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’.

—–

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.

—-

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

—–

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!

OK, here’s the second set of the areas of Openness.

Thanks to some great feedback from Pete Burden there are now 9 areas, as I’ve added Competition which is an interesting dynamic in the mix.

Let me know what you think!

——

5. Environment

As we all wake up to the huge environmental challenges ahead of us, so the role of businesses in the creation and solution of those challenges quite rightly comes into focus. In fact, if there is any reason why we need business to evolve, it is to address the environmental challenges we have ahead of us.

Openness will play a substantial role here: governments and activists will continue to use visibility and profile to influencer businesses to change and as the world takes the environment more seriously, this will be increasingly impactful; and secondarily, progressive businesses that make changes sooner than their competition (whether driven by a Purpose of Significance or in response to the influences and changes in their market) will promote their strengths and gain competitive advantage.

Carbon Disclosure Project

An example of this is the Carbon Disclosure Project, a brilliant and well-connected organisation  headquartered in London with regional offices around the world that ‘launched to accelerate solutions to climate change and water management by putting relevant information at the heart of business, policy and investment decisions’. In other words, using the power of Openness to drive a change in behaviour of corporations. CDP creates this openness by inviting businesses to complete an annual questionnaire about their emissions, water management and climate change strategies.

Responding to the questionnaire is voluntary but one of CDPs great insights has been that a failure on behalf of businesses to manage these aspects of their operations would represent a threat to their future business success, in a world where a business that is not environmentally sustainable will become a business that is not economically sustainable, and in doing so CDP has gained the interest of the institutional investment community who increasingly demand that the corporations which they invest in begin to positively manage the sustainability of their business. As such, CDP creates demand from the investors for transparency from the companies which they have shareholdings in, which in turn drives up the profile and importance of such information inside the businesses.

Walmart

Whereas CDP could be said to be operating from the top down, there are also initiatives driving greater openness and transparency around environmental impacts bubbling from the bottom up: one is initiatives like Patagonia’s Common Threads programme which we looked at earlier, whilst another which has had huge impacts in the sustainability of business has been Walmart’s massive moves towards becoming a greener business.

Amongst an interesting and positive heap of initiatives it has created since 2005, perhaps the most open of its sustainable practices has been the creation of Sustainable Value Networks. As Walmart says on its website: ‘SVNs bring together leaders from our company, supplier companies, academia, government, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs.) Together, we explore challenges develop solutions that benefit our business, as well as our local and global communities.’

Effectively, the SVNs are a vehicle to allow Walmart to invite in some of its biggest critics from activist groups and NGOs, bring in brains and perspectives from academia and government and also – vitally – draw in its supply chain too. These Networks have the responsibility and scope to simultaneously substantially reduce the environmental impact of Walmart business AND drive down costs in the business. The range is broad: SVNs span in focus from Greenhouse Gas to Chemical Intensive Products.

The brilliance of Walmart’s SVNs is their configuration − this really is openness at work, the opening up of a single-organisation’s ‘monoculture’ to greater diversity of ideas and values.

6. Marketing and communications

In the famous words of comedian Bill Hicks at a stand up gig ‘if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself’. He continues: ‘You are satanspawn, filling the world with violent garbage..’.  Marketing and communications has a huge opportunity in the 21st, and it is not just to cease being satanspawn!

Unfortunately, too often, those in marketing and PR were the creators of opacity – obfuscating and obscuring simple, easy-to-access truths like the fat or salt in a food product, or the true cost of a financial services product, or coaching the CEO to evade difficult questions in interviews, instead droning away at their key messages, disrespecting their interviewers and their audiences.

Alternatively, marketing has been too late and too lacking in influence to substantially improve the given product or service: it has been the recipient of the finished article, told only to ‘get it out there’ and so it has lobbed freshly packaged products over the corporate wall, bombarding those on the other side with a hail of incoming messages. “INCOMING!”.

