decisions are made, are resources allocated to "degenerate" into work? With this question, Drucker referenced his belief that "strategies are just ideas until you have a team who can execute. Allocated resources are just ideas." (Hence, Drucker's terminology: The broad strategy must "degenerate" into concrete tactics-or "work.") In The Effective Executive (HarperCollins, 2002), he credits good leaders with knowing "that the most time-consuming step in the process is not making the decision but putting it into effect."

End note The Center for for Creative Leadership publishes a useful book Developing Your Intuition: A Guide to Reflective Practice. You can download a description here .

Another book I liked that helped me develop thinking time is by Mark Bryan and Julia Cameron. The Artist's Way at Work,

Last week I got a reminder from the Organization Design Forum that:

We Are Now Welcoming Proposals for 90 minute Concurrent Sessions for ODF's 2011 Annual Conference! May 9-12, 2011 Austin, Texas – The Omni Hotel "Beyond Structure: Designing for Engagement in the New Normal"

As organizations continue to anticipate, adapt and respond to an uncertain environment, engaging employees and customers through design must take on new approaches, shapes and forms. Both traditional and non-traditional elements of design must be considered as organizations look to the future. This conference will provide the forum for skilled practitioners, academicians and business leaders to learn, discuss, debate and practice the next generation of organization design methodologies.
Criteria and suggestions are in the Call for Presenters form which can be downloaded from our website.

Also last week I was asked by the HR Society, for whom I'm running an organization design workshop in London on May 23 whether I was "happy for the event to be titled 'Organisation Design' again in did you have an alternative title in mind? Also would you like me to use the 'blurb' from last year's event or would you like to send through an updated version?"

At the same time the UK's CIPD is introducing an element of certification into its organization design program and I've been involved in commenting on that.

So these three things set me thinking about organization design in the 'new normal'. So what is the 'new normal'? For some reason 'normal' to me implies some kind of predictability within a given range, as in 'serve the wine at normal room temperature", or 'normal working hours are 9:00 – 5:00'. It seems to be about a predictable environment. So a 'new normal' would imply a predictable environment but a new one.

Making a strange leap I remembered an article I'd just read on NASA scientist's discovery about

A bacterium discovered in a Californian lake appears to be able to use arsenic in its molecular make-up instead of phosphorus – even incorporating the toxic chemical into its DNA. That's significant because it goes against the general rule that all terrestrial life depends on six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. These are needed to build DNA, proteins and fats and are some of the biological signatures of life that scientists look for on other planets.

Christened GFAJ-1, the microbe lends weight to the notion held by some astrobiologists that there might be "weird" forms of life on Earth, as yet undiscovered, that use elements other than the basic six in their metabolism.

A organizational 'new normal' might then be discovering that what operates an organization is not the standard five elements (for Galbraith acolytes) or seven (for Mckinsey people) but a different set of elements but what could these be, and where to search for them?

I'm guessing that they are around web based interactions. (I see I'm hesitating to use the word 'organization'!) Many of these, Boing Boing is one, are constructed in ways that defy a conventional approach to 'design'. We could search for them on the web in web based organizations. But maybe we just need to look through different lenses at what already exists in 'normal' organizations. As Paul Davies of Arizona State University, one of the scientists says in the New Scientist report on the discovery:

"It could also be that this 'weird life' is all around us, intermingled with carbon-based life. If so, it's going to be hard to detect, as we would have to find a way to first filter everything out,"

Maybe the new normal is already in organizations and we just have to do a similar filtering process – and organization design will be about filtering what is the 'old normal' out to concentrate efforts on the 'new normal' – predictable but in a different range, and one that we didn't realize or know existed.

Yesterday someone sent me the following enquiry:

I am on a working group related to disability employment within Birmingham, the aims of the group are about increasing the numbers of people with a disability in employment.

I wondered if either of you have come across any innovative approaches elsewhere in terms of organisation design or such just success stories you might have come across?

If you have could you let me know, am trying to get the group to look boarder than just the UK public sector which is where they are at the moment.

