Key learnings from Ignition Conference 2013 - and what HR needs to heed!

Ignition 2013, the Future of Digital. New York City.

When global thought leaders in all matters relating to anything on-line speak – we listen!  

The line-up at this year's conference included Elon Musk, extreme entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla Motors, the first fully electric car taking the USA by storm; Business Hip Hop label magnate Russel Simmons who is revolutionising the world of entertainment through his approach to launching new singers; Executive editor of Linked In, Dan Roth; the CMO of Salesforce, Mike Lazerow; Lewis D’Vorkin, Chief Product Officer of Forbes and Chris Peacock of CNN.

So what did some of the most powerful players in the digital landscape say that have an impact on HR and on learning and development? 

1. Ignore what is happening on-line at your peril.  There are nearly 3 billion people on-line and most of the world’s money is already on line.  There are over a billion smart phones sold and people spend about an hour a day on their phone.  The desktop market is shrinking and mobile and video are booming.

The world is now multi-screen and Facebook reaches more people than free TV….  

Watch out for the next big thing:  wearables such as watches or Google glasses; networked houses and remote control lives.

For more facts and interesting statistics and data:

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-future-of-digital-2013-2013-11#-14


2. Consider carefully how you make use of social media.  It is a great way to humanise your brand and to share information.  Find the channel that suits you best.  This is certainly something for HR and L and D professionals to consider as we raise our own internal brand equity.

3. In order to get closer to the customer, think about on-line ways of engaging them.  One of the most watched adverts of the year on Youtube was the Dove soap campaign:  it inspired women to believe that they are beautiful.

In the case of HR and L and D, it leads us to consider how we can get closer to our stakeholders.  We also need to re-imagine the experience that our team, management teams and staff have with us.  Can we emulate what happens in a Burberry store where they know who you are and what your buying preferences are as you step in.  Very different from an Apple store experience where no one knows who you are.  Which possibly explains why the CEO of Burberry is joining Apple…

4. When it comes to innovation, here are some great lessons shared:

Most speakers freely acknowledged how many mistakes they make –“we get it wrong at least half the time.” Sometimes, it is simply right idea and wrong time.  Be prepared to kill things quickly if they are not working and also resurrect things that could work in different circumstances.

You also don’t need to be totally certain that your idea is going to eventuate or have a positive outcome. You do need to be reasonably sure that your ideas are supported by data and not simply blind faith. 

Launching things on line does give you the ability to be more nimble and creative and make changes as you go.
A sign of a good company is the ability to recover once you hit the brick wall.  Do our HR teams have that ability?

5. Some great one-liners that have implications in terms of how we think about our roles and strategy within HR:

• “Google is now bigger than both the magazine and newspaper industries.”
• “As a brand your goal should be to stop telling your own story. Inspire others to tell it on your behalf.”
• "If you unveil something new, do it in an entertaining way."
• "Don't expect companies to be perfect.  We know we are not best at.... But we are great at....  In this way we humanise our brand."
• "There is no more time for the perfect message. Now we need to get the message to the right person to the right time." 

  

  Denise and radical entrepreneur, Elon Musk

Change Management 101

We continue to receive many requests from our clients for change management programs and we offer them excellent workshops following the methodologies and insights of change management gurus such as Prof John Kotter and the Heath brothers.

During the session, participants tend to ask these types of questions - all to do with very practical steps that are often foremost in the minds of change champions, managers and supervisors.  Here is a sample of some of the questions and I would love to hear from you as to how you would respond:

1. "There is a massive change coming and my team is suffering from change fatigue"

There is no question that we now live in times of VUCA - volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.  The pace of change is fast and furious.  We know this rationally just by looking at the progression in the mobile phone technology that we use daily.  When did you last hear any moaning or whinging about the latest release of the iPhone new operating system - even though it certainly does take some getting used to....

Yet, when it comes to thinking about change in our work environment, all of a sudden we are just worn out by the pace of change.
We suggest that team leaders and managers constantly shake things up in their teams without waiting for the announcement of a major organisational change.  If the team has the sense that change is always around them, they will move away from victim thinking.  They start to accept that change happens at work - constantly!