What is more, marketers stand accused of creating aspirational expectations for the average Joe that leave him or her feeling miserable with what they really have. They – the argument goes – created the demand for the shiny car, the puffy lips and the orange skin, for the expensive mountain bikes (plural), the two foreign holidays a year. Which led in turn to the spiral of over-borrowing, of credit card debt and general financial woes.

Marketing in the last century was an industrialized process of shoving stuff into the world. There wasn’t a great deal of dialogue, there wasn’t a great deal of participation and there wasn’t – by the end of the century – a great deal of love or respect for Marketing with a capital M.

That ethos of marketing will not cope with the challenges and changes of the 21st century. It just won’t pass.  The opportunity for marketing today is in harnessing this momentum towards greater openness. Here are some examples of how.

Customer service as marketing

In an open and connected world, consumers and businesses experiences of the products and services they buy are no longer isolated. There is no longer a kind of asymmetry in the power between the provider and the consumer because as you will know well, within minutes of finishing a meal – or even during, if you so wish – you can leave a review of a restaurant that will be findable through Google. The power is more balanced now: if tens of customers have bad experiences of a tradesperson or a lawyer, or if tens of thousands of businesses have bad experiences of an energy company or a government department, they can interlink, aggregate into a more formidable whole and distribute ‘the truth’ about company X far and wide.

This creates a new imperative for marketers which I believe is already making business better: the imperative to take customer service more seriously than ever before.

As such, customer service is an integral part of the new marketing.

The winning marketers will celebrate the potential of reviews, they will create word-of-mouth through outstanding customer experiences, they will create cultures and processes that imbue their employer’s with customer-centricity. They will lead each element of the organisation to appreciate their role in the customer’s end experience. And as they do, brands will rise and fall based on their transparent, openly available customer service experiences.

Openness as marketing

Secondly, beyond customer service alone, marketers will find ways to create value and advantage from openness in how their organisation communicates and interacts with the outside world.

Some simple examples:

Skittles & econsultancy

Skittles, the American candy brand, and econsultancy, the global marketing membership organisation, don’t share a great deal of characteristics. One is B2C, a ‘food’ while the other is B2B and a publishing and community business. But both have experimented with the power of open in their marketing by transparently displaying tweets about their brand names on their own homepages.

During their now-famous campaign, Skittles turned its whole website homepage over to tweets from people – anyone – mentioning the word ‘skittles’ in their 140 character update. The result was a minimally-filtered stream of consciousness from a global audience of Skittles lovers, haters and people playing a old-fashioned game of bowling! The rationale here is: ‘we are what people say we are – and we’re bold enough to project what they say about us on our own sparkly website’. econsultancy continues to do this to this very day: across their popular marketing resource (but no longer on their homepage) website is a stream of recent tweets mentioning the brand.

Crowdsourcing as marketing

Kickstarter is an incredible exemplar of what is possible with openness in marketing. Kickstarter is a platform where I – a creative – can outline a project I’d like to bring to life: a film I’d like to shoot, a book I’d like to write, a technology I’d like to develop. After describing my would-be project, I can invite the world to become ‘backers’ – that is, to co-fund the development of the project in return for a small reward – a signed copy of the book for $25 or a private reading for $250!

Some projects are hugely over-subscribed – those that ‘go viral’ and are passed through social networks as must-help projects, whilst others just meet their targets and some don’t at all. The crowd decides, and the crowd funds: this is crowdfunding.

Given that an established marketing practice is research, focus groups, test marketing and piloting and so on, why won’t this kind of early-stage openness and participation become mainstream marketing in the development of products and services? And what a powerful prize: to turn consumers into investors, into co-creators.

7. Finance

In the progressive business of the 21st century, openness plays an incredibly important role in the finances of an organisation. So important, in fact, that there is a whole chapter dedicated to that topic here: Finances

8. Privacy

One note of caution: privacy must not be confused with Openness or – worse – actually lost in this drive towards a more open world. It is true that notions of privacy are changing, particularly in younger people growing up having never known anything but a world with an Internet. But for some that is an excuse to ride roughshod over people’s reasonable expectations and rights to robust personal privacy.

