August 16, 2008
Why Leading Thinkers Won't Be Thought Leaders
In the ideas game, cutting edge thinkers are typically too far ahead of the approval criteria for implementers, and since "thought leaders" derive their credibility from the probability of implementations occurring, most leading thinkers don't become thought leaders.
To get probability on their side, leading thinkers usually have to choose to think about something that approvers already want to implement.
This certainly distresses the notion of "innovation", except within the sense of "infusing the accepted with newness". But that is not an outright knock on anything; it simply points to a reason for having the notion of "pragmatic innovation".
Much leading thought throughout history has been pretty rapidly dismissed as "impractical", which of course should have meant "unable to be put into practice"... But with 20/20 hindsight we are able to know at least that what is undoable for one outfit is merely inconvenient for another. And yet another may have no resistance to the idea at all and let it rip, wherefore the popular "disruptiveness" tag in the vocabulary of the betting pundits who track ersatz innovators.
Thought leadership is safe. It doesn't carry along with it the stockades, burnings-at-the-stake, smear campaigns, or other proven techniques used to enlighten leading thinkers about their impracticality. In fact, when you get right down to it, thought leaders are "voted into office", more or less like successful consultants, which means that they are the product of followers, not vice versa. This explains why the best-known thought leaders hardly ever have a hardluck story about finding followers...
In the other camp, leading thinkers sprout of their own accord and may carry on for quite some time with no followers at all. Some leading thinkers get lucky: they wind up being befriended either by a thought leader or by an influential producer who can spell "pragmatic" but isn't worried about it for the time being. But conventionally, the bridge between leading thinkers and thought leaders is the kind of engineering called "R&D".
The problem is that if R&D is not funded well enough, then the bridge may not reach all the way across. So the issue mainly comes down to who will sponsor the way that the R&D is adequately funded.
Leading thinkers really are often into fundraising, but a lot of fundraisers aren't any good at it. In a healthy organization that wants to be progressive as well, the case for funding thought leaders is not so hard to make, but the exceptional organization strategizes funding of its leading thinkers.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:28 AM
April 19, 2008
The Innovator's Real Dilemma
Jessica Stillman at the new BNET1 blog rounds up research from Accenture, the Conference Board, and Wharton to talk about why Fostering Innovation Stumps Executives ...
This is an interesting situation to ponder: making choices about how much to invest in innovation , versus in knowledge management and, separately, business intelligence as other paths to insight. Overall, what the organization is mainly after -- where the real money rests -- is the insight, whatever the path. But the current thinking about management priorities indicates that insight is pretty hard to come by, so lesser-beaten paths to it are also getting a lot of attention.
One challenge that surfaces, somewhat amusingly, is the presumed need to be innovative about how to foster innovation. For example, given that "innovation" is so easily approached as "creativity", it is not surprising that at places where real urgency comes from competition against either industry rivals or the budget, the idea of stimulating the worker's right brain with art experiences can gain some real traction.
But perhaps everything new is old again... The simplest way to assure that innovation is "fostered" is to provide
(1.) a clear statement of why the company will consider something to be "innovative" and...
(2.) a clear statement about what circumstances will cause the innovation to be rewarded in a way that directly benefits the individual(s) involved.
Generally, if company leadership can't get that much communication together and abide by it, then most other "fostering" efforts are essentially arbitrary.
Furthermore, this effort should not be confused at all with management's concern about how to measure the innovation's impact on the company's performance. The performance impact issue is not something that should be making innovation special. Any management team that rewards "performance impacts" with bonuses should simply add innovations to the mix of things that can be clearly accounted for as contributors to better performance. Meanwhile, innovation is about doing things differently to create opportunity; but execution is about doing things a certain way to hit performance targets.
This is where managers have to get real: if they will not reward innovators for being innovative, as opposed to making the reward conditional upon performance increases, then people will learn that innovation is not worth the effort at this organization. So in step (2.) above, the "circumstances" to be declared must start with something other than performance metrics.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:42 AM
March 30, 2008
Careful What You Ask For...
Anyone who has visited Archestra more than once ( all nine people! ...well, ok, eight not couting myself) knows that a major point getting made is this: what looks like problems without solutions is often due to the romantic allegiance we have to a misleading vocabulary.
It's especially important to catch those times when strategy, management, execution, and other fundamentals are being wrestled by name. In that vein, one of the longest-standing friends of Archestra -- Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith, Esquire -- caught the notice (again) of a somewhat newer friend -- Jack Vinson at Knowledge Jolt -- setting the stage for the commentary now here.
Bruce starts it off by reviewing ideas in the The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig. Rosenweig explores the historical ineffectiveness of management guru wisdom, and Bruce shortly comes to his own punchline: "In this unknowable world, what attitude and what approach grace us with the best odds of success? Only one: Critical thinking."
But as you read Bruce's fluid argument to the conclusion, you pass through the equally important question in his theme: "What do you have to know, to be the best performer?"
Jack, a seasoned spokesman for the Theory of Constraints (TOC), embraces Bruce's conclusion; but moreso he picks up that earlier question with his own followup, posing a perhaps ironic counterargument to Bruce's conclusion. With no pretense of being gurus, both men argue for the value of logic to management that would aspire to the top rung of performance. But Jack shines a light in the dark corner of logic's chronic problem with gaining broad acceptance. Case in point: Jack's observation that TOC works but still doesn't proliferate poses this question: "What does it take to get chosen as the management approach?" And our question, naturally, becomes "if you aren't chosen, then how can you be the key to success?"
Evidently, what it takes to be chosen is a combination of marketing and politics -- and the facts may be that the underlying genius of "success" is not the management approach used but instead the competitive approach employed by the executives. What Jack points out, intentionally or not, is beautifully brutal: that sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. And we must remember that winning ugly is still...winning. TOC companies may be winners, but most winners don't use TOC. (True, or false? Jack suggests, True.)
Consequently, when it comes to competition, we can't be sure that a great lot of companies should do anything in common; but instead we have to focus on why something works for the company that it works for.
In other words, there is a glaring difference between strategic management and competitive strategy, with the better competitors doing most of the winning, not foremost the better managed.
What executives must be responsible for is figuring out what strategy their company can win with; and what managers must do is figure out whether the company is doing what that appropriate competitive strategy calls for.
As both Bruce and Jack assert, critical thinking ought to be a key tool, and here we assert that it is a key tool in both competition and management. But what overrides both circumstances is the possibility that the thinking will be done about the wrong thing.
Eschewing mythologies and the emperor's new clothes, Jack quotes Bruce's counsel against that problem : "rigorous and unblinking analysis of reality as it is, not as you want it to be..." What we must take this to mean is not that some approach is inherently more competitively clairvoyant than another, but instead that executives and managers must not run the company based on a mythology (of an approach) that does not fit the company. To puncture the mythology, you have to be able to cut through the marketing and politics that surround it within the company.
New punchlines: as the top person in charge, you can't know what strategy will be your most successful against the competition before you know your organization; and when you reach an understanding of what your organization can do, you then have to either select a strategy that fits the organization, or you have to change your organization to fit a different strategy. What's tough is that you have to do this while the game is already underway.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 1:53 PM
March 23, 2008
Suddenly, It All Made Sense
Finally, that track that everything went off of, and where to get back on.
For the hi-res view, click here and go full screen or print.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 18, 2008
The End of Irrational Execution
Faisal Hoque, Chairman of BTM, appeared in Baseline Magazine with a brief discussion on the three elements needed for "Transformation: Inertia to Agility" (BTM innovates new business models and enhances financial performance by converging business and technology.)
As usual, Faisal offers a wonderful summation of what levers to throw and why to throw them. Here, he observes innovation, efficiency and abandonment.
Sound familiar? Perhaps the most interesting aspect of his article's proof point -- Amazon -- is that it shows how far we have recovered from the dot com era assumptions, particularly when it comes to understanding that in a business we actually have to get paid for making people happy. What Hoque really pins down, though, like a refreshed road marker, is that the "making" part is not the business, but is instead the competency.
Amongst the problems in the mix, the inertia that Faisal details is arguably the description of how business frustrates competency (“We have to meet this quarter’s numbers or we’re toast.” ), while on the other side of the coin Hoque highlights how competency, through enterprise architecture, can drive a business ("the first step is to get a clear picture of the entire enterprise...").
