Hello!

A quick update on the book.

The book is now at the final proof stage which means:

• it has been professionally proofed
• the manuscript now gets a final check from me and a proofreader
• we add in the foreword, which is being written by the excellent Traci Fenton from WorldBlu
• …and the endorsements saying things like ‘This book will save your world, your marriage, your Marmite supplies! – Brigadier F. Comelypants’
• …some of which are also then added to the cover design
• Finally it goes off TO BE PRINTED!

There’s a blog post to be written another time about the strange experience of being a digital person, finishing a piece of work and then waiting 6 months to get it out the door, but not necessarily (or only) in a bad way.

So yeah.

By the way, if you happen to recommend the book to someone you can say to them, with steel in your eyes, that IT IS AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER ON AMAZON TODAY but this isn’t a big sales push just yet 🙂

Also

Also, a new but intimately related project is that my company NixonMcInnes is putting on a proper one-day conference around very CultureShocky topics in this fine city of Brighton. That’ll be announced next week, but if the fire for a better world burns hot in you, get the 1st October in your diary… more to follow, comrades, more to follow.

Will

Hi Culture Shock kinda-readers,

Here’s the intro to chapter six, which is one I’m particularly interested in – see what you reckon…

—-

CHAPTER SIX: CHANGE VELOCITY

In addition to their Openness another fundamental characteristic of organisations in this progressive movement is their ability to change very rapidly. And their propensity to do so. For me it’s one of their most violent and disruptive advantages.

These fast-moving, fast-changing new players eat away at industry incumbents’ market share through their ability to learn, iterate and change, loop after loop, many times faster than the old guard.

Another change! Another change! Another change! POW. Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble (US) / Waterstones (UK), Netflix vs. Blockbuster, Threadless vs. GAP.

This is not just a business imperative – governments and not-for-profits must also speed up. As Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently relayed in an interview, Andy Grove, the long-serving CEO of Intel said at a dinner in 1995 “High tech runs 3X faster than normal businesses. And the gov’t runs 3 times slower than normal businesses. So we have a 9X gap.” If government would like to emulate the success and practices of Silicon Valley, then they have a great deal of flexibility and speed to find in themselves.

And related to this, one of their other great emerging characteristics is their ability to u-turn. By u-turn I mean not just product innovation. This is wholesale changes of direction.

Whatever you think of it, Facebook has been absolutely brilliant at doing something, hearing a load of feedback, and doing a public u-turn within hours or days. It doesn’t always, and has returned to the same initiatives and goals over time, but the Beacon turnaround sticks out – though there are others. See this Google search for “Facebook u-turn” – 999,000 results (same search for “Google u-turn” returns me 18,200 results, and for Apple 19,400).

I thought of this characteristic again having followed the interesting Netflix story lately.

If you haven’t already heard, they made some bold changes to their product – divided the whole business in two with no consultation, called the DVD mailing business Qwikster, kept Netflix as the solely-focused streaming business.

The outcry has been sustained, and numbers have backed up the complaints – some commentators say this is hitting Netflix’ business.

Now I read that, 23 days later, they’ve reversed the decision – That Was Qwik: Netflix Dumps Qwikster, Won’t Split DVD-Streaming Accounts by paidContent

I always admire a u-turn:

1. You tried to innovate and make change – that takes guts and brainpower
2. You listened – that takes ears!
3. You are humble enough to publicly admit you were wrong – that takes guts

Now having begun to write this I realise that before this little phase of reading and writing I just got off a call with a team in a gigantic multi-national bank. Some young talents in a development programme for top potential future stars have been working on launching a business innovation. Their biggest challenge is what they describe as the internal ‘conservatism’. Making change in that organisation is really really hard. Scarily hard when you think about the above.

So what we are experiencing here is the ability of organisations to rapidly adapt to the world around them.

What is change velocity?

A mate of mine called David has worked his whole career in sales. He is a proud salesman through and through. And he half-jokingly introduced me to one of his favourite concepts a few years ago: “revenue velocity”. This is not how much work the client needs doing in total, but how quickly they need or want to invest that budget. At the time I find it a hilarious encapsulation of his deliberately-cultivated salesman persona both good and bad (though in time running this services business I’ve learnt to appreciate the wisdom in it).

This phrase makes me think about an organisation’s ability to change quickly. Change velocity of an organisation is its ability to change quickly. Not just agility, which is its ability to shift its focus rapidly – an organisation can be agile without internally changing. Not just its speed, which is the speed that it moves at – again an organisation can move quickly without changing. And not just its ability to evolve – an organisation can evolve effectively over time, but can it do so quickly enough?

The higher an organisation’s change velocity, the faster it can shift its focus, the faster it can execute, and the faster it can fundamentally change itself.

—

Next extract: ‘Why must 21st organisations be able to change so quickly?’

Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

As always, please feedback and share with people you feel will find this useful.

Thanks Shock-fiends,

Will

Writing a bio should be a small thing, and I should be able to do it on my own.

But I need help because for this book and this message I am concerned that how I position myself will affect how the message is received. Plus it’s hard to get this right when it’s you – yourself, your thing!

I reckon there are two approaches to writing my bio for the book:

– traditional approach – lots of credential-dropping, big names and big achievements, gives tangibles (like these bios)

– accessible approach – less hype-y, more refreshing straightforward tone, hoping to build confidence in the reader

But sometimes with the latter people say ‘you’re being too down / not bigging it up enough’.

