Resonating social patterns with project processes

People are social complex agents, organising people is a bit like herding cats, however when people are working together collaborating in teams they can achieve amazing things. So why is it that some approaches and teams structures work and others seem to cause problems?

I’ve been thinking about things like nudge theory, servant-leadership, agility in software development, lean business, social business, serious gaming and agile at scale. Most people tend to think that these are all (or mostly) good things, they’re often desired bottom-up in businesses and support “faster, cheaper, better, happier” agendas. All good things that tend to be desirable at every level of a business and yet a lot of my work is about helping individuals, teams and businesses towards this simple agenda using these kind of things because although the goal is simple and the change is desirable, actually doing the change isn’t easy.

All of these things seem to “feel right” to people and are generally desirable and yet they are often at odds with traditional management techniques which tend to compartmentalise people and decompose everything into linear hierarchies.

So why is it that treating people like complex social creatures works better than treating them as simple functional unit? Er… because that’s what they are, people. I’d love to know why people think the opposite can ever work?

I think that the reason that the list of things up there is generally so successful at working towards faster, cheaper, better, happier business is that they are socially resonant. That is, ways of thinking about work such as agile software development are congruent with normal human social behaviour, that’s why they work.

Nudge theory acknowledges that people are lazy and don’t do what you tell them to. Delayed gratification doesn’t motivate most people so put things you want people to do in their way and gently nag them about it. Make it easier to do the right thing, make the wrong thing harder and more formal. The rise of the adult playground is a great example of this. People don’t want to be told what to do, they want their ability and contribution to be valued. Servant-leaders are ideally placed to nudge people, which they can do based on their personal social relationships.

One of the reasons that the agile movement has taken off as well as it has is because it treats people like people, in fact that’s in the agile manifesto! By aligning ways of working to normal human behaviour you are enabling your team to get on and do things intuitively, normally and comfortably.

Photo by Mykola Swarnyk

I’ve been applying this kind of thinking to large scale project structures and that’s led to the Project Forum practice (think Roman Forum rather than phpBB!) which I’ve described as a “middle-out” management structure as it’s not bottom-up or top-down. Instead it’s more like a tribal council bringing together the leaders of other groups to an area where they can all have their voices heard. It’s democratic and social, it doesn’t pretend there isn’t any conflict instead it provides a vehicle to resolve that conflict. This structure resonates with democratic political structures from the tribal council all the way to parliamentary democracy.

In this model, the Project Manager has a pressure from the business to deliver and he gets to impress this upon the other members. Customers with a pressure for quality or short-term goals get to understand why their concerns need balancing with scope and resources. Contributing teams get to have their agendas and issues collaborated on by the wider group and can manage supply and demand of their resources. Wherever there is conflict the way to resolve it is through open honest communication, the Project Forum is that vehicle, providing a sort of open parliament. Yeah, I know it’s not a great name but I’m not good at naming things.

Most cultures have evolved away from autocratic dictators towards representative democracy in one form or another because that’s the way people want to collaborate socially. So why not apply the same model to large projects? Thousands of years of history already tells us it works.

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This blog is part of a series on Holistic Communication: The linguistics of business change. Introduction, ethics and table of contents is all in the first post.

Scaled Agility: The Project Forum

Name: Project Forum (Middle-out management structure) – Agile at Scale practice

When it might be appropriate

• In situations where multiple competing stakeholder groups with different agendas are required to work together
• In situations where multiple product groups need to collaborate on a bigger outcome
• Where there is a conflict in direction, resource management/ownership or scope between collaborating groups
• System of systems development

What is it?

The Project Forum is an application of agile philosophy to large project structures. Rather than impose a hierarchy of decision making from the Project Manager downwards the Project Forum is a virtual team in the middle of all stakeholders.

The Project Forum is a self-organising democratic group that balances competing voices and concerns, owns high level scope and architecture, runs the high level release train and performs integration activities for the product.

Use of the Project Forum practice does not prevent any communication directly between contributing groups it only provides a vehicle for that conversation when it’s relevant for the wider project.

