One of the challenges we have wrestled with since we launched Post*Shift is how to combine the best elements from new theory, ideas and models in the most practical and actionable way possible, whilst retaining enough flexibility to address the unique features and needs of each part of the organisations we work with. We have always been a very practical team, and have been practising the implementation of new ways of working using social technology since before there were labels like Digital Transformation, Social Business or even E2.0, so we have seen a lot of small things that work and much more that don’t.
It is great to have so many gurus, business books and management frameworks available, and last week’s Drucker Forum in Vienna was another rich source of insights into the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ (if not always the ‘how’) of Twenty-First Century business. There has been such an explosion recently in books and studies about new forms of organisational structure and new approaches to management that even nerds like us can hardly keep up. At every major conference, preachers, teachers and one-model gurus are to be found waving their hands and offering thoughts about the possibility of change in complex organisations. Sometimes we are inspired and excited, and sometimes we sit there quietly sucking our teeth and wondering whether some of these speakers are aware of the painful, complicated, imperfect landscape inside large organisations that makes change so hard to achieve.
What we need from theory
In seeking a consistent approach that can enable company management and internal teams to digest these ideas and turn them into actionable, locally-relevant insights, we have asked ourselves the following questions:
- how can we help organisations navigate the relevant theories and ideas and find the bits that can help them address their own needs?
- how can we translate big ideas into small, everyday actions so that change becomes gradual and accepted?
- how can we evaluate one approach against another if the theories or models start from different assumptions?
In trying to answer these, we have now extended our initial framework of target attributes in both directions to become a solid end-to-end methodology that can translate theory into measurable actions that can be undertaken by various levels of an organisation as part of a gradual, evolutionary approach to digital transformation; or, working in the other direction, it can start with local use cases and needs, helping guide them in the direction of higher-level organisational capabilities they make possible. What excites us about this is that it allows us to create a toolkit and a way of bringing together various small-scale change efforts that can help individual teams and managers to manage change locally, rather than it remain in the realm of top-down initiatives.
Towards the Quantified Organisation: Change becomes Routine
A key problem with organisational change efforts has been this notion of change as an initiative – i.e. a one-off, top-down wave outside the flow of daily work, which might produce short-term improvement, but rarely sustainable impact. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini articulate this well in their recent McKinsey piece Build a change platform, not a change program. Just as knowledge sharing works better if it is part of the daily flow of work, perhaps change would be more likely to sustain if it too was part of our everyday management of teams and organisations. New behaviours, habits, practices and working culture take time to develop, and they tend to endure only if they are embodied in day-to-day work, not mandated from above.
People are becoming familiar with the idea of Quantified Self – tracking personal health and fitness data to improve wellness – but so far, the idea of Quantified Organisation has only been applied to individual task performance rather than the health and shape of the organisation itself. Just as a crash diet rarely works for individuals to become more healthy compared to gradual QS improvement, which is more effective and sustainable, so big-bang top-down change projects rarely enjoy sustained impact over the long term. Instead of thinking about change as a series of expensive, high-impact projects where a pre-defined model is imposed on a sceptical organisation, we should be monitoring the health and effectiveness of our organisational structures and practices on an ongoing basis, tweaking, iterating and shaping them based on measurement and feedback loops.
One of the great lessons of QS is that if the experience of this data is good enough, and close enough to real-time, then people usually begin to move the needle almost imperceptibly in the right direction without necessarily being conscious of changed behaviour – much like biofeedback in medicine. Our take on the idea of the Quantified Organisation is a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against the desired future operating state.
Looking through our knowledgebase of theories, methods and ideas, we realised that each can be expressed in terms of required organisational attributes and capabilities, which gives us a way to compare and combine – or mix and match – between models and to evaluate them against each other in specific circumstances. So in our framework, capabilities are first class objects that can be derived from more general goals (‘faster to market’, ‘one face to the customer’ etc) and attributes represent what needs to be in place to achieve them; but also, crucially, they can be either measured or qualitatively assessed. Note that measuring the existence of key capabilities is not the same, in most cases, as existing KPI approaches to assessing outcomes.
