What's in my head today?

In our last post, we looked at some examples of “innovation” initiatives that had been doomed from conception (I use the term in inverted commas because none of them, to my mind, were truly about innovation and collaboration). This post, I promise to be a lot more positive as I lay out some thoughts on how to go about encouraging true innovation and collaboration across an organisation.

Based on my own experience with these kinds of initiatives and on the experience of other organisations who have rolled them out successfully, there are some basic points that I think need to be considered by anyone who hopes to get a new innovation and collaboration project up and running. I use the term “innovation and collaboration”, rather than simply “innovation”, because I firmly believe that any true innovation requires the participation of multiple people with a variety of perspectives and experience. As I said in the previous post, true innovation is about more than a single person having some incredible light bulb idea that can be rolled out without amendment or refinement.

Preparing the environment

OK, just what does that mean? Just as military planners conduct intelligence preparation of the battlefield as part of the operational planning process, there are some critical first steps that we need to conduct if our innovation and collaboration initiative is to succeed. Preparation of the environment includes:

1. Identifying what you hope to achieve: This is critical to point 2, below. If you’re to win any support, let alone the support of senior managers, you must have a value proposition that relates directly to important business outcomes. If you’re struggling to identify some tangible benefits that will catch the eyes of your leaders and colleagues, have a look at some of the successful initiatives others have launched and think about the impact they could have on your own organisation. You’ll find some excellent ideas at: Cisco, Jet Blue, Starbucks, Intel and The Open Innovation Blog.
2. Gaining the support of the Executive team: It can be surprising how quickly a member of the Executive team can kill an initiative with offhand or dismissive comments overheard by others. These casual asides are often taken much more seriously than any prepared email or announcement a senior manager distributes. Add to this the fact that not too many meaningful initiatives will succeed in the face of Executive resistance or apathy, and you can see why getting Execs on side early is critical. In a perfect world, you could gain the support of the full Executive team; in reality, you may have to make do with one or more powerful sponsors and an agreement from the rest not to sabotage the process.
3. Identifying your champions: Before you actually launch the initiative, think about the people you can approach to champion it among their peers. Here, you want to identify the people others listen to, and who welcome the chance to share their own thoughts and ideas. Contact them and get their input and their support, because these are the people who will be crucial to gathering momentum early on.

A few posts ago, we looked at Maloney’s 16% Rule, and diffusion of innovation:

Your peer champions should come from those with the vision to see the great potential of true collaboration across the enterprise. Don’t rely on the 2.5 % of innovators who love to try new things as a matter of course. The majority of their peers recognise there is something different about this group and may distrust their  quick acceptance of anything new as evidence of their flightiness or restlessness. Whatever the label, these people rarely have the social credibility to pull others along with them. Identify the people whose opinions carry weight with their peers and engage them as early as possible.

Make it easy for people

This point really is crucial. Whatever system you use, putting forward an idea should be quick and easy. Ideally, single sign-on should mean users don’t have to log in separately from their main account to access the application. There are software applications that can automate much of the work for you (e.g. Bright Idea), but you don’t have to shell out money to get a workable system up and running. There are many open source apps that can get you started, and here are a couple of lists for your research: Wikipedia list of collaborative apps; 15 free collaboration tools. 

Of course, after a suggestion has been submitted, it should be just as easy for others (and the author) to go and suggest changes of their own.

Ease of administration of the system should also be a consideration.

Encourage wide participation

I’ve said it so often I’m just repeating myself now, but it’s important: open up participation as wide as you can (you might want customers to have a say as well - up to you). At the very least, the people who are going to be most affected by any change that gets the OK to proceed should have a say in how it’s to operate. 

Involving those most affected will certainly help you avoid embarrassments like this one, from Victoria Police. 

Say thank you and follow up

Such a little thing, but so often neglected. Give genuine thanks to those who take the time to participate, and honour their efforts by making sure you do all you can to ensure appropriate follow-up occurs when potentially workable ideas come in. Not every suggestion is going to be feasible, or even desirable, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be thanking those making an honest effort.  The explanations that are provided in response to ideas that can’t be realised should also be treated as an opportunity to increase participants’ knowledge of the organisation and how it works.

Don’t try to do it all yourself

Finally, remember to reach out for help when you need it. As your user base grows, assign others to help you with administration. When suggestions need follow-up, make sure clear accountabilities for providing information are in place. 