Meanwhile, that flashback we easily have on older preached wisdom like "Fail Faster!" and "Destroy Creatively!" still seems to apply, but the difference is that we have actual history on that now. The history begs the question, "why are only the exceptions successful?" Hoque's answer looks to be a turnaround on the old saying "If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter how you get there..." The turnaround is, "If you don't know how to get there, it doesn't matter where you're going." But we can't make the mistake of joining the casual crowd exuberance for "execution": the point is that enterprise architecture is the competency enabler that then delivers execution for the business.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 8, 2007
Knowledge Workers : the wisdom of the Crowd?
No great company can expect to compete without a great stockpile of knowledge and, therefore, knowledge workers. Question: the more k-workers, the merrier, right? Answer: it depends.
The concept of the "knowledge-driven organization" is the strategic rallying flag for businesses bred amongst the Information Society. But that enthusiasm doesn't automatically translate from ambition to reality. Faced with the pressure of quarterly earnings reports, many companies can't decide whether the daunting task of becoming knowledge-driven is a "do" or a "die".
Yet most career hierarchies in an organization -- a.k.a., "success" ladders -- are marketed with the idea of "demonstrated expertise." This ought to mean that careers are the channel by which organizations actually apply the knowledge in residence. In turn, that ought to mean that organizations are already inherently knowledge-driven. If that's the case, today's idea of knowledge management being something new must indicate something that has heretofore been missing. So where's the gap, and why?
The reality is, careers are fundamentally about influence, not knowledge; and most careers are promoted on the basis of power; and typically the power is manifest in "productivity", not "skill", and productivity is measured in outputs, not inputs. Just as athleticism gets you on the team but not necessarily off the bench, for most players the primary key is to fit into a prescribed position -- which translates into measurable productivity good or bad. And as the authors of Mass Career Customization (Harvard Business School Press) describe it, the positions that typically matter in an organization's career tracks are management. Net: when it comes to career success in the organization, the way management itself is prescribed or defined will generally trump knowledge. This puts knowledge workers in the position of needing a strategy to make management repeatedly buy into their knowledge.
Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg, two executives of Deloitte, hit the issue from two directions in their book. One direction looks right at productivity through the lens of performance results associated with female executives. The distinctively superior results that the authors find there inspire the question of which female qualities are so naturally more productive. The implication is that innate qualities of women produce higher performance in the corporate ladder. But what evidence of these qualities makes the qualities explicit? Why would these same qualities generally drive corporate success, and can men practice them too?
At this point it's worth pointing out that most careers, really, are built on making one's decisions agreeable, not on intellectual athleticism -- but then again only smart women seem to have big corporate careers. The classic dilemma of these smart women has been, how smart is it to have a life outside of the company if we want a strong career inside the company?
Benko and Weisberg's discussion gives some answers to that, but it still leaves us (intentionally) with the idea that even for those workers with these better female qualities (one notable mention is about "multitasking" as a woman's talent) a corporate ladder is hostile territory, whereas a new and trademarked model -- a lattice -- will promote and keep more women (and likewise men) in a profile that drives business performance. Mass Career Customization (MCC) offers a way to make the important "career" qualities explicit and "tunable" like the different ranges of a graphical sound equalizer. The trick is to get the company to accept these tunings, or profiles, and the book is largely an explanation of how and why the company should.
The issue of knowledgeworkers intersecting organizational structure is the very singular topic of the Benko-Weisberg book. The issue amounts to more than one thing, but the most consistent thing it amounts to is a view of organizational structure managing knowledge workers as assets. One major reference used by the authors is (click here if you want it) the Deloitte Enterprise Value Matrix, and the book's major offering -- MCC and an alternative to the corporate ladder -- is given an ROI argument by being presented through a Deloitte-style framework.
A dispassionate reading of the Deloitte matrix reveals it to be an internal pipelining of assets from resource cost to strategic investment. But there is a story broader than the corporate boundary, which is the connection between the information society and the knowledge-driven organization, and the ecosystem that it generates around and through the company.
In this story, one plot-line is the following path of assumptions, which amounts to traversing the bottom, middle and top rungs of the ordinary hierarchical corporate model for workers' value:
But while the MCC framework promoted in the book finds an alternative to that pattern for the employee, there's an even bigger message for the company itself to draw from the book. As knowledgeworkers, we like to feel that we're selling our intrinsic value to the company, but companies have their own reasons for buying or not.
The bigger value framework posed by the book Mass Career Customization has terms of measurement different from productivity and from the Deloitte matrix, where the employee must determine how much value the employee can have to the company. Instead, as seen below, the key terms are about how the company can have value in the new ecosystem generated by the Supply of Employees, the Demand for Employees, and how they relate to the Information Society supplying them versus the Knowledge-driven Organization using them.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 18, 2007
How IT Assets come from Business Requirements
After twenty years of developing, managing, marketing and deploying IT, providers still have huge opportunities to miss the mark by giving the customer what the customer asked for instead of what the customer needed.
To see how much can still be missed in any new delivery, check this chart and ask whether the implementations you're familiar with came anywhere near covering what was important.
Key shockers to lookout for:
- Customers didn't know what they needed! How could they always be right?
- Providers weren't solving the right problem! Why would the quality matter?
- Most of all, requirements held no accounting for the difference between risk, complexity and difficulty -- so who knows when anything would actually "work"?
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 13, 2007
Fast and Pretty, but not Cheap
Normally you'll find an article here instead of a conventional blog posting, but today Michael Hugos, of CIO Insider, caught my attention with his blog posting about agility on his site, Doing Business In Real Time. It definitely warranted a fast reply of comparative and perhaps contrasting views, reproduced here below. (Be sure also to see his Comment following.)
Very often the agility issue comes up in conversations with managers, and there are two interesting and recurring characteristics when it does.
One, it comes up *after* results have been calculated and posted. That is, managers see what already happened and ask "if we had been more agile, would it have made a difference?"
And two, there is tremendous confusion of agility with other ideas including "flexibility", "resilience", and "versatility".
The one-two punch of being reactive and confused makes "agility" something that remains vaguely ambitious as most managers don't know where to start, on which aspect they are really concerned about, or whether it is the right aspect.
Let's call that the worst case scenario. Hugos' article addresses that by outlining "agility" measurements -- which turn out to be what is largely now identified as Operational Performance Management (OPM) -- great stuff that is not the same as "agility" but is the same as "alignment".
I propose that the agility issue comes in when OPM is a strong practice, allowing targets and their pursuit to change in ways that are (here's the punchline):
- easily operationalized...
- with successful change management...
- to realign on time...
- without breaking things.
There, in a nutshell, you have the four points of reference that allow you to spot why your company is or is not agile. It's a process matter.
As for the 2% to 4% financial improvement that Hugos uses to stand for agility, that's a target, interesting as a representation of what ROI might justify the effort to be agile. But knowing where the target is doesn't tell you how to get there. For most managers, it is not so much that being agile will "cause" the percentage increase; instead, the issue is one of "prerequisities" -- namely, the probability of getting the increase without being agile is so poor.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 12:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 28, 2007
Gettting from A to B
Ideas are a dime a dozen; implementations are a million dollars per success.
Is there a "model" that describes the success factors of "implementation" as a practice or methodology?
On the surface, "implementation" typically presumes translating an idea into requirements, specs, and engineering, with a quality (compliance validation) check and delivery effort at the end.
A more sophisticated look will generally include considerations about likely necessary environmental adaptations, so more efforts get included in the form of assessments and monitoring.
So far, the point is that there is a layering of attention that not only manages production but manages change. Are there ony two layers?
In future versions of this article, an Archestra framework for implementation is coming.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 16, 2007
Mind Canary
For decades, as a precaution, miners have been reeling canary birds down into their mines to warn them of potential disaster -- as the canary is particularly sensitive to toxic gases such as carbon monoxide which is colorless, odorless and tasteless. If the canary dies, then the mine is dangerous.
A mind canary is very similar, with the word "mind" as a play off of the word "mine." If the "idea miner" sends an idea canary into the "mind" and it fails to return, then the mind may be lethal!
Thanks to marketing pro Alan Brooks at Mindcanary.com for memorializing this bit of Archestra legacy. He's adapted it a bit (as you'll see in the wording on his homepage) -- but to good purpose: he's guiding folks to safe mines. Hi Alan!
What do you do with a lethal mind? See "change management" and/or "knowledge management" -- at an Archestra location near you...
