Creating Organizational Agility

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Why is it that we need so much agility for digital transformation? The answer is simple: the speed of digital.

Creating Organizational Agility

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Digital moves fast. Technology is changing rapidly, and changing customer expectations. Competitors are moving rapidly, and start-ups and tech companies are going after your customers. You have to be able to come up with new ideas, test them quickly in the market, make quick decisions about what you’re going to pursue or not pursue, and how you’re going to change and evolve.

Remember in the movie The Matrix, when the bullets are flying past Keanu Reeves? He’s able to move very quickly, sensing which direction a threat is coming from, and adjusting his movements to successfully avoid them. That is the kind of agility that we need in the digital arena. It’s the kind of agility that most start-ups have, and many enterprises don’t.

What are some ways you can improve your organizational agility? In this article, we’ll discuss five specific types of agility that important for success in digital and digital transformation. We’ll also discover some of the things you can do. within the context of a large enterprise, to try and improve each of those types of agility.

Sensing

The first type of agility is the agility of sensing. But what does that mean? Imagine The Matrix. The first thing you have to focus on isn’t moving, but knowing what’s going on around you, so you can be alert and aware of all the things that might require action on your part. You can think of sensing agility in four major categories:

1. Customers

  • Ultimately, your customers’ behavior drives your success. Study their behavior on your websites, mobile applications, in stores, and through the other channels in which you interact with them. Be constantly measuring and watching their behavior. Agility in this area isn’t just how quickly you’re collecting data, but how nimble and agile you are in analyzing that data, and in understanding what it means so you can determine what actions to take.In addition to your own behavioral metrics, how else can you study your customer? Make sure to measure their ongoing satisfaction, survey them, conduct usability testing, and use data from third-party research that shows technographic, behavioral trends and psychographic trends. There are many sources of information to help you understand your customer segments and how they may be changing.

2. Technology

  • Technology is changing at a rate like never before, whether it’s wearable tech, big data, or virtual reality. Things like beacons and other network tools allow us to sense where our customers are with more accuracy than ever before. There are so many technologies that have the potential, at the right point in time and at the right level of maturity, to enable you to create a new value for your customer. Paying attention to and sensing these changes in the technology landscape will allow you to quickly figure out when they’ve reached a point where you can take action. If you don’t (or don’t move quickly enough), you can expect your competitors, traditional or start-up, to be doing just that.

3. Competitors

  • It’s critical to have to sense what your competitors are doing, and to constantly research competitive strategies. How are they changing their product mix or pricing? How are they changing their customer service, and where are they failing to deliver for their current, or might fail their future, customers? How are they communicating with your customers, to bring them over to their side?

4. Regulatory

  • Regulations are especially key if you’re in a heavily regulated industry (though, most industries are subject to some level of regulation.) As regulations change over time, they can change current opportunities, or even create new ones.

That’s a lot to pay attention to! How can you effectively put sensing programs in place? The first thing to remember is that simply gathering information is not sufficient. You need to gather the information, and then analyze it to develop actionable insights. Finally, you’ll need to social and share that information with your team.

When you break it down, there’s no big mystery on how to achieve a sensing culture. The main thing you need are resources that are both dedicated to these activities, and that have the right research and analytical skills. Recognize that a part of success in digital is to be constantly sensing, and create a culture where information from sensing is being communicated and disseminated on an ongoing basis. Encourage your people to voraciously consume information, and use it in actionable ways as they develop products and services to improve the digital experience of the customer.

Technology

The primary tool of the digital world is the tool of technology. Do the tools you have at your enterprise allow you to move quickly from an idea to a customer experience?

Generally, that’s not the experience in most enterprises; many struggle with technology stacks that were created in an era before we had the need for this level of agility. They may have been conceived with a certain kind of transactional process in mind that’s either no longer applicable or reflects only one of many different types of transactional processes that you need to support. Truthfully, a lot of aging technology needs to be replaced, or needs to be wrapped so that it can gain the necessary level of agility.

Here are three specific things you can do to help guide work between your business and IT departments and see how to move forward technology that you currently have supporting digital forward.

1. Requirements

  • What does requirements mean? Traditionally, the business side would define the requirements needed for a particular project on a particular channel and IT would build them for us (hopefully successfully!) The problem this model is that the end result is only what’s needed at that moment. Today, we need to be able to change, evolve, and adapt so quickly that process is too slow. If every time we realize what we need, we have to go back through a whole time-consuming IT build, things wouldn’t move quickly enough. When you’re thinking about requirements, don’t only think in the context of what you need today, but ask the broader question of the requirements for technological agility, and communicate that to your IT department.After all, the IT department and those responsible for implementing technology all need to understand what needs to be flexible — because you can’t make everything flexible. There needs to be ongoing dialogue to focus the requirements around the things that need to be able to change on an ongoing basis.

2. Software

  • Software as a service platform is a huge help for all of us trying to make technology more agile. Why? Because in the old days, a software product (something like a major piece of enterprise software,) would require hardware implementation. It could take a year or two to implement it, and the implementation would require massive customizations. The software would be expensive to buy, implement, and customize. And if you wanted to make a change? You’re talking about abandoning major investments.In today’s SAAS world, we’ve created much more flexibility by using an integration layer around our most core systems and data. We can plug in different tools, whether a shopping cart tool, CRM, data mining tool, or mobile capabilities added into our apps. If we build out our capabilities using these types of platforms, we can swap out and change things much more rapidly.