Learn from the experience

Most of all, treat any mistakes along the way as learning opportunities. It’s almost guaranteed that not everything is going to go right all the time. When you are doing your preparatory work, reach out to others who have done it already (yes, it’s OK to reach outside your own organisation) and leverage their experience. You will still make your own mistakes along the way, but don’t be too hard on yourself. Keep the end goal in mind and remember why you started this thing in the first place. 

And keep reaching out to others for support when you need it.

Spend some time talking to the leaders of just about any organisation about the future performance of their business, and at some point they’ll bring up how important it is that their workforce be able to marshal skills like creativity and initiative to identify better ways of working and improved outputs (products, information, outcomes - whatever they’re in the business of producing). Get away from the leaders and spend time with the people on the front line, and you’re likely to get a very different picture of exactly what those same leaders do to “encourage” innovation and support their people’s efforts to improve products, processes and the workplace itself.

Case in point: a large national organisation started to recognise, about two years ago, that their workforce likely had some attractive, and financially rewarding, ideas about how to improve the work they do. The organisation formed a working group whose job it was to design a way for staff to put forward new ideas, and to be rewarded and recognised for the ones that led to verified and measurable improvement. One of the problems from the outset, though, was that the working group consisted solely of staff based in the organisation’s national office; there was no representation for the hundreds of others who worked elsewhere, and who were the actual subjects of whatever process was to be brought about.

Problem number two was the level of knowledge and skill of the working party members; none of them had been involved with anything like this initiative before, all were well removed from the work going on out at the offices and there was a startling lack of knowledge regarding not only what other large companies had tried regarding innovation (successful and unsuccessful), but also of how technology could be used to support and smooth over the process, for both the end users and those involved with sifting through suggestions and selecting viable ones. 

Not surprisingly, given the make up of the working party, the process that was put into practice some weeks later was time consuming, unwieldy and, when it came to what happened with the suggestions that did come in, shrouded in mystery for those who did participate. Any staff member with an idea they wanted to put forward was to complete a template document, created in MS Word), email it to a designated member of the original working group, and wait for feedback. When ideas came in, another small group of national office staff, mostly made up if the working party members, came together and discussed the suggestions, and decided whether any were to be pursued. Compounding the existing problems, it was a “no correspondence will be entered into” process, where the person who put an idea forward was not contacted to clarify what they had submitted. Thus, if anything in the template was unclear, or if the small group of “judges” misunderstood some aspect of the proposal, there was no chance of correcting the problem.

As ideas were considered by a single small committee, there was opportunity for input from others who may have seen the beginnings of something else in the original idea. Ground-breaking new initiatives rarely come about through the incredible insight of a single individual. Rather, they more often grow and develop from the input of a wider number of participants, each of whom suggests twists of their own. As the group goes through the process of, “What if we did this?” or “How about instead of that part, we do this instead?”, the idea evolves into something more than the simple sum of its parts. This wider input also allows people from varied roles and backgrounds to conduct some theoretical trouble shooting along the way, saving time and frustration later if the idea is trialled in the field.

So, back a the organisation in the example, a few people put forward their thoughts on how something could be improved or which new thing should be introduced. The small committee came together, made their decisions, and awarded a certificate and small prize to the monthly “winner” - yes, the rules of the process said that one idea had to be chosen per month, no matter whether the “best” of the suggestions had little chance of being implemented. The idea behind this was no bad - wanting to reward people for having the courage and commitment to put their thoughts forward. It was bound to cause problems later, though, as the “winners” tried to seek an update on how the implementation of their suggestion was coming along.

Unfortunately for the organisation, nothing came of the initiative. A few small projects were trialled, only one of which led to any long-term change, and after a mere four months, the whole thing died a quiet death. The company went back to relying on their executive team and other high-level managers for improvement suggestions.

A new CEO came on board later and wanted to resurrect the process of seeking meaningful input from the field. This time, instead of the highly manual process of the first initiative, staff would be able to put forward their thoughts in a discussion group on the corporate forum. This was certainly an improvement, as more people would see the suggestion and have the opportunity to build on it, modify it and use it to trigger ideas of their own. This wider participation would greatly improve the chances of something meaningful coming out of the exercise. The CEO spruiked the plan on visits to offices around the country and encouraged all and sundry to participate. This form of marketing was a bit hit-or-miss, but the new initiative was looking like it had more chance of success than the previous one.