Understanding how to achieve these capabilities then helps us enumerate specific, granular recommendations and measure the impact of their implementation over time. These granular recommendations become elements of a to-do list that can be managed, triaged and prioritised on a week-by-week basis in much the same way as agile software development. Think of the goals as agile user stories for the organisation: “We would like to be able to spin up a new team in a day, with everything we need to serve a new customer account”. As Jeff Gothelf wrote in HBR this month, agile as a management principle has huge potential to improve the way organisations work, so it makes sense to organise organisational improvement in the same way.
So, now we have a model that can take a given organisation (or just a department or team), analyse what is wrong or needs to change and, informed both by theory and aspiration, define target capabilities required to improve it; then, we can create a categorised set of recommendations for small actions and changes that can move us forward towards a desired target operating state, whilst measuring progress every step along the way.
Organisational change becomes a weekly agenda item, seeing what works and what can be tweaked, rather than a biennial or triennial major initiative that throws everything up in the air, but ultimately might not achieve traction and change much at all. Importantly, it also gives everybody involved a simple way of assessing what they think needs to change and promoting awareness of the organisational assumptions in which they operate, much as QS has done for the individual. We started with an organisational capability framework of fifteen attributes relating to the main areas of structure, culture and practice, but I would imagine this will change as we refine the model and incorporate additional goals from new theories and models.
What this means for our work
For us, this is exciting, because it means we go into 2015 with an alternative model to traditional strategy consulting or technology implementation as a way to engage with our clients, and crucially one that focuses on how we really add value, rather than trying to shoehorn our work into old ways of bringing external input to a client organisation. This builds on the success of work we have undertaken with clients this year to translate business strategy into digital transformation goals, and then organise the resulting recommended actions in a system that can be dipped into and adjusted as needs change over time.
We can now go further to create a toolkit and a management system for ongoing change actions that puts control in the hands of the individual teams and managers who want to improve their area of operations; but rather than offering a single, fixed methodology, this approach enables people and organisations to assess and assimilate new idea, theories and models that emerge in the future in a way that allows comparison between them and most important of all, consistent measurement of progress and results. Our goal is to enable individual teams, managers and change agents inside organisations to do this work themselves, rather than wait for a combination of executive edict and external consultants to do it for them.
There is something fundamentally wrong with calling it “Change” programs or platforms, which is that this is an idea from the viewpoint from the organization. Regular non-HR employees don’t say “I know my change platform.” If you’re lucky, they might say “I am adaptable.”
On the other hand, I bet many of them would be willing to say, “If only I could do this differently than I have to, I could do it (sooner / faster / easier / better).” And they would rather not have to learn the context behind the change they need to see happen, and work at it to get it changed. That learning the context behind all “this” is what slows or blocks people. Eventually they throw their hands up in frustration because the more complex the organization, the harder it is to do it.
My point–even as I use the phrase myself– is that we need to dump the idea of change management, and work on how individual people and their groups can be allowed to be flexible and adaptable.
I am not sure I fully understand your point, but I would start from the POV that organisational structure and practice is currently a barrier to individuals and small groups being able to exercise their adaptability and do things different at a granular level. There is widespread recognition that needs to “change”, whether using the old terminology of “change management” which I implicitly criticise n the post) or newer terms such as digital transformation. Essentially, until we remove some of the organisational barriers to new, better, more agile ways of working, there is a real limit to what people can achieve in that direction.
For the organisation and its management, and indeed all the way down to a team lead, we think there needs to be an awareness of why and how to reform the organisational structure, precisely to create the space for new ways of working to emerge. I think my point is that this should move from being top-down initiative-led towards a constant tweaking of structure, culture and practice based on feedback and measurement of the kind of organisation they want to become. So, yes, in a sense this is an organisational play, not a tool for individual work improvement, for the reasons I mention in the paragraph above. Without that, in many orgs, individuals and their groups will not be able to achieve the level of flexibility and adaptability they are probably already capable of.