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 15, 2007
Critical Mass on the Critical Path
In his comments on the Archestra article "Why Change Is So Hard", Sid Kemp of QTI, Inc. picks up the beat on how to campaign a change. His description highlights the idea of transitioning between different stable states: the periods before the change and after it. A seven-element program that Sid outlines is a case methodology for "covering the bases" that the Archestra matrix on individual attitudes presented in the original article.
Where it comes to covering these bases, Sid's comment calls out something of more pointed interest to think about -- i.e., that an individual exerts influence on other individuals in a way that leverages the current state of things into a sufficient level of steadiness for a change to be either "accomplished" or "prevented". In other words, the individual can disproportionately contribute to a critical degree of momentum or inertia.
Good call. Furthermore, that has very obvious implications for the idea of "leadership"... It's a given that a group involved in a change will typically feature, within the group, different functional roles in the composition of the "to be" steady state. Not everyone will have the same kind of influence, and the new equilibrium will not ask them to -- neither in the composition activity nor in the final composition structure. In effect, amongst the group of individuals involved, would-be leaders may need to adopt the change differently from would-be followers, and so forth. Along with that, some individuals may experience a change in role due to the move from before to after the adoption campaign. Following suit, have we as change managers identified the leaders and followers on the "momentum" side, separately from the leaders and followers on the "inertia" side? (By the way: we'll note here, for future consideration, that change leaders and change agents are not the same role, even though they may both be played by the same individual. But how about when the agent is not a leader?)
This lets us revisit a "truth" that we've both observed and experienced, which is that in some occasions, "success" is not pretty. It goes without saying that becoming different is not necessarily becoming better, so a proposed change has to carry with it a presumptive confidence that its objective is an outcome that has more value than does the status quo. This is exactly why one of the quadrants in the Archestra matrix is "appreciation" -- it includes the same sense that we convey when we say, as an objective measurement, that anything else has "appreciated". The change proposal argues that the value will be there; the question is, will the individual say "I'll buy that..."??
When the proposed change is an executive goal, those individuals that don't buy that may in a different sense "buy it" : they may become either targeted damage or collateral damage, clearing the way for transition.
But if these individuals are still deemed important as resources to the future state, then managing these resources is a risk management activity within the campaign for change. At minimum, the individual's role must be proposed.
Attention to this issue had been developed methodologically during 2000-2002 by the consulting group Fulcrum Management, whose principals Howard G. Hastings, David A. Messineo, and yours truly M. Ryder offered Change Assessments using the analytic cycle Requirements-Risks-Resources-Approvals to reality check the top-down alignment of objectives and commitments in change.
It is on this point of "alignment" that Sid Kemp's comments on populations being "systems" carry weight. Additional specific light on this alignment problem is cast quite strongly since 2004 by Jonathan Becher in his work with Pilot Software, Inc. in Operational Performance Management. Kemp likewise offers work on the "leverage points" of alignment through his current offerings, under other labels, at QTI, Inc. Neil Russell-Jones puts out "The Managing Change Pocketbook" at www.pocketbook.co.uk, containing a fairly classical approach that we can see mapping to this issue. And (if you are still reading this!), similar efforts in your own sphere of activity are likely familiar to you under various other programs and entities you can name.
So what?
In further articles at Archestra, we'll maintain an opportunity to show how these different offerings reiterate the attitudes matrix from "Why Change Is So Hard", and how they help to explain the criticality of the individual's adoption to the design for change. Naturally, if we find that the matrix is broken, we'll change it...
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 13, 2007
Why Change is So Hard
"People change; populations evolve."
The success of a proposed change will naturally depend on whether a critical mass of the necessary participants play along well. As change managers, we naturally prioritize that struggle at the top of the ToDo list.
But when it comes to having a proposed change adopted in the first place, it's not about groupthink. The difficulty begins with the predisposition that individuals have towards the evident idea of the change. Regardless of what the exact idea of the change is supposed to be, the process of adopting the change begins with what people think it is about -- and this will invoke their varying individual attitudes.
Attitude is when one's position is dominated by one's predisposition. It's what allows a guy who needs eight ounces in his glass to decide to call only four ounces either "half full" or "half empty"... Change provokes attitude-sensitive comparisons. Then, the comparison seeks "credibility", an effect which is always part objectivity and part validity.
What we should do is assume that the individual's initial position is always from a personal comfort zone, and that a change challenges it. In particular, starting from the individual's comfort with the "subjectively similar" (as in both the already adopted and the already familiar), the move that Change asks for is to a full appreciation of the "objectively different". This isn't about being easy or hard; it's about being sure to cover the bases.
To cause this move to take place, two key techniques are needed:
- Examples move the subjective perception to an objective certainty.
- Logic extends validity to the unfamiliar or different.
In practice, one can find these techniques utilized in the most common leading tools for influencing performance-related change, such as the Balanced Scorecard. While many differences exist between such tools, they share a reliance on the ability to present a logical "validity" model of causal relationships, along with definitions of elements that allow measurement to provide feedback as "objective" proof.
To summarize the range of attitudes that can exist, and their relative positions, the picture below maps the territory that is to be crossed in bringing about adoption of a change. The axes cross-reference point-of-view against the appearance of the proposed change -- which creates quadrants of positions. In the central area, key words representing the pre-disposition of the individual are placed in each quadrant. The words in the corner of each quadrant label the working evaluation of the prospects for adoption, which the proposer can expect. In the center of each quadrant, the individual's position is indicated. An extremely important principle illustrated is that while making a proposal either preferable or acceptable is probably necessary, it is insufficient to make it adoptable. (This usually turns out to be true because adoption requires creating opportunity, versus constraints and risks, in ways that preference or acceptance alone does not accomplish. Neither preference nor acceptance necessarily amounts to commitment. And while together they only maximize the likelihood, separately they rarely carry enough weight against constraints and risks.)
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 1:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 18, 2006
The 3-D's of Change
Despite the obvious allure of innovation and efficiency, the two best reasons to change are not to "be different" nor to "escape dead ends."
But they are close. The two best reasons are to "be better" and to "create new options." In other words, what's the point of getting different without knowing how it would be better, and to figure along with that, what's the point of having more options without knowing how they lead to the difference?
Yet change does not guarantee those outcomes. To the extent that change is "driven" by reasons, change is about developing the new means for opportunity; it is not the end in itself.
Thoroughly thinking through the positioning and requirements for change might take some research, which might take some time; because time is often scarce and precious, gravitate towards the "fast tracks" of lessons learned and "best practices" about changes undertaken elsewhere or before.
Emulating such models of change management makes plenty of sense, and yet it remains empirically evident that two organizations trying to change in the same fashion may get two very different results. No real surprise: effective change is an environmental shift, and why should two different environments respond alike to a given model of change?
It's not that they couldn't.
Differences will occur because activities and environments have to form together into functional relationships, and this coherence will feature the detail level of chemistry rather than of carpentry. (Take note, ersatz change agents.) The specifics of cultivating two different environments may call for more risk, tenacity or tolerance in one environment versus another, not to mention time.
But the real key to a successful change lies in getting a grip on its entire lifecycle, which has three major phases that are about how the organization agrees to transform:
- adapt...
- adopt...
- approve.
As a true cycle, it has the property of re-iterating by having the approval phase directly influence the adapt phase.
But the individual phases themselves can be hard to progress.
Without tackling "risk" and "resources", the adapt phase won't have an output. Here, the "support" scenario must be described.
Next, the adopt phase can't mature without good marketing of how the stakeholders' own performance in the new scheme will be evaluated. "Roles" have to be declared and accepted. They will rely on support.
And the approval phase relies on confidence and clarity in how people will know that the intended effects are being realized. "Transparency" and feedback needs to be universally established, according to the roles.
Although driving a successful change has this cyclical buildup of viability, real change in action always shows all three phases occurring simultaneously. This makes them each able to affect each other at all times, more like "dimensions" of change maturity, not just phases of the change implementation.
So, as you might imagine improving on each dimension, the probability of sustainable success with the change gets higher. On the other hand, you can see that failing changes probably stem from weakness in one or more dimensions, which causes imbalances and discontinuities. The many sources of rigidity, resistance and disagreement are where the gremlins reside, undermining (respectively) adaptation, adoption and approval. But they are the flip side of a coin on which support, roles and visibility are the critical redeemables.