Shortly after the launch, people starting posting their suggestions - and everything started to head downhill. The CEO, honestly believing in the initiative and wanting it to prosper, made sure, whenever possible, he would be the first to reply to an idea by setting up an email notification whenever a new post went to the group. His replies were fast, all right, but they were unfailingly negative. Each response focussed on why the idea could not work; at best, there was a vague undertaking to “check things out” and “get back to you”, which was not updated later. After an initial burst of enthusiasm in the first weeks, suggestions dropped to a trickle, then stopped altogether. The discussion group remains in the corporate forum to this day, but it’s a wasteland when it comes to entries.

Sadly, this story isn’t unique to this single organisation. Many companies, with the best of intentions, sabotage their own efforts at gathering input and suggestions from their workforce. Yet almost all countries cite the need to seek improvement and new ideas from the bottom up. When those ideas do come through, they are more often dismissed or replied to with patronising platitudes.

After seeing this phenomenon a number of times, I think part of the problem lies in the approach of the managers involved to management itself. These problems normally come to light in organisations that have been comfortable in the old “command and control” system of corporate management. Senior managers set the agenda and direction, those beneath them are responsible for spreading the news and putting things into operation, and those at the coal-face do what they’re told and shut up about it. If the time comes when that organisation (or its senior leadership) starts to buy in to the idea of bottom-up improvement, they find themselves poorly equipped to change their instinctive approach and cede a greater level of control.

This can be dangerous for those companies involved in what we have come to call “knowledge work” - industries where what counts is what the workers know and what they can do with that knowledge, rather than whether they can follow step-by-step instructions that never vary. The problems that these organisations face on a day-to-day basis as they go about their business are often unique (yes, often unique variations on the theme around which the company does business, but unique in the sense of what worked on the problem just dealt with doesn’t work on this one). The benefits that can be gained from the knowledge and experience of front-line staff are just about limitless. Building the environment where the people at that front line believe the organisation genuinely wants to hear from them, and genuinely values their contribution, is not something that just happens as soon as the CEO says, “I want to hear from you.”

These days, there are a number of software platforms that can help you gather and track ideas and initiatives from the field (Idea Storm is my favourite, but there are many others). Low price (in some cases, they are free) and easy implementation mean there’s now really no barrier to using these tools in preference to old paper methods or emailed templates. The hard part is engaging the workforce and getting them to buy-in and put their best ideas forward, then keep building on them. If this was as easy as putting the software to do it in place, everyone would already be there, after all). This kind of cultural change is something that sets truly effective managers apart from those who simply manage. We’ll take a look at some ideas on how to bring this about in the next post.

Apologies to everyone that it has taken me so long to post again. Heading up to the period of my leave over Christmas, work was absolutely hectic and I was racing to get a few things finished before I went, so that meant long nights and weekends once more. I couldn’t work up the extra energy or brain power to post anything new.

When I mentioned to a few of my friends that I was just going to spend the first couple of weeks of my holidays laying around on the couch, avoiding all thought of work - even avoiding Twitter - a couple challenged me to extend that period, fully expecting that I’d cave in the first week.

To help me get through, I thought I’d turn the time of self-denial into something of an experiment. I wondered how not accessing all of the great new research and insights that come via Twitter and various blogs and websites might affect how I viewed my own perceptions of the currency of my knowledge in my own field of work. Usually, I trawl through my Twitter feed and a number of online resources each and every day - sometimes, just to take a look at topics that catch my interest, more often to delve into new and developing ideas regarding corporate learning and organisational development.

To cut a long story short, while I don’t feel I’ve de-skilled myself in my few months of absence, I certainly have noticed the lack of access to the people I follow and engage with. Over my holidays, I’ve caught up with a few colleagues from other organisations and, of course, we’ve discussed “work stuff.” Those discussions left me confident I can still do my job, but I’ve definitely missed the easy access to information, especially new things I’d not think to look up on my own. 

So, a note to those who fear that Twitter and all of our other online communication and collaboration portals are insidiously changing and cheapening human relationships: Yes, they are certainly changing relationships and our ability to access information and stay abreast of trends, BUT, by themselves, they aren’t irrevocably harming our ability to relate to other people through other means. From my recent experience, these tools can be used to extend and deepen traditional human relationships, while opening up access to like-minded others one would never meet if we didn’t reach out using technology.