So as managers, employers and marketers, we must treat privacy with the highest regard. In general, people must have control over their own data and must not feel exposed without their consent and forewarning.

‘Open and appropriately private’ is the goal.

9. Competition

Given all of this openness, where does competition fit? What even is competition in the context of a more open, more connected 21st century? Who are we competing with? And why?

As my business partner and long-term collaborator Pete Burden commented as I published this extract on my blog ‘Competition (as we have previously understood it) only makes sense in a world of scarcity and underlying a lot of what you are saying about openness is the opposite of scarcity – an abundance of easily replicated information and data’. He is right. And it is unresolved both in this book and in my mind.

It is true that notions of competition are changing. You must have noticed, as I have, the rise of the use of terms like ‘frenemy’ and ‘co-opetition’. What is interesting is how digital culture is beginning to change organisational culture. On the internet, linking to other good content is what makes the web tick. Which led old-school business people to question ‘why would we link to him, he works for the competition?’. And on the internet, communities grow organically, messily, collaboratively and together create valuable ecosystems – and then the question from old-school (and logical) business is ‘so who owns this?’ which creates all kinds of brain-wrangling challenges for intellectual property law and for community members. Take Facebook for example – is the value in the platform, or in the user base (ie the community)? And if it is indeed the community, what is their reward, their share scheme and payback?

Finally on competition, it may seem that we are entering a world of abundance but one crucial constraint may be our attention. In the end, whilst we collaborate much more and work closely in co-opetition with traditional competitors, the available attention for what we provide may be scarce. Competition is not going away (for many, it is massively intensifying) – it is adapting and evolving in this more open world.

Summary

Openness is a fascinating topic and trend. Like a force of nature, it is awesomely powerful and not always benign or kind to those on the receiving end. And like a force of nature, that huge power that it possesses can be partially harnessed. In business, our tendency is try to resist openness. Business usually wants closed-ness. It wants control, narrowness, monopoly, few rather than many, integration, quality, secrecy. Very often, business wants to be opaque. Generally, business people find openness terrifying.

But regardless, its power grows. Society is becoming more and more connected, which is leading to more and more openness. We can batten down the hatches, hate what it brings, and hope that it passes, and ideally soon. Or we can harness its energy, go with it, run full force with it and throw everything we have into being more open. In this chapter we have looked ways to do so. To make it happen, as everything else in this book, will require grit and vision, and will lead to extremely positive cultural change.

As progressive business people, this is a wonderful opportunity and a force we can channel to help us make things better.

Further reading

Wikinomics – Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams
Open Leadership – Charlene Li

—

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

Next extract: starting the Change Velocity chapter…

Thank you for your support,

Will

Hello people,

There was an intermission while I made some serious progress on writing the book over Christmas, and then I had a trip to the USA.

But now I will be regularly publishing 3 or so extracts a week and would love your continued feedback and sharing.

General progress is quite exciting as the cover design has now been commissioned, and when I get some early designs I’ll be sharing them here.

Today, we’re breaking Openness down into 8 chunks – here’s the first 4.

Let me know what you think,

Will

—-

To understand how contemporary organisations are more open, we need to look at eight distinct areas of openness.

The eight areas of Openness

1.    Culture & behaviour
2.    Environment
3.    Systems
4.    Innovation
5.    Environment
6.    Marketing and communications
7.    Finance
8.    Privacy

1. Culture & behaviour

To discuss openness meaningfully, we need to start with your (or any) organisation’s culture and behaviour. There’s a reason why this book is called Culture Shock, and that is because so many of the adaptations that need to happen and the opportunities that are available are cultural. The following six domains on this list all interact with culture – they create it and they are created by it, the are all interlinked. But culture is like the glue binding them all together, which is why it is first.

So what does an open culture look like? Here’s a checklist; as you read through it, think about your own organisation and where you are.