Incidentally, one aspect of the described approach that excites me is helping teams (not just whole orgs or divisions) to become aware of their structural context and practice, and to set goals for improving that themselves, rather than wait to have it done to them, so whilst this is not currently a tool for everybody, it does have the potential to increase self-management one level up, at the scale of teams.
Lee
There is something fundamentally wrong with calling it “Change” programs or platforms, which is that this is an idea from the viewpoint from the organization. Regular non-HR employees don’t say “I know my change platform.” If you’re lucky, they might say “I am adaptable.”
On the other hand, I bet many of them would be willing to say, “If only I could do this differently than I have to, I could do it (sooner / faster / easier / better).” And they would rather not have to learn the context behind the change they need to see happen, and work at it to get it changed. That learning the context behind all “this” is what slows or blocks people. Eventually they throw their hands up in frustration because the more complex the organization, the harder it is to do it.
My point–even as I use the phrase myself– is that we need to dump the idea of change management, and work on how individual people and their groups can be allowed to be flexible and adaptable.
I am not sure I fully understand your point, but I would start from the POV that organisational structure and practice is currently a barrier to individuals and small groups being able to exercise their adaptability and do things different at a granular level. There is widespread recognition that needs to “change”, whether using the old terminology of “change management” which I implicitly criticise n the post) or newer terms such as digital transformation. Essentially, until we remove some of the organisational barriers to new, better, more agile ways of working, there is a real limit to what people can achieve in that direction.
For the organisation and its management, and indeed all the way down to a team lead, we think there needs to be an awareness of why and how to reform the organisational structure, precisely to create the space for new ways of working to emerge. I think my point is that this should move from being top-down initiative-led towards a constant tweaking of structure, culture and practice based on feedback and measurement of the kind of organisation they want to become. So, yes, in a sense this is an organisational play, not a tool for individual work improvement, for the reasons I mention in the paragraph above. Without that, in many orgs, individuals and their groups will not be able to achieve the level of flexibility and adaptability they are probably already capable of.
Incidentally, one aspect of the described approach that excites me is helping teams (not just whole orgs or divisions) to become aware of their structural context and practice, and to set goals for improving that themselves, rather than wait to have it done to them, so whilst this is not currently a tool for everybody, it does have the potential to increase self-management one level up, at the scale of teams.
Lee
Your post here Lee and the first point Rawn makes in his comment reminds me of an assertion I made in a recent post (1st link below):
Organisations are dynamic not static. They don’t so much exist as transmute, continuously.
It seems that the three of us agree that this is a fundamental truth, but one with which only a minority of organizations have currently chosen to grapple to their potential competitive advantage.
And Lee, I also interpret your post as our having a shared intention to redefine business performance management. What we’re contemplating is “not so much performance management in the old simple counting sense, but in the full biomimetic sense.” (2nd link)
Lastly in the same spirit, and if pasting a third link below isn’t too egregious, I cannot contemplate a ‘quantified organization’ without it consisting of many a ‘organized self’.
http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/02/goal-become-social-business-get-revolution-started/
http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/03/organizational-performance-private-conversation-public-now/
http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/10/mcveillance-coveillance-and-socioveillance-in-the-context-of-social-business/
Hi Philip. Three links? Why Ambassador, you are spoiling us! 😉
I agree with each of these points, but regarding performance management, I see our (Post*Shift’s) role as focusing on the health and performance of the structures and practices, rather than the individuals and teams (I am sure there will be many new ways and new tools to help with that) and similarly, whilst I completely agree that Quantified Orgs will be comprised of many a Quantified Self, we see our role as developing thinking (and possibly tools in the broadest sense) for the former, as there will be plenty of others looking at the latter.
Performance management, as manifest by the Balanced Scorecard and associated Strategy Maps, is very much integral to the appropriate sustained alignment (ie, continuous realignment) of structures and practices I think. Per Kaplan and Norton’s Alignment – http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1591396905
Of course, Kaplan and Norton’s work is framed in terms of functional structures and more traditional hierarchical organization than you and I would condone these days, but I suspect they were only framing their recommendations in the dominant context they found around them at the time (and, it has to be said, persists). This is why I explored the Influence Scorecard in my book, aspiring to leverage today’s centralized structures and BPM capabilities to embed performance management as sensory feedback throughout the organization. Explored a bit further in Attenzi.