I survived my self-imposed fast, but I don’t feel I’ve regained some lost part of myself that communications technology had damaged or reduced. Honestly, I just feel that I’ve denied myself access to tools I find extremely useful and that I enjoy using - and I’m happy to call an end to this little self-experiment. While I don’t doubt that some individuals may have an unhealthy fixation with some aspects of technology, it also can’t be denied that this is a phenomenon not limited to technology itself, and these problems existed long before Facebook, Twitter, et al cam along. For me, I’m glad to dive back into the information stream and catch up with what I’ve been missing.

I had what I thought was an odd discussion yesterday with a friend of mine who manages a couple of business units in a large corporate here in Australia. He was lamenting the fact that no matter how much time he allowed his staff to have away from their desks to participate in learning, their performance seemed to orbit around a mark that the business really needed to improve on. His question to me, after a good ten minutes of explaining the latest example, was simple: “What’s wrong with our training department?”

Of course, given he was on the operational side of the business, he spent most of his time with operational people (to give him credit, he spreads his attention around beyond his direct reports and makes sure the people who work in his area know him and know they can reach out to him if they feel the need) he knew the operational managers and staff were working their backsides off. He also knew he had some very savvy people in positions up and down the reporting line. So it had to be the training people that were the problem, right?

Well, partly. I had an idea what the problem seemed to be, or at least an important piece of the puzzle, not far into his story, and it’s something that plagues many businesses still, if what I see and hear is a representative snapshot. There was just an amazing gulf between the concept of “training” and the imperative of “performance.” Managers up and down the line seemed to be of the opinion that “training” was the responsibility of the “training department”, and it happened away from the job. Staff go to training and they come back all fixed up and ready to perform better. The role of managers was to monitor the performance of their people and teams and crunch the numbers - once per month, they’d chair a team meeting.

The trainers didn’t really seem to be in any better shape. Their responsibilities began and ended at the doors to the training rooms. From what I was told, they weren’t seen among the operational people before or after training (my friend clearly said that when a manager thought training was required, that manager would phone “someone from training” and they’d have a conversation, maybe followed by some emails back and forth. Once in a while, for a particularly important initiative, one or two of the training team would come over - they worked in another building - and meet with a few key managers to hash out the details).

Talk about silo city. The training team did very little intelligence gathering from the people who would be attending their programs, and didn’t come back afterwards to see what was being applied back at work after a training session. Managers neither asked for, nor received, a summary of how their people handled the training or any feedback on common questions raised by participants or observations from the trainers themselves. Everyone had the best of intentions, but it was like they lived in different worlds.

Needless to say, my friend and I talked about the importance of integrating a learning and development team with the operational people they were supporting. Far from being fly-in/fly-out consultants, the training people needed to be a part of the larger team. Similarly, managers needed to take an active role in the development of their people, and the frontline operators needed to be able to use their own experience and knowledge to become involved in the conversation. 

We also talked about putting the operational staff in the driving seat - giving them the tools and support to share their knowledge and skills among the wider organisation. As you guessed, we’re talking about a very traditional organisation here, and the idea of giving all and sundry access to broadcast their tips and thoughts on practices and improvement ideas met with a worried frown.

This friend and I will be having this conversation for a while yet, I think, but at least he’s heading to work this week determined to bring ops and L&D closer together. It’s a start.   

OK, I promised a short summary of my LearnX presentation for those who were interested, so here we go.

A simple premise: the nature of work changes, and the pace of that change has never been faster

I doubt anyone will argue with the straightforward premise. In the past few hundred years, work has moved from subsistence farming and craft professions, through industrialisation and on to knowledge work (and beyond). These days, the value of many public companies rests mainly on the knowledge and skill of their workforce, expressed in patents, innovation and greatly accelerated product cycles.

In the early days of the 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor published the seminal book The Principles of Scientific Management. This work became the standard text of management for decades (and you can still see some of Taylor’s thinking expressed in many workplaces even today). 

Taylor’s basic argument was that workers were not paid to think. Work was a simple series of steps that, if followed correctly, led to a known and desired outcome (think of a widget coming off a production line). The role of managers was to ensure those steps were followed correctly and that people didn’t slack off when they should be working.

To paraphrase Dan Pink, that system worked well for many organisations - right up to the point where it didn’t work anymore.

Good decisions in the face of uncertainty

When a job just consists of following a series of steps toward a known outcome, training is as simple as the job itself. These days, however, fewer and fewer jobs can be shoe-horned into that category of work. More often, people at all levels of organisations need to make sound decisions, based on incomplete information, in response to situations that may not have arisen before (or at least, situations where there are circumstances that present in a unique combination). 