In an open culture:

•    Almost all information is available to almost all members of the organisation – there are few secrets and it is easy to get the information you need.
•    People across the whole organisation are open about their emotions – there is little disguising or hiding of true feelings
•    Collaboration is a natural state, both within distinct organisational structures (like teams and divisions) and across them – there is little evidence of silos and no problem with people hoarding knowledge and protecting turf
•    The organisation collaborates as well as competes with its competitors – there is a nuanced view that competitors are also valuable collaborators who help build the market and ongoing joint projects

2. Environment

Interestingly the trend towards openness is also affecting our organisations internal environments, and has been – along with other trends over the past decades like those of global competition and the associated pressures for some companies to drive down costs in order to compete  – is beginning to transform how our workspaces look and operate.

Some of the emerging elements of these changing working environments include:

A shift from closed offices and cubicles to more shared spaces. Increasingly organisations are re-designing their spaces to have more ‘third spaces’ as Starbucks described themselves – that is, casual, comfortable, collaborative spaces like coffee shops, sofa areas and open plan spaces suited to informal meetings and conversations.

A shift from fixed desk spaces for all towards more hot-desking and even co-working. For several decades this has been happening, and many people have experienced both the pluses and the minuses of hot-desking. The next iteration of this trend is co-working: collaborative, shared workspaces for freelancers, independents and distributed employees who would otherwise work from home or alone in solo office spaces. What is particularly interesting about co-working spaces is how they physically design-in the opportunities for cross-over, serendipity and formal collaboration that we look at in the area of Innovation just a little bit further on in this list. In a co-working space, an architect sits next to a web developer, who sits across from a medical instruments sales rep, who shares a desk space with their illustrator partner. Co-working is the physical manifestation of a blended, connected, loosely connected workforce.

A shift from ‘the company provides the best technology’ to an emerging ‘Bring Your Own’ approach. Not long ago, the technology at work was pretty good and often better than that which most of us had access to at home. Over the past decade, that balance has inverted – many employees in developed and developing countries have better technology in their pockets and their home-offices than they are made to use at work! We are just starting to see intelligent organisations moving to harness this trend, with an emerging movement towards ‘here’s your tech budget, here’s an approved list of technology that will play nice with company systems – go choose the tools that are best for you and your job’.

A shift from company firewalls preventing access to large chunks of the web to an opening up of permission and a corresponding move towards IT as enablers rather than policers. When I worked in a traditional business in my first and (so far) only ‘proper’ job, it quickly became obvious that IT were gatekeepers. Theoretically there to serve the organisation, the IT manager wielded an unusual amount of power and seemed to revel in making things difficult. As an aside, he meant well, and did actually wear Disney ties – some stereotypes are true! Fortunately, times have changed in some organisations and there are those in IT who see themselves not only as gatekeepers and managers of security, but also as enablers of business results. As a result, in some organisations there is an enlightened recognition that employees need access to almost all of the web in order to carry out their lives and often to do their jobs too. The ‘Bring Your Own’ tech approach above is also a pretty enlightened trend. Long may the shift from IT as police to enablers continue! We look at this in more detail in Chapter Six on Technology.

3. Systems

Do you remember when Google Maps first came into your world? Suddenly, Google Maps was everywhere. It was the backdrop for news items on TV as the presenter introduced a piece about Iraq or Iowa – there was this big fat sattelite-y map and in the corner the Google Maps logo. It was soon popping up on other organisations’ websites – there, in the middle of an otherwise branded web page, was a Google Map of their office location. And then entirely new services popped up plotting all sorts of interesting property or crime or weather data onto a map that just happened to be a Google Map.

What Google had done so brilliantly was to build openness into the heart of their Google Map product. This was a map that came with a plug and a set of rules that said ‘hey, as long as you follow these rules, you can come along and plug into me and have a Google Map as part of your service and for free’.

You see, somewhat fascinatingly for non-technical geeks like me who are attracted to shiny cool technologies that do really useful things, openness, if allowed to, reaches into the very guts of a progressive organisation. It goes beyond the culture and the office layout into the very fundamentals of a business, into its systems and its inner core.