So here’s an attempt at the accessible approach – what do you think?

Author biography

Will McInnes is a reasonably normal human being who – like you – has mainly made it up as he’s gone along.

After dropping out of a politics degree at The University of Liverpool, and working his way up from a role where he had to make a hundred cold calls a day, Will ended up starting a different kind of company with fellow young entrepreneur Tom Nixon.

This company wasn’t to be just about money or success. It would celebrate people, purpose and work towards a better world.

Thanks to the passionate efforts of quite a few clever people along the way NixonMcInnes is today a pioneering social business consultancy that works with large organisations that need to change their culture, structure and skills to meet the demands of business in the 21^st century. The work is enjoyable and exhausting.

NixonMcInnes itself is constantly experimenting with its own radical management practices and has been recognised by WorldBlu as one of the most democratic workplaces in the world for three years running. This is also enjoyable and exhausting.

Will’s work is divided between developing the company and spreading the word of a better business world through talks, workshops and writing.

Will lives in the creative city of Brighton, UK with his wife and two energetic young sons. He is a mountain biking geek, loves camping in the great outdoors and eating far too much curry.

That’s the ‘he’s a normal human’ approach.

For context, if I go the traditional route, it will talk about the many impressive organisations NixonMcInnes works with, me being a non-exec at Wired Sussex, drop in something tenuous about doing a short course at London Business School etc. Not hard to write – in fact, here’s a few I made earlier 🙂

What do you think?

Hello people,

So it’s close now – I have feedback on the manuscript from Wiley, and in tandem we are working with design agency Crush on the cover designs.

We’d love your feedback on the design directions:

Which directions do you like?

Any other feedback?

Get involved and leave your feedback in the comments below or email me at wmcinnes@gmail.com.

Thanks as always, Will.

Hello culture shockers,

Perhaps the most important bit about Change Velocity is thinking about how you can actively and deliberately speed up your organisation’s.

This checklist of 8 practical activities should help.

Let me know,

Will

——–

How can you speed up your organisation’s Change Velocity?

Here are 8 areas from which you can positively influence your organisation’s willingness and ability to change and change quickly. It’s a dry looking list, but trust me – the contents, if applied, are electric.

1.    Planning
2.    Structures
3.    Processes
4.    Systems
5.    Attitudes
6.    Hiring & firing
7.    Rewards
8.    Personal change

        1. Planning

Activity in brief:

Start planning in 6 month cycles. And plan in as high a contingency budget as you reasonably can to jump on unexpected opportunities or emergencies that arise. That’s it.

Description:

Most plans resist change. Or at least bad plans do. Although the world understandably craves control – people like to know what’s going to happen – progressive businesses need and take more flexible approaches to planning.

If you see the same world that I do, how on EARTH can we reasonably do a five year plan?

To improve your change velocity, you need to bring the planning horizon right back into the present day, back from those misty forecasted mountains out there in five years time of exceptional, uninterupted, White Swans-only business-as-usual. And with your opportunity/contingency budget, you can start to be more responsive to what happens along the way.

Sure, there’ll be resistance (and perhaps death threats) from others in your organisation – no matter how big or small. Maybe you’ll need to play the game a little bit, and fill in their long-term planning spreadsheets. But you can start planning in a more adaptive, agile way. It will spread (slowly) unless you’re a very senior manager, in which case ‘hey, get on with it!’.

2. Structures

Activity in brief:

Start creating and encouraging small, inter-departmental, cross-functional teams around projects and initiatives. Start doing what you would otherwise do alone or in a small group only from your own team instead in more mixed groups – bringing in ‘outsiders’.

Description:

Deliberately include people from parts of the organisation which your part usually competes with. And if you have the chance, invite the mavericky ones – the upcoming ambitious talents who know their way around and want to get stuff done. Set a peer-to-peer, collaborative tone in these groups, and allow the group to prove the power of collaboration over time. Keep bureaucracy to a minimum, and where keep things low-key and under the radar.

Remember Gore’s lattice structure in the People chapter? These small inter-departmental teams will massively improve connectivity in your organisation. They will build an important network of alliances that can be called on in crises.

Through our own consulting work we have found to our surprise that such groups can be seen as subversive – a clear sign that the organisation is badly silo’d and needs exactly this kind of approach to collaboration.

        3. Processes

Activity in brief:

Do a quick audit of the processes you have which mean that it takes you hours, days or weeks to respond to something that you need to be able to respond in minutes to (think of the train guy and his ‘twenty seconds to prepare and respond’).

Description:

Reflect on what’s blocking this in your organisation. Where do the problems with responding quickly lie? How serious are they? What can you do about them? What are the costs (current or potential) of the delays caused by this bureaucracy?

Now put this in a short document which clearly and accurately describes the costs and potential worst case scenarios and get the processes changed.

If you are a senior manager or CEO in a large organisation start encouraging your people to identify and flag up ways that the organisation is constraining their ability to respond quickly. You could also consider the approach that Indian systems integrator HCL takes by allowing any employee to hold support functions like finance, HR, admin and senior management to account by raising a ‘ticket’ on from the employee to the department in question, underpinned with a strict and transparent commitment to reply within certain parameters.

        4. Systems

Activity in brief:

Get some Buzz Monitoring set up, or – if it already is elsewhere in the organisation – get access to the relevant reports. Then feed the snippets and insights you get into your teams, your colleagues and obviously into your own planning, thinking and doing. Congratulations, you are now moving at close to realtime!