Map out your change effort, dimensionalize it, and see whether your efforts to manage the change are as rationally aligned as you think.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 1, 2006
The CMDB as a Knowledge Base
An executive overview.
In the front-office world of a business, the holy grail of a "360-degree view of the customer" is already old hat.
Well, much of what is now happening in the middle office -- the IT world -- revolves around the criticality of utilizing a "configuration management database", or "CMDB". This database is the key to a 360-degree view of any IT asset. In particular, it is a centralized repository of information about how items are defined and situated as components of the information technology infrastructure on which the business runs.
As a singularly authoritative (or "master") source of information about the infrastructure's components, the database content is very involved in the documentation and decision support for almost any business process workflow requiring IT enablement. But what is it about the components that the CMDB describes?
Typically the components for which the CMDB holds descriptions are referred to as "configurations". A quick survey of the CMDB literature shows that would-be CMDB users can get mired in great controversy about what consitutes a configuration, because there are so many ways to segment a chunk of infrastructure IT and legitimately call it a component. After all, the notion of a component necessarily refers to the idea of some larger entity that the component helps to make up. The problem is that any entity's distinctive identity must be defined with a boundary around its scale, complexity and purpose -- but just as any category may be said to be a subcategory of something else, any entity may be a component of some other entity. Thus it may be unclear where to draw a boundary, create an object, and call it a "configuration". The question always begged is "of what entity is this item a component?"
This makes it very difficult to decide what to include and exclude -- the CMDB's catalog of entities should be neither too general nor meaninglessly specific. How many levels of categorization and subcategorization (so to speak) must the CMDB contain?
In the below, we skip all of that confusion by looking at "things" in a more objective way. First, we take the notion of configuration not as a noun but instead mainly as a verb that has a result. The focus is on the motive for action. That is, nothing in the IT infrastructure is there except through the labor of making it fit into the company of other things -- and our first emphasis is on the labor that takes place to respond to the perceived need for including something that wasn't there before. This allows us to think of a "configuration" as the output of a system of functions, and the CMDB first of all collects facts about that output (and other ones, similar or related, in the same infrastructure ) -- as accounted for by its system.
But why collect the information? The primary reason is to put management of these outputs on a foundation of knowledge instead of on hunch. The CMDB's content can fuel knowledge by organizing its information into the three main contexts that matter to the difference between being managed and unmanaged.
Managed conditions always compare the actual against the planned and the authorized. This indicates three forms of knowledge that the CMDB would support: respectively, models, analyses and histories.
The essential CMDB content will be descriptions of states generated by the functions (as illustrated above), to be evaluated in these three contexts.
However, management tends to root itself in the posture of "operations" -- with the difference being that operations are mainly about organizational responsibilities while functions are about activity. This distinction is more profoundly yet simply identified in the hierarchy of management as shown in the next table. Top-down, starting from a focus on business value, the table rows address the questions "Why are we doing something?"; "how are we going to do it?"; and, "what are we going to do it with?":..
It is easy, then, to recognize the same top-down pattern in management's attempt to associate the needs of the business with the infrastructure that would address it.
Arguably, tactics are derived from respect for the customer's agenda, and functions leverage the offerings of suppliers -- so the primary challenge for differentiated management is in the operational dimension. Not surprisingly, Operations lays out responsibility areas in a way that tends to generally reflect functions. For example, the operational chain of development/implementation/administration/support is, on the surface, an echo of the functional flow of build/release/monitor/maintain. But Operations must intentionally, not coincidentally, associate its responsibility areas with the functions it can govern, if the dynamic is to be called "management". Operations must decide what functions will "execute the infrastructure" and how.
Consequently, what management wants from the CMDB is content that helps construct the artifacts of management that should populate the following framework. In this framework, captured knowledge explains how Operations currently puts functions into the context of the bigger management picture -- the one that generates business value. That overall knowledge-based governance looks to the CMDB to fortify its perspective and acuity on what to change, when and why.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 29, 2006
Changing Performance
Although quality of execution ("QOE") is not the same as "performance", in the minds of many managers QOE's Deming Cycle has long ago taken up permanent residence as the basis for performance improvement.
In that view, the mantra of PLAN DO CHECK ACT (i.e., design, execute, measure, and adjust) is a huge reminder that while the "activity" half of work (PLAN DO) is always to be attended formally and closely, the "achievement" half (CHECK, ACT) is not just a "gimme".
From that perspective, managers have a better view of how to make things work not just well but, due to the repetition of the cycle, also with continuous improvement.
Yet forty years after the cycle's debut, the challenge of ever-increasing organizational complexity makes the effectiveness of this advice harder and harder to realize. For management solution-builders like CEO Jonathan Becher of Pilot Software, a reinterpretation of management focus seemed necessary and timely enough to even build his company around. Becher's model -- MOTIVATE, MANAGE, MONITOR, MEASURE -- shifted emphasis from the "Plan / Do" of Deming to a sensitivity about how communication brings workers into the realm of reliable support for the Plan. As a result, purposecould become more consistently followed by execution.
Both of those men's approaches convey value through completeness in a scripted sequence of management influences. Yet both must be grasped within an even larger context of what more completely accounts for "performance".
What really controls the generation of events and their results is the interrelationship of internal forces in the organization; and what is often overlooked is the degree to which those connections are leverage points that are vulnerable to unscripted change. The following illustration's high-level view exposes these points of leverage:
In representing a cycle, part of how this picture works is of course how it positions the leverage points in question, which are Interpretation, Participation, Examination and Prioritization. Here, they take up spots in between the more conventional subjects of management attention.
Each of the "new" items significantly constrains the influence of managed strategy, planning, execution and evaluation. It is relatively easy to grasp that defects, omissions, exceptions or errors at any one of these four constraining points will potentially delay, disrupt or at worst cripple the cycle, despite attention to the more standard concerns. Yet all it takes to introduce those interruptions is competition from some recognized alternative -- in goals, methods or needs. Given that, can we say that we're managing things if we aren't attending to the four constraints on an explicit and sustained basis?
Sometimes the alternative comes from outside of the manager's field of view; sometimes, from deeply within.
For example, as now seen, a Plan is not a transcription of a Strategy; instead, it is more nearly a transcription of an interpretation of strategy. Or said better, interpretation is a precedent of the plan. People don't automatically interpret things the same way; and naturally, politics can play a heavy hand in which interpretation may have the best shot at prevailing. The point is, do we know why people are interpreting things the way they do?
And consider the phenomenon of a second opinion; if interpretation imposes a competing sense of credibility, opportunity or belief on the strategy, the prior anticipated plan will again likely risk being changed.
Further along in the cycle, at the point of Participation, a deeper look at people is also due.
Participation is perhaps the "intermediary" point that ordinarily gets the most attention. But what often gets overlooked in that attention is the distinction between productivity management and change management -- with the big question being how we know that people will really adopt and execute the plan.
These days it is still relevant and popular to understand productivity from the viewpoint of running healthy "systems". And most typical in our thinking about that is the mantra of "people/process/technology". That describes the three dimensions of the systems that we think are both useful and manageable -- plus it offers the encouraging claim that technology will make things more likely do-able. But the catch is: people have to want it to. If they don't want it to, a lot can change. (As noted frequently elsewhere in Archestra discussions, the People/Process/Technology mantra is essentially flawed and should be replaced with the mantra of People/Events/Technology, further superceded by Assignments/Processes/Configurations. But for now we'll leave that alone, and just take advantage of the focus on people.)
What about change? Underneath Deming's "DO", and between Becher's "MOTIVATE" and "MANAGE", people decide what they are going to actually bring to the party. They make the decision as a result of comparing what they are being offered as "next" versus "now". This will not just be a simple comparison of better versus worse, with "now" being the benchmark; "now" may not even be clearly good or bad.
Instead, the comparison will be about whether being involved as requested (for example, by the plan) is a difference that the person can prefer. So what in particular is getting compared?
Both "now" and "next" present possible but alternate realities that elaborate, in detail, the general picture below:
For the individual person, the issue is to reconcile how they already are now with how they are going to be next. Any part of the above cycle that changes -- whether that be expectations, intent, or observed effect -- can introduce a new preference, dissuasion, or even some cognitive dissonance such as pitting their desires against their ideas or against their ethics.