This is a huge and unstoppable trend, so let’s look at some of the core opportunities

APIs. Although Application Programming Interface isn’t the most user-friendly name it does do what it says on the tin from a technology perspective. I think of an API as a plug available in Company A (like with the Google Maps example or Facebook) that allows Companies B, C, and D to come along and plug into Company A and access some of the core functionality it provides. Simply put, this allows Companies B, C and D to get a lot more done with massively less resources – ‘hey, we don’t need to create a whole map thing now – we just plug into Google Maps for that part of our new property search engine’. And it allows Company A to substantially increase the distribution of their offering and their brand, and to build competitive advantage through having an ecosystem of related services that build on top of their own, but at little additional cost to themselves (Company A, that is).

This is how – in simple terms – independent companies are producing apps and games used daily by million inside Facebook. Facebook provides the platform, the plug, the rules, and independent companies are then able to develop their apps and games that take advantage of Facebook’s gigantic user base, its user information, its login functionality – the whole damn thing! In theory, everyone wins. Zynga, producers of Farmville, Mafia Wars and Words With Friends, did $600m revenues in 2010, a huge percent from game playing happening inside Facebook.

APIs tend to favour companies that have distinct, systematised products and services, and those which are powered by databases and technology – at least at first glance. So organisations providing very tailored products and services may struggle to identify opportunity here. But Facebook and Google Maps may be poor examples to use, because they allow the rest of us in non-digital native companies to get off the hook. That may be a little too easy. This is a seismic shift in how – from a systems point of view – business gets done in the networked 21st century. It will come knocking at your organisation and market sooner or later.

To find an opportunity, the way to think about the value that an API strategy can create is to think ‘What is the very core of our organisation? What are the crown jewels, and how could we accomplish our goals better by allowing other organisations (or individuals) to plug into a carefully considered part of those jewels in a way that creates value for us and for them?’

Open data

Let’s look at an overlapping opportunity but from a consumer’s point of view.

What would it be like if your bank could give you not only your balance and your recent transaction information, but could also provide a dashboard that gave you a sense of the trends in your personal finances and some meaningful insights into patterns and quirks that allowed you to better understand and manage your money?

What would it be like if you car could help you understand what your driving is like, and particularly when your driving style is more economical (financially and environmentally) and less, and when that tends to be in your journeys and why, and what you can do about it?

And, avoiding the old cliché of the Internet Fridge, would it be helpful if you could Google for your keys when you misplaced them at home (seriously, how cool will that be?), and if you could look up your cat flap data to tell whether the cat was in or out? Increasingly, objects are becoming connected to the Internet. The next generation of the web – the Semantic Web – is often popularly characterised as The Internet of Things. Soon it won’t just be people and data connected to one another through the web: almost everything will be connected.

In this digitized world, we are all leaving trails of breadcrumbs behind us that are being collected by the companies and organisations providing services to us. Recognising this, there is a whole raft of innovation happening around this idea of unlocking existing data stores to give value back to the creators – that is, the consumers and users – of that data. Some people are calling these ‘data handbacks’, and you can see this trend also located in the rise of visualizations of data, in infographics being used in the media to convey complex information through images as well as many other newly spawned opportunities.

Many banks and financial services institutions are beginning to hand back useful intelligence to their customers through a raft of ‘Personal Finance Managers’ – a good example for further research is Mint.com. The car example I gave just a moment ago is actually the Fiat 500 Eco-Drive which does exactly that – provides useful web-based information, nicely visualized, to the owners of their cars to help them understand and improve their driving.

Here’s a business-to-business example: Zappos, who we looked at earlier, has a vendor extranet where the c. 1,000 suppliers that it buys its many lines of shoes from can login and monitor the various stock levels for the lines that they supply. Nothing too revolutionary there, though I’d bet many companies wouldn’t allow their suppliers to do the same based on attitudes rather than technology limitations. But what about this? Zappos then permits those thousand or so vendors to raise Purchase Orders from Zappos to them to order new stock where they feel is necessary. Let me play that back to you: the supplier raises order from its customer to buy more stuff from itself, when it wants to. Zappos sees this as ‘a thousand extra people helping us to manage our business’. Pow!