    And with most of these SAAS platforms, we don’t have the issues associated with versions. Previously, if you were on one version of SAP, and you wanted to go to another version of SAP, it required a major headache of an upgrade. Today, versions build off core components in software. A product like SalesForce is constantly evolving and improving. Everyone is always on the most recent version of SalesForce, and you have a huge ecosystem of plug-ins and other code that’s designed to work with anyone’s implementation. That’s just one example of a SAAS platform that gives you an enormous amount of agility and flexibility, so it’s important to move yourself to SAAS platforms wherever possible.

3. Abstraction

  • You want your product development team, product owners, content creators, and marketers to be able to tweak and adjust the digital experience as much and as rapidly as possible. That means you want to try to abstract the capabilities up from the level of code.

There are three main areas of abstraction:

  1. Content Management: It’s imperative to be able to publish and edit content without needing to go through IT. I know that might sound super obvious and kind of old school, but I constantly see large enterprises where key parts of the content ecosystem isn’t accessible from a business perspective, and always requires IT involvement. Don’t let that happen to you!
  2. Presentation: It’s one thing to edit the content, but what if you want to change the layout? What if you want to change the process for content creation? Making those capabilities accessible to business users is possible with today’s experience management tools. We do a lot of work implementing these kinds of tools, and making sure that the business has the ability to make changes in the experience at their fingertips, and without having to go back to IT. This is a crucial capability for anything they’re going to want to frequently change.
  3. Business Rules: Implement a business rules engine as part of your technology stack, so that as you decide to make changes — whether in pricing, policy, or logic — they are not primarily in code that has to be changed by a developer. Then your business rules can be changed in more or less the same way your content is changed: by a business user that has the appropriate entitlements.

Decision Making

If you’re in a large enterprise, I’m guessing that you’ve had the experience of trying to move digital efforts forward, only to be faced with a multi-month or multi-quarter capital budget approval process that requires endless spreadsheets, forecasts, meetings.

On one hand, these things exist for good reason. When companies are doing a large amount of capital investment, they want to make sure that those decisions involve all the right people, and are being thoroughly vetted. It makes sense to want to spend their money carefully, but in the digital world, this process just doesn’t work. The speed of decision-making from the old, quasi pre-digital world kills our efforts in the digital arena, because digital requires moving quickly. It’s crucial to create a faster process for getting those decisions made. In the digital realm, you’re better off being fast than being right. If you’re fast but wrong, you have agility. You’ll be able to sense how what you’re doing is wrong, and can react and make a shift. If you’re slow? Forget it.

Wayne Gretzky explains that he wins at hockey not by skating to where the puck is, rather, where the puck is going to be. Can you imagine seeing where the puck is going, but then having to fill out a 25-tabbed Excel spreadsheet, submit it to the capital-approval process, and wait several months? By then, the game is over, everyone’s gone home, and the puck’s been put back in the locker room. You need to be able to move more quickly than that.

To solve this problem, make sure that you have true alignment around the goals you’re trying to drive through digital. So often these capital-approval processes are about strategy and tactics: What are we going to do? What kind of tools are we going to use? What technologies are we going to buy? What capabilities are we going to provide to our customers? That’s exactly the kind of stuff we have to be agile about.

Agree with senior management on the things we’re trying to drive through digital: brand awareness, lower acquisition cost, increased wallet share, and increased conversion on the website. Once you agree on the key business goals, find people who you trust to run digital. Give them the money, and the room to fail on the way to success.
I worked with a large energy company once that made this shift because of these problems. They made the decision to give the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer a substantial capital budget to rapidly drive digital, with quarterly check-ins to report how they spent the money, and what the programs were achieving. This process was hugely successful for them, and resulted in large increases in digital revenue, that far eclipsed the investments that were being made.

Unfortunately, after two years of success, another even larger energy company came in and bought the first company, telling them, “That’s not how we do it.” They dismantled the process, and the gains and growth subsided.

You can learn from their story. Try your best to get the level of autonomy and authority needed for the folks on the ground, who are actually doing these digital transformation projects.

Strategy Shifts

Ninety percent of all start-ups fail. Those that succeed don’t often achieve success because their original idea, business model, or original concept was right. As I’ve mentioned previously, Facebook started off as a dating site, eBay started out as a Pez dispenser collectors’ site, and Flickr started out as an online role-playing game. These companies succeeded because they changed and shifted their strategy many times on their way to success.

In the enterprise world, we often judge projects on whether they achieved their original vision or goal, hit their original budget, or achieve the ROI based on their original funding. This mindset doesn’t work in the digital space. You run the risk of teams starting to see issues, problems, or reasons to shift their strategy, and not doing it, because they’re afraid of being judged by the project’s original standards. They’re afraid of being told that they have to start the funding process all over again, simply because the strategy has shifted and changed the scope of the project. This isn’t how successful digital companies are operating.

Create a process that embraces and expects that the project you’re funding is going to go through a process of trial-and-error to find its way to the kind of digital transformation success that you’re seeking. Keanu Reeves can’t know where all the bullets are going to be before he goes into the room — that’s not how he avoids getting hit by a bullet. He does it by sensing what’s going on around him, and moving to where he needs to be at that particular moment in time. Give your digital teams that level of flexibility and, reward them for making those kinds of shifts.

