BankerVision

Promotions Cultures & Innovation

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed working for Government*, it is there’s an endemic promotions culture here, far worse than anything I’ve seen anywhere else.

A promotions culture is what you get when the main objective of everything you do at work is to get to the next grade level. For some people, that’s a financial incentive more than anything else. Others want that promotion for the status and power that goes with it. A few, very few, want to be at the next level so they have an opportunity to make a bigger difference.

A sign of a promotions culture is everyone talks about the “career limiting move”.

I don’t believe in career limiting moves, though of course if it is evident that someone isn’t ready or capable of the next role, that’s something else. I mean, you have to prove that you’re ready for the next role if you want to get the next role.

Proving you’re ready requires a little bit of risk taking. In healthy corporate cultures, that’s behavior which is rewarded.

Not so in a promotion culture.

In a promotion culture, you are rewarded for being as similar as possible to the group of people who decide your next promotion. It is human nature to like those who are similar to us, so pretending to be as similar to your boss as possible is sensible.

In a promotion culture, you are rewarded for showing that you steer a steady course, one that doesn’t rock the boat. It is human nature for bosses to like it when their lives are easy, so promoting those that make it so is an easy decision.

And in a promotion culture, longevity of service, dedication to the organization as it is today, and conformance to all corporate norms is behavior that’s rewarded. A maverick might destabilize the steady progression of everyone else, so being the same as everyone else is the behavior that’s wanted.

You’ll all know where I’m going with this. Promotions cultures destroy any organizational capability to innovate, because they act to petrify the present status quo.

What can you do if you’re stuck in a promotions culture?

The best advice, I think, is find someone who’s senior who didn’t get senior by virtue of the promotions culture. They’ll have a different perspective on things than everyone else, and be willing to take a few more risks.

I consider myself lucky that my boss is in that category. He came into the Department from the outside, and has allowed me the liberty to do things I really doubt few others get.

If you aren’t lucky enough to be in that position though, what else can you do?

I think the choice is really very simple. You are either on the promotions bandwagon, or you’re off it.

In the former case, you should accept that you aren’t able to make any meaningful change, or take risks, or create a better future. Those things are incompatible with getting promoted.

If you’re off the promotions bandwagon, on the other hand, you can do all those things with impunity. You won’t be rewarded for doing so, of course, since rewards are reserved for those on the bandwagon. But you’ll have the chance to make a really significant difference.

Since I’ve joined the Government, promotions have become much harder to get by virtue of the fact that the resources available are being scaled back. And guess what? There’s lots more risk taking and innovative behavior going on. People are being far less conformant. They’re recognizing the old rewards system is changing.

Isn’t that an interesting outcome from public sector austerity?

* I feel I must point out, for any hacks who decide to hatchet me for having a blog daring to comment, that these pages are a private effort not reflecting the views of the Department, or any present or future employer. Yes, I sometimes sail deliberately close to the wind, but I do it with intent, ‘cause sometimes the best way to drive change is talk about it openly. And in case this post isn’t evidence enough, I want you all to know I opted out of the promotions culture on about, um, day 2. Follow #welovebaskers on Twitter.

Never waste a crisis

I'm in Malaysia presently speaking at a banking conference (civil service watchers - I've taken annual leave to do so).

A question I've just gotten is "what is necessary to make a bank go after radical innovation"? My answer was "you need to be staring death in the face".

This is true for most organizations, I think. Truly business radical, game changing innovations that affect core business almost never comes from large organisations who can sit happy on their current operations.

"But", I hear you ask, "what about Apple? What about Google. What about.. what about..?".

Notice that I said game-changing innovation that affect core business. Apple, with iPhone went after a new segment. Google, with Docs and so forth, are going after a new segment. They're not doing anything that disrupts where they got their money previously.

Banks, and to a lesser degree, the public sector are different. Bankers don't have any new segments they can go after. They go after incremental innovations that let them do more of the same, certainly, but you either are a banking customer or you're not. And for public sector, you are a customer, whether you want to be or not.

In both cases, there is no reason to change anything unless you're facing a crisis of titanic proportions and your back is against the wall. You have to innovate because there are no other options available. If you fail to pull something out of the bag, its game-over.

Banking had it's crisis, but conveniently got a bit of a boost from the public sector. This meant it dodged the "do or die" transformation it might otherwise have been faced with. Whether that was the right thing or not, I won't comment on. But let's face facts. There will likely be no radical transformation of the banking service offer, because profits are returning and "going back to basics" is a perfectly reasonable strategy in this scenario.