So the question for you is ‘What information do you hold that could be enormously valuable to your customers, employees and stakeholders?’. And think about it good: there’s gold in them thar hills.

Open vs Closed systems

An interesting related consequence of the rise of Open is the tension between Open and Closed Systems. It is not something we are able to look at in detail here, but keep your eye on the positive conflict between open systems and closed systems. An example would be the open Google Android operating system for mobile devices in contrast with the closed ‘vertically integrated’ Apple system of iOS and iTunes, or the open Linux operating system for computers in contrast with the closed Windows operating system.

Both approaches have advantages: as an Apple user, I enjoy the (relatively) seamless integration between my iPhone, my iPad, the Macbook Pro that I have written this book on and my iTunes account. It generally ‘just works’, the quality is high, things work the same across different touchpoints. Yet here I am espousing the benefits of open systems.

4. Innovation

Perhaps the most radical influence of Openness has been in how businesses innovate in the late 20th and now early 21st century.

Crowdsourcing innovation

In 2010 a Russian by the name of Yury Bodrov solved twelve well-paid tricky ‘challenges’ for businesses around the world that he may never need to physically meet. That problem-solving feat made Yury the top solver of the year on innovation marketplace Innocentive. Yury is prolific – the next solver on the year’s leaderboard solved four challenges. And the challenges were not posted by just any old businesses: challenges have been set on Innocentive by P&G, NASA, Lilly and Roche.

You can think of Innocentive as a dating website where companies with business problems that they need solving can advertise their unfulfilled wishes to talented specialists that love solving problems. Solvers might be passionate soloist ‘amateurs’ working from their garden shed or a local lab, or highly paid professional scientists moonlighting. As Alph Bingham of Innocentive said at a recent event: “95% time the solver wouldn’t have been hired by sponsor”. This is problem-solving from the edges, or some kind of formalised serendipity – a way of gathering intelligence from the unexplored, unaccessed corners of possibility. And it is a valuable exchange for those involved.

At Threadless, community members submit new t-shirt designs, community members vote for their favourite designs which then go into production and community members send in photos of themselves and their friends wearing the t-shirts, which Threadless then adds to the product pages. So which bits of the typical t-shirt business does Threadless actually do? Well it prints the t-shirts, it takes some nice photos of them when they are first ready to be purchased, it takes the money and it sends them out – the logistics. But it’s just a hobby business though, right? Although the company doesn’t disclose financials often, it is in the public domain that Threadless is turned over $30m in 2009.

These kind of collaborative, online problem-solving endeavours have been called Crowdsourcing – the idea of harvesting or sourcing effort and intelligence from an online crowd or community.

This great opening up has been a radical shift in how innovation gets done in some organisations.

Previously, innovation was a matter for the Research & Development department. In-house talent would cook up the new product developments, and great innovation factories like 3M (sticky notes!) and Proctor & Gamble (the Swiffer!) would churn them out. This was both a practical reality and a source of company pride.

In this networked age, however, the opportunities to solve problems are far greater. As we have already touched on, businesses are no longer limited by their own available equipment, time, talent and resources. By opening up their fortress walls, these organisations are able to draw on talent dotted around the globe, on ideas and problem solving approaches that have not (and perhaps would not) emerged inside their own four walls and so can get better quality solutions to problems, and quicker too.

It’s like businesses have begun to get over the idea of themselves as the be-all-and-end-all and found a new found humility. That, or the economics of crowdsourcing as deeply compelling to profit-driven businesses in a hyper-competitive marketplace!

Getting stuff done in Government

As governments and local authorities wrangle with their delivery challenges in the recent austere, harsh economic environment, they too are exploring how opening up both their resources (like data stores) and their workloads to distributed groups can help. This is not crowdsourced innovation in the mode of Innocentive, but more like crowdsourcing-as-innovation.

