Only Dead Fish

Redefining Leadership in the Digital Age

When I did the research late last year for the Econsultancy report on Effective Leadership in the Digital Age, one of the (many) interesting things to come out of it was the emphasis placed by the interviewees on the value of softer skills. Nobody that I spoke to (and I spoke to a lot of senior client-side people) was saying that traditional leadership characteristics such as having a strong commercial focus or being visionary, inspiring or clear-minded and action-oriented when it was needed were no longer important, but many talked about the increasing value in 'softer' qualities such as curiousity, empathy, collaboration, creativity and adaptability.

Which was interesting since one of the points of view I came across in my desk reading, from researchers at Wharton University, seemed to posit something very similar. The Wharton academics were effectively saying that leadership styles needed to change to reflect the fact that digital had enabled new business models, new sources of value and new types of relationship with suppliers, partners, customers. Whilst more traditional 'command and control' leadership styles were still valid in some scenarios, leaders needed to increasingly embrace the role of collaborator or co-creator. Where command and control assumes most of the key insights will come from the top of the organisation, the modern reality is increasingly about an emphasis on ideas and insights from wherever, meaning that leaders need to draw on a wider range of leadership styles to reflect this broader set of value sources. As more business models rely on the creation of technology, or on so-called 'network orchestration' involving value being derived from more intangible assets such as relationships, leadership styles that prioritise collaboration or co-creation become more important.

And IDEO founder Tim Brown expresses some similar thoughts here, arguing that the traditional way in which we've thought about leadership as 'leading from the front' with someone at the top making all the decisions, is not the most effective way of unlocking the the kind of creativity in an organisation that is so crucial in an environment that dictates a need to constantly evolve. He frames the role of the leader as an explorer - someone who can set the direction but also ask the best questions ('In traditional design terms, it's about setting the brief'). Modern, successful leadership, he says, is like a dance:

"It's about the effective playing of a number of different leadership roles depending on the moment and the circumstances and having the skill to move between those stances as needs require."

All of which means makes me inclined to agree with Jim Carroll's leadership metaphor about mechanics and gardeners:

'Surely in the digital age we need our leaders to be more gardeners than mechanics. Surely we need leaders who can plant and nurture; tend and grow. Modern leadership is not about power; it’s about empowerment. It’s not about controlling; it’s about cultivating.' 

Strategy and Tactic Trees

Apart from companies that express or communicate their strategy poorly, or those that conflate a varied set of goals or targets with a coherent strategy (as Richard Rumelt said in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: 'Goals are not strategy. Goals are wishes. Strategies are how one goes about achieving goals.'), one of the most common strategy issues that I observe in businesses is the disconnect between an over-arching organisational strategy and the ability to bring this to life at a departmental or team level. Many teams and those that work in them often seem to simply not be aware what the company-wide strategy (set by those at the top of an organisation) should really mean in terms of what they should do differently, or what they should not do differently. And that's if they even know what the strategy is.

For what it's worth, Richard Rumelt's definition of strategy is (obviously) pretty good:

'A strategy is a coherent set of analyses, arguments and actions that respond to a significant challenge. A good strategy derives from consideration of many plausible courses of action and selects, in a deliberate, reasoned way, one/some of those courses of action to the exclusion of others.'

Richard Rumelt talks about his 'strategy kernel' in terms of a diagnosis, the creation of a guiding policy, and a coherent set of actions or direction. So a strategy, as I've mentioned before, is about making choices. And a strategy is not the same thing as a plan or a tactic (although these things seem to often be confused). My favourite exposition of the difference comes from Lawrence Freedman's Strategy: A History:

'Strategy is much more than a plan. A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns… The inherent unpredictability of human affairs, due to the chance events as well as the efforts of opponents and the missteps of friends, provides strategy with its challenge and drama. Strategy is often expected to start with a description of a desired end state, but in practice there is rarely an orderly movement to goals set in advance. Instead, the process evolves through a series of states, each one not quite what was anticipated or hoped for, requiring a reappraisal and modification of the original strategy, including ultimate objectives. The picture of strategy… is one that is fluid and flexible, governed by the starting point and not the end point.'

Many businesses set a company wide strategy and then regard everything else as a tactic that contributes toward that strategy. Not so. Dr Eli Goldratt (in 2002) observed that strategy itself has a hierarchical structure, and that there might be several layers of strategy that are each connected by necessary conditions (so objectives at a lower level are prerequisites for objectives at a higher level - the former more specific or detailed than the latter). Goldratt defined strategy as the answer to the question 'What for?' (in other words the over-arching direction needed to get to an objective), and tactics as the answer to the question 'How to?' (the steps in the process needed to pursue the strategy). In defining his strategy and tactics trees, he argued that if strategy was hierarchical, every strategy should have an associated tactic and the two should always exist in pairs at every level of the organisation. Thus, a strategy can be brought to life and related to specific actions at every level.

Such a simple idea, and yet so often forgotten.

