Three basics:

1. Honest conversations, discussing the undiscussable of emotions and reasoning – nothing can develop unless there’s a shared effort to get at the truth
2. Clarity – no learning is possible, and productivity and psychological safety are unlikely, without clarity of roles, tasks, decision-making, and relationships
3. Learning – true learning isn’t possible without planning, prediction, and learning and reflective practices

These three create a learning system

4. Culture shaping, understanding that leaders and systems and emotional responses to them create conditions which generate psychological safety and productivity – or not.

A productive system.

Intent – measure customer / citizen / community outcomes – as they judge them.

A purposeful system.

Culture and achievement of intent are self-correcting measures – if you measure the actual outcomes of your practices; the experience of employees and customers, and learn what works, you can’t go wrong.

But you have to make them a practice – daily, built-in, acknowledging your weaknesses.

Download the ‘five core practices’ here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fqlktld46xcmgs4/Benjamin%20Taylor%20-%20five%20core%20leadership%20practices%20for%20linkedin.pdf?dl=0

Which practice do you need to work on the most?

#complexity#transformation#culture#leadership

The challenges appear insurmountable. Conditions that are truly ‘turbulent, uncertain, novel, and ambiguous’. And we are running on empty. 

This paper, from @RedQuadrant and the Public Service Transformation Academy @ServiceReform, sets out twelve principles for an adaptive approach to meet the needs of our circumstances.

Which of these twelve capabilities do you think is the most important? Which have we missed? Did we get any wrong?

Full paper: https://lnkd.in/gXn9CkX

PSTA page: https://bit.ly/2JF7Hfp

#adaptivecouncil#publicservice#localgovernment#adaptability#organisation

If you want to really satisfy your customers, read on.

• Most organisations hear ‘listen to what the customer needs’ and say ‘yes! optimise for this!’
• They hear ‘transactional efficiency saves money’, and go ‘yes! everything efficient!’

Truth: there are two types of customer service flavours:

1) transactional – customers can reliably specify and find the right service, and just want it over with – or not needed at all. Paying a bill, changing address. You want reliable, standardised, low-cost activity to drive volume, fast.

2) emotional/’customer intimacy’ – when you really need to listen to know what the customer needs. Understand. Experts, specialists to work with them for a joint solution, and every requirement is a new, unique little project.

You can do one, or t’other. But try to mix and match, you’ve got problems. 

Treating emotional as transactional fails to meet the needs, costs you more, and upsets customers. Treating transactional as emotional… well, same.

Which parts of your service require customer intimacy? Which operational effectiveness? Are you sure?

Have you ever been given the wrong sort of service?

#customerservice#effectiveness#organisation#operatingmodel

Everyone responds to the incentives, demands, risks, and situations they face – only a tiny bit of this is visible to anyone else.

That’s why I use the ‘blind men and the elephant’. 

My point is not that we can ever see ‘the whole of the elephant’ – forget it. 
Everyone’s world is their own, unique, based on what’s going on in their life and how they make sense of it.

The front end is sharp, spiky. Dangerous. Being there is a world of pain. Everything you send them looks like more spiky and dangerous stuff. 

The very back of the elephant? The universe is only sending them one message – dung.

This can help us at three levels

• emotional literacy: if I don’t know what’s going on in their world, I can enquire, learn, adapt
• thinking strategically: ‘If I’m in elephant rider world, trying to work with elephant foot people, that’s not just person-to-person’
• thinking about changing the conditions of the different worlds – ‘how can I do what I need to do now, but make it slightly easier for our parts of the world to communicate’

What’s your best tip for getting into the worlds of other people – understanding what’s really going on for them?

#complexity#society#weltanschauung#organisations

First, you establish enough shared context to move on – so you all know what is happening around you.

Then, you establish enough shared purpose or intent to move on.

Remember, you all need to be able to move to the next step together – any problems, back down you go!

Then, identify the critical ‘what if’ (risk) and ‘how to’ (outcome) questions which, if answered, will allow us to define the work to achieve the intent.

Generate ideas to answer those critical questions, select the best, and check benefits and concerns of the actions they suggest – do a mini ‘seven steps’ on each piece of work if necessary

Then assign tasks and get on with work… and learn what you’ve done wrong. 

The golden rule is:

any time you get a surprise, e.g. you learn that we didn’t understand the context, that our purpose might be counterproductive, that we didn’t really understand the context, that we’re answering a question wrong…
…you have to all go back down as many steps as needed to correct that problem.

It takes practice. And it works.

Where does your team go wrong on decision-making in complex times? Where do you get it right?

#decisionmaking#complexity#organisation

Download ‘seven steps to heaven’ – a decision-making model for complex times – here: https://media-exp1.licdn.com/dms/document/C561FAQG9RXREfwjpnA/feedshare-document-pdf-analyzed/0/1603262148057?e=1610557200&v=beta&t=R_4LBWEoYBUmOH5AkNuEz71TGAF_Wsvk0fO9u-H9lmI

This was a client, but it might as well have been me! With things changing so fast, unpredictably, and it being hard to know what you can rely on, how can we make any kind of business decisions for 2021?

Sure, we’ve learned!

How much we don’t know – the degree of uncertainty we were actually always operating in

How much we can cope with. If the pandemic, lockdown, economic impacts etc have shown us, it’s that we can keep on keeping on

In businesses I work with, decision-making has survived and improved in these main ways:

• realising how important the ‘thick data’ is – the actual stories of peoples’ lives, to go alongside the cold hard analytics
• increasing the effort to get the right information to really make decisions to the right levels of management – compared to how waffly and, ultimately, meaningless those meetings were before
• realising how many decisions need to be, and are, taken at the frontline – freeing people up to get on and do that, with only big strategic decisions out of their hands

What’s your big learning about decision-making from 2020? How are you feeling about big business decisions in 2021?

Join us: https://lnkd.in/gGuQWwB
#requisiteagility#2021planning#business

Culture is the scoreboard, not the game. If you try to specify the score you want, you’re far more likely to do things that are counter-productive than you are to work on the things that will change how the game is going.

As soon as you publish values and behaviours, you get three things:
1- indignation from those who aren’t experiencing that, who judge you more harshly
2- fear from those who know they aren’t living it, and determination to avoid being found out
3- a double bind – ‘we say we’re an honest culture. But I’m not able to say what I think. But I can’t say I can’t say what I think – because we say we’re an open culture’

Instead, work humbly to change the score by changing how people experience the organisation, and what that changes.

It can work to publish values when you have a small team who can both set and police them (it might not last long).

In a bigger group, it can work when there’s enough momentum and frustration, and energy from knowing someone at the top really will enforce the changes. That person is likely exempt from the values they espouse – because who’s going to challenge them?

What’s the thing you’ve seen at work that most defines a culture?

#organisations#society