Description:

Buzz monitoring is technology that automatically scours the web for mentions of keywords of your choice. It is a way for you to get closer to realtime by stayng more up to date with it happening in the outside world. Appropriate keywords might be your brand name, the product or services names that you are responsible for, your competitors brands or your customers names – it depends on whatever it is that you need to be on top of.

A very simple but excellent place to start is Google Alerts. You can set up a Google Alert in seconds, and then Google will email you ‘mentions’ of those keywords either ‘as it happens’, daily or weekly (I recommend daily for a good balance between being overwhelmed and being out of date by the time you get them.)

At the higher end offering more sophisticated filtering and reporting are buzz monitoring technologies like those provided by my personal buddies at Brandwatch and a host of others. If you work in a corporation, someone somewhere will almost certainly have subscribed to one of these providers – find out who!

    5. Attitudes

Activity in brief:

Nurture more agile approaches to getting stuff done. Send a motivated project manager (or go yourself) on an Agile Project Management course. Start using agile to manage your projects.

Description:

Spread awareness and excitement around you about the ‘Always in Beta’ approach to launching new things – it doesn’t matter if its a new expenses process or a glossy new piece of

Celebrate failure. Talk about your own failures, don’t hide them. If you have one, tell your boss that you believe the organisation needs to be more supportive of failure and that you’re going to start talking about failure more. Encourage and reward failures in your own team. If you’re brave enough, do a Church of Fail! See People

        6. Hiring & Firing

Activity in brief:

Be more rigorous about who is right for the organisation and the journey it’s going on – to get that right, you have to raise the standards on who gets hired and – necessarily – who gets fired.

Description:

Simple but will take time to have an effect, as hiring and firing generally don’t happen over night, but essentially what you are trying to do here is increase the blend of people you have in your organisation who are change-friendly. So hire people that appear to and can evidence their ability to flex and their welcoming of change and evolution. These people will be more likely to be able to demonstrate self-awareness of their habits and perhaps of habits they have changed. They will be energized and excited about change, possibility, challenge.

The other practical reality is that to make this work you and your organisation will need to move people on that absolutely refuse to and bitterly resist change. It is not good for them to be in an organisation that is pushing to adapt and move quickly, and it is definitely not good for everyone else that is trying to do so. The word ‘firing’ here, in this book, might seem out of place. A little harsh, a little old school, a little flippant maybe. But as my friend Will Morey puts it, this is incredibly important: “Breaking up is hard to do.  Get better at it. Learning how to let people move on from the organisation is critical.”

If the future of your organisation depends on its ability to change (which it does, basically) then hiring and firing are absolutely crucial in getting the best possible group of people in the organisation to adjust to whatever the future throws at them, both in the moment and in market changes that happen over time.

    7. Rewards

Activity in brief:

Make changing and evolving a part of everyone’s job, and hugely reward those efforts to change.

Description:

Build into your own role description and those of the people in your team or wider organisation clear responsibilities about changing and evolving the organisation. What gets managed, gets done, and by explicitly making elements of change velocity peoples jobs, you vastly improve the likelihood of it actually happening. So incentives and rewards are powerful allies in helping shift your team, your division or your start up team towards this culture of ‘we embrace change’.

Ensure that you ask any reports to include examples of positive change that they have made both in the organisation and in themselves in their annual reviews, and be sure to reward them for doing so – both in financial and non-financial ways. (In our team we have a shield of win that peers pass from one to another to celebrate success – the point is that it isn’t only about job descriptions, you can have fun with it.)

    8. Personal change

Activity in brief:

Those endlessly challenging words from Gandhi: ‘You must be the change you wish to see in the world’.

Description:

To really make this happen you will have to speed up your own personal change velocity. To embrace change personally, to role model the personal development necessary to overcome the habits and behaviours that resist change, to dance in the moment when crises or unexpected events happen, to roll with it, to accept and then celebrate failure in yourself and in others and the learning that it brings. Simple really, yes? No! Terribly difficult, and incredibly rewarding. No matter what level you operate at, you must lead in this. You must be the change you wish to see.

Summary

In a world where change is constant, and possibly accelerating, our businesses will thrive or decay according to how quickly they can adapt. The media and communication environment that we all now exist and participate in is close to realtime: things happen, everybody knows about it, with a 20 second lag (and falling).

To thrive, to reach for our Purpose of Significance, and make a difference to the world, we have to increase our change velocity. As a side effect, we gain huge advantages – we move faster and better than others and so gain rewards, we individually become more flexible, more open and less resistant to the world around us and so gain rewards. Let’s move. Now!

Next, appropriately given its role in change velocity and openness, we will look at how to harness Technology.

—-

So that’s us done with Change Velocity. Next up? Technology…

Feedback in comments here on the blog, twitter @willmcinnes / #cltrshck or email to wmcinnes@gmail.com.

Continuing with this rich seam on flexibility and pace of change in the 21st century, here are the second two areas of Behaviours and Counterforces.

——–

3. Behaviours

If our businesses are going to move with the cat-like agility described above, what will underpin that? What new behaviours must emerge? Which existing behaviours must change or die?

Collaborating

Firstly, it seems fairly obvious to say, but it will be impossible to move at the requisite new-speed-of-business if the people in our teams and across our departments are unable to collaborate.