Teaming

FROM gets involved from working with a lot of companies, and we get the same questions a lot:

  • What’s the right organizational model for digital?
  • Should there be one central digital team?
  • Should digital be part of all the different P&Ls?
  • Should it be a blend, a combination?

These are important questions. Having said that, let me disavow you of the myth that there’s one magical structure whereby all the digital work can be kind of done by one single team of people operating under one executive. That’s impossible! Digital efforts cut across every part of the organization. When you want to move quickly to make a change or bring something new to market, you need IT, Marketing, R&D, Customer Support, Engineering, Manufacturing, and any other key silos in the organization to make it happen.

As a side note for all of you balking at the idea of silos: You’re going to have them. You can structure them in different ways, e.g. phases of the customer lifecycle, customer segment, geography, but you’re going to have them if you’re a large enterprise.

The key isn’t to try to figure out how to get rid of silos, since that’s all but impossible, but to figure out how to create a culture where teaming across those silos happens rapidly, and there’s alignment and mobilization of the people that are needed. We’ve done work like this across many organizations, including our own. Teaming agility is what’s necessary to achieve that kind of alignment, whether by workshops to align goals, or just a culture of innovation that creates the organizational functionality that we need for people to be able to swarm around an opportunity quickly, instead of focusing on the friction that can exist between different departments.

These five areas of agility that are essential. Most are something large enterprises struggle with, but hopefully you’ve gained a few tips and tricks on how to overcome some of those challenges.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credit: Pixabay

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Change Management Team Dynamics

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Change Management Team Dynamics

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

As the pace of change accelerates and becomes more encompassing, teams stand as the backbone of a successful organization. To stay ahead, teams must not only adapt to change but also leverage it to their advantage.

So, how do we harness change management to ensure our teams remain robust and agile through ongoing transformations and uncertainties?

By integrating team dynamics with change management, we aim to transform not only how teams operate but also how individuals perceive and engage with change.

That’s why I’m developing the Team Dynamics for Change Management Framework, and I invite your feedback and perspectives on it.

Understanding Change Management:

Change Management is the structured approach to transitioning teams or organizations from their current state to a desired future state. It’s about guiding and supporting individuals through this transition to realize lasting benefits. A significant part of this involves understanding people – their perceptions of change and how best to aid them through it.

Defining Team Dynamics:

Team dynamics are the behavioral and psychological forces at play within a group, profoundly influencing its direction and overall performance. These forces spring from individual personalities, relationships, roles, and the environment the team operates within. They mold the team’s interactions, communication patterns, collaborative efforts, and conflict resolutions.

Why a Framework for This Makes Sense

While numerous change management models cater to organizational or individual change, few focus directly on the unique behaviors and interactions within teams.

Given the pivotal role of teams, it’s essential to have an approach that marries the principles of change management with the realities of team dynamics.

Inspiration & Roots:

Two groundbreaking models serve as the foundational inspiration for this approach:

Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change: Developed by Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter, this model provides a step-by-step strategy for organizational change. Its emphasis on creating urgency, building a guiding coalition, and embedding new approaches makes it a revered guide in change management.

ADKAR Model: Introduced by Prosci, a global leader in change management solutions, this model emphasizes the individual’s journey through change. Its focus on Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement captures the stages of personal transition during organizational shifts.

Choosing these models as the foundation is due to their robust, time-tested strategies, which I believe can be tailored to address team dynamics specifically.

Change Curve

Eight (8) Elements for the Team Dynamics for Change Management Framework

1. Assessing Team Dynamics:

Objective: Understand the current state and behaviors within the team.

Rationale: Before any change management strategy can be effectively implemented, there’s a need to understand the present dynamics of the team. This sets the foundation for everything that follows.

2. Understanding Individual Aspirations (WIIFM):

Objective: Recognize and validate the personal drivers and motivations of each team member.

Rationale: Following the assessment of team dynamics, it’s critical to delve deeper into individual motivations. Understanding the “what’s in it for me?” for every team member will influence and enrich subsequent steps, ensuring changes resonate on a personal level.

3. Evaluating Team Change Readiness:

Objective: Gauge the team’s willingness and preparation for change, considering both collective and individual motivations.

Rationale: Once the team dynamics and individual aspirations are clear, it’s pivotal to measure the readiness for change, which will be greatly influenced by the alignment (or lack thereof) between team goals and personal drivers.

4. Formulating a Shared Vision:

Objective: Create a unified direction for the team that also respects individual aspirations.

Rationale: Armed with insights from previous steps, crafting a shared vision becomes more feasible and grounded. This vision will better reflect the aspirations of the team as a whole and its individual members.

5. Enhancing Communication & Collaboration:

Objective: Foster positive and efficient team interactions.

Rationale: With a clear vision in place, the focus can shift to enhancing the ways team members interact, ensuring that individual aspirations and the collective vision are continually in dialogue.

6. Implementing Change & Skill Development:

Objective: Facilitate the smooth adoption of new practices while building necessary skills.

Rationale: Changes can now be introduced and executed, backed by a well-understood team dynamic and vision, and supported by individual motivations.

7. Feedback & Continuous Improvement:

Objective: Monitor the impact of the changes and refine as necessary.

Rationale: As changes are implemented, it’s essential to keep the channels of feedback open. Here, the alignment between team goals and individual motivations will be rechecked and fine-tuned.