I thought this was fascinating. I'd never really thought of organization design in terms of disability in employment and what it might mean in terms of the four aspects of organization design I'm now tending to juggle with: people, process, organization, and space.

In general terms there are numbers of legal requirements around disability and access – so space design means compliance with these. For example, the organization I work with also has a whole group of people working on making technology Section 508 compliant. (Section 508 requires that [US Government's] Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. There is good information on what this means on this website: http://www.section508.gov/

In a wider context 'disability' is a sliding scale. One might be disabled at one point in time and able in another. The day I got the enquiry I'm now writing about I read a profile of Gail Devers, (a US hurdler) who developed Graves Disease and a side effect of her treatment was that 'Devers would often have to crawl or be carried because walking was too painful'. To cut a long story short 'Devers proved she was back by claiming the 100m hurdles silver medal'. You can read her story in the book Gail Devers, Overcoming Adversity.

Turning to an excellent introduction on disability from the World Health Organization, Towards a Common Language for Functioning, Disability and Health: ICF I found that their definition does accommodate the sliding scale of disability.

The Guide makes the point that: Disability is a complex phenomena that is both a problem at the level of a person's body, and a complex and primarily social phenomena. Disability is always an interaction between features of the person and features of the overall context in which the person lives, but some aspects of disability are almost entirely internal to the person, while another aspect is almost entirely external. In other words, both medical and social responses are appropriate to the problems associated with disability.

With this perspective it "offers an international, scientific tool for the paradigm shift from the purely medical model to an integrated biopsychosocial model of human functioning and disability".

This is a model that "synthesizes what is true in the medical and social models, without making the mistake each makes in reducing the whole, complex notion of disability to one of its aspects … that provides, by this synthesis, a coherent view of different perspectives of health: biological, individual and social."

By its nature "ICF puts the notions of 'health' and 'disability' in a new light. It acknowledges that every human being can experience a decrement in health and thereby experience some disability. This is not something that happens to only a minority of humanity. ICF thus 'mainstreams' the experience of disability and recognises it as a universal human experience. By shifting the focus from cause to impact it places all health conditions on an equal footing allowing them to be compared using a common metric – the ruler of health and disability."

… Having access to both performance and capacity data enables ICF user to determine the 'gap' between capacity and performance. If capacity is less than performance, then the person's current environment has enabled him or her to perform better than what data about capacity would predict: the environment has facilitated performance. On the other hand, if capacity is greater than performance, then some aspect of the environment is a barrier to performance.

With this concept and framework in hand organization designers can start to look at their designs from the perspective of matching capacity and performance across the spectrum of health and disability.

Many of the themes in the ICF guide are taken up in a book called Universal Design 2E:

Though the emphasis is on the application of universal design in the build environment, there is a mass of material that is pertinent to anyone researching or teaching universal or inclusive design. The fact that it covers a wide set of issues across the various design communities is especially useful as it helps designers and researchers place their own practice and interests in context with approaches in other design fields.

Thanks to this enquiry I've now learned a little more that will inform my organization design practice. If you have any help you can give the orginal enquirer please let me know and I will pass details on.

I was contacted recently by a research student asking me to take part in his Delphi Study. The European Commission Joint Research Centre has a very clear explanation of what a Delphi study is.

The Delphi method is based on structural surveys and makes use of information from the experience and knowledge of the participants, who are mainly experts. It therefore yields both qualitative and quantitative results and draws on exploratory, predictive even normative elements

There is agreement that Delphi is an expert survey in two or more 'rounds' in which, in the second and later rounds of the survey the results of the previous round are given as feedback (Cuhls 1998). Therefore, the experts answer from the second round on under the influence of their colleagues' opinions, and this is what differentiates Delphi from ordinary opinion surveys.

Thus, the Delphi method is a 'relatively strongly structured group communication process, in subjects, on which naturally unsure and incomplete knowledge is available, are judged upon by experts', write Häder and Häder (1995, p. 12). Giving feedback and the anonymity of the Delphi survey are important characteristics.