Formal training, as most people know it (pre-existing courseware presented as self-paced material or as part of a group training session) can only go so far in preparing people to thrive in modern organisations. After all, things like procedural training can only really address problems that have been seen before. When people are dealing with novel situations, they need support to be able to make wise decisions - and they can’t afford to take time out to complete some kind of training intervention before they make their choice.

In organisations that face these kind of issues, training departments need to become stewards of corporate knowledge - and this requires that they are brave enough to hand off a large portion of control to the very people who confront the problems on the front line.

Technology meets good old fashioned discussion

Allowing workers access to knowledge tools such as wikis, blogs, discussion forums and short messaging services carries many more benefits than risks. When used wisely, these tools can help capture critical organisational knowledge (everything from procedural knowledge to simple tips from the old hands) and serve it up when and where it’s needed. Full-text search combined with user-based tagging of content can help the cream rise to the top.

Of course, technology isn’t the be-all and end-all of knowledge sharing; organisations should also be mindful of the value of setting aside discussion spaces in their offices - places where people can gather and talk in a comfortable environment. After all, multiple studies have shown that people learn somewhere between 70% and 90% of what they know about how to do their job from their day-to-day exposure to the work. This includes discussions with colleagues, asking questions, trial and error and observing others. Giving people a chance to codify that knowledge so that it’s accessible from anywhere within the company is a wise investment.

Combining wikis, blogs, video, audio and old fashioned sit down and chats has the potential to speed a new starter’s journey toward proficiency, while also carrying benefits for the proven performers. Sometimes, we focus so much on new starters and those who require additional assistance that we forget the value we can derive from helping those who have already reached proficiency get a little bit better. If the true high performers are encouraged and willing to share what they know works in a place where it can be accessed even by people they don’t have a chance to speak to day to day, think of the potential for performance improvement across an organisation. Think also of the knowledge that could be saved within an organisation when good people move on or retire.

But who has the time, and who will take the leap?

Yes, time is an issue for many people; however, selling the potential benefits well will help you draw out the innovators and early adopters who will make the effort early on. After that, it’s a case of making others aware of the benefits that are being found through the use of the tools and marketing the value of collaboration more widely.

An understanding of the concept of diffusion of innovation can help here:

I could waffle on with a long-winded explanation, but I much prefer this one: http://innovateordie.com.au/2010/05/10/the-secret-to-accelerating-diffusion-of-innovation-the-16-rule-explained/

Basically, your innovators will leap into using the new tools because they love trying out something new - you won’t need to exert much effort to attract them. Your early adopters require some coaxing, but represent fairly easy converts also. Attracting the early majority and beyond, though, is a case of marketing the wins (the demonstrated benefits you have found and taken the time to record and measure) and explaining how the tools will help them in their day-to-day work (the old What’s In It For Me - WIIFM -proposition).

Getting permission (and resources)

One presenter at LearnX this year addressed this question in the following way: “I’d much rather ask for forgiveness than permission.” Personally, I don’t subscribe to that theory, and I don’t recommend it to you. Winning support for an initiative like this takes planning and a sound sales pitch to the right person or people. Ideally, you want a high-level executive sponsor who can drive through resistance for you. Winning that sponsor is a matter of speaking the language that execs understand - and speak themselves: bottom line results.

It’s no good (in most cases) floating an initiative like this based on better access to information, increased support for people or any other nebulous terms. You need to sell it on the basis of those core business measures that execs are measured on in their performance reviews. Is it decreased product cycle times? Improved contractual compliance? Increased revenue through greater proficiency, and greater speed to proficiency? Decreased staff turnover through more responsive and relevant decision making support? If you don’t yet know the core measures at the operational coal face, you need to learn them, and then understand how they come about - what is it that can be improved to drive them forward further? At that point, you need to sit down and work out how your planned initiative contributes.

Fortunately, you can roll out many of these tools for very little investment; there are any number of free open-source software offerings that may cover what you need them to do. The greatest cost will likely be the time of the people involved in developing and deploying the tools themselves. 

You may also find that some managers (especially those responsible for compliance and quality) blanch at the thought of opening up an environment where anyone can contribute information. Well, there are differing levels to that proposition. Changes to certain areas of knowledge (e.g. procedural manuals) may need to be approved by certain staff. For the most part, though, companies that have taken the leap find that the communities that develop become self-correcting quite quickly. People identify erroneous or incomplete information and correct it. And let’s be honest, if anyone thinks poor information doesn’t get sent around their company in the absence of wikis and blogs, they’re kidding themselves. At least when it’s available to be seen and corrected, you know where that bad info is coming from and you can help that person (and others) by correcting it.