Launched in 2009 by Hilary Clinton, the ‘Virtual Student Foreign Service’ is a U.S. Department of State programme harnessing ‘technology and a commitment to global service among young people to facilitate new forms of diplomatic engagement’.

The VSFS pairs ‘e-interns’ it has recruited – all of whom are American students –  with State department offices and US diplomatic posts worldwide, whom they then help with a variety of tasks from their own college and university campuses around the world.

As the VSFS says on its website: “Past projects asked students to:
•    Develop and implement a public relations campaign using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc. to communicate and reach out to youth
•    Conduct research on the economic situation, prepare graphic representations of economic data, and prepare informational material for the U.S. Embassy website
•    Create a system to gather and analyze media coverage on a set of topics including environment, health, and trade
•    Research IT-based interventions that have been successful in higher education, particularly in teacher training
•    Write and contribute biweekly articles to the U.S. Embassy’s Facebook page on topics such as internet, computer science/technology, history, and literature
•    Develop a series of professional instructional video clips to be published by the U.S. Embassy
•    Survey social media efforts of U.S. diplomatic posts, NGOs, and private companies around the world to help establish best practices in a U.S. Embassy’s social media outreach business plan.”

A global workforce of unpaid, willing volunteers? Seems to work for the U.S. State Department in these lean times.

Smaller steps in crowdsourcing

However, the big, developed end of crowdsourcing that we have looked at above is increasingly well understood. There are whole books and events and – as we’ve seen – innovation marketplaces enabling this wonderful connectivity between those with something they need and those with something to give.

What else is there to enable Innovation in progressive businesses around crowdsourcing? There are a couple of fairly simple trends worthy of our attention, both building on these ideas of the organisation having porous edges so that ideas can flow in and out.

Firstly, hackdays. Hackdays are a wonderfully simple and useful phenomenon to emerge from the developer community. Like any community, software developers have always been drawn to one another and have a rich history of meetups and big community events where they can get together, geek out and make stuff. At hackdays, developers, designers and creatives get together – usually at a weekend – to ‘hack’ something together: that is, to make something, and usually something they personally believe in – something that scratches an itch they have. Barcamps – a global network of open, user-generated conferences – really helped distribute the methods and benefits of hackdays to a global audience.

We are now seeing the rise of nichely focused hackdays, either around a cause, a specific niche area or around a technology. Organisations are also increasingly using hackdays to either foster internal innovation or even externally, like the recent Honda Hackday in London.

Social Innovation Camp is a brilliant example. Founded by a few good-spirited, frustrated people in London who that felt there was a huge opportunity to innovate more to provide better practical solutions to social issues in society that just were not being taken up by the usual solution provides of Government, charities and NGOS. The Social Innovation Camp guys felt passionately that some of the making and getting-stuff-done-ness of the hackday formula could be brought usefully to bear on the job of innovating around social causes. The first Social Innovation Camp was run in London in April 2008.

In the UK alone Social Innovation Camps have generated more than 450 ideas of which over 30 have been protoyped into social ventures, and a few have continued to grow including MyPolice, ‘an online feedback system for the police service, allowing direct, open conversations between the public and the police’, and the awesomely practical SimpleCRB which provides ‘A cheaper, quicker and more effective CRB checking service for organisations in the voluntary and public sector’. Real outcomes. And Social Innovation Camp has now spread far beyond London alone: camps have happened in Nigeria, South Korea, Australia, Slovakia, Georgia, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Bosnia. These lightweight, open movements are so much more viral than their centralised predeccesors – they spread.

Secondly and perhaps most simply of all, one of the most practical trends around this growing porosity in the edges of organisations is the rise of formats that bring guest speakers and potential collaborators into the organisation. Driven by the rise of the great talks available from inspiring events like the TED and TEDx series and the wonderful DO Lectures in Wales, there seems to be a growing consciousness that the world is full of interesting and alarmingly talented people that if we’re not careful, we may never hear from.

At NixonMcInnes we operate a First Friday programme where we simply ask interesting people we know to come and talk to us about their work on the first friday of every month. I think we ‘borrowed’ the idea from Google which has a whole external speaker programme in place bringing some of the world’s most interesting speakers to talk to their employees. Why wouldn’t we all do that?