Characteristics of Delphi are therefore specified as (see e.g. Häder and Häder 1995):

• Delphi studies always tackle issues formulated in statements about which uncertain and incomplete knowledge exists. Otherwise there are more efficient methods for decision-making.
• Delphi involves making judgments in the face of uncertainty. The people involved in Delphi studies only give estimates.
• The experts involved need to be selected on the basis of their knowledge and experience so that they are able to give a competent assessment. They have the opportunity to gather new information during the successive rounds of the process.
• The Delphi method stresses the psychological processes involved in communication rather than mathematical models (Pill 1971 p. 64; Dalkey 1968 and 1969; Dalkey, Brown, Cochran 1969; Dalkey, Helmer 1963; Krüger 1975).
• Delphi tries to make use of self-fulfilling and self-destroying prophecies in the sense of shaping or even 'creating' the future.

If you consider yourself expert in organizational culture and complexity science and would like to participate in the survey please follow the instructions below, and/or contact Gregory Yelland, the researcher on this.

==============
From Gregory Yelland, PhD candidate, Health Research, Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, Phone: 306-716-6789

I am contacting you today to request your help as an important contributor to Organizational Culture and Complexity Science knowledge with my PhD research. I am asking that you participate in a Delphi survey project designed to identify the key factors for understanding and assessing organizational culture from a complexity perspective.

This Delphi survey is one component of my PhD research, in which I am attempting to develop a complexity-based framework for understanding organizational culture. Specifically, a framework based on the view of organizations as complex adaptive systems. This Delphi project consists of three questionnaires; the first of which will probably take 30 – 40 minutes to complete. Following completion of this questionnaire you will be invited to participate in two follow-up questions over the next 7 weeks. I estimate completing all three questionnaires will take 60-90 minutes.

The individuals who complete all three questionnaires will be entered into a draw to win an iPod Touch. I anticipate 30-40 participants so your chances of winning are very good!
Simply click on the link below, or cut and paste the entire URL into your browser to access the survey:

http://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8cEkKlRzw8VAxGA

The password for the questionnaire is Delphi-1.

Please enter the iPod code below in the survey in order to be entered in the iPod draw.
iPod code: 58738

I would appreciate your response by midnight, December 30, 2010.

This survey project has been approved by the Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board at the University of Calgary. Your input is very important to this research and will be kept strictly confidential – your responses will only be reported in the aggregate.

Please contact me at gsyellan@ucalgary.ca if you have any questions or would prefer to complete a paper survey.

Yesterday we were celebrating the move to the new office. On Monday the final set of people moved in and so we are now 'moved'. It's all very exciting, and to celebrate we held a 'Town Hall', immediately followed by the 'Holiday Party'.

The 'Town Hall' wasn't strictly a town hall, but more of a 'Staff Meeting', (UK) or 'All Hands' (US). A Town Hall is traditionally an informal democratic forum in which citizens have an opportunity to put their point of view and hear what others have to say on a specific political issue or community topic.

The term has now migrated to organizations to describe a large scale face to face meeting where orchestrated information is presented for information, update, or education. It seems that organizational Town Halls are less about consultation and more about telling staff things, although there's usually some form of Q and A slot. For example,

"Steve Jobs recently held a Town Hall meeting for Apple employees, and according to Wired, he had some very choice words for both Google and Adobe."

Designing organizational Town Halls is a skill – they need to be informative, and with a participatory element. I came across a very useful guide to planning one called 'Maximizing outreach through town halls: a planning guide. It's got step by step instructions, and various tips on how to promote the meeting. Although it's focused on town halls around addiction education the planning points are entirely generalizable.

Our move celebration town hall was designed so that all 1400 staff could listen. As the hall only holds about 200 people we took advantage of the technology that the new building offers. Thus the face to face proceedings were streamed live to smaller conference rooms in the building and also to people's computers. And we heard some lovely stories like the one from the person who was traveling to the Town Hall to be there in person but was running late so was watching it on his i-pad in the shuttle bus.