Encourage people to take on different tasks.  Invite them to sit in different seats in meetings.  Challenge them to do one different thing on their way to or from work. 

2. "I don't believe that the new change is going to work, so how on earth will I sell this to my team?"

This is a tough one because not every business decision is in your sphere of control or influence.  Simple fact.  Yes, you can try out your influencing skills and motivate upwards in the line to ensure that you improve the processes or the outcomes.

Sometimes, the reality is that you cannot make any adaptations to what has been decided and you need to make peace with it and move forward.  Just having an internal, whinging conversation with yourself about it, is not going to make any difference to the final outcome.  But, what it will do is pull the rest of the team down with you in terms of their thinking.

Without you knowing it, people's eyes are on you all the time.  How you talk and how you frame conversations has a powerful impact!  No matter how tough the times are, your own concerns and doubts are for behind closed door discussions.  In front of the team, you demonstrate quiet confidence and authority.  People will role model themselves off your attitude.

Think Ernest Shackleton - he needed to get his men safely back from their failed expedition but never let on to them just how dire the circumstances were.  They all survived.

3. "The change is being planned by the top management team and they have no idea about the implications on us further down the tree."

Work on your influencing skills.  Make sure that you build your level of credibility.  YOU need to become the person who top management turns to when they want to know what the impact of the change will be.  

This is not something that you can achieve overnight.  It takes a concerted effort to build the right network so that when you need to call on them you can.  Remember the strength of weak ties.  You need both a very close network as well as a loose network so that when these changes happen, you can tap in to the network to connect you to the right people.

4. "Not all change is perceived as positive - some involves a re-structure that does not impact everyone in a good way."

Yes, sadly there are changes that have an impact that is not positive.  All you can do is be there for those who need your support.  Don't make judgements.  Simply say that you are there to assist as needed.

5. "Stress levels are through the roof because of the pace of the change."

I would love to say that you should offer the team the MCI stress management course!  

There are techniques that you can use to reduce stress and anxiety.  One of my favourite ones is to ask people to remember the very worst thing that has happened to them - and sadly most people have had some really bad things happen to them in their personal lives.

Compared to those terrible events, usually what we experience in the workplace is relatively minor.  We need to remind people of this constantly.

6. "I have told my team about the changes several times and I am frustrated because there are still questions OR worse still, no one is adopting the new way of doing things"

When we think that we have communicated enough - we have only started!  Communicate in different ways.  Email is not nearly enough.  Say it in team meetings.  Use posters.  Add in to newsletters if possible.

Where possible, make it in to a game or a challenge.  We all love a competition and if there is a way of injecting fun in to it, do so.

If they are really not taking to the change well, also consider looking at what could be changed in the system or in the environment to make the change easier.  Think of the lion in the Animal Kingdom in Disneyworld.  Instead of training him and begging him to sit on the rock so that the guests to the park can see him, they heat or cool the rock depending on the weather.

7. "I am in a company that suffers from analysis-paralysis.  So much planning happens and then nothing moves until the last moment - when it is often too late."

This is often a mind-set that permeates many teams.  Keep the energy high!  Push people to solutionise.  Send the message that the view is forward and that near enough is good enough.  Don't slip in to paralysis mode yourself.  Apply your decision making skills and take a stand on a decision with the facts that are currently available.

The high value of the LEGO Serious Play methodology!

This is a fabulous post from Robert Rasmussen, one of the top facilitators worldwide of the LEGO Serious Play methodology:

Why invest in training if anyone can buy bricks and claim they are using the LEGO Serious Play method? 

 

Now that LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is open source, any Maria, Carlos, Kim or Peter can order LEGO SERIOUS PLAY kits and invent ways to use the kits.

And naively, people who have not yet benefitted from LEGO SERIOUS PLAY facilitator training may believe they are experiencing the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology. After all, they purchased and are using the special LEGO SERIOUS PLAY kits.

This would be like buying test tubes and thinking you know how to conduct scientific experiments or buying paints and attempting to create museum quality art.

How to playfully coax, coddle and cajole reluctant participants to build, even when they don't know what to build or why it's going to help their understanding, is also an acquired art that one can begin to acquire by learning from the best.