When the train crisis happens, if there are now only twenty seconds instead of the 2 hours available ten years ago, then our man at the train company cannot afford any internal friction. On behalf of the company, he simply cannot tolerate politicking, unnecessary bureaucracy, or delay. He needs a network of highly responsive, empowered and helpful colleagues to move at realtime speed.

Silos do not support this kind of collaboration. In fact, they are diametrically opposed to enabling this kind of collaboration. Yet so many people describe the silos and silo behaviour in their organisations.

Where does silo thinking come from and who can change it? Leaders must address these issues, and especially their own personal behaviour that contributes to this. Leaders at all levels must model collaboration, must reward collaboration and unlock the blockers of collaboration.

Failing

Secondly, as we have previously explored in both People and Leadership, shifting organisational perceptions of failure are incredibly important in the organisation of the 21st century.

A lack of understanding failure and celebrating of failure leads to butt-covering, which in turn (without wanting to sound like Yoda) leads to a clogging of the pipes of collaboration. And failure itself may not be the greatest cost in an organisation but instead the fear of failure which actually paralyses decision-making and creates enormous stress for the people in the organisation.

Greater willingness to fail will lead to greater levels of trust between people in the organisation and a higher degree of honesty throughout. Indeed, if we see failing as learning, then the opportunity to fail more can create organisations which genuinely cherish and work towards learning and our companies will truly become real ‘Learning Organisations’ which restlessly adapt and move forwards.

Rewarding

Thirdly, what your organisation fundamentally rewards hugely affects its change velocity. For clarity, when I say ‘what your organisation rewards’, I mean what it really rewards – not just what it says it values. We’ve all been in organisations where there is an espoused value of integrity, only to see behaviour that is quite the opposite, or where thinking differently is internally branded as a core value, yet the people in the organisation actually squash new ideas and prefer to rinse and repeat, sticking with the ‘way things have always been done’.

So to accelerate their change velocity, organisations must truly reward the bundle of behaviours that unlock flexibility and agility: behaviours like personal development, business change, creativity and innovation, risk-taking and failure, and collaboration.

The organisations that do reward these qualities do so with both hard and soft rewards: in pay packets, bonuses, promotions and so on, and in ‘softer’ but perhaps even more impactful ways such as prizes, public visibility internally and externally, in one-on-ones and through coaching. And this will influence literally everyone in the organisation: from a founder or CEO to the receptionist or groundskeeper.

This truly nourishes an organisation striving to operate faster and better. A groundswell of collaboration and energy for change from the people in the whole team, in the whole organisation, pushing for a better organisation that can dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee. What is rewarded is absolutely key.

4. Counterforces

As we hurtle into this realtime world, where a friend uploads a photo of their meal in a fine restaurant to their chosen social network seconds before they devour it and then leaves an online review of the food before they’ve paid their bill, where organisations are monitoring and acting on feedback continuously gathered through forums and review sites, it is worth recognising that there are the beginnings of a counter-revolution or at least obvious counter-forces against this always-on way of life. And rightly so.

For the constant on-ness of a realtime world cannot be healthy. Some researchers talk about the side-affects of ‘Continuous Partial Attention’, the state where we humans are continuously monitoring a variety of information sources but with a thin ‘partial’ slice of our attention. Is it healthy to be plugged in to our mobile phone, our email, news headlines, an internal collaboration tool, one or two or three social networks AND have conversations with loved ones and colleagues? What does is this doing to our relationships, our brains, our blood pressure? What is it like for a child to grow up in a world where its parents are often absorbed by a little black rectangle they hold in their hands, expression frowning in concentration, thumb scrolling away? When do we start talking seriously about internet addiction?

Other researchers celebrate instead the virtues of Flow: that dream-like state where everything comes together without any fuss, where you are ‘in the zone’, uninterrupted, locked in, all of your attention poured onto one single area of focus. And – in the flow state – the report practically writes itself, the spreadsheet starts to add up, the bookshelf gets categorised, the garden looks good again. Where is the flow in a realtime world? How can an organisation achieve greatness when its people are spreading their attention so thinly every day?

Artists and thinkers are also playing with notions of slowness, fighting back against the incessant speed of modern life. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has funded a brilliant project that has built ‘The 10,000 year clock’ in a remote Texan hillside. The clock chimes once a year, is designed to function for 10,000 years, and every single chime will be unique from any before or after. In a disposable, short-term world, this project is designed to strive for a longevity that has become lost in the hurly-burly and speed of the 21st century. And of course there is the Slow Food Movement, celebrating the virtues of patience, time, space, peace.

Lastly, a debate continues about whether change is even accelerating at all. Some people say that of course it is, and point to all of the things we discuss in this book and more. In fact, futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that we are only at the earliest part of an accelerating phase that will get substantially faster over the next fifty years, arguing that as technology develops so it has a  compound affect on each next wave of progress and so further accelerates until we reach ‘The Singularity’ where human and computer intelligence are merged but that’s a whole ‘nother book! The anti-speeding-up lobby resists, and points to the fact that our grandparents generation went from the horse and cart and steam-powered trains to men on the moon, smart phones with inconceivable computing power and kids playing and learning in online virtual worlds. Fair point.

The point is this: the world is changing. And to many people, it feels like change is accelerating. Whatever the case, it is certainly true that the majority of our businesses, organisations and institutions are unable to move quickly enough to keep up any more. They are increasingly out of touch. What we have to do is increase the velocity that they are able to change at, in order that they remain relevant and bring their resources to bear on the problems that need solving.