8. Celebrating Success & Expanding Impact:

Objective: Recognize achievements and share the team’s journey with a wider audience.

Rationale: Concluding with acknowledgment reinforces the importance of both the collective endeavor and individual contributions. Celebrations serve as reminders of the harmony between team goals and personal aspirations.

What’s in it for Teams:

  • A clearer path through organizational changes.
  • Enhanced trust, teamwork, and collaboration.
  • Fewer conflicts and more transparent communication channels.
  • Readiness for upcoming challenges.
  • Foster an environment where everyone thrives.
  • Provides individuals clarity on their roles, highlighting the unique value they bring to the organization, reducing uncertainty.

Help develop our framework? Get a free e-book!

I’m in the process of refining this framework and would greatly value your perspectives. If you have insights, feedback to offer or questions to ask, please get in touch. Let’s work together to redefine how teams adapt to change. I will soon turn this into a free e-book to share the learning.

Image Credit: Stefan Lindegaard, Unsplash

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Driving Change is Not Enough

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You Also Have To Survive Victory

Driving Change is Not Enough

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In early 2004, Viacom announced it would spin off Blockbuster Video, leaving CEO John Antioco master of his own fate. He moved quickly to meet the threat posed by Netflix head on, launching Blockbuster Online in 2004 and, after successfully testing the concept in a few markets, ending late fees in early 2005.

Still, not satisfied with playing catch-up, Antioco searched for model that would return his company to dominance. He found it in 2006 with the Total Access program. Within a few weeks of announcing the promotion, Blockbuster was winning the majority of new subscribers, outstripping Netflix for the first time.

It was a textbook case of sound strategy and execution meeting a disruptive threat, but it would not end well. In 2010 Blockbuster would declare bankruptcy and become a cautionary tale. We tend to think that driving change is merely a matter of coming up with a clever plan and executing well. Yet that isn’t enough. You also need learn how to survive victory.

Defying Critics And Beating The Odds

John Antioco was the quintessential American success story. Starting from humble origins as a management trainee at 7-Eleven, he rose to become a senior vice president at the company. He then moved on to run the struggling Circle K convenience store chain, which he turned around in just three years before moving on to Taco Bell and working the same magic there.

So when he joined Blockbuster as CEO in 1997, he was ideally suited to the job. Early in his tenure, he came up with a program to share rental revenues with the movie studios rather than buying the videos directly.The strategy improved the firm’s cash position and its access of high demand movies, while also allowing it to increase its marketing budget. It was a stroke of genius.

“The experienced video executives were skeptical,” Antioco would later tell me. “In fact, they thought that the revenue-sharing agreement would kill the company. But throughout my career, I had learned that whenever you set out to do anything big, some people aren’t going to like it. I’d been successful by defying the status quo at important junctures and that’s what I thought had to be done in this case.”

So Antioco approached the Netflix problem in the same way. He assembled a team of talented executives, came up with a strategy and worked to execute it flawlessly. Yet although his efforts were initially successful, there was a flaw in his plan that he didn’t see at the time and it would lead to Blockbuster’s downfall.

Failing To Align Stakeholders

Not everybody was thrilled with the moves Antioco made. Franchisees, many of whom had their life savings invested in their business, were suspicious of Blockbuster Online. They only owned 20% of the stores, but could make their displeasure known. The moves were also expensive, costing roughly $400 million to implement, and investors balked.

So while Blockbuster was making progress against the Netflix threat, as earnings turned to losses, its stock took a beating. The low price attracted corporate raider Carl Icahn, whose heavy-handed style made managing the company difficult. Things came to a head in late 2006 when Icahn demanded that Antioco accept only half of the bonus he was owed.

“I was at a point, both personally and financially, that I had little desire to fight it out anymore,” Antioco told me. He negotiated his exit early the next year and left the company in July of 2007. His successor, Jim Keyes, was determined to reverse Antioco’s strategy, cut investment in the subscription model, reinstated late fees and shifted the focus back to the retail stores.

When Blockbuster declared bankruptcy in 2010, the event was portrayed as corporate America’s inability to navigate digital disruption. Yet, as we have seen, nothing could be further from the truth. The management team came up with a viable strategy, executed it well and proved they could compete, yet still were unable to survive that victory.

Building Shared Purpose And Shared Consciousness

When General Stanley McChrystal took over command of special forces in Iraq, the situation he encountered was surprisingly similar to that of Antioco and Blockbuster. A well-led, well-resourced and highly efficient organization was faced with a disruptive challenge by a smaller, less powerful, but incredibly disruptive adversary.

Yet while Antico saw the problem as one of strategy and tactics, McChrystal saw it as one of one of organizational coherence. So he embarked on a program to improve the links both within his command and also to outside stakeholders, such as partner agencies, law enforcement and embassy personnel, to build “shared purpose and shared consciousness.”

“We began to make progress when we started looking at these relationships as just that: relationships — parts of a network, not cogs in a machine or outputs and inputs,” McChrystal would later write in his book, Team of Teams. Within a few years, the terrorists were on the run.

The difference in outcomes is striking. Antioco, who had built his career on defying the critics, largely ignored their concerns and pressed on with his strategy. McChrystal, on the other hand, understood that if he couldn’t get key stakeholders on board, the strategy wouldn’t matter. He worked on building relationships not to overpower, but to attract others to his cause. There were still critics, but they were vastly outnumbered.