Various constraints meant that the 'voice of the occupants' piece – a panel discussion was videoed not from the main hall but from a different room, so there was a certain amount of switching. All this was fairly nail-biting as it was the first time the technicians had used the new set-up, and although they'd spent a lot of time in testing you can never tell what will happen on the day. (That seems to hold true however familiar someone is with the technology).

Also yesterday I attended a different form of all-hands/Town Hall/Staff meeting. This was billed as a teleconference where staff members (50+ people all over the country) would get an update on a staff survey, and the business plans for the coming year. This suffered the standard teleconf difficulties of some people putting their phones on mute and others not so that there were the strange 'noises off' that one gets. In my case I couldn't access the website with the powerpoint so as the speaker pointed out the percentages on the pie chart I was looking at the apple pie remaindered from the holiday party earlier. Questions were entered in the 'chat box' on screen – also unavailable to me but fortunately the option also existed to ask questions over the phone.

Thinking about the two meetings I realized that they had characteristics in common:

• They were for a large group of people – the Town Hall for 1400, and the teleconference for 50+

• They involved various communication channels

• They were largely one way but with some limited opportunity for questions from participants

• Each lasted an hour

• They were orchestrated with an agenda and each had a specific purpose and intended outcome

Where they differed was in their original choice of channel. The Town Hall was planned as primarily a face to face event, and the teleconference as phone and web powerpoint presentation. Once again this set me wondering about the power of face to face communication and when it is worth the time, money, and other resource to invest in it.

I've never met any of the 50 people that I had the teleconf with, but I've worked alongside them for several years. In presenting the employee satisfaction survey that had some disappointingly low scores in several dimensions, not once did the notion of having a face to face meeting – a real Town Hall or failing that a video conference – come up as a suggestion. I think that it might make a real difference to the way people feel about both the organization and their colleagues.

Orchestrating it in the face of stringent budgets, time constraints, and other hurdles might be difficult but seeing the enjoyment people got in the face to face Town Hall and the buzz of seeing colleague on screen from those watching on computers suggests that face to face is good for communication.

Any views on face to face over voice only? Perhaps the growth of telepresence answers that question?

The other week the Real Estate Executive Board ran a webinar 2010 Research Recap: Aligning Corporate Real Estate (CRE) HR and IT. The intro to the session read:

The Board's strategic research for 2010 will help real estate executives align better with HR and IT, and realize a true competitive advantage from their portfolio assets.

In this teleconference learn how the best real estate shops:

• Create a workplace road map that resonates across all three functions, with a focus on mobility and enabling work
• Bridge the gap between disparate metrics and arriving at a dashboard that speaks as effectively to CHROs and CIOs as it does to CRE executives
• Translate workplace best practices into customized solutions and tool kits that business units can get behind and sell

As I listened, what it heralded for me was the fact that organization designers typically do not include 'facility managers' or CRE people in organization design work and alignment activities. It's an omission that can affect organizational performance – as the speaker pointed out. Talking from the real estate side he noted that organizations are increasingly concerned about their real estate costs.

To solve for this, CRE must show that it is not just working on space-based savings initiatives. It must demonstrate that CRE can help the business think about how work needs to be done in the future to avoid big productivity risks, capture productivity gains, and yes, drive savings.

This requires CRE to be more deeply integrated with the business, particularly when it comes to planning around future work-related changes.

The speaker went on to comment that achieving this integration is easier said than done, "and it is often the case that process and staff decision that have a material impact on real estate are made with no or very little involvement of the real estate function."

The speaker moved on to talk about 'future of work planning' that "refers to how the core elements of "work"-staff, process, technology, and space-collectively evolve to drive productivity in the future."

Then turning to organizations that have CRE functions that were both good at getting involved early in business decision making and informing the business of the full impacts of real estate-related implications of business decisions. (Described as Integrated Work Planners) the speaker noted that:

"As it turns out, Integrated Work Planners not only achieve deeper planning integration with the business, they are able to execute more efficiently and deliver better outcomes.

