Recent Posts
What do we mean by an Org OS?
"The greatest challenge for today’s leaders is how to upgrade their organisation’s operating system” This is how we frame the conversation about organisational change and the role of digital transformation on our newly-updated website, so I thought I would explain our...
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Our Guide to the Evolution of the Digital Workplace
A few weeks ago, LJ hosted a vibrant and well-informed twitter chat about the future of the digital workplace, which we summarised in a blog post. It occurred to us that there are a lot of people and organisations still working hard to develop a basic connected...
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Digital Workplace Retrospective | #PS_Salon Summary
Last Friday I hosted our first ever #PS_Salon discussion on Twitter, conducting a retrospective of the Digital Workplace. Hearing what the Digital Workplace community have learned over the last 20+ years and speculating on what will come next proved to be a fertile ground for conversation…
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Using technology to fight technology; tips for learning in the 21st century
As technologies continue to advance and the amount of information grows, “keeping up” can feel overwhelming. This is not going to change, in fact, it will worsen as technologies and work environments continue to evolve. An employees’ learning agility is a critical factor of success, and should be a key competency in recruitment…
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Building Ethical Organisations
As organisations struggle with the increasing complexity of change, they are at increased risk of moral missteps. The challenge of ensuring products are ethically designed can come second to being disruptive, innovative and cutting-edge. Many large organisations take their cue from Facebook, Google and Uber who are not covering themselves in glory in this area…
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Why “not enough time” is no excuse
We do a lot of work with organisations to help embed new ways of working enabled by the digital workplace. One of the most commonly cited barriers to adoption of modern work techniques is employees who think they lack the time to try new things. More often than not, this objection comes from leaders, rather than front-line teams…
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Diversity-as-a-System
A 21st century organisation uses systems thinking to enable agility. Shipping working code is an example of a highly valuable system that most startups develop early. When startups scale, everything moves so fast that the sole focus is on shipping the product to specified deadlines. If diversity isn’t engrained into the system of shipping the product, it will be forgotten during scaling…
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Trustfulness and professionalism
In a complex world where few of us have time to understand the intricate detail of data, accounting, law and perhaps even code, we will need trusted professionals to help us navigate complexity. So whilst automation and technology will probably reduce headcount in the profession overall, the prize for those who can use our new technology superpowers to create value for their clients will be ever greater. Algorithmic transparency and code standards can help us trust the underlying machinery, but I predict we will still place our trust in humans to make the final judgement.
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The trap of user-centricity in the Digital Workplace
The aspect of the future of the digital workplace that most excites me is its data. The social and organisational network data produced by these tools provides a wealth of possibilities to explore. These can be as simple as a chatbot that replaces an IT help-desk, or as complex as being able to understand the behaviour patterns of your business.
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Why throwing out job families is a good first step to creating a future-proof talent strategy.
In HR, the concept of job families is one example of a practice that needs revising to stay relevant. Clustering a set of roles into a ‘job family’ allowed for transparency in rewards, promotions and career paths, but today this can create artificial barriers to collaboration and personal development.
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The Tell-tale Heart of Team Failure
At the end of a conference presentation, I was recently asked “how can I tell if an enterprise agile team is failing?”. A question for which I didn’t have an immediate satisfactory answer…
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Change the system, change the culture
The challenge of transforming large, complex organisations that have grown up around calcified hierarchies and process management structures is a hard one, so we should not be surprised that people often have different areas of focus or emphasis about where to start and what matters. But at some point, we have to face up to and challenge the core system that sustains the old and holds back change…
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