Having said organizations don’t so much exist as transmute, I wonder, with my obsession for all things complex / emergent, whether one can consider an objective snapshot of an organization at all, even if the shutter speed was 1/1000th second. Is your Post*Shift the same as that for each one of your colleagues? In which case, the Quantified Org only makes sense viewed through each of our respective lenses; hence the Organized Self. While I’m no more than an amateur org sociologist, perhaps this then aligns with the modern critique of Marxist reification.
I have not read the Kaplan and Norton’s book you cite, but am familiar with the approach. Nothing against it, but as you say, it is very much framed in the existing paradigm of organisational structure. I have some deeper concerns about performance management anyway, and how measures can distort priorities (Goodhart’s law, etc), but I like your idea of the influence scorecard as part of an approach based on sensory feedback throughout the org (apologies i have not yet read Attenzi, so I am basing this on what you wrote above).
My own view on whether or not organisations exist is rather Schroedinger-like. They do, in the sense that even entities like the Yakuza can sustain a set of behaviours, culture and an organisation for 400 years+, but at the same time, I guess you could argue they are constantly transmuting. But even if the organisation is nothing more than a shared hallucination of its members, I would say it exists and we can call it a thing.
You are spot on with regard to the question of whether there is a single valid view of the organisation, and whether or not individuals or teams might have their own map. I was just discussing this question over lunch yesterday. Quite a tantalising proposition! But I am currently (tentatively) thinking of this more as subjective (or multi-perspective) Quantified Org, rather than Quantified Self, which I see as being about personal health measures (pace Adriana et al) or possibly personal performance management (a la Betterworks.com for example). It’s not that I think these categories are less important, it is just that I see a gap/need for the view of the org.
As for reification and it’s critiques, whilst I see some value in Lukacs and his work, I think neither Marx, Lukacs nor later critics such as Althusser knew enough about neuro-science, identity formation, etc to fully understand why we hoomans like to turn things into Things. (I hope you are satisfied now you have given me University flashbacks. )
Do you fancy lunch to debate this further? It sounds like this is adjacent to areas you have thought more deeply about than me, so I would love to learn more.
This is a fantastic discussion. If the two of you do meet for lunch, I hope you post some of the highlights.
Cheers Lee. Finally got round to doing this thread justice with a post of my own: The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self.
http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2015/02/the-quantified-self-the-quantified-organization-and-the-organized-self/
Performance management, as manifest by the Balanced Scorecard and associated Strategy Maps, is very much integral to the appropriate sustained alignment (ie, continuous realignment) of structures and practices I think. Per Kaplan and Norton’s Alignment – http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1591396905
Of course, Kaplan and Norton’s work is framed in terms of functional structures and more traditional hierarchical organization than you and I would condone these days, but I suspect they were only framing their recommendations in the dominant context they found around them at the time (and, it has to be said, persists). This is why I explored the Influence Scorecard in my book, aspiring to leverage today’s centralized structures and BPM capabilities to embed performance management as sensory feedback throughout the organization. Explored a bit further in Attenzi.
Having said organizations don’t so much exist as transmute, I wonder, with my obsession for all things complex / emergent, whether one can consider an objective snapshot of an organization at all, even if the shutter speed was 1/1000th second. Is your Post*Shift the same as that for each one of your colleagues? In which case, the Quantified Org only makes sense viewed through each of our respective lenses; hence the Organized Self. While I’m no more than an amateur org sociologist, perhaps this then aligns with the modern critique of Marxist reification.
Your post here Lee and the first point Rawn makes in his comment reminds me of an assertion I made in a recent post (1st link below):
Organisations are dynamic not static. They don’t so much exist as transmute, continuously.
It seems that the three of us agree that this is a fundamental truth, but one with which only a minority of organizations have currently chosen to grapple to their potential competitive advantage.