They spend less money reacting to business decisions after the fact without having to sacrifice on project timelines.

They are able to drive the bigger changes needed to improve productivity and drive savings (i.e. further shrink footprints) than their peers."

These Integrated Work Planners – McDonalds, Pfizer, Google, and General Dynamics were some – are adept at deploying four competences

• Partnership-Facilitation Competencies
• Engagement Competencies
• Teaching Competencies
• Value Demonstration Competencies

Those CRE function without these competences struggled with business skepticism, narrow perspective on real estate impacts, and capacity to engage.

Three approaches to overcoming these three handicaps were presented: the Executor Approach, the Advisor Approach, and the Challenger Approach – largely driven by the CRE functions, with evidence from company examples on how each of these produce real benefits.

What wasn't presented was an approach that involved redesigning the CRE functions across HR and IT. (In fact HR and IT were not talked about in any specific way – the term 'the business' was used in lieu of them). And this seems to me to be an opportunity for organization designers and for the businesses they work with.

Organization designers should a) start including CRE functions in ANY organization design project and b) initiate work specifically with CRE functions to help them integrate and align more effectively with the business.

Four things on the same day last week converged on sustainability issues:

• I listened to a podcast The HR Function of the Future given by John Boudreau, Center for Effective Organizations, USC in which one of the questions he asked was "Will HR Connect Values and Culture to Sustainable Strategic Success?"
• Someone sent me some information about SAP's new HQ building that has just received LEED Platinum status.
• I was invited to join a community group "to share ideas and efforts related to sustainable workplace strategies".
• One of the students that I mentor decided last week to focus his dissertation research efforts on service innovations in the utilities sector – specifically related to sustainability.

So what did I learn from these four different slants on sustainability? First I learned that the term 'sustainability' was no being used in the same way, with the same definition, in each of the four instances. That confirmed my opinion that it's a word that is used very loosely. People have very different takes on it and usually do not take the time to clarify what they mean by it.

John Boudreau equates it with market position. One of the questions that he discussed in the webinar was "Will HR Connect Values and Culture to Sustainable Strategic Success?" In this defined sustainable strategic success as "How we intend to compete and defend" and in his book Beyond HR presents some diagnostic questions on this: "What assumptions will be critical to our strategy? What unique competitive position do we want to achieve? What will make our advantages difficult to duplicate?"

SAP seems to be using 'sustainability' as development and growth, as Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP AG explains "When we laid the foundation for the new SAP building in Pennsylvania, our goal was to create an inspirational work place for our Philadelphia-area employees and show our commitment to sustainable development and growth in North America"

The workplace strategy community group does not specify what it means by 'sustainable workplace strategies' but it seems to be around a workplace that promotes healthy, high-performance environments, using environmentally responsible materials, methods and principles thereby improving occupant health and performance, maximizing human capital investment, and creating a more efficient organization.

The researcher defines sustainability as "all activities and actions of an organization that are designed to create value for itself and society, refrain from overly consuming and negatively impacting natural resources, and enhance the life of people and their communities (World Business Council for Sustainable Development, 2002)."

Second, I learned that I still prefer the Brundtland definition of sustainability – or rather sustainable development:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:
• the concept of 'needs', in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.

Third, I learned that one of my challenges as an organization designer is to work with designing 'sustainability' into the fabric of an organization. If it means different things to different stakeholder groups where does one start in the design process? Thinking about this I remembered another thing I'd just read – a piece called Surrender Matters. Briefly, it's about about giving up on a strategy in order to collaborate on the values underpinning it. Following this argument sustainability becomes about organizational and individual values not about strategies. The author of Surrender Matters makes the point that

Strategies are always expendable and getting overly attached to any one strategy is dangerous. .. That's why great leaders defer the conversation about strategies until everyone has had a chance to fully express and appreciate the conversation about values. What matters most here? What are we trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to serve? What needs are we trying to meet? However we frame the question, there is a clear difference between ends and means.