The Project Forum practice is an example of Agile at Scale combining social business practices, technical software practices and ways of working to make a simple way of doing big complicated bits of work.

Social Business: Because people do the work

People, working together achieve business goals. Processes, plans and organisation charts don’t.

A group of people forming human relationships and interacting is often called a “team” but another equally applicable term is a “social network”. Add a common goal to do some work as opposed to sharing pictures of their latest cooking/pet/kid and you’ve got a bit of social business going on whether it’s recognised or not.

To get work done effectively you need teams to work together effectively and that means enabling the team to form relationships and collaborate together as a social network.  So how do you create an environment that fosters social networks focussed on achieving their goals and interacting with the wider organisation?

The answer to that question is variously termed “Enterprise 2.0″ (which I hate), “Social Enterprise” and “Social Business” which is a little ambiguous as it could relate to a business incorporating internal social awareness into it’s ways of working but it also refers to businesses who are aware of their interaction with their external community. Both of these meanings are based on the same awareness, only the direction of attention is different.

Any business can be enhanced by enabling people to work well together through cultural changes, process (ways of working) changes and supporting tooling. Image a world where:

• You have an idea to improve your business capability, talk to your work mates who are sitting near you about it who help you refine the idea a little
• You post the idea on a general ideas list within your organisation adding some tags to relate it to general topics
• Other people in the organisation react to your idea based on finding from a tag feed, an activity stream, their relationship (work or social) with you etc.
• They comment on your idea adding relevant experience and knowledge
• Someone else IMs (Instant Messages) you about the idea and adds some useful thoughts
• The idea has formed into something that sounds like it might be worth the company investing some time in, you promote the idea to a company backlog.

So far none of this feels like “work” and yet a network of people are forming around an idea that improves the business adding their expertise and opinions, collaborating on and for the business.

• The idea gets given some time to investigate so you create an online project area, inviting the previous contacts to have a look and interact
• You decide to have a meeting to look at the various ways forward for the idea, two team members are remote so they video conference in
• You blog the meeting minutes to the project area so other interested people can add useful insights
• During the lifetime of the project various team members post status updates and blogs about the progress, customers and users interact directly through face to face discussion, virtual discussion threads, vote on requirements etc. while the team continuously radiates progress and quality information in an open transparent fashion.

This part was definitely work but socially aware collaboratively work making use of a range of technologies to enhance the team’s way of working.

This is an example of social business, and one which I’ve had for real with one of my clients. You might already have things like wikis, a blogging platform, micro-blogging, social group areas, project areas etc. in which case integrating them and driving cultural change through soft practices to “allow” individuals to interact in a trusted collaborative environment might be necessary.

Alternatively you might have none of these things, but don’t worry you can get them for close to nothing as there are several excellent open source solutions for each of the technology features mentioned, in fact some open source packages (Social Business Software or SBS) can do most if not all of the above!

Linguistics of business change: Holistic communication, ethics and morals

Introduction

I’m planning to write a blog series on the language involved in business change. I’m not sure where it’s going to go yet which is why a series of blogs seems like a good idea rather than trying to fit it all in one post, or structuring it too much! To that end I’ll post all of this stuff under the “holistic communication” category to make it easier to find amongst all of the other things I post about.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language so I’ll be covering a fair amount on grammar and sentence structure but my aim is to not make it too academic but practical and useful.  I’m also planning on covering some non-verbal stuff since what I’m really interested in is “holistic communication”.

I first came across the term “holistic communication” in an essay on nursing care by Kim Antolo a few years back when I started researching this topic. Communication in this context is the transfer of messages from one person to another person. Holism refers to treating the whole of a system not just an constituent parts. Therefore holistic communication is applying systems thinking to inter-personal communication.

I’ve studied psychology, linguistics, behavioural science, neuro-linguistic programming, magic (think card tricks rather than crystals and naked dancing), mentalism, hypnosis, cognitive science and business change so this blog series is likely to be a bit of a mixed bag of stuff.

Why is this important?