As trained facilitators know, the science and art of the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology are embedded in the theoretical foundations of the methodology and the accumulated experiential learning of facilitators who have completed training and are actively engaged in designing and

facilitating workshops and learning from doing.

The workshop flow and how to engage trust and build confidence that allow the insights and stories participants share to go deeper and deeper has to be experienced, and is close to impossible to explain. And how to question components or elements of the models others build

in a non-threatening and productive manner is best demonstrated in real time.

How to design open and inspiring challenges, with enough structure to address the goal of the workshop while still leaving room for new, unanticipated and surprising constructions and stories, could be the topic of a Ph.D. dissertation.The days of training are barely enough to provide some parameters and context to create challenges that get to the essence of complex issues and deeply held beliefs.

A Toolkit of Actions that Work!

One of the most powerful aspects of the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY process is when teams create a landscape where individual models relate to each other in specific ways or a shared model. Both processes require the facilitator to empower the confidence of individual participants while protecting the group from the dominance of one or two members. And when the group is completely stalled, there are emergency actions that move the group forward that a skilled trainer will share.

The lasting value of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY workshop comes through the documentation. Trained facilitators are exposed to a variety of templates and options for ensuring lasting value of the workshops they design and deliver.

3 reasons why on-line learning DOES work!

I was a panelist at the recent LEARNX conference in Sydney and there was certainly a large amount of scepticism in the room about on-line learning - and how the self-paced learning model can in fact result in sustainable changes in behaviour.

I have seen first-had that on-line learning, at the right time and in the right place, can in fact lead to improvements in  performance!  At the very least, there is as much chance of improvement as there is with face to face training delivery.

1. We are becoming so much more accustomed to the concept of self-service. 
Who last went in to a bank to complete a transaction?  Who last saw an insurance broker?  The shift in the way in which business transactions take place have also had a ripple effect in the on-line learning world.  We want our learning in short bite size chunks and we want to access it from our computers, laptops and mobile phones wherever it is more convenient.
Transferring over to on-line learning is no longer attached to the major drama that used to accompany it years ago.  It is in fact what is expected by learners!

2. The trends in the uptake of on-line learning are on the increase.  Major organisations that used to have firewall issues are building their learning LMS outside of the firewall and are providing options for participants including:

• Engaging and interactive forums for conversations to promote the social side of learning and to make the process more inclusive
• Interactive exercises and gamification  to involve and engage participants
• A whole range of different ways of learning to appeal to different learning styles such as resource libraries for the theorists and the ability to print out workbooks and job aids for the tactile learners. 

3.  There is a far stronger body of knowledge around instructional design for on-line learning development.  We have more choice with regard to authoring tools and there are more and more examples of excellence around as well as many more case studies that highlight successful roll-outs.

We have so many better, cheaper, faster ways of implementing the learning and for conducting on-going follow-ups to embed the major outcomes. 
Did I mention "better bang for buck"?  
Did I also mention, more reach to many more participants?

AND - Performance management becomes part of how the whole elearning set-up is created and so training and performance are no longer separated. 

Speak to us about our elearning suite of programs to enhance your training!

 

7 Leadership lessons from the elections

What can the political arena teach us about leadership?  No matter which side of politics you sit and who you consider voting for, there have been many examples of some great - and some very poor - leadership skills on display.

These are some of the key ones that I have noticed over the past few weeks:

1.  Leaders are highly articulate!  They are not only able to present well - they can also formulate their arguments in such a way that they are understandable by a broad audience.  They do not ummmm and ahhhh their way through their pitch - they use a few well chosen words to capture the key messages.

2. Great leaders cut through the nonsense and do not hide behind words that are less than truthful.  It is just so easy to pick up when someone is not quite upfront with what they are saying.  And you know what - that loss of trust plays a huge factor in leadership.  If you want buy-in, creating trust is step number 1.

3. Leaders use their body language well.  They display genuine Duchenne smiles that are go right up to their eyes.  There is nothing worse than some false smile that does not light up your face.  And whether you want to believe it or not, likeability is a strong factor in leadership.  Yes, people who are likeable are able to influence others far more readily.