In this second picture, as in the first, the points of influence are interrelated by position. To the point, Acceptance is always preceded by Expectations. Then, when Acceptance is followed by Intent, people really arrive as drivers of the activity that eventually will be studied for determining performance.
What managers need to know is that the Expectations segment of the cycle is affected by both Awareness and Acceptance. If either of those changes, expectations change too. Likewise, intent will be sensitive to both Acceptance and Actualization -- so managers have to provide corresponding opportunity that moves Intent to real action. These sound a lot more like issues of leadership that managers must fit in.
Meanwhile, in the end, the individual's mentality about his/her requested role must track back beneficially to the participation needed in the point between planning and execution. That's what the two illustrations together reveal.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 26, 2006
Managing Change Partners
Solutions actually arrive for use through the activities of design, development and implementation. But each of those steps is a point at which opportunity and ability may easily associate with each other in ways that can unpredictably affect the other steps, and/or can result in doing something for the wrong reason. Worse, because getting a problem solved is important, sometimes the importance translates into a sense of urgency that makes most kinds of help look attractive. This can confuse the assessment of the value of the help, leading to a selection or acceptance that means doing the wrong thing for the right reason...
To avoid those problems, the division of labor and responsibility needs to carefully associate ability and opportunity through authorization and control. In short, the difference between what can happen and what should happen must be planned, and recognizing proper roles is a success factor in supporting the plan.
In the picture below, a number of typical opportunities for solution production are mapped out to show the situation in which they are most appropriate. This helps to guide requests for certain types of participation and investment in the solution production. Using outside help to supplement one's own capabilities in design, development and implementation should mean using the time and money on having the partner do the right work.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 9, 2006
Driving Action with "Values"
In most conversations about how to properly focus an organization for success, the prescription calls for the organization to leverage its identity as a source of performance strength. For doing that, the notion of "values" is promoted as a major success factor.
What makes "values" so important? The key ideas are that it is typically easier to maintain effort for what one believes in, and that not knowing what matters the most "internally" leads to an inability to sort out and navigate through what matters the most "externally".
In trying to make "values" an integral part of operations, the organization will typically develop priorities; then it will group and cascade the priorities into policies -- ones that can be applied as instructions accompanying activies that the organization anticipates it should conduct or host.
While policies provide the practical expression of the priorities, many organizations are only partially successful at providing them and even creating them. The initial challenge in developing the priorities is usually to decide not just what is considered to be a representative "value" but also to get agreement on why it is necessary to hold onto it. The challenge is made tougher by the fact that the circumstances surrounding the organization may be constantly changing in important ways demanding direct attention. Further, the identified priorities may seem to compete with or even contradict each other.
Consequently, this period of investigation and definition takes many forms and often must be repeated -- but while no two organizations may arrive at the same conclusions, they all try to arrive at them through what will be called a "value system" -- some model for evaluation that is persistent above and beyond the level of ordinary circumstantial change. This sytem will then govern, more or less, the ongoing refinement and validation of priorities and policy -- at least until again too many new occasions prove to be irreconcilable within that system.
When this roadblock occurs, individuals or organizations experience conflicted priorities as indicators of a defect or breakdown of the value system. But in this experience, it can be unclear as to whether the apparent conflict is really due to the system or instead due to a lack of rigor or understanding within its use. For example, rules are often seen as the specific expression of a priority. Sometimes in using them, there may be confusion about whether an undesirable situation -- meaning, one in which prior action has turned things sour or subsequent action will likely do so -- has been forced by "a bad rule", or whether instead a good rule has been inappropriately applied. The conflict stems from uncertainty about the correctness of what was done or of what to do.
This example is notable because the action that makes the situation "undesirable" normally derives its justification from the presumed value system. When the undesirability of the situation makes us debate the system's own correctness, we tend to wonder if the system is unfairly "skewed" one way or the other. Meanwhile, the conflicted priorities that come with the undesirable situation may be a disagreement between two or more parties, but the conflict can also be a disagreement that one party feels within itself.
An important part of a value system's responsibility is to provide a means of distinguishing the character of one action from another. A critical understanding of the importance attached to "value systems" is that they are focused on why things should or should not be done a certain way -- not on what the actual results are. But perhaps most important of all is that a value system's force comes first from its ability to identify and describe things, not from asking it to measure things. That is, a value system is a perspective, not a set of scales.
With that in mind, the discussion below takes a look at how the essential form of a "value system" works to provide critically distinctive identification (not measurement) in a "situation at hand".
To begin with an example, the following picture shows a highly generic framework, intended to more precisely declare the main factors that go into the often fuzzy notion of "values". These factors are what goes into actual decision-making in "real time".
In an ideal situation, this framework would represent an organization's or individual's "mindset" -- one with consistent awareness across all of the framework's factors. That is, there would be an equal and simultaneous grasp of what is "responsible" or not, and what is "right" or not. Armed with that awareness, the character of the action that is possible at any moment could be evaluated as one of a few basic types -- for example as being "virtuous" or being a "gamble".
The framework identifies these basic types by introducing and cross-referencing a major distinction between acts and beliefs -- which respectively translate into the corresponding difference between ethics and morals.
This framework can offer the terms that it uses without the burden of emotional and philosophical histories, because it is not concerned with persuasion but rather with description. All descriptive systems have built-in assumptions, and this framework is not an exception; however the purpose of the framework is completely explicit, with no ulterior motive -- and therefore it can easily be used or ignored according to the practical interest of the observer. It's not that one must compare acts and beliefs, but rather that one usually can.
Two important assumptions in the framework are indicated by the lower left and upper right tags added to the central 4x4 grid. (Arrows are also supplied to signify these assumptions in the diagram.)
The first assumption is that Laws are primarily concerned with enforcing behavior away from transgression and towards virtue. (Moving behavior both higher and towards the right eventually would converge in virtue.)
The second assumption is that Principles are primarily concerned with defining and promoting behaviors that meet acceptable standards. Principles "pull" behavior towards them.
The lower left and upper right regions in this framework are readily comparable. But what is among the most interesting experiences of our society and social value systems is that we are constantly bumping into behaviors that occupy the "middle zone" of sacrifice and gambling.
For example, with sacrifice, a person discovers, perhaps unexpectedly, that they feel an innate (not externally imposed) responsibility to do something that they actually did not otherwise believe was "right". The very occasion itself exposes the difference between what they recognize as acceptable from the standpoint of need, versus from the standpoint of preference. As very dramatic samples, commiting a mercy killing or submitting oneself to bullying in order to protect someone else both fall into this category. As a very mundane sample, giving up properly ("rightfully") earned profit in order to placate a confused customer falls into this category.
In the case of gambling, circumstances are such that the gambler (the actor) often knows a gamble is being taken when others cannot tell. TV shows regularly feature examples of this, where with the best intentions detectives search crime scenes without a warrant, or prosecutors try to use the "fruit of the poisoned tree". Yet sometimes the actor is doing something with self assuredness about rightness, while unaware of how it might be irresponsible. This latter case is accounted for by the framework, but in our discussion the framework is primarily interested in the awareness that motivates the actor. How does the actor decide to do something "irresponsible" in order to do something "right"?
The thinking behind this framework additionally assumes that the actor chooses to gamble -- to take an irresponsible action -- due to his perception of need, while the preference to cause something "desirable" is normally what actually provides the actor with his "justification". Clearly, this is the formula for pragmatism, or the idea that the ends justify the means. The problem lies in whether the "desirable" is also what's "right".
On the other corner, back to sacrifice, actors and their critics often mistakenly judge sacrifice as pragmatism. The judgement error lies in not realizing that sacrifice is not about the ends but instead about the means. Compared to gambling, sacrifice is about not having a choice in how to proceed and doing what is possible instead of doing nothing. This is why "heroes" are not always seen as "the good guys", even though they are usually distinguishable from anyone who is not heroic. Heroism is a way of being that is actually not defined by results. A sad and common example of this is the case of dysfunctional personal relationships wherein one party is routinely heroic but with only the effect of propagating a bad relationship. Likewise, heroic corporate leaders can quickly take the company to ruin. By the way, these examples only reinforce that the actor's overall frame of reference is the dominant one behind the activity. Meanwhile, external observers might readily conclude that the heroism was "noble" but still "not right". (Gambling is generally not seen as being noble.)