Communication is the transfer of a message from a sender via a channel to a (number of) receiver(s). The meaning of any communication is the result generated in the head of the receiver(s) not the intended message. Communication and collaboration are critical to our success as individuals, teams, companies and societies and yet often the result of intended communication is not what the sender originally intended. Improving our communication skills can literally improve our lives and everyone else’s lives.

When we communicate we’re trying to move a representation of something from our heads to someone else’s heads. There’s a lot of ways we can do this ranging from words, pictures, actions etc. Thinking about each of these carefully and how to use them together as a holistic communication approach enables us to ensure that the received message really does match our intention making us better communicators.

I think that holistic communication is the kung fu of business change.

Ethics and morality

Being effective at getting a message from our heads to other people’s heads involves changing other people’s representation of an idea, being really good at it is sometimes called being: inspiring, convincing, compelling, persuasive, seductive, hypnotic, manipulative. Some of these words have positive connotations and others negative and that’s kind of my point.

Being really good at holistic communication gives great power, and as Spiderman’s uncle would tell you “with great power comes great responsibility”. Carefully crafting a message provides the ability to put a representation of a concept in someone’s head changing their perception of reality. Sometimes that message doesn’t superficially look like the intended result making it deceptive or deceitful. Another two negative words and this is why my introductory post is going to talk about ethics and morality.

Ethics and morality are related but different. Ethics define system wide standards of behaviour whereas morals are a more personal distinction between right or wrong. Therefore in terms of business change and holistic communication we need to consider professional ethics and our personal morality.

In terms of professional ethics I think that in the agile coaching/process improvement/business change consultancy space that the hippocratic oath taken in the medical profession isn’t far off. Basically my personal morality is fairly happy with “do no harm”, the whole point of consultants is to help people.

So the focus of my application of the various concepts, structures and techniques I’m going to be covering is not how to deceive people into doing what we want but how to understand and structure our communication to get the best results and to learn how to avoid unintended negative consequences. I  believe there’s a moral imperative to learn how to communicate properly, not for the purposes of gross manipulation but to increase the impact of our messages in a positive way.

But what are the best results?

I said above that holistic communication is about understanding and structuring our communication to achieve the best results, which begs the question “best for whom”? This is why professional ethics and personal morality are important. In business change there can be a conflict between the needs of the business, the needs of the change project, the needs of the change agents and the needs of the individuals. Balancing all of these with an emphasis on “do no harm” is what I consider the “best results”.

Um… Is this hypnosis?

Both of the following are true:

• No, there’s no such thing as hypnosis.
• Yes, all communication is hypnosis.

Topics

As I post topics in this series I’ll add them to the topics list here and reference them all back to this post. You’re welcome to suggest topics and knowledge in the comments, if I know something about the topic I’ll add it, if not I’ll just say so and maybe you can add some content. Keep coming back as new posts will be added to this table of contents all the time

• Creating Change
  • Why do people change their behaviours?
  • The difference between complicated and complex
  • Autonomy vs. Empowerment
  • Resonating social patterns with project processes
• The rights and wrongs of communication channels
• Professional mindfulness, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution
• Get your point across using positive statements
• Making Decisions
  • A model for making group decisions
  • How to reach agreement in a group – autocracy vs. democracy
  • Decision making case studies
• Metaphors
  • Direct, Indirect and complex metaphors
  • Metaphor Restrictions
  • Serious Gaming for education with complex layered metaphors
• Rapport, Congruency and Hypnosis

This blog series is designed to be read quite quickly with a lot of indirect metaphorical messaging and implied meaning so rather than consider each point analytically you will get more out of it by letting it sink into your subconscious as you internalise the various techniques. The last thing you want in a conversation is to spend 5 minutes analysing each sentence instead of speaking!

The practical bit

Don’t believe in all this stuff? How about a little thought experiment? Clear your mind, chill out, image a big blank whiteboard, sit back and try not to think of purple penguins.

Impossible right? I constructed a couple of words that ensure that you represent a purple penguin in your head. Probably on a whiteboard in a meeting room you’re familiar with. To negate a concept you first have to represent it. This is a trivial example, but an important concept which I’ll come back to in a later post.