4. Leaders are there for the long haul and their egos are not the most important part of the equation. Yes, you need to be confident and sure of yourself but no, it is not all about you alone.  In the work context, we know full well how people's egos destroy culture and create dysfunctional teams.

5. Great leaders are aware that eyes are on them all the time.  They do not really have the time to be able to step backstage and have a minor meltdown.  Leaders are quietly confident and minor irritability is well hidden. 

6. We are very quick to form impressions of people so those leaders who are well presented and groomed tend to make that first good impression.  Not great that we should form opinions based on what people look like, but it does happen: ensure that we do put our best foot forward.

7. Don't be afraid to confess to making mistakes.  Leaders make errors - they cannot predict and judge every situation accurately.  Acknowledging mistakes is a way of building up that level of trust and ensuring that lessons are learnt for the future.

SO: for you in your own organisational context - please, oh please, do not repeat any of these leadership mistakes.  It is easy to sit at the ringside and criticise and it is not so easy to act as a leader! Watching these lessons in action is better than reading any book on leadership. They are playing out painfully in the public arena and what we do as leaders plays out in front of our teams. 

Remember that it is time to play to win!  Game on!

Create the right context for innovation

Why is organizational climate so vitally important as we set the context for innovation?

This was one of the key messages that came through so strongly at the Creative Problem Solving Institute 2013 conference in Buffalo, USA.

The climate of the organisation is not the same as the culture and it is important that we measure it. Once we have some hard data on what the climate is, this enables us to explore ways that leaders can influence positive climate change and leverage it to boost performance and promote creative thinking.

If we do not introduce creative problem solving and innovation in to a context, there is little chance of success.

What is climate?

What is culture?

Think about what is in your experience a good place to work.

What made it a good workplace?

Examples are - flexibility, location, people, org purpose alignment, good work in the world, autonomy, play to win, different roles, very social, build on ideas, work life balance

How does this make you feel?

Examples - energized, engaged, creative, energetic, happy, useful, valued, part of a whole, world changing.

Then - think about the opposite of that - the bad workplace.   

Here are examples of what made it so: inconsistent expectations, no room for growth, politics, mismatch of skills, authoritarian leadership, instability, squashing ideas, oppressive, silos, environment, egos, bland

How does that make you feel?  Examples: frustrated, suffocated, insecure, drained, stressed, abused, unsatisfied, limited, unappreciated, unchallenged, stuck, idiotic, impatient, headachy, apathetic.

When you experience the great feelings, how do you behave:  committed, friendly, open, respectful, loyal, cheerful, willing to take risks, collaborative, part of a team, inclusive, initiative, sense of pride.

When you experience the bad feelings, how do you behave?  Examples - Procrastinate, not productive, backbiting, dishonest, secretive, minimal amount of work, sleepy, sporadic, disruptive, lack of caring, aggressive, sick leave, wanting to change, only there when i had to be, blame others, paranoid, protest everything, slouched.

So dare we say that there a correlation between workplace and performance? 

If you compare how people feel and how they perform, there is a strong correlation. It effects their level of engagement and retention.  The magnitude of this impact is sometimes underrated.

So to distinguish between culture and climate - culture is the values, beliefs, traditions and reflects the deeper foundations of the organisation.  What the organisation values is reinforced in the decisions that are made. 

Climate is the recurring patterns of feelings and attitudes and behavior that members of the organisation experience.

A changing climate eventually has an impact of culture. Climate is more visible, more on the surface and is easier to change. 

They are not entirely separate - over time as you impact the climate, you will impact the culture.  But it is easier to deal with the tree at the top and what is visible and where there is growth than by messing with the roots of the tree. When you walk in to an organisation, you can feel the difference.

Uncover your organisation’s climate data to determine what your current climate is by reviewing the following dimensions:

1. Challenge and involvement – determine what do they do on day to day basis and how this links and relates to what the purpose of the organisation is.  The more people see the connection, the more likely they are to be engaged.  

2. Measure Freedom - independence of behaviour exerted by the people such as respecting the individuals and no micro management.  