Image source. HT to Noah Brier and Mike Baxter for originally leading me down this path

The Lifecycle of a Technology

'Invention is a lot like surfing; you have to catch the wave at the right time.' Ray Kurzweil

Digging into Kurzweil's 'S-curves' a bit more I came across his lifecycle of a technology (or invention). Kurzweil noted back in 2004 that the pace of innovation is doubling every decade and so he said that inventions should be aimed at the world of the future, not the world that exists when your R & D project is launched, since so many contexts change so rapidly. So if technologies follow an S-curve over time (slow, then rapid adoption and devlopment, before plateauing into maturity), in order to time an invention properly you need to be aware of the entire lifecycle.

Kurzweil describes 7 key stages in the evolution of a technology (and I'm paraphrasing here):

Precusor: the enabling factors for the new technology are in place (and visionaries may even be able to describe its goals or its operation), but it has yet to become a reality.

Invention: for which determination and timing are often key

Development: the refining of the invention, which has likely entered the world as 'an ungainly and impractical device'

Maturity: this stage often comprises the bulk of a technology’s life span. It has become an integral part of everyday life and probably seems as though it will never be replaced

False Pretenders: assaults on the now established technology from potentially disruptive newcomers that claim to be in a position to replace it, and indeed might be better in some ways, but are invariably lacking in salient, critical features. The failure of the newcomer(s) only leads to a stronger conviction that the existing technology will survive indefinitely 

Obsolesence: further newcomers master the absent qualities, pushing the older technology into obsolesence

Antiquity: The final resting place

Kurzweil says that in order to be successful, an invention needs to move through each phase (pre-cursor, invention, development and maturity), which reminds me of the Schumpeter definition of the process of technological change which is divided into three key stages: Invention (ideas); Innovation ('the development of new ideas into marketable products and processes' or in other words commercialisation); Diffusion (scaling or adoption). There are of-course challenges at each of these stages which are often forgotten about but worth considering at an organisational level, since we need to be good at all three of them.

Image source

The Agile Team Onion

I really liked Emily Webber's thoughts about Agile team onions. I've talked a lot over the past few years about the power of small multi-disciplinary teams to drive big change, and retain agility as you scale - and concepts like Amazon's two-pizza teams.

Although as this piece adeptly describes, the point of two pizza teams isn't only about their size - it's about accountability and autonomy. Each one of those small teams has (or at least had) a 'fitness function', a key business metric agreed between the senior leadership and the team lead that is the teams' focus and accountability:

'Once approved, the team is then free to execute relatively autonomously to maximize its fitness function—to pursue creative strategies and to set its own internal priorities'.

This autonomy enables greater entrepreneurialism, the opportunity for greater ownership and growth. Amazon had effectively taken a divisional organisational structure to it's extreme.

Anyways, Emily's post talks about the composition of such a team or unit in terms of having all the roles needed in order to design, build and operate a service (like a product owner, scrum master, designers, developers etc - my own version of this is a combination of business, technology and creatively focused roles). But in a large organisation there will inevitably be some level of dependencies - other functions (perhaps ops, legal, finance etc) around the core team that are involved in some way in delivery but which are situated in silos. So the onion is, says Emily, a way of creating understanding about who is in the wider team, and inviting them in without disrupting the small (and effective) size of the core team:

'This isn’t just a stakeholder map, it is about bringing the organisation in and having shared responsibility for what you are creating together.'

Worth reading the whole thing, but she classifies it thus:

Core team:

• Purpose: delivery of digital services
• Communication: Daily (all stand-ups, retrospectives, planning, show and tells)
• Co-located: daily, all day
• Types of people: product owner, scrum master, developers, designers etc

Collaborators (who might be working on multiple teams):

• Purpose: bring in specialist information to assist the team,  assurance as needed, reduce dependencies and blockers (open doors)
• Communication: regularly, they come to some agile meetings
• Co-located: on a regular basis (as a guide ~2 days a week) – this also depends on what is needed and the phase of project – but enough to be able to not block anything
• Types of people: other delivery teams working within the same portfolio, security liaison, policy liaison, portfolio manager, operations, suppliers etc

Supporters

• Purpose: keep informed, feed into broad organisational priorities
• Communication: every sprint / iteration (show and tells, ad-hoc when needed)
• Co-located: monthly or as needed
• Types of people: steering groups, wider organisation

Although the numbers may be slightly different Emily suggests that it may be useful to relate this to Dunbar's number of group size (5 confidents, 15 core support group, 50 close friends, upto 200 others). Mapping out your team onion, inviting people in, agreeing expectations and protocols establishes the right footing for it all to work. So ultimately, an organisation may consist of many overlapping onions.

There's lots to like about this. It enables autonomy whilst acknowledging and providing a structure for dependencies. Nicely done.

Post of the Month - April 2016 - The Winner

There was a good showing for Rory Sutherland in this month's vote but a strong run of votes for Ramzi Yakob's post on how Business Strategy is Simple, Doing it is Hard meant that he won through in the end. So well done Ramzi - you are entered into the hall of fame. My thanks to all who took part.