And Lee, I also interpret your post as our having a shared intention to redefine business performance management. What we’re contemplating is “not so much performance management in the old simple counting sense, but in the full biomimetic sense.” (2nd link)
Lastly in the same spirit, and if pasting a third link below isn’t too egregious, I cannot contemplate a ‘quantified organization’ without it consisting of many a ‘organized self’.
http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/02/goal-become-social-business-get-revolution-started/
http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/03/organizational-performance-private-conversation-public-now/
http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/10/mcveillance-coveillance-and-socioveillance-in-the-context-of-social-business/
Hi Philip. Three links? Why Ambassador, you are spoiling us! 😉
I agree with each of these points, but regarding performance management, I see our (Post*Shift’s) role as focusing on the health and performance of the structures and practices, rather than the individuals and teams (I am sure there will be many new ways and new tools to help with that) and similarly, whilst I completely agree that Quantified Orgs will be comprised of many a Quantified Self, we see our role as developing thinking (and possibly tools in the broadest sense) for the former, as there will be plenty of others looking at the latter.
Performance management, as manifest by the Balanced Scorecard and associated Strategy Maps, is very much integral to the appropriate sustained alignment (ie, continuous realignment) of structures and practices I think. Per Kaplan and Norton’s Alignment – http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1591396905
Of course, Kaplan and Norton’s work is framed in terms of functional structures and more traditional hierarchical organization than you and I would condone these days, but I suspect they were only framing their recommendations in the dominant context they found around them at the time (and, it has to be said, persists). This is why I explored the Influence Scorecard in my book, aspiring to leverage today’s centralized structures and BPM capabilities to embed performance management as sensory feedback throughout the organization. Explored a bit further in Attenzi.
Having said organizations don’t so much exist as transmute, I wonder, with my obsession for all things complex / emergent, whether one can consider an objective snapshot of an organization at all, even if the shutter speed was 1/1000th second. Is your Post*Shift the same as that for each one of your colleagues? In which case, the Quantified Org only makes sense viewed through each of our respective lenses; hence the Organized Self. While I’m no more than an amateur org sociologist, perhaps this then aligns with the modern critique of Marxist reification.
I have not read the Kaplan and Norton’s book you cite, but am familiar with the approach. Nothing against it, but as you say, it is very much framed in the existing paradigm of organisational structure. I have some deeper concerns about performance management anyway, and how measures can distort priorities (Goodhart’s law, etc), but I like your idea of the influence scorecard as part of an approach based on sensory feedback throughout the org (apologies i have not yet read Attenzi, so I am basing this on what you wrote above).
My own view on whether or not organisations exist is rather Schroedinger-like. They do, in the sense that even entities like the Yakuza can sustain a set of behaviours, culture and an organisation for 400 years+, but at the same time, I guess you could argue they are constantly transmuting. But even if the organisation is nothing more than a shared hallucination of its members, I would say it exists and we can call it a thing.
You are spot on with regard to the question of whether there is a single valid view of the organisation, and whether or not individuals or teams might have their own map. I was just discussing this question over lunch yesterday. Quite a tantalising proposition! But I am currently (tentatively) thinking of this more as subjective (or multi-perspective) Quantified Org, rather than Quantified Self, which I see as being about personal health measures (pace Adriana et al) or possibly personal performance management (a la Betterworks.com for example). It’s not that I think these categories are less important, it is just that I see a gap/need for the view of the org.
As for reification and it’s critiques, whilst I see some value in Lukacs and his work, I think neither Marx, Lukacs nor later critics such as Althusser knew enough about neuro-science, identity formation, etc to fully understand why we hoomans like to turn things into Things. (I hope you are satisfied now you have given me University flashbacks. )
Do you fancy lunch to debate this further? It sounds like this is adjacent to areas you have thought more deeply about than me, so I would love to learn more.
This is a fantastic discussion. If the two of you do meet for lunch, I hope you post some of the highlights.
Cheers Lee. Finally got round to doing this thread justice with a post of my own: The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self.
http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2015/02/the-quantified-self-the-quantified-organization-and-the-organized-self/