You Need A Plan To Survive Victory From The Start

In my book, Cascades, I cover a wide range of transformational efforts, from revolutionary political movements to corporate turnarounds. In every case, the movement for change inspired others to move against it. As Saul Alinsky pointed out decades ago, every revolution provokes a counterrevolution.

I saw this first hand in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, which I personally took part in. Five years after we protested in the bitter cold to overturn a falsified election, we saw the target of our ire, Viktor Yanukovych, win the presidency in an election that outside observers judged to be legitimate. Later, similar events played out in the aftermath of Egypt’s Arab Spring.

What makes the difference is not a particular strategy or persona, but whether an organization can align based on shared values and purpose. It wasn’t that Blockbuster franchisees were worried that Antioco’s plan wouldn’t succeed, they were terrified that it would and they would be left behind. Investors, for their part, were more focused on earnings than Antioco’s vision.

Yet shared values are what enables a transformation to succeed beyond a few initial victories. As Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a key player in IBM’s historic turnaround in the 90s told me, “Because the transformation was about values first and technology second, we were able to continue to embrace those values as the technology and marketplace continued to evolve.”

And that’s what so often makes the difference between ultimate success and failure. Those that see driving change as merely a series of benchmarks often find their efforts thwarted. Those that build a plan to survive victory based on the forging of shared values, are much more likely to prevail. Transformation is always a journey, never a destination.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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5 Essential Customer Experience Tools to Master

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5 Essential Customer Experience Tools to Master

by Braden Kelley

There are so many different tools that customer experience (CX) professionals can use to identify improvement possibilities, that it can be quite overwhelming. Because CX is a human-centered discipline, it doesn’t require a lot of fancy software to do it well. Mastering these five (5) tools will help you and your customers:

1. Customer Research

Go beyond surveys and purely quantitative measures to include qualitative research that helps you uncover:

  • The jobs your customers are trying to get done
  • Insights across acquisition, usage and disposal
  • Their most frequently used interfaces
  • Their most frequent interactions
  • Where customers diverge from each other on these points

2. Customer Personas (Go beyond the demographics!)

  • Include THEIR business goals
  • What they need from the company
  • How they behave
  • Pain points
  • One or two key characteristics important for your situation (how they buy, technology they use, etc.)
  • What shapes their expectations of the company

3. Customer Journey Maps

  • Make sure you map not only the customer touchpoints and pain points, but any points where lingering actually creates value. Focus each journey map on a single customer persona.

4. Service Design Blueprints

  • Uncover the hidden layers of a service’s true potential. Service design blueprints can become a visionary force to steer the course of exceptional customer experiences. Weave a masterful tapestry of intricate details into a big picture that creates a clarity of execution.

5. Customer Experience Metrics

  • Every customer experience (CX) leadership team must decide how to measure changes in the quality of their customer experience over time. This could be customer churn, first-contact resolution, word-of-mouth, CSAT, customer effort (CES), or whatever makes sense for you.

Conclusion

The right set of customer experience (CX) tools will enable you to create a shared vision of what a better customer experience could look like and empower you to make the decisions necessary to create the changes that will realize the improvements you seek.

Great customer experience tools will also help you identify:

  • The moments that matter most
  • The tasks your employees need the most help with
  • The information, interactions and interfaces that are most important to your customers
  • Where different customer personas are the same and where you need to invest in accommodating their differences
  • How to efficiently prioritize your CX improvement investments

Let us help you supercharge your customer experience!

Reach out to us at:

https://www.hcltech.com/contact-us/customer

Download the Customer Experience Tools Flipbook

Image credit: Unsplash

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5 Secrets to Building Smarter Teams

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5 Secrets to Building Smarter Teams

GUEST POST from David Burkus

One of the most fascinating concepts in the study of teamwork and collaboration is the concept of collective intelligence—the idea that when teams collaborate exceptionally well, they tap into a reservoir of knowledge and abilities that exceed the sum of each individual’s capability. Research led by Anita Williams Wooley helped solidified this theory with evidence that some teams truly did perform better than merely the average of the individual team member’s abilities.

Perhaps more surprisingly, teams who managed to achieve collective intelligence did so on a variety of tasks—even tasks for which some teams had individual members whose knowledge and abilities were uniquely suited. In other words, talent didn’t make the team. The team made the talent.

But taking a team from individually talented to collectively intelligent can be tricky. In this article, we’ll outline what makes a team smarter through five evidence-based actions.

1. Leverage Diversity

The first action that makes a team smarter is to leverage diversity. It’s undeniable at this point that diverse teams perform better than homogenous ones. However, many teams and organizations achieve a level of diversity but fail to experience the benefits. Simply put they’re not leveraging diversity. The reason is that diversity in its commonly used definition (racial, ethnic, gender, etc.) is intended to lead to an intellectual diversity on the team. But often it doesn’t. New members join the team and increase the surface level diversity but either don’t bring different perspectives or don’t feel safe and included enough to express their different perspectives. Great teams leverage diversity by creating the psychological safety that allows those differing ideas and opinions. And in doing so make the whole team smarter.