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

Next extract: Finishing off the 8 areas of Openness by looking at areas 5 – 8.

Thank you for your support.

Will

Hello shock-heads,

Hopefully you are not yet suffering from gout due to your Christmassy over-indulgence, and are instead primed and ready for some snippety business reading, eh.

So, having finished Leadership, we’re now onto a core element of how a progressive, social business *is*, which is open.

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CHAPTER FIVE: OPENNESS

The world we now live in radically more open than that which is existed even five years ago. With the digitization of information, our society is only beginning to scratch the surface of what it is to live in a world where openness is easy and increasingly the default. Do you remember the first time you were sent an email you shouldn’t have seen? Who can forget poor Claire Swires and her email to her boyfriend (or was it fiancé?)! With the prevalence of Facebook, incidents like these happen every minute of every day across continents and hundreds of millions of active users. We are still coming to terms with the incredibly low-friction and massively high reach of sharing in the age of the Internet, even today.

Wikileaks releases top secret government records, journalists are able to hobble media empires and members of parliament through careful and persistent chasing down of digital information. Hacktivists Anonymous expose the names of visitors to paedophilia websites and hack Iranian government email systems. Videos of rogue employees misbehaving at work go around the globe in minutes, amongst billions of hours of video footage of kittens, double-rainbows and other oddities and extreme events that transcend themselves to become popular ‘memes’, ending up on t-shirts and in popular parlance.

And our young people are growing up in an age where they may have thousands of friends in social networks, a digital footprint of photos since they were babies that have been published in some form on the internet without their permission and are so creating new norms and new behaviours which have older generations shocked at the lack of privacy.

On the plus side, we can look up user-generated reviews of the restaurants we plan to eat in, the hotels we plan to stay in, of the tradespeople we plan on hiring to work in our homes. We can learn from other parents in Mumsnet, from other car-lovers in Pistonheads, from other gardeners and geneaologists and learners and whoever else we seek, in the ecosystem of niche communities that create a flow of open, helpful information that could never have existed before.

Hard-edged corporations too, even those with the glossiest of brands such as Proctor & Gamble and TK, have begun to share their most troubling and tricky business problems through crowdsourcing platforms and innovation marketplaces like Innocentive to collaborate and co-create solutions with networks of independent problem-solvers and customers alike.

Why is the progressive business more Open?

First and foremost, it makes sense for a progressive business to be more open because openness itself is irresistable. We cannot stop this trend, we cannot hold back this tide, so surely and inevitably we must instead celebrate and harness it.

That may be a little too based on faith alone. Businesses that are inherently more open cannot be driven simply because of some far-off understanding that one day the world will be more like this, can they? There must be some shorter-term reward, something more imminent, more pressing, more rewarding sooner. There must be jam today for openness to be a powerful part of this radical business movement.

In fact, by being more open a social business opens up tremendous new opportunities for itself, its people, its customers and wider stakeholders. These benefits include:

•    More powerful commitment and smarter problem solving internally thanks to greater openness around information and performance internally
•    Lower cost and higher impact marketing through the sharing of valuable information from the inside of the organisation to the wider world
•    Drastically lowering the cost of R&D through innovative and blended approaches to creation
•    Serendipity and unexpected consequences from outsiders making connections and creating possibilities where the organisation could not see or make them (not only in ‘innovation’ but in progress and activity generally)
•    To reduce costs and massively increase consumer loyalty and word of mouth buzz by capitalising on the trend towards greater participation between creator and consumer, including crowdsourcing, co-creation, crowd-funding and so on
•    And as a result of all of these, substantially reduced risks through being better prepared and more able to cope in an open world, which in turn creates a competitive advantage over slower, more reluctant competitors

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Just a quick one today to set the scene. The next extract will outline 7 practical areas where the power of Open can be applied 🙂

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

Next extract: 7 areas that open can be harnessed.

Thank you for your support.

Merry thingybob, Will