The same cannot be said of the public sector though, which has its back to the wall substantially. We will not be able to do the things we've done in the past the way we've done them, because the money to do so doesn't exist. Ergo, we are forced into new ways of doing things, whether the entrenched hierarchy likes it or not.

Here is the conclusion I draw from all this. If you want to be an innovator, and you want to make a real difference, you can only go to organizations in crisis. They are the ones that are forced into changes rather than choosing to adopt changes. No-one chooses to change without a good reason.

Fake Experts

It is possible that the most frustrating thing ever is to have to sit through meetings with people who have declared that they’re experts, and then discover that they aren’t.

Here are the top five categories of people I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks who fit this category:

1. Innovation experts who say they know lots about the subject, but then dish out standard stuff that wasn’t current a few years ago. They toss out key buzzwords like “open innovation” and “radical Innovation” and “stage gates” because they’re the words that come up when you Google innovation. I reserve a special level of irritation for those who quote the major thinkers like Clayton Christensen, and then misrepresent his theories as something else entirely.

2. Social media experts who say they know everything about online but don’t do online themselves. Double demerit points awarded those inside large organisations who are responsible for intranets and therefore think they know anything about how social media really works. Their own intranets should tell them they don’t.

3. Analyst gurus who have gone into management, and then are trotted out by account managers because they are “senior”. As you know, my view of analysts is pretty dismal most of the time, because you so rarely see anything original from them. Managers of analysts almost never have an original thought left in them, and they always refer to their past research as if it was what made them qualify as management.

4. Architecture thought leaders. Please do not trot out one more model, or one more rendition of TOGAF with a new colouring scheme. Or, worst of all, a “disruptive” new approach to architecture. It is all so, so tired.

5. Almost all vendor CTOs (thankfully, we have a good one or two at the Department, who at least try).  They are there to flog product. Period. Any thought leadership you get is driven entirely from the perspective of convincing you to make a purchase of some kind. Of course, vendor thought leadership is somewhat an oxymoron anyway. They are always about responding to what the market will buy, so they are pretty much forced into copying the thought leadership they find in the market. That’s why analysts are always reporting what decision makers think, rather than dreaming up new stuff themselves.

What could all these groups have done differently and made the meetings less annoying? To have made it a valuable discussion that created new opportunities?

They could have thought through the stuff they Googled, and used their highly paid brains to give some unique opinion or insight.

They could have said something unexpected, something we might not have dreamed up ourselves.

They could have brought their unique experiences to the table, and used them as a foil for whatever points they were making.

Or, maybe they could have used their networks to bring interesting people to the table that would have astounded us. People we have now way of accessing ourselves.

Instead, what we get is oxygen thievery of the first order. Sometimes, you open the door and the whoosh of air into the room is palpable.

Originality is a precious commodity. Its such a pity that you so rarely see it.

Five IT-Shop Sacred Cows

1. Myth: If you get more “efficient” at IT, you will get a more “efficient” organisation. Reality: The more cost you take out of IT, the worse it is for users and customers. Optimising your cost  base to the point, for example, where users have a PC that is orders of magnitude less capable than their delightful home consumer experience will just cause them to bring their own laptops to work. Then they’ll break all your security rules in order to use them. And what are you going to do about it? Fire them?

2. Myth: You must have IT security people who must approve everything you do in order to secure the organisation and manage your risk. Reality: Most Some IT security people don’t have much understanding of the new stuff they’re asked to adjudicate on. They just make it up as they go along. The worst ones can’t be bothered to keep up because it involves too much work, and anyway,  they always have the ability to just say “no”. This doesn’t manage your risk, all it does is slow you down.On the other hand, count your blessings if you have been lucky enough to get a security group that know how to show you what you can do to do new things safely and efficiently.

3. Myth: High quality on-time and on-budget delivery are the development objectives and this will make you an IT leader. Reality: Who cares about whether you’re an IT leader or not from a development perspective? Superb delivery is a waste of time if what you’re delivering is crap in the first place. Forgive me the arrogance, but my observation is that many traditionalists don’t get the way the new world is changing as a result of technology, so what makes you an IT leader is if you can help them understand that, actually, what they’re trying to build is rubbish.

4. Myth: Most IT projects fail or are late, so we have to improve our failure rate to be successful. Reality: Causing any change whatsoever to happen is a success, since everything is optimised around stopping change in an IT organisation. If improving the “success rate” means doing less new stuff, then you’ve got a big fail coming up when your organisation fails to adapt because IT stopped it doing so. All in the name of improvement.