If anyone really doubts the value of information that comes from the people who do the work (as opposed to the L&D team or somewhere else), point them somewhere like the SAP Community Network. You can Google a number of other options, including acrobatusers.com or any one of dozens of companies who use software from Bright Idea. These sites will also give you some idea of the possibilities available to your organisation if you haven’t yet had much exposure to this kind of approach.

Thank you to all of those who have sent such kind messages regarding my presentation at LearnX last week in Brisbane. A few people have asked for a copy of the presentation and notes so, in the spirit of sharing, I’ve uploaded a copy of the PowerPoint to Slideshare. You can find it at http://www.slideshare.net/GlennHansen/learnx-2011-presso

I’ve uploaded a copy of the supporting notes to https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xM4drFt31eF1FYtanOzI7b8UGyor0GO2ww5JEHv_-LM/edit?hl=en_US (unfortunately, Slideshare doesn’t allow them to be included with the presentation file).

I’ll also post a Readers’ Digest version here in the blog shortly.

Consider this a late entry for June’s Learning Circuits blog Big Question. I’ve deliberately left it late because I was very interested to see what others thought about breaking through these obstacles and how they defined them, and I recommend the other posts as worthwhile reading (just click on the Learning Circuits link above to see them).

Now, for my two cents. Let’s start by clarifying what I’m thinking when I talk about organisational walls. For this post, I’m going to look at two particular types of walls:

• Walls within an organisation (e.g. the old “silo” mentality that many companies have struggled to overcome for the past 10 years or more), and
• Walls between an organisation and the outside world

Intra-organisational walls

The disadvantages of the first kind of walls have been enumerated many times over by various people, and they revolve around the negative impact they have on communication, collaboration and the building of a wider sense of people from different business units “being in it together” and working toward common goals. They act as defining limits to little patches of knowledge and authority within the wider expanse of the organisation. Sometimes they exist because they have been deliberately created (perhaps by a manager or team leader who sees themselves of the “owner” of that particular area) and sometimes they appear almost out of nowhere as a consequence of the way a business is structured or the way it develops its operating processes. How is not as important as the fact they are there, and when they are there, there are good reasons to breach the majority of them.

Those brave enough to tackle the walls around teams, functions, business units and other intra-organisational entities will normally have to gird their loins for a battle, and this is particularly so if the barrier is there to define one person or team’s “patch” that they own. Doing so can take tact, patience and no small amount of effort, but the rewards are worth the work.

Inter-team workgroups are a good way to begin to expose others (dare I say “outsiders”) to the people, skills and knowledge of a previously closed off area of the business. Off-hand, I can’t think of a business unit or team in any organisation that operates in complete isolation, with no dependency on the work of others or with no others as the recipients of the team’s outputs. The simple fact of the interconnection of diverse groups within just about any organisation is a solid argument to make representatives or small teams work together on larger projects. This allows them to share commonality of purpose, to set and own shared expectations and to spend valuable time in collaborative effort.

This kind of approach will often benefit from well-planned groundwork to lay the foundation for the collaborative effort. This may be something as simple as a well-articulated project plan that shows the common sense and value of working collaboratively with other areas. At the other extreme, it may require certain interventions from the HR or L&D team (or external contractors) before the teams are brought together - this can be especially useful when vehement resistance is encountered.

The kind of “interventions” I’m thinking about here are those that relate to raising self-awareness within people as to why they have the negative expectations they hold about the planned effort, the evidence for holding them and an examination of how realistic they are. It can involve some pre-planning to put initiatives in place to head off issues or problems that are identified as being reasonable possibilities during the project (e.g. what do we do to make sure everyone adheres to the commitments they make?). This can lead into early team building sessions, perhaps using the old storming, norming and performing model. Emotional intelligence and personality profiling tools can be excellent means of broaching the subject of resistance, automatic thoughts, and realistic expectations, and I recommend their use at this point.

When bringing members of diverse teams who have not previously worked together into one project group, it is also a sound strategy to use a group facilitator (perhaps even a project manager) who is trusted, but not part of any of the groups. This way, they can act as a facilitator of collaborative discussion and planning, and they can lay the groundwork for a very important marker of progress in any collaborative endeavour - early success! Take the time to plan in a way for the group to experience an early success in their work, acknowledge it and allow them to celebrate the achievement. An early achievement can be an important milestone in the transition to true collaboration.