The above comments tend to suggest that action is based on needs while beliefs are based on preference -- and that suggestion is intentional even if conceptually experimental. Assuming the suggestion is valid, there is notably still no reason why both need and preference would be unaltered over time by experience and education, or by each other. So it is not a simple opposition of "needs vs. preference" that is unlikely to be valid -- rather, it is the actor's sophistication about the two of them that will make their opposition more or less complex and reconcilable.
We see this continuing dialog between them on a grand scale in the court system, where laws and principles tussle with each other for control of the interpretation to be applied to sacrifices and gambling -- to idiosyncratic heroism and to pragmatism. In light of the framework's clinical terms, the history is saturated with debates over things that seemed ethical but immoral, and things that seemed moral but unethical. Often, the challenge is to "unload" the labels of their psychological baggage, so that the important contrasts and comparisons can be made between the context that declares "right/wrong" (correct/incorrect) and the context that declares "responsible/irresponsible" (proper/improper).
On a corporate scale (i.e., a microsociety), requirements wrestle with policies to control the interpretation (and exploitation) of "opportunities". A company will agree that a lucrative and reasonable proposal should be accepted, but it will disagree that a non-executive should make the deal. The idea and goal of the deal might be right, but the non-executive taking charge of the transaction is irresponsible.
On a personal and private scale, roles wrestle with desires and wind up shaping personalities and relationships. In this discussion, the personal level is really not intended to be directly explored any further, but the recognition of the dynamic is not difficult on a personal level, so the discussion has leveraged this fact to help reinforce support of the framework's idea at other levels of organization or influence.
What clarification does the framework present, finally, about the notion of "values" ? The main clarification is that "values" are an idealized way of pointing at something more specific -- namely, the prescription for the balancing of beliefs and acts. But the framework shows that values come in a range from unambiguously good to unambiguously bad. Naturally we promote the "good", but this doesn't logically eliminate the others nor their actual practice.
The other key clarification is that the influence of values on action is by will of the actor -- meaning that values are not inherently compelling. Instead, the value system has to propose definitions of right and wrong, and propose definitions of responsible and irresponsible -- and the acting party (individual or organization) still has to find reasons to position itself within the range of values generated.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 18, 2006
Operations Value versus Operations Performance
To say the least, operations are a lot of costly effort. Then, because we're concerned about what our expended effort is worth, everyone wants to measure value and measure performance.
But not many bother to distinguish the two well enough.
The point of measuring performance is to determine what one's effort is worth. In fact, we'll often think and say that if performance is good then the effort was "valuable". But it doesn't necessarily follow that the effort wasn't valuable if performance was not good. Why not?
Don't confuse "value" and worth: instead, think of worth as the target impact of the overall effort -- or in other words the goal.
Meanwhile:
- Performance indicates how close to the goal your effort got you;
- Value indicates what was effective about how the effort got you there.
The danger in confusing the two is that steps taken to "correct" or "enhance" previous results can too easily turn into solving the wrong problem. For example, in the name of getting better results, changing value doesn't necessarily change performance -- nor vice-versa.
To choose and make the right kind of change, and to know how it will finally help, each kind of change -- value or performance -- must be accurately conceived, and their relationship to each other must also be defined.
I.
First, consider value. Put simply, value within operations is identified in the production of a significant difference.
Ordinarily, we think that "significant" means that things didn't just get different but that they got closer to what is desired. But more strictly speaking, any difference that alters the dynamics of conditions from what they had previously been must be recognized as "significant". In that case, determining value means understanding the meaning of whatever actual difference has occurred -- whether the meaning is desirable or not.
One of the main reasons to recognize different roles in organizations is to be able to focus on different kinds of value being created. For example:
- Leaders see themselves as creating culture.
- Managers see themselves as creating viability.
- Implementers see themselves as creating capability.
So they each have different ideas about value -- and also possibly about performance. More importantly, these different approaches have to be leveraged in a way that actually does improve overall performance, which means there must be some model or "performance logic" that explains and reconciles how the various approaches get the job done.
Let's take the example of what a business wants from an IT organization. To understand this relationship properly, it must be recognized that a business person who has responsibility for leadership, management or implementation is in the role of a "leader", "manager" or "implementer". Where IT is concerned:
- Leaders want IT to provide advantages through innovation and cost-reduction.
- Managers, serving the leaders, want complexity and risk minimized, and availability maximized.
- Implementers want customizations and configurations to be prefigured and completed, not ad hoc and hurried.
And to fully understand that state of affairs, it must be recognized that ideally an IT person can take on all of these roles as well. What should happen is that in sharing a given role, the business person and the IT person should divide the labor called for within that role, and conduct the labor to make the appropriate kind of difference with that role.
The division of labors starts with clarity on what the issues are to which each role should be primarily attentive.
- Leaders see change in terms of Opportunities and Threats.
- Managers see change in terms of Strengths and Weaknesses.
- Implementers see change in terms of Norms and Exceptions.
With the issues distinguished by role, a given role's two main viewpoints on responding to them are as a Decider and as an Enabler.
II.
In the Business/IT example, it is common that the Business takes the Decider view and IT takes the Enabler view. But -- to cite an instructive case in cooperative role-fulfillment -- these days IT executives are usually strongly urged to acquire the ability to understand things from both points of view, and to exploit that ability within their responsibility and domain expertise for managing IT.
In pursuit of goals (i.e., worth), everyone wants change to be positively valuable instead of indifferent or destructive. In the normal business context, recognized value is associated with the ability to positively influence the customer's acceptance of what you want to offer. For this purpose, the roles align with each other to systemically (not systematically) address each other's requirements and leverage each other's contributions. Leaders look at the market and respond to it; but Managers respond to the leaders, and Implementers respond to the managers. In the flow of requirements from leaders to implementers, this alignment -- or better, coherence -- can draft progress towards the goal. The point is that each role makes a kind of difference that nurtures the effort of the role next in line. In the following illustration, we go further and argue for a fully interconnected set of relationships.
Given this "closed loop" view, the final link of alignment would appear to be that Leaders will also look to Implementers in some way, not just to the market. Superficially, it's hard to argue against that link being "evaluation" or "assessment" -- that is, leaders taking the time to decide whether the implementers (were able to ) have realized what is needed.
But based on long-standing arguments in the field, most organizations need a better understanding of what this last apparent link is really about. The starting point for clarification is simple: Leaders should not tell implementers what to do -- but instead tell implementers what is needed. The better Business gets at defining needs, the more likely it will wind up with something valuable that it wants -- so it falls to Leaders to assure that Business Needs are well defined and communicated. For example, in the classic case of trying to coordinate business and IT interests, leaders need to set the business agenda for IT -- but business should not set the technology agenda.
But how do they forge their cooperation?
III.
In general, agreement, not command, is the "constructive" mode for their coherence or alignment:
- The business agenda for IT is made up of objectives; it should be all about when and why. Leaders and managers should agree on that -- on when some condition should be developed or pursued, and why. This will be reflected in planning.
- The production agenda is made up of requirements; it should be all about which and how. Managers and implementers should agree on which activities should be executed and how. This will naturally be reflected in the choice of producers but will also be reflected even more basically in processes.
- The technology agenda is made up of resources; it should be all about what and who. Implementers and Leaders should agree on what gets used and who gets to use it. But that agreement will be based on business needs. Policies, especially, will hold this connection.
The set of agreements describes how the continuously interacting roles stay contained in the loop.
How does this model the logic of performance instead of just the range of value types?
Going back to the basic definition of "performance", the focus is on how far the effort has taken us towards the goal. The key idea of the performance logic is that certain types of value are created by the effort, and the value-types combine to foster progress towards the goal. The "logic" of the progress is in how the value-combinations create advantages for, or remove barriers to, progress -- and the punchline is that progress itself must be defined before it can be measured. In the model offered by the diagram above, performance is seen in the additional degree to which a goal-oriented change means capability (through implementers), viability (through managers), and acceptability (through leaders). Said differently: what can be done, how well can it be done, and how much will we support doing it? To the extent that those factors account for successes already noted, their combination may be used as a predicter of future success. For the most part, amongst roles that generate these "success factors", the coherence provided by plans, processes and policies mirrors and directs the logic and its re-use.
The table below pulls together the above thoughts in a representation of discovering and cataloging the generation of these success factors. It overlays the distinction of the key roles with the main viewpoints within each role. The table lays out the task of identifying what decisions and enablements can be associated with each role -- and from there, alignment would be tested or attempted in plans, processes and policies.
IV.