——-

Feedback in comments here on the blog, twitter @willmcinnes / #cltrshck or email to wmcinnes@gmail.com.

Ciao.

Continuing with Change Velocity, now’s the time to get into the meat of it 🙂

So here are the first two of four major components: Personal and Organisational Factors.

—-

So what areas influence an organisation’s change velocity?

We’re going to break this down into four categories – each with its own sub-set of levers and buttons that can be pulled and pushed to speed up the organisation’s ability to change. Those categories are:

1.    Personal factors
2.    Organisational factors
3.    Behaviours
4.    Counter-forces

1. Personal factors

You may be wondering what does the personal have to do with my organisation’s ability to change. The perspective of Culture Shock is that an organisation is made up of people, rather than of bricks or inventory or processes. People are the organisation. And so to shift how well a whole organisation responds to change, we must shift how the many individuals that make up that organisation each respond to change.

It is well understood that it is normal to find change difficult. Just check out the shelves of the self-help sections in a book shop or do a quick Google for ‘behaviour change’. So given that change is difficult, if we are to personally help change our organisations, and credibly lead such change, we must ourselves understand change intimately and be evolving ourselves.

Attitude

The highest order lever, then, is our own attitude and approach towards change. We must develop a personal appreciation of the challenge of change. We must sample and interrogate the flavours of change just as a wine buff would roll a fine wine around her palette – picking out the flavours, the nuances, the good bits and the bad! Change, then, must be something we taste, feel, appreciate (appreciate does not necessarily only mean positively – like you can appreciate a cold rain or a hard run!).

We must take the attitude that change is a constant, and that what we can influence is how we respond to it and flex with and around it.

And we must respect, appreciate and constantly learn about what it is like to change personally, over time developing our own reasonably strong understanding of how we personally respond to change.

Understanding things like:
•    What do I personally find hard to change in myself?
•    How do I typically respond to change at first?
•    What motivators really work for me to see change through?

In short, our attitude must be two-fold: embracing of change, and respectful of the consequences and demands of change. Doing so gets us ready for everything that follows.

Habits

My limited understanding of the power of habits has been gained from two brilliant Professors of Behaviour Change – Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine. In their Do Something Different programme, they have developed a programme to guide personal change based on their academically robust research which is now being used at large-scale in deprived areas in the UK to enable individuals to unlock the personal habits that prevent change.

As I have learnt from Ben and Karen, our habits are a complex web of behaviours that may control us more than we realise. And these habits are fairly hard to wiggle out of – they interlink and hold one another in place. We are, to quite a large degree, ‘habit machines’ – much less conscious of our decision-making than we at first realise.

Think about this:
•    When you take a shower, in which order do you wash yourself?
•    How do you travel to work each day?
•    Where do you normally sit on a bus or a train?
•    Do your arguments with loved ones tend to have particular pattern? If so, what are the patterns?
•    What do you choose for lunch and where do you go?

This mesh of habits both help by making the nuts and bolts of everyday life simpler, and hinder by providing a barrier to us changing some of the habits we wish to. So if we shift the context to that of you at work, you may start to find habits there: how you respond to communications, both physical and digital; how you react under pressure; how you give and receive praise; how you say yes and say no and who to. Can you think of habits you have at work? Can you observe habits and patterns in those you work with?

The Do Something Different programme operates on the basis that loosening up the grip of some of our most basic, ‘unimportant’ habits makes way for us to be able to take more transformative personal steps.

So if the purpose of you reading this book is to change how business happens in the 21st century, and we agree that organisations are made up of individuals, then one of the keys to change is going to be the individual changing of habits: starting with your own!

Listening

In order to be able to personally change, and to therefore become part of the positively-evolving future organisation, like Short Circuit’s Johnny Five, you ‘neeeeeed input’.

This skill is in managing your attention, especially in listening, in dialogue and in empathy.

The successful leader in change senses and pays attention to what the market is doing, to what customers are saying (and not saying), to what their colleagues are feeling and seeing themselves. (I’m guessing that as a reader of this kind of book you already know that).

This is why the business press has notably shifted in the past 5 years to a focus on things like Emotional Quotient (EQ) over IQ, to celebrating right-brained qualities like creativity and empathy over linearity and number crunching.

In my first and only proper job a very experienced and quirky sales person told me that we have two ears and one mouth and in selling one should use them in that ratio – it’s an old saw, of course, and one you’ve no doubt heard yourself many times. I suggest, as so many others have before, that the same applies to anyone that desires to create change through working with people. If we are to lead change (not just once, but continuously) it would be better to listen twice as much as talk.

Humility

Finally, in order to accelerate our own change velocity – which frankly sounds like something out of a bad science fiction novel – we have to cultivate our own humility.

It is one thing to hear feedback that tells us that something we have done or are responsible for must change. It is another to act on that feedback and accept that we were wrong. Yet this is the very quality we need to wash through our teams, our organisations and our business community – a willingness to be wrong, an acceptance of other people’s opinions and ideas, the self-belief and humility to publicly change course. Because this is the fuel of change velocity.

We cannot change but getting it right every time. We cannot go from stasis to ‘perfect next step!’. We have to make a mess, learn-by-doing, and crack on without losing vital time in endless paralysing focus groups and internal discussions.

To change, we have to DO. And to do the big things that need doing (like changing how our whole organisation behaves, one step at a time) we need humility and self-awareness.