Enough of cross-team projects and work groups - you get the idea. Other ways of breaking down the insular walls include things such as providing areas for discussion and simple getting-to-know-you. A combination of online and real-world places are helpful - discussion groups, blogs (personal, team, project, etc.) and discussion spaces (areas of the office where people can come together and just chill out, sit down and chat. Other environmental strategies include removing the walls around work areas and dispensing with the traditional pod system when setting up desks in the workplace. The less physical barriers exist, the more interaction people feel comfortable with. Get managers and team leaders out of their offices and on to the floor. Of course, you need to provide private places for confidential discussions like performance reviews and personal problems, but do this with meeting rooms, rather than personal office space.

One final note on intra-organisational walls. Breaking them down doesn’t mean all information becomes completely open and available to everyone. It’s just common sense that everyone does not deserve to automatically know everything about everyone. The rest of the company doesn’t get access to confidential HR or business records, certain management discussions and strategies are kept private and confidential until such time as others can be brought into the know. Don’t take my advice above to be advocating some kind of wonderful fantasy land where everyone shares everything and the world is all collaboration, trust and love.

Inter-organisational walls

I call them inter-organisational, but they can easily also be walls between a company and the general public. These are the things used when the “outsiders” are people outside the company as a whole, rather than those within the organisation, but from another work group. Some of these barriers are necessary and simply common sense; many companies have information and processes they need to keep to themselves to maintain a commercial and competitive advantage over their competitors. Others, though, are just plain self-defeating.

In my personal experience, there are more organisations that keep themselves to themselves as a reflex action than there are organisations that actively consider how they and others could benefit from sharing information, resources, people, etc. There aren’t a lot of initiatives that ask companies to go out of their way to form links with others, and when they do exist, you’ll most often find they are government initiatives that are kind of small-scale and often not that well resourced or supported. 

The Australian Flexible Learning Framework is an excellent example of an initiative that encourages such linkages. I’ve been critical of the Framework in the past because many of the deliverables that arise from their sponsored projects are so very basic (I’d love to see them dream grander dreams and place more emphasis on business outcomes that vocational education outcomes), as well as being dated by the time they come to fruition (usually because the ideas were dated before the project even got going). It’s to be commended, though, for its role in bringing together organisations such as commercial companies, RTOs, universities and not-for-profits in collaborative efforts related to extending exposure to elearning and blended learning practices (use the link above if you’d like to see some of the initiatives).

One of the ways the Framework encourages collaboration between disparate entities is through their funding of collaborative projects. To qualify for the larger sums of money, a project needs to encompass at least two businesses from a related field (say, community services providers) as well as an RTO or university. This sharing of knowledge, skills and resources has the potential to find innovative and creative solutions to problems that exist across many players in a single industry, and because the outcomes are available for everyone to see through the Framework’s website, benefits can flow well beyond those involved in the project itself. 

As many of you will know, I work in the employment services industry in Australia - specifically the federally funded employment services industry designed to help those who are out of work back into jobs. I’ve lost count of how many providers there are doing the work that my organisation does, but there are plenty all over the country. This is good - if one or a few players were to suddenly hit the wall and go under, there are others to step up to the plate and provide services to their clients. The way the federal contracts for this work are structured, though, and the way they are administered by Australia’s Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, is not so good, though. Far from encouraging collaboration between organisations with the same goals, performance outcomes and who are facing the same issues that need to be overcome, the contract and the way it’s governed encourage isolation and competition. It’s obviously based on the free market premise that companies in competition will drive each other to develop more and more efficient services which ultimately cost the Australian taxpayer less. This isn’t a bad idea, but it does act as a massive disincentive for organisations to band together to help each other develop innovative new initiatives and to solve common problems. Of course, many would argue that a contract that encouraged commonality of effort is not going to attract organisations that want to make money out of the endeavour. I don’t have the perfect answer to the status quo, but there’s something deep inside me that says there has to be a better way that both caters to the creation of potential profit and efficiency through collaboration.