Thinking of organizational sustainability in terms of those sorts of questions could serve to iron out the disparate views on what it 'means' and lead to an organization design that is sustainable in a way that meets the needs of the present without compromising the future.

Someone sent me a link to a Ted talk 'Why work doesn't happen at work'. Jason Fried gives a number of reasons for this – but they boil down to two M & Ms: managers and meetings. He's got a nice image of one's day being shredded as in a Cuisinart by these two M's.

I enjoyed the talk but it didn't get me any closer to answering the question why do 'knowledge workers' need to come to a workplace (beyond the M & Ms). We were discussing this at a meeting on teleworking and office use. We're trying to design a building that people will only need to come to for specific reasons but we're still wrestling with what these reasons might be.

A report from Harvard Business Review's Analytic Services called Managing Across Distance in Today's Economic Climate makes the point that face to face delivers a level of interpersonal confidence, understanding and business value that cannot happen through other media. The whole report sounds plausible but my skeptic meter leapt into high alert mode when I noticed that the research was sponsored by British Airways. (Another report on the value of face to face meetings was sponsored by a Hilton hotels)

Managers we're talking with do make the point that new joiners are likely to need face to face contact with colleagues in order to learn the organizational ropes. But another Ted talk – also sent by a colleague – on education innovation suggests that face to face is not a prerequisite for learning. In fact the speaker, education scientist Sugata Mitra, "gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching".

He started experimenting in 1999 trying to prove the point that children needed face to face teachers, but failed. They were able to learn to do what they wanted to learn to do. Mitra tells the story of meeting Arthur C Clarke who said 'A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be.' Apply this phrase to face to face meetings. "A face to face meeting that can be replaced by collaborative technology should be."

Would this negate the need for office meeting space, usually the place where 'collaboration' is deemed to happen? I looked around my local coffee shop this morning. Around 20 individuals were drinking coffee working on their laptops. As far as I know they didn't work with each other, and neither were they speaking to each other. It may be that meeting space is less for collaborating in and more for just being warm and comfortable in, away from the demands of being at home. Since meeting space in offices still leaves one open to the M & M scenario why go to offices to sit in a warm, possible comfortable – but may be not -space?

So if we don't need meetings and we don't need collaborative meeting space do we need an office? That leaves the other "M" – managers. Fried is fairly dismissive of them too. His view is that most people can self manage – i.e. they will do productive work to their preferred schedule, delivering on time to the manager, even when not being 'supervised' by a physically present manager.

If managers took the leap of faith that they could manage remote workers, and were perhaps taught how to do this effectively, why else might people come into office space? Well some people like the collegiality of going to lunch with their friends. Others don't have appropriate houses or coffee shops in which to work. But I was reading about Boing Boing a popular blog site

"According to Quantcast data, it gets about 2.5 million unique visitors a month, racking up 9.8 million page views, a traffic increase of around 20% over 2009. It attracts blue-chip advertisers such as American Express and Verizon. It makes a nice living for its founders and a handful of contract employees."

Its 'management team' is "quite a meeting of the minds — except the minds are pretty spread out. Frauenfelder and Jardin both live in Los Angeles, Pescovitz in San Francisco, and Doctorow in London. The site's managing editor, Rob Beschizza, who also posts frequently and coordinates many of the guest bloggers and other contributors, is in Pittsburgh. Maggie Koerth-Baker, who writes about science, is in Minneapolis. Technically, nobody is "on staff"; the editors are partners, and the other regulars work on extended contracts. Most communication happens electronically; conference calls are only for dealing with urgent problems or opportunities; in-person gatherings happen, at most, once a year."

Maybe the need for 'knowledge workers' to meet face to face is over-hyped and unnecessary, it's a left-over from an earlier age, a kind of security blanket that people are reluctant to give up on?

What signals do organizational titling conventions convey? I have worked in organizations where it is required to put one's job title on a business card or in a signature block, and standard to include one's academic or professional qualifications after one's name, and the norm to put one's department.