2. Build Empathy

The second action that makes a team smarter is to build empathy. And when seeking to leverage diversity, building empathy isn’t a suggested action but a requirement. Building empathy on work teams doesn’t mean the same as empathy in personal relationships—teams don’t have to get to the level of empathy where they feel each other’s pain. But they do need to understand the different perspectives, preferences, and contexts of their teammates. And more importantly, they have to recognize the validity of those perspectives and preferences even if they disagree. This type of empathy is built through exercises that draw out those differences—it could be personality testing and group discussion, but it could also be in holding team charter meetings or sharing “manuals of me.” These exercises not only draw out differences, but they create a set of team norms that help the team perform and make the whole team smarter.

3. Take Turns Sharing

The third action that makes a team smarter is to take turns sharing. While teams are building those norms, enforcing conversational turn taking will likely be one of the most effective ones. That’s because Wooley’s research suggests turn taking in conversation is one of the strongest correlated actions to the experience of collective intelligence. But most teams don’t do this. Instead, they defer to the “hippo” (highest paid person’s opinion), or they allow a few over-talkers to dominate every meeting. High-performing, collectively intelligent teams do the opposite. They have rules and rhythms in place to ensure that everyone on the team is given an equal chance to share their input. And their leaders don’t make decisions without knowing they’ve heard from everyone. Doing so makes the leader’s decision better because it makes the whole team smarter.

4. Listen Actively

The fourth action that makes a team smarter is to listen actively. It’s great to take turns and make sure everyone has a chance to speak, but unless they’re truly heard the team doesn’t get any smarter. And unless they feel truly heard, they likely won’t feel comfortable sharing much longer. That means making sure each member of the team is committed to actively listening and responding with respect when others share. On teams, leaders model the way on active listening. When leaders make consistent eye contact and use nonverbals to demonstrate connection, they train others on the team to do so. And when leaders resist the urge to jump in and share immediately, and instead ask follow-up questions that draw more information out, their behavior often gets copied on the team. That helps everyone feel their perspective is valued and makes the whole team smarter.

5. Equalize Status

The fifth action that makes a team smarter is to equalize status. As we’ve discussed above, often what shuts down a conversation and keeps a team from being collectively intelligent is defaulting to the highest status person in the room—whether it’s the leader or an over-talker. That person speaking too early or too forcefully in the conversation sets a tone that everyone else is responding too and can often trigger self-censoring behaviors in teammates. That’s why high-performing, collectively intelligent teams create methods to equalize status and reinforce the idea that—as long as we’re in discussion—all ideas are of equal value. Some teams even use symbols or gestures (like removing titles or status markers) to reinforce equality. When teams create a feeling of equal status on a team, the discussion gets better and the whole team gets smarter.

And as a team leader, the actions taken to equalize status are likely the best place to start. Equal teams are better able to leverage diversity and build empathy. Equal teams are more likely to take turns sharing and demonstrate active listening. Focusing on equalizing status first makes it more likely the team is able to tap into collective knowledge—to truly be smarter. And when teams get smarter they make it more likely everyone on the team can do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on May 30, 2023

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2023

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are December’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Five Key Digital Transformation Barriers — by Howard Tiersky
  2. Achieving a Transformation Vision for a Better Future — by Howard Tiersky
  3. Eight Innovation Executive Types — by Stefan Lindegaard
  4. Skills versus Judgement — by Mike Shipulski
  5. We Need to Stop Glorifying Failure — by Greg Satell
  6. What Will People See? — by Mike Shipulski
  7. Don’t Waste Your Time Talking to Customers — by Robyn Bolton
  8. The Amazing Efficiency of Systematic Guessing — by Dennis Stauffer
  9. Four Change Empowerment Myths — by Greg Satell
  10. Do the Right Thing — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in November that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Leadership Development Fundamentals

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Work Products

Leadership Development Fundamentals

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Leadership development is a good idea in principle, but not in practice. Assessing a person against a list of seven standard competencies does not a leadership development plan make. Nor does a Meyers-Briggs assessment or a strengths assessment. The best way I know to describe the essence of leadership development is through a series of questions to assess and hire new leaders.

1. Is this person capable of doing the work required for this leadership position?

If you don’t start here, choose the person you like most and promote (or hire) them into the new leadership position. It’s much faster, and at least you’ll get along with them as the wheels fall off.

2. In this leadership position, what work products must the leader create (or facilitate the creation of)?

Work products are objective evidence that the work has been completed. Examples of work products: analyses, reports, marketing briefs, spreadsheets, strategic plans, product launches, test results for new technologies. Here’s a rule: If you can’t define the required work products, you can’t define the work needed to create them. Here’s another rule: If you can’t define the work, you can’t assess a candidate’s ability to do that work. And if you can’t assess a candidate’s ability to the work, you might as well make it a popularity contest and hire the person who makes the interview committee smile.

3. Can the candidate show work products they’ve created that fit with those required for the leadership position?

To be clear, if the candidate can show examples of all the flavors of work products required for the position, it’s a lateral move for the candidate. That’s not a bad thing, as there are good reasons candidates seek lateral positions (e.g., geographic move due to family or broadening of experience – new product line or customer segment). And if they’ve demonstrated all the work products, but the scope and/or scale are larger, the new position, the new position is a promotion for the candidate. Here’s a rule: if the candidate can’t show you an example of a specific work product or draw a picture of one on the whiteboard, they’ve never done it before. And another rule: when it comes to work products, if the candidate talks about a work product but can’t show you, it’s because they’ve never created one like that. And talking about work products in the future tense means they’ve never done it. When it comes to work products, there’s no partial credit.