5. Myth: Governance is the key to discipline and control in an IT organisation. Reality: Governance is like a virus. It grows as swiftly as possible to consume all available resources, and then declares success when there are no project failures. Usually, this will be because there are no projects, or at least, none that have much way of progressing. Why does this happen? Because Governance is a licence for people without much capability to drive change themselves to get in the way of those who can and declare that they’re “part of the journey”.  ‘Tis a rare Governance person who knows when not to govern.

What other sacred cows do you have in your IT-Shop?

Unconference Crowd Sourced Strategy Pt. 2

CIO Magazine were interested enough in the discussion about our approach to using unconference and crowd sourcing methods to do IT strategy, that they asked us for a write up for their magazine. Its published here, for any of you who are interested in a few more details about what we did.

Local knowledge is everything

As I mentioned in my last post, I was doing work on the frontline with some our staff in JobCentre Plus last week. I was in a disadvantaged area in Scotland, somewhere around Glasgow, and  as I said before, the experience was incredibly valuable.

It is so easy to imagine how things will work in production when you’re remote, but you don’t really know how they’re going to work in practice. That’s why (as I said in my last post) you see good people at the frontline who cover over the cracks with manual workarounds, paper based systems, and their own home-built IT.

I mean, let’s face it. No matter how many requirements you gather, no system is going to be perfect for every single user in every single situation. I suppose the art is to get as many use cases that suit as many people as possible whilst minimising the inconvenience you cause to everyone else.

But there was a particular eye-opening, smack in the face, ah-ha moment in the whole week for me. And I know, as I relate it to you, you’re going to say “well, duh!”, especially given the fact that I do work in the trend space as part of my day job.

Here it is: Local knowledge is everything. 

There is a particular stage in the present back-to-work regime in the UK that requires people who’ve not worked  for about two months to attend a 1 hour group session with a staff member for Job Centre Plus, who explains to them what they’re required to do from a benefits perspective, and who provides a basic refresher on what to do to get a job.

There is a script full of guidance notes on what to say, and you have to be trained specially to give the session.

Anyway, so I sat in on one of these, and got to watch.

The script, had it been given verbatim, would not have provided all that much additional value at all to the attendees, I suspect. But the presenter in my session had detailed local knowledge of who was hiring, who wasn’t, and what facilities were available in the local community to help job-seekers. Questions weren’t answered in generalities: there were specific, do-right-now action points. The local stuff made all the difference, and you could see the attendees going from disinterested, to interested, to pleased they’d attended.

I mean, I don’t know why I was surprised at how valuable locality turned out to be, because we’ve all been talking hyper-local on social sites for a few years. But to see it in action for people suffering the recession: well, it made me recognise the value of all this stuff more than intellectually. I mean, I believed in it before, but now I believe it.

The value of local knowledge is no great revelation I suppose. But it certainly is good to get reminded of the fact that at the edges, small things – like which specific building sites are hiring today - are the most important things.

Now, of course, there is a lesson here for those of us who are responsible for building systems. When we build them, rigidly prescribing every sequence and every transaction, what we tend to do is eliminate the value of locality.

We seek to use systems to impose standards of service and uniformity across the offering. “People are unreliable!”, we scream as we write as much discretion away from users as possible, thinking, as we do so, that we are serving both them and the customers.

Well, we’re not. What we’re actually doing is eliminating those things that would really make what we do thrill customers. At the edge, where people meet real customers, such a standard offering doesn’t thrill anyone. It may provide some value to most people. But I suspect that only outliers would actually be thrilled.

And, yes, I do think it is possible even for job-seekers to be thrilled in their interaction with a government department.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that  people recognise this and find their own ways to generate thrill. That’s why you see all this stuff springing up around the systems, service, and processes that get provided centrally. 

Thank you, Jobcentre Plus, for reminding me of something so fundamental as this.

Halfway through my week at the front line

As you know, if you’ve been following me on Twitter, this week, I’ve been working at the front line of the Department – in a Job Centre in a challenging area in Scotland.

Banking readers: Job Centres are the UK goverment’s centres that help unemployed people find work. They are also the face to face contact points for administration of benefits that the govermment pays to people out of work.

Anyway, in my Job Centre, I’ve been working with the staff as they’ve dealt with a range of things, from bereavements to people with no money at all (as they’ve lost their benefit payments, and now may be sleeping out in the snow).