By cultivating humility and demonstrating failure, and by rapidly gathering up the self-awareness and learning which comes with failure, we open up new possibilities around change and flexibility that are simply not available otherwise. We welcome in unexpected consequences, put up less resistance and move faster in response to Black Swans, we learn and change personally more constantly. None of which is possible if our posture is of ‘I’m already perfect’.

2. Organisational factors

Now having explored some of the personal factors, let’s look at the organisational traits and areas where change velocity can be driven from and what that can achieve.

Agility

At a recent conference I was speaking at, a panellist on just before me from a national train company who works in PR described the challenges they have in today’s connected world when there is a crisis in their rail operation (for example if  a train gets derailed).

He said ‘ten years ago we had 2 hours to get a handle on what had happened and prepare to brief the media, five years ago with the mainstream adoption of the mobile phone that dropped to 20 minutes, now – with smartphones, picture messaging, Twitter and Facebook – we have twenty seconds before the world knows more about the crisis than we do’.

This is what is demanded of our organisations today. Pow! Something happens. 20 seconds later, the world knows about it. A plane crash landing in the Hudson river, the king of pop Michael Jackson dying, a politician being arrested or an oil company facing an oil spill. You and your team have a buffer of twenty seconds between something happening and it being potentially shared globally and with no friction or cost.

We call this realtime. That is that the lag between what happens and the world knowing about it is ever-closely to realtime – they are nearly the very same. The buffer is al but gone.

We have already looked at how the accelerative role that online platforms are playing not just in the external media, as in this train company and Twitter example, but also in how employees generate feedback for managers in HCL, in how customers innovate continuously for t-shirt company Threadless and for other businesses through the crowdsourcing of Innocentive. The phenomenon of realtime isn’t just a media and external communications thing: the need to be more agile and connected is a whole business thing.

    The OODA model

When the American ex-fighter pilot John Boyd developed his OODA model, I wonder whether he saw how broad its use might eventually become. Originally conceived to describe how combat happens between fast jets, the OODA model illustrates that decision-making happens in loops – we make a decision, see what impact that has, make another decision, see what impact that then has and so on. Here’s what OODA stands for:

•    Observe – what is going on in the environment around me?
•    Orient – what is my place in that environment, where am I in relation to everything else?
•    Decide – given all of that, what shall I do as my next step?
•    Act – implementing the decision

And repeat. So one thing to like about OODA is its iterative nature. That alone suits this organisational environment that we are exploring here where change is constant. But the big takeaway from the OODA model is not that decisions are in chains, linked together, all part of a constant process of decision-making. The big takeaway of the model is actually that the faster you can go through the OODA loop, the more likely you are to win.

Hold on a sec, you say. Perhaps fast decision-making isn’t the only thing that leads to winning in business or in combat or in policy-making! Maybe the best decision wins, and we should emphasise putting time and thought into patiently crafting the best decision? That may be true. For me, though, the shift to thinking in a OODA mode is that we are no longer seeking ‘the single best decision for all time’ – we are instead freed up to make a whole series of ‘the best decision right now’ choices. As a result the stakes are actually lowered. In the OODA mode we are shifted from thinking mode into doing mode, and we move from planning and considering into actively learning more about works and what doesn’t work. To me this is intuitively the absolutely right for a world of volatility and ever-present change.

    Ready, Fire, Aim, Agile Development & Always in Beta

Other people, like the brilliantly challenging management thinker Tom Peters, have characterised and long-promoted this same shift in decision-making from ‘Ready, Aim, Fire!’ to ‘Ready, Fire!, Aim’. And in software development and in entrepreneurial start-ups (of any kind), this emphasis has been gaining momentum steadily.

A start-up founder knows that the speed her team can move at is one of her few advantages against the big players, and knows that – with a limited pile (or indeed no) cash – the best thing she can do is drive her business to move quickly.

Similarly, an experienced software engineer knows that the lowest-risk approach to hitting his deadline and shipping some high-quality code may not be by working to a carefully developed and endlessly detailed plan, but instead by breaking down the whole project into a series of ‘sprints’, chunking the whole development into much smaller batches, and then re-prioritising the next steps every two weeks. This Agile approach to software development has gained in momentum over the past decade and at its very core is the philosophy that things will and always do change during the project – both in the environment and in the development team and client’s learning – and that harnessing that change is the key to success. There is nothing more demoralising than following a 12 month plan that is already out of date in week 3: Agile software development recognises this and flips traditional linear approaches project management on their head.

The good news is that Agile as a project management approach has been leaking out of its homeland of software development into many other organisational silos and into government too. Project owners, managers and teams are voting with their feet – an agile approach makes sense in the 21st century.

So what happens when we take these increasingly trendy approaches into business? We shift from ‘perfectly planned’ to ‘always learning’ or perhaps ‘Beta’. Beta is another term borrowed from the world of software development – the Alpha version is the shaky first prototype of a new web service or technology, the Beta version the next iteration with some of the most obvious glitches fixed, still incomplete but ready to share with a wider group of people for testing in the real world.

Being in Beta has since become as much an attitude as a formal state: Google’s Gmail was in Beta for years and had millions of daily active users! Since late 2009 the financial mobile payment startup Square has signed up 1m retailers by offering an innovative mobile approach to handling financial payments that has entirely caught traditional financial services providers off guard. I’m sure that Square changes every day, if not every week. Always in Beta has become a slogan for an OODA-like attitude that says ‘this web app / restaurant / teaching curriculum is never going to be complete – it will always be tweaked, improved and iterated’.

