Decrapify Work or Die (show me the way)
Oops!… I did it again!
They banged this drum last summer and the general response was ‘Meh!’. And that was from the organisations. The response from office workers was short and anglo-salon. But here we go again, another attempt to wind the clock back because …
Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? No reason has been put forward that stands up to any analysis. It’s just the leaden weight of the status quo, wanting to recreate the winning hand it had before COVID, wanting the behaviour that drove it’s money-making machines to come back.
There’s a seriously good explanation as to why this is utter foolishness by the excellent Simon Wardell here (he of Wardell Maps and more cleverness than one man should be allowed). It’s a bad move economically and strategically. And it won’t work.
Meanwhile, sensible organisations are seizing upon this opportunity to rethink and reconfigure themselves and grasp the benefits that have now been revealed to them, creating organisations that are fit for the future. Agile, resilient and people-centric.
Diamonds
One of those companies is Slack, with their Roadmap for the Future of Work, which they define as ‘digital first’. I like their guidelines, which are:
The executive team will be digital-first.
Getting teams together in person should have a purpose.
“One dials in, all dial in.”
Shared space is for teamwork.
Embrace asynchronous tools.
All employees have a “home” team with core hours
Although I have a couple of quibbles (yeah, I know, no surprise there, Colin)
Firstly, why is having a purpose for getting teams together in person a NEW guideline? I mean, why would you get a team together for no reason? That would be a stupid waste of everyone’s time. Who would do that? What kind of idi… oh, hang on. I have some memories coming back … beige room … big table … droning noise … unreadable powerpoints … undrinkable coffee … throbbing head … drowsy, must not sleep … ow, ow ow! No, stop it!! I’ve spent 20 years getting that stuff out of my head, I’m not letting it back in now!
Anyway (breathes deeply, regains composure). Why has it taken a company that actually makes tools that enable remote working take so long to see the benefits of remote/hybrid working? It really shows what we’re up against here, that mindsets are so fixed, habits so ingrained, worldviews so habituated that even THEY took years to realise they could do it differently.
Eventually, they found the diamonds in their own back yard because COVID meant they couldn’t go anywhere else. But they’ve finally got the idea. As they conclude “… this is about progress, not perfection; it’s about experimenting and evolving.”
House of Fun
Don’t want to go back to the office? Well, how about going to the Studio? Does that sounds more attractive? Dropbox hope so, because that’s what the now call their physical spaces.
As a ‘virtual first’ company (how many terms do you think we can invent for this stuff?), Dropbox have avoided the danger of a two-tier employee experience, where those in office benefit over those that are remote. It’s an elegantly simple solution -they have removed the office.
The Studios are designed solely for teams and co-workers to come together, to build culture and camaraderie. "We've got this mantra about when to come together,” says Dropbox, "keep it special."
They have two spaces, configurable meeting rooms for, er, meetings; and ‘touch down’ points for one-to-ones and small groups to gather in a social setting. Everything in the meeting rooms are on wheels so they can be used for multiple purposes and even changed during a gathering for different modes of interaction. It all looks really cool and a fun place to hang out. But it's not set up to do deep work, because that’s what you do remotely.
There’s a lot to commend Dropbox’s approach and you can read the full article on how they have created their Studios here.
Somehow, I think we’ll need to see more physical representations of this new way of working for the penny to drop across the board. ‘Digital first’, ‘Remote first’, ‘Virtual first’, whatever you call it, it’s all a bit abstract for most people. We just have to see, feel, touch and experience things for them to really come alive.
The office might be dead but I think the Studio could be very much on the up.
Complicated
Over the past several months, I’ve become more interested in complexity. When I say ‘interested’, what I mean is dazed and confused. I mean, it’s complex, right?
I started with Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework (some might say his somewhat acerbic, curmudgeonly, contrarian approach appealed to me. Well, they say opposites attract 😐) Then I came across complex adaptive systems as a way of talking about organisations, and then Becky Andree introduced me to complexity thinking.
Now, complicated is not the same as complex. It’s a different context in the Cynefin model and one of the common problems in organisations is that they are applying complicated thinking in a complex context because they don’t realise it has changed. We often use the terms interchangeably but the distinction is important.
(I know that means I should have titled this section ‘Complex’ but I try to use song titles and so ‘Complicated’ by Avril Lavigne came to mind. I mean, there IS a song called ‘Complex’ by Gary Numan but who’s heard of that? And I can’t play it on the ukulele, either.)
There is a worse thing to do. That’s to use simple thinking to deal with complexity. We’re all guilty of this and I’ve certainly spent far too much time looking for simple solutions and short-cuts. We are awash with people offering this, it’s practically the staple of internet courses from get-rich-quick schemes to 10-steps-to-nirvana programmes. It IS the staple of a lot consultancy firms with their seven-step models and 2x2 matrices, but they dress it up a bit to make it look more complicated.
It’s also predominant in politics today with the wave of populism we see around the world. Simple solutions to complex problems is pretty much the stock-in-trade of the demagogues, with disastrous consequences, particularly in the case of COVID. A failure to engage with the complexity of the situation has had deadly consequences, prolonging the crisis and killing hundreds of thousands.
So, it’s important. We need to get much better at understanding it, because the world is not getting any simpler and we’ve got some wicked problems to solve in short order. We need leaders who are capable of complexity of thinking too. Time to learn more about it.