Did you know there are money illegal money lenders walking the streets, who forcibly take the money people on benefits get? They hover around outside and take away what people get to pay for food and shelter.

It is presently snowing here.

So you get all these people coming in who have nothing, who explain that they’ve “lost their money”, because they are worried what will happen to them if anyone from the Government knows they’ve dealt with an illegal financial service.

When you are sitting around after a crisis loan interview, hearing what is likely going on behind the face the customer has presented, the experience is extremely eye-opening. Staff were telling me about the (regular) times they’ve had to tap on the glass to wake up drug-affected people in interviews, for example.

Drug dealers and money lenders. Two financial traps for vulnerable people. You can imagine my wide-eyed response, having sat in my nice comfortable cocoon in London all this time.

But here is another thing I’ve found in this Job Centre, and it is something I’m not surprised about.

Staff build their own stuff to get around the limitations of systems we provide. There are Excel based spreadsheets which are used for diary management (“oh, I can’t have this open too long, otherwise no-one else will be able to make appointments”). There is email based workflow, where each step is a new inbox that gets manually monitored. And there’s any number of self-made data capturing things that are used for statistics and business reporting.

And all of it is stitched together with another technology: paper. They create their own forms, and their own paper based systems in order to supplement their jobs.

Consequently, the work is processed in a highly efficient way. I’d make a guess that each JobCentre does things slightly differently, depending on how good their custom additions to each of our centrally provided processes are.

If there was ever proof needed that decentralisation of the core is a good thing, then I’ve been immersed in it for the week so far.

I wonder what would happen if we put the appropriate end-user computing tools in the hands of these people and said “design the perfect Job Centre system”. My guess would be something good.

GovCamp is tomorrow

Tomorrow, is UK GovCamp, a bar-camp for Government. I’m going, and it’ll be at Goggle’s offices in Victoria from 10AM. Here’s the list of everyone whose going. Unfortunately, though, I think the tickets are all gone but there is a waiting list, if you’re interested. If you want to know more, there’s a vertical social network running.

I’ll post impressions next week, and of course will be on twitter during.

How to crowd source an IT strategy

1.5 days. 100 people. 20 design sessions, and 200 ratified decisions.

It’s the reason I went dark last week online. We were running a crowd sourcing un-conference event to work out the details of IT strategy in as short a time as possible.

It was an event that showed me the reputation the public sector has for being bureaucratic and unable to do anything quickly is unfounded.

Lots of people doubted us when we said we wanted to crowd source strategy development. “Crowds won’t give you anything you can use”, someone said. “They don’t have all the background” someone else told us.

The thing is, they may not have all the data my strategy team had, but collectively, they had deep insight that we would never have gotten ourselves. All we had to do was provide this big group with a way of expressing it in a reasonable way. 

Just like most organisations, whenever there is a decision to be made in the Department, lots of people like to have their point of view. The traditional approach is to call various meeting with various stakeholders until you reach what passes for consensus. This can sometimes take a long time. Everyone complains about it, but nothing seems to make things go more quickly. It was exactly the same at Lloyds Banking Group. Big organisations are challenged when you ask them for quick decisions.

But none of that happened at the strategy event last week. In each design session, the subjects were discussed in detail, but since we made it a rule that anyone making a proposition would automatically trigger the chair to call a vote, people naturally put their cards on the table quickly. It worked well.

Now, I don’t propose to go into the IT strategy we’ve come up with here, though I have to say it is a very powerful document, and vastly more detailed that you could expect to get when you task a small secret-squirrel team to do the work, who then do a big reveal once everything has been watered down appropriately.

But for those of you who are interested, I though I’d explain exactly how we ran the day. Several of you who’ve been reading my Tweets have been asking.

So we started out by doing PowerPoint to the whole group. We laid out the problem we were trying to solve, and provided some stimulating material that people might liked to consider across the event. This was the only time we did Powerpoint, actually.

Then we moved straight into propositions for the first design session, using the basic format pioneered by unconferences. We asked the question “What do we need to design”, in order to prompt proposals for sessions, and then voted as a group on what was needed. The top voted four sessions were immediately scheduled in breakout rooms.

At this point, I’ll pause to let you know that we decided to use electronic voting systems throughout. There were a couple of reasons: firstly, there 100 people in the room, so it was too hard to count hands every time we wanted to put something to the group. But secondly, we were hoping there’d be a bit of contention and provocation, and we wanted the anonymity of electronics. Plus, it gave us the ability to get actual metrics on how positive people were about each thing that came up.