4. For the work products the candidate has shown us, are they relevant?

A candidate won’t be able to show you work products that are a 100% overlap with those required by the leadership position. The context will be different, the market will be different, and the players will be different. But, a 50-70% overlap should be good enough.

5. For the relevant work products the candidate has shown us, do they represent more than half of those required?

If yes, go to the next question.

6. For the work products the candidate has not demonstrated, has the team done them?

If the team has done a majority of them, that’s good. Go to the next question.

7. For the work products the candidate or team has not demonstrated, can we partner them with an expert (an internal one, I hope) who has?

If yes, hire the candidate.

Wrap-up

Leadership development starts with the definition of the new work the leader must be able to do in their next position. And the best way I know to define the work is to compile a collection of work products that must be created in the next position and match that against the collection of work products the leader has created. The difference between the required work products and the ones the leader has demonstrated defines the leadership development plan.

To define the leadership development plan, start with the work products.

And to help the leader develop, think apprenticeship. And for that, see this seminal report from 1945.

Image credit: Pexels

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9 of 10 Companies Requiring Employees to Return to the Office in 2024

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9 of 10 Companies Requiring Employees to Return to the Office in 2024

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Happy employees mean more engaged and productive employees. I’ve written many times that what’s happening inside an organization will be felt on the outside by customers. A good employee experience (EX) will positively impact the customer experience (CX). And of course, the opposite is true. A “ripple effect” of employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction will inevitably reach your customers, impacting their overall experience.

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced a shutdown, many companies and organizations realized—or at least thought—their employees could work remotely. Many companies walked away from their offices and didn’t renew their leases. This shift in the traditional in-office, five-day-a-week schedule was either eliminated or modified, and many workers discovered they enjoyed working from home. However, it looks as if this “experiment” didn’t work out as planned, and many companies will start requiring RTO (return to office) in a schedule that looks similar to pre-pandemic office hours and attendance requirements.

In August, ResumeBuilder surveyed 1,000 corporate decision-makers about their RTO plans. Here are the main results:

    • 90% of companies will return to the office by 2024.
    • only 2% say their company never plans to require employees to return to work in person.
    • 72% say RTO has improved revenue.
    • 28% will threaten to fire employees who don’t comply with RTO policies.

The Opportunity

Why return to the traditional office environment? The answer is something we already know. Because companies potentially make more money.

The move to return to the office started in 2021, just after the lockdown. That year, 31% of companies required employees to return to their offices, 41% in 2022 and 27% in 2023. Most of the respondents to the survey claimed they saw an improvement in revenue, productivity and worker retention.

And for those companies that plan to demand RTO in 2024, 81% say it will improve revenue, 81% believe it will improve the company culture and 83% say it will improve worker productivity.

These decision-makers aren’t making an arbitrary determination. They recognize the negative impact an RTO policy can have. Many of them (72%) said their company would offer commuter benefits, 57% would help with child-care costs and 64% would provide catered meals. But are the perks enough?

The Danger

There is concern that a shift back to full-time office hours could cause a company to lose good employees in a hiring environment in which candidates are “calling the shots” and working for companies that not only give them a steady paycheck and traditional benefits, but also a work schedule and in-office policy that aligns with their need for work/life balance. Even so, according to the survey, 28% of the decision-makers surveyed claimed they would fire employees for not complying with their RTO policies.

As we navigate the complexities of a post-pandemic working world, companies face a tough choice that will shape and impact both the employee and customer experiences. Suppose a company decides to require a 100% return to the office. It must recognize and weigh the opportunities—primarily, increased productivity and revenue—with the negatives—less-than-enthusiastic employees and the potential (even probable) loss of employees.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Image Credits: Shep Hyken

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The Emotions of an Innovator

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The Emotions of an Innovator

GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

Your emotional state has a lot to do with how innovative you are, especially when those emotions are negative. How willing are you to act in the face of uncertainty and take those risks? How comfortable are you with new ideas and interpretations that may conflict with those you have? Can you overcome your biases to gain a clear-eyed understanding of the challenges you face? The fears and prejudices we all have can undermine our ability to find solutions.

Take a few moments to recall some of the negative emotions you’ve experienced in your life.

Things like:

  • Frustration
  • Disappointment
  • Jealously
  • Resentment
  • Annoyance
  • Anger     …and that’s just the short list.

One thing they all have in common is that they make you feel bad. They undermine your happiness. They can also hamper your ability to innovate.

Now ask yourself: What prompted those emotions? I suspect you think of something that happened or that someone did that upset you, but there are deeper reasons for these emotions. They form when something isn’t what you expect or hope for. Someone isn’t doing what you want, or that you think they should. You think something needs to be corrected. You already have some outcome you’d prefer, an expectation that isn’t being met.

That’s your mindset—your beliefs about how things should be—beliefs that generate those expectations. You may think someone is doing something wrong. Perhaps they’re being mean or rude. But that means you have an idea in your head of what’s right—how you think they should behave. Or, something may not have turned out the way you hoped. Maybe you didn’t get the promotion you wanted. But that means you think you should have been given something you didn’t receive.

Change those expectations and your emotional response changes. What’s happening in your head has just as much or more impact on the emotions you feel, as whatever is happening around you—and that’s empowering. When you blame your emotions on what others do, you hand them control over your emotional state. They determine how you feel.