3. Determine the level of trust and openness - emotional safety in relationships.  Is there enough trust in the relationship to know my short comings.  The more productive the environment will be when people can spit out what they want to.

4. Look at the level of risk taking - how people deal with ambiguity and uncertainty.  Is there a level of tolerance for uncertainty?  We don’t always have to jump towards dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

5. Ask if there is a climate of debate - occurrence of encounters and disagreements between viewpoints.  Is there open and frank conversation and not a climate of taking things personally.

6. What level of idea support is there - ideas are respected and nurtured and not thrown out immediately.  Ideas not killed too soon so that they can move out the door and be adopted.  Novelty will otherwise not survive.

7. How is conflict managed – there is positive and negative conflict.  Distinguish between conflict and debate.  Conflict results in tension between people and leads to the deliberate sabotaging of ideas.  There are also many cases where organisations try to avoid the conflict and performance is zero unless the areas of friction are surfaced.

8. What is the level of playfulness and humour - ability to behave and interact in a spontaneous way.  Is humour is accepted no matter the level of the person?  Great climates weave this playfulness in to work.  People work to make play happen.  

9.How much play time is there - how much time do we have to develop and elaborate on new ideas? 

These observable and tangible behaviors can be measured.   We can easily see the stagnated organisations that cannot get stuff out the door to the marketplace.

Climate is the one variable that can be changed – and immediately innovation has a context and a soil in which to grow.  Climate has to be constantly watched – you have to recreate it every day.

Final notes:

 

1.    Climate is important and palpable and it is measurable.  When you target it specifically, you can move the needle on these dimensions.

2.    The climate for innovation is ignored at your own peril.

3.    This stuff is not soft - it is as hard as you get!

Unleash the possible - Learnings from CPSI 2013

We all have the potential for great results.  It starts somewhere – it just takes one step forward to make the impossible, possible!   This was the clear message from the top creative solving conference in the USA, CPSI 2013.

Here are some more insights that we gained:

Mary O'Hara Devereaux - http://global-foresight.net/ - was a fabulous speaker who reminded us that we used to think of the future by extrapolating from the past.  It no longer works like that.   

We need to develop a much stronger peripheral vision and look beyond narrow viewpoints. If we are trying to facilitate change we need to encourage our team to say yes to possibilities.   

We need courageous creativity so that we can put forward alternatives that are different from what we have today.

Mary also warned that you need to look for who is doing your future now!  There are always weak signals of things to come and someone out there is already doing your future, right now.  Remember that our competitors are no longer just local – they are global.

 Her 4 laws of the future are:

1. Don’t over-estimate the driving forces in the short term and underestimate their long term impacts.  We cannot only respond to the immediate

2. If something is unsustainable, in the long end it will end.  Trends are indicating disruptive shifts in work areas as follows:

Employee to entrepreneur

Career ladder to experience portfolio

Permanent to velcro relationships

Outsourcing to crowd sourcing

Physical to digital infrastructure

Organizations to social networks

Sharing knowledge to creating context for persuasive conversations

3. Her 3^rd law of the future is pay attention to weak signals something in your peripheral vision that is noisy enough - it could be small but if you scan the horizon, think about these weak signals.  Some examples of recent weak signals include –

Most knowledge workers in the world are women

Net speak ‘OMG’ – is this a weak signal of the end of language as we know it?

3D printing – we will soon print out household goods for homes

China files more patents than Japan

Same sex marriage

The rise of the one person household

The second middle age from 60 - 80

4. Mary’s next law of the future - beware of conventional wisdom as it is nearly always wrong.

Take the transformation of medicine as one example.  The sacred cows have been turned out to pasture and we turn them in to hamburgers.

Don't let the short term cancel to the long term.

Mary’s other tips:

1. We are facing the end of work as we know it. We are looking at more robots and more smart machines.  

2. Watch for the growing irrelevance of knowledge.  There is more and more knowledge generated but we have to make sense of the knowledge.  Sense making is now king.  The real challenge is leveraging knowledge in the age of big data.

3. Look out for the rise of the individual and the ME economy.  We want the capability of hyper personalization to live our dream.