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Feedback in comments here on the blog, twitter @willmcinnes / #cltrshck or email to wmcinnes@gmail.com.

Ciao.

OK changers, so here’s the next snippet on Change Velocity.

The aim here is to unpick why this is happening and what the benefits are for progressive social businesses.

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Why must 21st organisations be able to change so quickly?

In simple terms the argument is easy: because the world is changing so much more quickly. And specifically not the world elsewhere, over there in a distant corner of the globe, somehow removed and less relevant. Today, in the global marketplace, connected as we are by technology and systems those far-off changes in ‘the world’ elsewhere mean that the external environment directly around our organisations which is shifting rapidly, unexpectedly and disruptively. Most importantly, we have to get better at changing to handle the big shift from a world where we seek continuous growth to a world where we seek Betterness, as Umair Haque would put it.

As a result of this compelling blend of drivers and trends we have to be conscious of and work at ever-increasing our change velocity.

Global shifts and Black Swans

It has become a cliché, but in a world of continuous disruption change is the only constant.

Let’s remind ourselves of some of the recent volatility and disruption in the global political and economic landscape:

•    Lehman Brothers and the corresponding global financial system meltdown
•    Double-dip recession 2007 – present day
•    The Arab Spring
•    Rise of BRIC (Brasil, Russia, India, China) as new economic powerhouses – in particular the rise of China
•    American stagnation
•    Euro crisis, with Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain in various states of deep financial malaise
•    Occupy movement
•    Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, Japan
•    Wikileaks and Guardian campaigns against News Corporation
•    Bin Laden and Ghaddafi’s deaths

In his brilliant book Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb described how organisations are geared up for expected risks – things that have happened before. These are ‘white swans’ – normal crises. But Taleb illustrates how the most cataclysmic, impactful, disorienting crises are entirely without precedent – we cannot prepare for them using scenarios, or simply adjust and prepare for what has happened before. These are Black Swans. Unimaginable until they have been discovered, preposterous until they happen. Some of the above were Black Swans, while others were known possible outcomes. Combined, they represent a great deal of change.

In addition to these geopolitical and Black Swan events, society too has evolved (or changed, at least!).

Activism and campaigning in networks

In society a new generation of activism has emerged. At the time of writing in my home town of Brighton on the sunny south coast of England, a campaign has spread through the social networks connecting up people living in the city who are outraged at the alleged bullying of a breast-feeding mother in a local restaurant, with a number of fellow customers telling her ‘she should be more discrete’. I first heard of it in Twitter, and quickly saw friends and friends of friends sharing the news, commenting on the original blog post (which now has 100 odd comments) and then details of a planned ‘flashmob’ protest in Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has often talked of the platform as being a ‘social utility’ which ‘removes friction from sharing’. The campaign ended up in the national and local press, on regional TV and was a brilliant success for a small group of busy (and probably tired!) mothers. Could a grassroots local campaign have spread as quickly with as little effort fifty years ago?

Clearly, this trend is not just about local campaigns. A new kind of campaigning organisation is possible in the 21st century – take The Tea Party in the USA, or the Save The Forests campaign in the UK. These digitally networked, purpose-driven campaigns can quickly form and perform, seeming to emerge out of nowhere before applying very real influence on the issues of their choice.

And the result is that – as an organisation on the wrong side of a campaign, rightly or wrongly – you can go from pootling along in business-as-usual mode, to facing a full-scale crisis, with your brand name trending on Twitter, connected activists overwhelming your website, and journalists combing through digital information in less than the time that it used to take to craft a press release.

Technology disruptions

The influence of technology is woven through this whole book. We look at specifics both further on in this chapter and in the specific Technology chapter. Suffice to say that the role of technology in driving the pace of change has been paramount – indeed, of more influence than any other individual cause.

Nobody changed the rules (yet)

It is also worth noting that one of the tensions that the 21st century organisation must deal with is that presented by the fact that the rules of the game, and in particular the law, lag behind the present-day realities of our businesses.

The law must necessarily follow society – it cannot be designed in advance and put on the shelf, ready for when that unforeseen development in the world suddenly happened. So it is that the law follows events in the real world, and always has been.

However some would say that we are in a period where there has been a wholesale paradigm shift driven by technology and media which the law is particularly lagging today. For businesses, that means the rules have not changed. Regulators and law courts still demand 20th century behaviour, which can provide a strong counter-pull to that of needing to evolve (we have also found in our work that it can provide a gold-plated excuse not to change too – a crutch and a shield to hide behind).

In particular, the law around intellectual property feels distinctly 20th century. It will be fascinating to see how the law changes to fit an age of changed notions and expectations around sharing, ownership, creation and collaboration, which will affect all businesses.

The biggest reason we need to get better at changing quickly

However, there is a more fundamental reason that our businesses need to get better at responding to change than all of these put together.

That is the perilous state of the environment.

If our businesses do not lead huge transformation in how modern life in the 21st century happens, we are all screwed. We have run out of time. The ice is melting, the seas are emptying of fish stocks, the weather systems are changing, the water is running out, many species are threatened or worse. We close our eyes and hum while the planet slips into an accelerating period of poor health. And right now most business feels like part of the problem rather than the solution.

We have to change the vested interests, the way things have always been done, the cultures and norms in every organisation, every economy, every nation state. All of these require huge change in individuals and organisations and industries and government. The status quo is the biggest single threat to the future of humanity. Seriously.