When you realize that your beliefs and expectations—your mindset—primes you to feel those emotions, you gain control over how you feel. Instead of anger, you can substitute curiosity about why someone would behave that way. Instead of annoyance at someone’s missteps, you can choose to be amused. Instead of disappointment, you can shift to resolve to learn from your setbacks. Instead of embarrassment, you can choose to feel humility. Instead of feeling the urge to punish someone, you can choose to feel compassion and understanding.

External events may not have changed. Those are things you don’t control. What changes is your mindset—something you can control. When you realize that you create your own emotions and take steps to create fewer negative ones, you increase your own happiness—regardless of what life throws at you. Skilled innovators have a mindset that minimizes their negative emotions. Because instead of focusing on what needs to be corrected—to restore the status quo—they focus on what can be improved. That enhances their capacity to enhance. Enhance a product or service, enhance their community and the larger world, and enhance their own lives.

Here is a video of this post if you prefer:

Image Credit: Pixabay

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How to Use Your Nervous System to Feel Psychologically Safe

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or “Why Mandating a Return to the Office Destroys Safety”

How to Use Your Nervous System to Feel Psychologically Safe

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In last week’s episode, we learned that psychological safety is more neuroscience than psychology and the huge role our nervous system plays in our experience of safety. 

This week, we’re going deeper into our nervous system and how we can use our understanding of it to influence our psychology.

I’m sensing I can’t think my way to safety.  So, can I fix my nervous system to feel safe and smart?

This is where I go beyond Dr. Amy Edmondson’s definition of psychological safety to incorporate neuroscience and how our nervous system works.

Our nervous system has three states:

  1. Immobilization or the freeze response, as you felt, is often accompanied by a sense of overwhelm
  2. Fight-and-flight when you try to either end the conversation or become more aggressive, resistant, and push back on exploring other alternatives.
  3. Rest-and-Digest when you feel safe, social, and connected to the people around you

This third state sets humans and mammals apart from other living things.  Communicating and connecting serve as a survival mechanism and represent a safe state for our nervous system.  When we communicate and connect, our tribe looks out for us and keeps us safe from threats like lions or unfriendly tribes.

So, the answer is to foster more profound connections among human beings, which requires going well beyond our work roles and activities.

Does it require hugging?  I knew it would require hugging.

Don’t worry, hugging isn’t mandatory.

We, as individuals, have a strong desire to connect and communicate, but it doesn’t necessarily require physical proximity. Being physically together doesn’t guarantee anything.

But what about the push to return to the office? There’s even research to support executives’ claims that physical proximity is essential to culture, innovation, and connection.

Not only does physical proximity not guarantee anything, but being forced to return to the office causes more harm than good. 

From a safety perspective, our nervous system doesn’t want to feel trapped. Being forced back to the office activates our flight-or-fight response and erodes safety. Because of how our nervous system perceives choices, the more choices people have, the safer they feel.

Even though I’m tempted to ask questions about building psychological safety at the team or company level, I want to stay on the individual level for a moment. We talked about how I wasn’t consciously unsafe during a phone call. How can I tell when I feel unsafe if I’m not conscious of it?

There’s physical science behind what happens when you feel unsafe. Your heart rate increases, you might hold your breath, and your body may tense up.  Your thoughts might blank out, and your peripheral vision may narrow as your body prepares for fight or flight.  Your body doesn’t differentiate; it treats any threat as a threatening event.

On the other hand, feeling safe doesn’t mean you lack emotions or feel calm. Feeling calm and internally relaxed signifies safety, but it’s more than that.  When your nervous system is regulated, your emotions align with the situation. They’re not an extreme overreaction or underreaction. There’s congruence. If your emotional response matches the situation, your nervous system and brain feel safe.

That makes sense, but it’s not easy.  We’re trained to hide our emotions and always appear calm.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard and said, “Be a duck.  Calm on the surface and paddling like hell below it.”

And that is not congruent.  But congruence doesn’t mean you act out like a toddler, either.

Step one in creating safety is calming your nervous system by verbalizing your feelings. If you say, “This conversation is overwhelming for me. I need a break. Let me get some water,” you’re safe and regulated at that moment. There’s nothing wrong.

But when you can’t verbalize what you’re experiencing and freeze, that’s a sign you’re no longer in a safe state. Your body starts pumping cortisol and adrenaline, preparing for whatever it perceives as a threat.

Even if you feel overwhelmed, if you’re aware of that feeling and can take some breaths or a short break and return to the conversation, you’re in a safe, regulated state.

I can’t imagine admitting to feeling overwhelmed or asking for a break! Plus, I work with so many people who say, “I feel overwhelmed, but I can’t take a moment for myself.  I need to plow through and get this done.”

It takes a tremendous amount of self-awareness. If you want to create safety and emotional intelligence, you must know what you’re feeling and be able to name it. You also need to sense what others are feeling and understand your emotional impact on them.

For example, if you say, “I’m feeling overwhelmed right now,” and I respond calmly and slow my cadence of speech, your nervous system receives the message that everything is okay.  However, if I’m in “fight or flight” mode and you’re overwhelmed, we’ll end up in a chaotic and unproductive cycle.

Self-awareness and understanding are essential to safety. Unfortunately, many organizations I speak with need help with this.

Amen, sister,

Stay tuned for next week’s exciting conclusion, 3 Steps to Building a Psychologically Safe Environment or The No-Cost, No-Hug Secret to Smarter Teams

Image Credit: Pexels

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