With the development of social networking software, we’ve seen many companies and other entities (such as not-for-profits and educational institutions) reach out to their customers and clients, and further to those who are not yet, but could be customers or clients. Names like Dell, Cisco and Adobe spring to mind in this space. Those that do it well are able to engage in conversations driven by the members of the public they are seeking to engage. Those that do it poorly just see the medium as another way to market to consumers and to provide spin in times of crisis. How well it is used depends upon the skill and the objectives of the organisation. The fact it exists to be used is another great opportunity to engage people who are outside the traditional corporate wall (firewall, in this case?), and to build trust and win raving fans for those who do it well. I’m a big advocate of organisations taking the time to engage with their customers, clients, sponsors or whatever you’d like to define them as - just make sure you plan your strategy carefully and are willing to do it honestly and with commitment. People will quickly see through a thin facade covering another cheap grab for profit.

Traditional means of reaching outside the corporate moat include focus groups and other methods of engaging consumers, clients, etc. Done well, the provide the organisation with valuable insight and information and the public participants with a sense the organisation values them and sees them as worthy of their time. I hope we never lose these face-to-face opportunities to a completely online presence and focus. I can’t see people losing their appetite for the opportunity to look someone in the eye and feel they are engaging on a deeply human level.

So, there you go. I’ve tried not to cover the same ground my fellow thought leaders in the LCBQ blog have gone over, though obviously there will be overlap when multiple people provide their thoughts on a topic like this one. I hope this post at least gets you thinking about the walls that exist within and around your own organisations, and about the things you may be able to do yourself to start bringing them down.

I’ve been sifting through various requests our team receives from the field - assistance with bringing people up to speed with one thing or another - which is nothing out of the ordinary (we are, after all, the L&D team). One thing generally stands out about requests that we receive, though, and I’m sure it’s been noticed by others at other organisations, too: just about every request that comes in comes from a manager asking for a certain training program to be run for their people.

What else would they be asking for, you ask? This is, as I said, the Learning and Development team. Of course they’ll be asking for training; that’s what L&D do!

The traditional view of L&D would agree with you. Someone, or in some cases a couple of people, from the L&D team go out to the workplace, run a course for a group of people, hand out some resources, maybe point participants to a guide that’s kept online inside or outside the corporate firewall, and off they go. People get sent back to their jobs (as quickly as possible, because people need to focus on “real work”, rather than sitting around in “training”) and perhaps someone from the L&D team will come back in a few weeks to make sure everyone has remembered the bits they need and can do the tasks that were taught.

It’s not like that anymore - and in organisations where is still is like that, it should be different. The assumption that some kind of formal training is the solution for any given performance need is a dangerous one that has led to uncountable hours of lost productivity and faux solutions across just about any field of endeavour you can name.

While it may seem natural for a manager to request a training solution, it is part of the responsibility of a learning and performance professional to emphasise that the key to whatever is done is performance. Positive outcomes for core business performance is the prime consideration when looking at any instance where that performance needs to be enhanced, supported or improved.

The way to achieve this goal will vary, depending upon the situation. Formal training is only one possible intervention among many, and the field includes changes to the working environment, improved access to required information, more open communication across business units, redesigning the way work is done - the list goes on.

It takes a certain amount of discipline to engage operational managers and higher leaders in a discussion of potential solutions, when instead they want to talk about the training they believe their people need, but it’s worth the time to develop that discipline (and the self-confidence to bring it to bear when it matters). It also requires learning and performance professionals to maintain an awareness of the key performance measures of the area or business unit in question, and how these relate to the way performance is rewarded/recognised within the organisation, in addition to the way in which these results are achieved within that team.

Early disucssion needs to be steered away from the solutions to be used (e.g. formal training, job redesign, better information resources, etc.) and toward examination of behavioural change in the workplace. What should people be able to do afterward that they are unable to do now, and how does this help achieve those results that are important to the performance of the team and the organisation? Only after that has been agreed should interventions be considered. Ultimately, it’s unlikely that any training program, by itself, is going to achieve the results the relevant manager wants. Performance issues are more complex than that, so even in cases where some kind of training is warranted, it is not the whole of the answer (and this is especially important when that training is done outside of the context of the work itself - e.g. in a training room). 

As learning and performance professionals, we need to be able to look beyond the quick fix and critically assess underlying issues that must be addressed and the end results that will indicate we have been successful. We need to be able to articulate the reasons why training alone is not a panacea to organisational, team or even individual needs. Finally, we need to be able to gather the information required to make a considered recommendation on how the desired results can be achieved, and then play our part in identifying who is going to be responsible for what actions.

If in doubt, better access to expertise and timely guidance is always preferable to offering people a bunch of theory and just-in-case knowledge, then hoping they can go about their merry way and put it to work effectively.