Equally I have worked in organizations where it is prohibited to do any of these – people just have their first and last names and the company name. I've also worked in organizations where there are no guidelines and people just do what they prefer in terms of title, qualification, and department mention.

Face to face there are similar conventions, or lack of them. Is it ok to call someone by their first name, or does one have to say Mr. Brown? What if they have a doctorate – are they then called Dr. Brown? But how would you know if the abbreviation 'PhD' was not on the business card.

The organization I'm currently in has no preferred conventions and people choose. This leaves me wondering what image is right – shall I put PhD in my signature block, and on my business card, or will that make me look 'too academic'? Shall I put my job title on either? Does it make any difference to my performance and productivity if people do or do not know these things? Will it influence their attitude to me? Of course, the answer to all these questions is 'Yes'. But I don't know how, or how much.

But the answers to these questions matter. Not just at an individual level but also at an organizational level. Let's focus on job titles: Lucy Kellaway (Financial Times columnist) in answer to the question, from
someone searching for a job, "What title shall I put on my business card?" replied

In the bottom of my handbag are cards that say "Senior Vice President for Cross-Industry Workflow" and "Client Value Enhancement Executive" – neither of which leave me any the wiser.

There are two points to a business card. One is to remind people who you are. The other is tell people how to get in touch with you.

The most memorable thing for you to write on a card under your name is nothing – thereby suggesting that you consider your name to be important enough to stand alone.

This impression will be even stronger if you spend money on thick white card with a plain yet classy black typeface.

Cards, signature blocks, and titles are important. The way they are used and perceived reflect the culture of the organization and also shape it. In most organizations jobs are titled to reflect, level of responsibility, impact, "size", skills and capabilities and are paid in accordance to a scale. Organizationally job titles answer the questions etc.)

• What is the relationship of this job to the rest of the organization?
• How is this work/this job valued relative to other work/jobs?
• Is this company egalitarian or status-conscious? Flat and nimble or hierarchical and bureaucratic?
• Are titles based on expectations and accomplishments or 'politics' or 'dues-paying?'
• Do titles … and the way we assign/manage them … support our business strategy and stated company values?

In most organizations job titling is an 'orphan' process. There's no one with the title of 'job titler' but titles have organizational implications because they:

• Drive reward eligibility decisions
• Facilitate decentralized organizational structure
• Promote internal equity across business units/geographies
• Facilitate movement of talent across business units/geographies

So some rules of thumb for job titling – thanks to my colleague David Van Der Voort for these.

• Titles should state Level, Function, and Organizational placement of work performed
• The Shorter the Better, 3 to 4 word titles are ideal e.g. Consultant – Applications Development not Project Manager, Agents' Office Automation Development
• Title from the organization's bottom Up / not the top down
• Base management titles on the scope and complexity of the organization managed
• Differentiate leverage titles tied to the special roles versus functional titles that describe job (e.g. regional 'President')
• Establish and maintain criteria for exceptions
• Respect professional credentials (e.g. 'engineer')
• Use criteria other than title for status and perquisite (perks) eligibility
• Create and manage to a specific process for assigning titles. This is not necessarily a highly controlled, centralized process. Decentralized management of titling against criteria is a reasonable approach
• Create a process for situations/roles that do not conform to 'normal' titling: special assignments, demotions, start-ups/spin-offs, unique individual roles
• Clearly state the objectives of titling – what it is and is not supposed to do
• Designate a process-owner. Delegating title-control to an empowered process owner simplifies the CEO's life. CEO involvement should be on a rare, management-by-exception basis.
• Communicate specific criteria for titles. Occasional challenges and attempted manipulation of a clearly communicated approach are less disruptive than the need to continuously deal with ambiguous criteria
• Periodically audit titling practices in relation to stated program objectives and criteria. Simplify and consolidate appropriately

Organizationally taking an equally thoughtful process to honorifics and qualifications would ensure clear cultural signals.