Postscript:
Because production flows from implementers to the leaders, Managers bear the responsibility for proving that implementations can be aligned sustainably with the business objectives. In effect, Managers act as the "agents" and "brokers" for Leaders.
Of particular note in the IT example scenario, change is the biggest problem in IT, because it challenges standards, forecasts, and budgets -- all the things that make it possible for managers to minimize complexity and risk. For that reason, Change Management must be something that Leaders are willing to be champions for, otherwise they should not expect managers to do well.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2006
Seeing the "I" in Team
Some popular notions of teamwork promote "selflessness" as a critical success factor. But the reality is that success in execution relies on acceptance of requirements by people who conduct the activity, and those people never want to stop being "themselves". The question is, can they find a self that they prefer, in the context of the group's needs?
Organizations rely on an interesting balance of interests: that people will accept the way management combines its awareness of people as resources with its awareness of people's autonomy.
The basic factors in this balance can be teased out quickly as shown below:
The illustration suggests and even argues that the way a member of the organization operates is subject to at least four different predispositions. This raises the question of whether a member of the organization feels compatibility amongst his or her four different predispositions. Additionally, at any given time, one or more predisposition may dominate. And even further, the predisposition(s) can easily be complicated by the influence of superiors or peers who "cast" him or her in certain positions that may feel more or less tolerable or interesting.
Often, organizations -- or at least their managers -- take it for granted that the member's four predispositions are aligned. The vocabulary of jobs, as seen inthe bottom half of the illustration, promotes the idea that alignment is almost matter-of-fact. At least, the assumption is that the member of the organization is experiencing a level of compatibilty amongst the predispositions that is critically adequate for effectiveness in the work at hand. Just in case, a combination of incentives and penalties wrap around the person, helping them to rationally "bind" the four predispositions together themselves.
But despite these behavior-management tactics, psychology, politics and luck are amazingly effective at changing the balance. Each is an influence with a more or less direct "line of communication" to the four different predispositions.
High-visibility persons intuitively feel that their profile (of predispositions) is under more pronounced scrutiny than do low-profile persons. In effect, the stakes are higher, and this raises the sensitivity that their predispositions have to the influence of psychology, politics and luck. It also raises the level of need to develop or exercise personal skills for managing the predispositions.
But this is not to point out an issue special to the upper ranks. Instead, the observation is more one that proves the point by magnifying it. To the extent that the organization's key objectives depend on personal commitment to goals and to "professionalism", efforts to leverage a balance of predispositions must practice a higher consciousness. They cannot afford to lose sight of the many ways that the person's four predispositions might combine to offer acceptance or resistance to the experience of the initiatives that the person predicts for themselves. The truth is, without the "I", there is not much chance of having a team.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 29, 2006
KM, and Measuring the Value of Change
We normally perceive change in terms of "good" change or "bad" change. That is, usually, the value of change seems readily measurable. But why is this? The answer is, because we have a preference before we notice the change, which gives us a reason to notice it.
The usual approach is to first define "value" -- namely, the difference that we want the future state of affairs to have from the current state -- and then to go about measuring the progress that action and time make towards achieving the desired difference. Here, the issue is that although actions and time are both highly various, we usually decide (prescriptively) which actions and timing we will watch.
Because that approach is such a routine for managers, it is all the more baffling to go about it the opposite and less frequent way -- defining the changes that action and time make, and afterwards figuring out what is the meaning of the changes to the current state of affairs. That is, in what sense are the changes recognizable, post facto, as "progress"? What, exactly, is progressing, and do we want it to?
Said that way, we might conclude that, as in the former approach, the majority of management's attention to the phenomenon of change is "regular" and pragmatic, concerned with oversight and with assigning old or current meaning to new observations.
Yet that passes up the home territory of insight -- or, as in the less frequent latter approach, assigning new meaning to old or current observations.
Put more precisely, the distinction is one of being practical versus theoretical. For most business concerns, the problem with theoretical value is that it's either too slow or too speculative to realize -- which makes it expensive to sustain.
Case in point: the influence of knowledge in the organization is often seen as stealthy or unmanaged, provoking changes of unknown value. But harnessing it for managed value frequently appears to lean towards the expensively hypothetical.
This is where many KM efforts get stranded today. Yet meanwhile, that makes it similar to the issue of R&D. In R&D, there is normally some investment justified by the expectation that significant future value will come from new products -- or said more forcefully, justified by the belief that innovation in production is necessary.
Justifications specifically call out the connection between motivation and measurement -- which indicates the importance of thinking about why to measure -- not just what to measure.
Given the example of R&D, the question in most organizations is whether innovation can also be culturally accommodated as a normal and important phase of the ongoing "production lifecycle" of adopted operational knowledge.
The way most organizations recognize their adopted operational knowledge is as "competency". Thereafter, the way they measure the value associated with changes in competency is by measuring the before-and-after difference observed in what looks like a capability: predictably achieving progress through selected modes of action in given situations. At least casually, everyone sees that as "performance", and thinks about performance improvement.
Of course, one of the practical approaches to incorporating changes of competency is simply to buy the already proved "better" competency -- as in hiring "experience". The catch here is not in the difficulty of finding such talent, but instead in correctly defining what it is about the talent that demonstrates the greater likelihood of providing greater predictability of progress. Ordinarily we look for that demonstration in proof provided by prior known situations, or "performance histories"...
But as we know, all workers must adjust to the complexity of the organizational environment, and those who might have seemed to be the most experienced people coming in do not always prove to be the most "effective" people later. For example, struggles with the current work environment (context!) can strongly frustrate the promise of previous experience.
In fact, the most distinguishing problem to solve through knowledge management -- the most challenging "given situation" to address with competency -- is to enable us to know what to do about what we don't know. The main example of this is an ability to solve new problems brought on by dynamics that currently lie outside of our control. (Politics, competition, economics, or whatever.)
Operationally, we can think of the level of that ability as a demonstration of "intellectual productivity"... the degree to which knowledge inputs generate situational effectiveness. But explaining that productivity puts a premium on recognizing improvements in problem-solving capability, instead of on the historical outcomes of solution efforts. Outcomes may indicate improvement, but managerially, the emphasis must be on the mechanism that produces the outcome.
Articulating the features of "successful problem solving" gives a list of (mainly behavioral) characteristics. Those characteristics are really the desired direct results (i.e., differences achieved) of applying knowledge management as an approach to changing operations.
Bluntly summarized, the main goal of knowledge management is to change how things are done, not to change what the doing delivers. The deliverables may or may not subsequently change because the production changed -- but the primary importance is in transforming the production itself in "necessary" ways, so that deliverables can change.
That gets us back to the motivational aspect: the challenge is to define what it is about the production that is necessary to change and why. If successfully articulated and agreed, that particular notion of "necessity" puts pragmatism into the overall KM effort -- easing justification of sustaining investment in the effort.
In re-engineering operations with KM, two broad categories of response to the necessities are: the type of knowledge to develop and incorporate; and, the mode of incorporating the knowledge in the real-time of operations. Aligning things across the two categories can happen as a matter of determining a best practice (process optimization), or as pursuit of an innovation (R&D), but the point is to ensure that this alignment actually occurs. The difference between the current degree of alignment and the target degree is the value of change to be observed.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 3, 2006
Driving IT Bang for the Buck: Evolution, Improvement, or Innovation?
When we think of effective IT spending, we're focused on making the best current use of the money, given competing alternatives or emerging options. But increasingly, the basis of effectiveness in business spending on IT proves to be in how the business manages its reliance on IT.
Sometimes we don't have enough visibility of legitimate alternatives and options. The urgency of our attention to the purpose that justifies the spend means that this lack of perspective could be left unsolved. But for that reason, a diligent evaluation practice looks for opportunity costs that should be factored in. As part of this diligence, what remains to be emphasized even more is not how the IT will make the organization work, but rather how the organization is going to make the IT work.
I.
In the full cycle of management, the business first conceives and identifies why IT is needed before it makes any other decisions. To avoid taking the need for granted, this first decision means describing the business model in terms of what potentials are granted it by available IT. That is immediately followed with a forecast of how sustainable those potentials are -- which necessarily means identifying and selecting how to make them sustainable.
When that architectural aspect is clarified, the next part of the decision cycle must create a "delivery" organization that can constructively practice the architecture. This means two things:
- establishing the sources and resources that will produce the infrastructure from the architecture, and
- establishing the processes that will link IT production cycles to business operating cycles.