So as the challenges presented by all of these external factors come to life, society will begin to wake up and change will become the premium factor – a much desired and celebrated quality. Investors, employees, senior managers, community stakeholders and the rest will begin to see that the propensity to change is all we have if we are to sort this mess out.

For that reason alone, understanding and increasing the change velocity of our organisations is absolutely vital.

What are the benefits of improving our change velocity?

•    Learning sooner, which leads to better decision-making including more effective use of resources
•    Staying closer to customer needs, which leads to better new product development, greater loyalty, greater market share and higher employee engagement
•    Greater resilience, which leads to a more stable organisation, the attraction and retention of the best employees and customers and higher long-term results and returns
•    Continuing relevance in a volatile world, which leads to long-term contributions and sustenance to all stakeholders from employees and communities through to stockholders and economies
•    Lower risk, by “following fast” and rapidly adapting to other organisation’s innovations (rather than always pioneering)
•    All of which lead to competitive advantage – being the best, soonest, and therefore winning.
•    Fundamentally contributing to the development of a sustainable global society

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What do you think?

Feedback in comments here on the blog, twitter @willmcinnes / #cltrshck or email to wmcinnes@gmail.com.

Adios. For now.

Hi all,

A quick update: the final manuscript has been submitted to Wiley (wooo, yay etc) and we are now working with the excellent creatives at Crush (mo’ Brighton talent) on the cover design.

I couldn’t keep up the pace of both blogging the writing and writing and editing all together, so your contributions now probably won’t make it into the first edition of the book (unless something HUGE comes up, which is quite possible).

However, I still hugely welcome your comments because they can make it into future editions, and help me improve my own understanding.

Here’s Chapter Six – introducing Change Velocity!

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CHAPTER SIX: CHANGE VELOCITY

In addition to their Openness another fundamental characteristic of organisations in this progressive movement is their ability to change very rapidly. And their propensity to do so. For me it’s one of their most violent and disruptive advantages.

These fast-moving, fast-changing new players eat away at industry incumbents’ market share through their ability to learn, iterate and change, loop after loop, many times faster than the old guard.

Another change! Another change! Another change! POW. Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble (US) / Waterstones (UK), Netflix vs. Blockbuster, Threadless vs. GAP.

This is not just a business imperative – governments and not-for-profits must also speed up. As Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently relayed in an interview, Andy Grove, the long-serving CEO of Intel said at a dinner in 1995 “High tech runs 3X faster than normal businesses. And the gov’t runs 3 times slower than normal businesses. So we have a 9X gap.” If government would like to emulate the success and practices of Silicon Valley, then they have a great deal of flexibility and speed to find in themselves.

And related to this, one of their other great emerging characteristics is their ability to u-turn. By u-turn I mean not just product innovation. This is wholesale changes of direction.

Whatever you think of it, Facebook has been absolutely brilliant at doing something, hearing a load of feedback, and doing a public u-turn within hours or days. It doesn’t always, and has returned to the same initiatives and goals over time, but the Beacon turnaround sticks out – though there are others. See this Google search for “Facebook u-turn” – 999,000 results (same search for “Google u-turn” returns me 18,200 results, and for Apple 19,400).

I thought of this characteristic again having followed the interesting Netflix story lately.

If you haven’t already heard, they made some bold changes to their product – divided the whole business in two with no consultation, called the DVD mailing business Qwikster, kept Netflix as the solely-focused streaming business.

The outcry has been sustained, and numbers have backed up the complaints – some commentators say this is hitting Netflix’ business.

Now I read that, 23 days later, they’ve reversed the decision – That Was Qwik: Netflix Dumps Qwikster, Won’t Split DVD-Streaming Accounts by paidContent

I always admire a u-turn:

1. You tried to innovate and make change – that takes guts and brainpower
2. You listened – that takes ears!
3. You are humble enough to publicly admit you were wrong – that takes guts

Now having begun to write this I realise that before this little phase of reading and writing I just got off a call with a team in a gigantic multi-national bank. Some young talents in a development programme for top potential future stars have been working on launching a business innovation. Their biggest challenge is what they describe as the internal ‘conservatism’. Making change in that organisation is really really hard. Scarily hard when you think about the above.

So what we are experiencing here is the ability of organisations to rapidly adapt to the world around them.

What is change velocity?

A mate of mine called David has worked his whole career in sales. He is a proud salesman through and through. And he half-jokingly introduced me to one of his favourite concepts a few years ago: “revenue velocity”. This is not how much work the client needs doing in total, but how quickly they need or want to invest that budget. At the time I find it a hilarious encapsulation of his deliberately-cultivated salesman persona both good and bad (though in time running this services business I’ve learnt to appreciate the wisdom in it).

This phrase makes me think about an organisation’s ability to change quickly. Change velocity of an organisation is its ability to change quickly. Not just agility, which is its ability to shift its focus rapidly – an organisation can be agile without internally changing. Not just its speed, which is the speed that it moves at – again an organisation can move quickly without changing. And not just its ability to evolve – an organisation can evolve effectively over time, but can it do so quickly enough?

The higher an organisation’s change velocity, the faster it can shift its focus, the faster it can execute, and the faster it can fundamentally change itself.

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Feedback in comments here on the blog, twitter @willmcinnes / #cltrshck or email to wmcinnes@gmail.com.

PEACE!