Each design session used standard unconference principals. You got to move freely between sessions as the mood took you, and could interject at any time once the preliminary points were made. In each room, the discussion eventually got to real proposals – and we asked the group to vote if they “agreed to add it to the strategy”. With a majority vote, it was tentatively added. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

We ran screens in each room so that attendees would know what was going on in other sessions, updated live as the tentative decisions came up. The idea was that people should be able to bolt from one room to another if they felt things were going on they had to be a part of.

We realised pretty early that walking out of meetings  for some people normally constrained by traditional formats didn’t come easily. We had to get specific in encouraging people to do it, actually. Perhaps they felt it was rude, or something.

Anyway, we ran 20 design sessions of an hour each over the 1 and a half days, and you’d not believe the breadth of topics. Or perhaps you would, if you’ve been to a BarCamp.

And the final step, after each design session, was we brought everyone back into the main room and had them ratify, electronically, every single tentative proposal that came out of the breakout sessions.

Just as a side note, I have to admit I was very, very nervous about how this format was going to be received. Firstly, we didn’t know if it would work in a corporate setting.  As in, when the outputs have to be more than networking and learning. We wanted a real document, and who knew if people would engage enough to do that?

But there was another worry as well, and that was that we’d find people in such violent objection to each other that we’d never get any decisions at all.

What actually happened was that most of the propositions were carried by a landslide. There were some, the especially contentious ones, that didn’t of course. I rather liked that, actually, since it showed that people weren’t just pushing the Yes button every time.

But I think the big learning is this: if you put people in a room and give them a novel way to make decisions, you will get decisions. It has proved to me that struggling against the big corporate stakeholder machine (which is highly optimised not to make any decisions) need not be the only approach one takes when trying to introduce change. At least, it seems to work for us.

If any of you want more details, feel free to reach out.

The In-Betweeners

You know, I think I have a very good work-life balance. I spend enough hours in the office that I think we’re accomplishing things. I do lots of private work-like things (writing here, reading the right blogs and twitter, participating in the online conversation, writing books, and the evening networking schedule) that are in the middle between work and leisure. And I have plenty of free time still to relax at home, or go out.

There is a graduation in my life between what is totally work (the office) and what is totally leisure (blobbing out at home or being with friends).

Having that graduation is a vital determinant of how well I can perform in the workplace.

For example, as an innovator, I really need to know what’s going on in the mobile phone market or what people think the next big trend is going to be. As a manager, I really need to the latest thinking which comes out of various thought leaders. And as someone who is responsible for a technical architecture team, it is important that I have at least a remote clue about what’s going on in that space.

These are all things I get in the in-between that’s in the middle between real work and real leisure. I am in a competition with my peers in each of these areas to know what’s going on, and I can’t have a rational conversation with them unless I am at least as up to date as they are.

Conversely, if they know more than me, is it reasonable I should have any rights to be part of the decision making for which they are clearly more expert?

Being as up to date as possible is table stakes now.

The In-betweeners (a name i just dreamt up, by the way) seem to be way more up to date, and way more able to have a reasonable conversation about the way things are likely to turn out.

But there are lots of people who don’t have an in-between. They do work, and they do leisure. There is no fine graduation between the two. Theirs is the Work-Life balance argument. The moment the office is left, take physical steps to make sure that work can’t interrupt at all. Turn off the devices. Shut down the email. Don’t take a phone call. And under no circumstances read anything at all that might have worky-like overtones.

Let me not for one moment make judgements about that lifestyle choice, which is perfectly valid. I mean, I probably do have fewer family and other commitments than most to which I must assign time. Although, there are some colleagues of mine who have very large families and who still manage to keep up, so I don’t know why I’m making that excuse, actually.

But let us not spend 2010 pretending that there isn’t a difference in performance between those who are up to date and those who aren’t.

2010 is going to be a performance – not an experience – competition. That’s why I said the other day that I think people who are connected are going to get all the rewards this year. It’s going to be about making things happen, and that means you need an in-between.

Because making things happen is not a 9 to 5 job any more. The conversation continues 24 x 7. Some of those conversations have unusual levels of significance.

I think it is possible to find a personally appropriate in-between that lets you participate whilst continuing to live a full life in the outside world. And I also think that those who don’t are going to get marginalised as their peers step up.

Update: Shane Dillon comments on the davepress blog that I “appropriated” the term “In-Betweener”. That made me check Google, and he’s right. The term actually refers to a Marvel Comics superhero. The wiki entry makes interesting reading, and is quite apt given the subject of my post.