At that decision stage, reliable design and reliable production easily wind up being qualifying criteria used to distinguish the various opportunities, organizations and risks that the business will incorporate as the elements of realizing of its model.
Thus, investments in their incorporation aim to relate reliability to the goals of business. That aim immediately offers a perspective from which a high-level assessment of the current business investments might be done. Normally this makes us think of metrics; but as pictured below, the main point is to allow the perspective to stage comparisons and guide questioning. Here we might just catalog known commitments by critical business goals.
II.
Those commitments might then involve or indicate spending on IT. But, as described there and below, the associated "IT investments" are not about IT per se but rather about the application of IT. We can understand the idea of "application" by considering the purpose of the IT utilization.
- At the highest level of distinction, the business goals of incorporating the opportunities, organizations and risks are recovery, health or growth.
- Within each of those goals, sub-goals are development, maintenance, and change.
- And within each of the subgoals, another sub-level features assessment, design, and control.
Consequently, it is possible to ask questions at the management level such as, "Can we control the maintenance of our health?" or "Can we assess the development of our recovery?"
These are not IT questions -- but they are questions that present opportunities for IT to enable successful management outcomes. In turn, management is focused on enabling successful business outcomes.
Taking that framework of IT incorporation as the main perspective, it is easy to appreciate that business utilization of IT is nearly always altering something -- either a behavior or a current state.
The importance of how IT is managed, though, is in how well IT supports management's ability to intentionally change how the business can behave. (From here on we'll consider "change" in this larger context.)
III.
The observation just made emphasizes that we can and should compare the kinds of value offered by different classes of change, and then associate IT's effects to those values -- as contributions.
To demonstrate that, compare evolution, improvement and innovation.
Relative to each other, these kinds of change differently affect the state of the business:
- evolution permanently modifies the fitness of the business's model to the dynamics of the environment in which demand develops;
- improvement modifies the fitness of its conduct to the current and targeted demand;
- innovation modifies the fitness of its output to the needs of the environment's population.
According to perceived conditions regarding recovery, health or growth, business executives must determine when any of these three modes of change requires higher-priority attention. A timely reaction is mandatory, but proactive change is potentially strategic to optimizing the benefit versus risk of those conditions. That may result in new or extended initiatives to create the necessary related sponsorship and opportunity, including competencies and technical support that might drive spending.
To support a proactive stance, a good device to have would be a framework for envisioning, monitoring and ultimately predicting circumstances that we can agree will signify a need for change. Not coincidentally, those circumstances have the look and feel of key ideas offered within the business justifications for IT spending. That device might look like the following:
IV.
But given those considerations, executives and managers together should ask the "big picture" questions -- for example, whether an improvement initiative is the most likely candidate to produce better recovery, as opposed to an innovation initiative. At the same time, it is important to recognize that one kind of change may be an element of another kind and acquire priority that way. After all, form allows conduct, and conduct (i.e., production) allows product. As another more specific example, innovation may accelerate evolution, and improvement may create more opportunity (security, income, knowledge, etc.) for innovation. Thus, an improvement initative can strategically foster the goal of accelerated evolution. But likewise, the requirements for supporting an adopted innovation may obsolete improvement efforts dedicated to earlier production, eliminating that legacy cost while potentially releasing resources for new purposes.
These interrelationships are characteristic observations in portfolio management.
IT management must be focused on applying IT to business operations present and future. On the one hand, it is typical that an IT budget might be evaluated in terms of how much spending goes to "maintenance" versus "R&D" and so forth. Those generic classes correspond to how IT responds to the business requests for support.
But the rollup of dollars into those classes can easily obscure the more important and time-sensitive issue of whether the right things have been selected for maintenance, or the right things are being pursued through R&D. By calling for a distinction between wise spending and merely approved spending, we get to a conversation about how management leverages IT for the business -- as opposed to mere responses. In that conversation business and IT organizations together find the logical path to measuring the effectiveness of the decisions, and to measuring how much that effectiveness was worth.
The view that unifies their concerns is not one about how "IT investments create business value", but rather one that business value subscribes IT.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 4, 2006
Change How You Change
The overall session plan for the strategic planning retreat was conventional. It began with a period of discovery and investigation, and would follow up with some prioritizations and then finally some commitment-making. But now it's running late. Then the attendees hit the realization that they don't yet agree on how to agree...
This moment is likely to recur; we can expect it at least once during discovery/investigation; again during prioritizations; and yet again during the committing phase.
The way the sessions are currently formatted is supposed to get them past these points, but now that's being seriously tested. The particular instruments being used along the way -- collaborations, pop quizes or games, spreadsheets, anecdotes, humor, testimonials and others -- are important accelerators and steering wheels, but are they even the level on which this barrier needs to be tackled?
We can detect the heat of the moment by someone saying "How about, let's try this..." and not infrequently the group willpower to make progress will find something that seems to cure the moment. But what if this is really skirting the issue -- which is that not knowing how to agree is a symptom of not knowing how to change?
I.
Real change hasn't occurred until the party that must sustain the change has become an agent of the change. For this to happen, that party's consciousness has to be altered. When the party is an entire group, the timing might be more difficult to anticipate, but the rule remains the same.
The change of group consciousness is a pattern we come to recognize -- occurring in four main stages that will ultimately allow a strategy to be adopted.
To see this clearly, the three-stage session format must first be set aside, although it might later be brought back more clearly as a vehicle instead of as a driver.
Even then, though the direction is towards making strategy adoption allowable, the destination must be correctly understood. There will still not yet be a strategy plan to adopt; but this is appropriate and, more to the point, necessary.
Why is that more to the point? Because making strategy is inherently a creative process and the bulk of the value is in the process of making, not in the product (aka the strategy plan) made.
Once the product exists, the value of the product is not a function of strategy -- rather it is a function of applying the strategy plan, which really is the issue of execution. Execution accounts for the mandate "change how you succeed". Because everyone wants to focus on success, it's natural that almost everything gets seen through the filter of execution.
But Strategy accounts for the mandate "change how you change." The most significant transformation that the organization has to go through is not the difference between new directives versus old ones, or between certain new processes versus old ones, but instead between being routinely strategic versus not being routinely strategic. The key challenge for most organizations now is to generally and continuously behave strategically, instead of simply executing approvingly.
II.
Here's how, in these sessions, we get to the real "strategic goal", which is actually not a way of being new but instead a new way of being.
First, we learn or otherwise acknowledge that needs are not requirements. Too often groups go into "strategy sessions" believing that the reason they are there is to find solutions instead of finding themselves. The solutions of course are connected to perceived problems, which in turn are connected to ideas about intolerable current differences from a state that "should be". (Observe how much churning is associated just with the disparities in those perceptions...) This issue of what "should" be is most often set forth as a future state which is described as goals. Those goals are normally "felt" like requirements to meet. So what's wrong with this? Answer: the feeling is almost invariably interpreted through familiarity with the way things have already been done. That feeling is about what, and how much, of the familiar stuff has to change. Granted, it is sensible to think about "how do we get there from here" -- but this is not going to establish the reason or justification for adopting an emerging strategy. Actually, it's a source of wrangling over commitments to the past.
The one thing that must be clear before the next step in consciousness can emerge is instead a common awareness of what need must be met. Meeting the need will happen in the future, but the importance of the need is that it already exists. Yet the need will not be properly acknowledged until the stakeholders have been identified and ranked by their importance as target beneficiaries. Keeping in mind that we ourselves are stakeholders, too, our responsibility to the stakeholder(s) defines the need that must be addressed. We have to both acknowledge the primary stakeholder's mandate, and agree to cooperate with it. To round out the understanding of need, we also have to be able to relate our own interests as a stakeholder to the highest priority other stakeholder. It is necessary to ask, "What is our purpose", but it is insufficient; we must also ask "Why is that purpose ours?"
In the next step, that clarity of need sets the perspective that sorts out the discoveries from current-state investigations so that effective selection and organization of knowledgable inputs can occur. What should come here is visibility that allows us to identify the right problem to solve. This step is often deceptive because of the difficulty of defining problems in the way they need to be defined. In this phase, a "problem" is a necessary difference to be made, for which the significance is stated and agreed but the approach and means is not. In other words, the problem is the "value proposition". The working definition of value is "a distinction with a differenc