Rowan's blog

Engaging and enabling IBM's Brand & Communications teams around the world (CEB Awards)

The 2016 CEB Internal Communications Summit and Awards is on in London at the moment. 

My colleague Nicky Parkinson and I submitted an entry (below) in the 'Innovations in Digital, Social, and Mobile Communications' CEB Award category, for our next-to-no budget work engaging and enabling IBM's Brand & Communications teams around the world. 

We were delighted to have been shortlisted, the competition was tough!

CEB AWARD SUBMISSION - Innovations - IBM - June 2016 from Rowan Hetherington

IBM on Brand

What is IBM's brand strategy? IBM's Jon Iwata explains it in two minutes:

“IBM on Brand” by Jon Iwata from VSA Partners on Vimeo.

 

I think the logic applies well to 'branding' a career too, i.e. a career is not defined by the various roles you have been in, but by your character - the values, beliefs and skill sets that make you unique.

 

'Engaging' requires building rapport

I just read this tweet from @SarahRobinson:

I'll laugh with you, Sarah. By the way I agree -- and I think this also relates to the concept of building rapport.

I see a lot of people simply promoting their stuff via social (rather like shouting into a crowded room and then running away). It's easy for people with a short term objective to use social as yet another media channel through which they can PUSH messages out to the ether. But will anyone get a full return on their investment in social if they only generate IMPRESSIONS? I don't think so.

To me, the true concept of 'social' necessitates people at the other end of the communication understanding and caring about the information being shared.  If they don't feel some sense of RAPPORT with the sender, they're less likely to bother to ENGAGE at the receiving end. 

I believe 'engaging' successfully requires building rapport -- and I think this part is often overlooked.

Building rapport involves listening, taking time to understand, relate and respond to other's ideas as well as sharing your own ideas, experiences and stories -- as a way to develop mutual understanding and the co-creation of value. Building rapport is central to the concept of 'building constituency' (see my post and short deck on how do that here).

You can probably tell that this is one of my current bugbears! Does anyone else relate?

One Tribe at a Time

It is Remembrance Day. In line with my interests in change management and building constituency, I read "One Tribe at a Time: A strategy for success in Afghanistan" by Major Jim Gant. My understanding of the War in Afghanistan in 2009 when this was written is very basic... but based on the information presented, this is the most compelling strategic change plan I have read.

The scale and complexity of the challenges, along with the brutal realities of failure in a war environment, put the digital/social change project I spend time thinking about into perspective! The external technology revolution we are all experiencing with digital/social communications - and the internal transformation organizations must go through to keep pace (the subject of many of my posts) - now feels like a walk in the park on a warm spring day with an ice cream. Having said this, I do see parallels.

My take on it:

• The vision is; To disrupt, dismantle and defeat the terrorist network, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To prevent the return of al-Qaeda in either country in the future and to facilitate security and prosperity for the Afghan people.

• A key cultural factor is the fundamentally different structures of America and Afghanistan: a central governance model vs a distributed tribal system.

• Major Jim Gant's strategy involves working with Pashtunwali tribes; one 'Tribal Engagement Team' building constituency with one tribe, eventually scaling to reinforce existing tribal structures right across the country, to partner with them against al-Qaeda. This makes sense because the Pashtunwali tribal system is centuries old - it's all they know - and they are likely to resist foreign intervention (like attempted structural change) to the death.

Implementing the proposed strategy would require institutional change and a shift in leadership style:

• Approval to pilot the strategy would require imagination and trust from leadership.
• Aligning with this approach at full scale would require transformation of the US Army, including a significant paradigm shift.
• Communications would need to be overhauled from command and control to, perhaps, Social Architecture, slide 6.
• Approvals processes would need to change - some efforts would need to go ahead with no approval.
• 'Trust and approval' would need to be agreed upfront (sounds a little like having Social Computing Guidelines, e.g. my employer IBM's).
• The risk-averse nature of staff would need to change - they'd need to be willing to 'get out there', partner and collaborate with the tribe/constituency to co-create value.
• Staff must be allowed to go 'native' and interact with external tribes at all levels (can staff in your organization openly collaborate with people externally about their non-confidential work e.g. on a blog, LinkedIn Group or via Twitter).
• Funding models must be streamlined, so staff have the power to do what makes sense (to draw a parallel with digital marketing and communications, this might be investing in new listening capabilities, developing locally relevant content for a key constituency in market and funding ongoing metrics and analytics to derive actionable insights). 
• Likely resistance from US ground commanders (I think all change agents can relate to that one).

Major Gant listed this familiar sounding challenge: "Identifying, attracting and training personnel who could perform this type of mission would be a daunting task". This seems to come back to the need for a new (or, perhaps, old) predominant style of intrinsically motivated, transformational leadership:

• More parallels here: Finding leaders with integrity, 'Strength and Honor' who can 'build constituency': incl. building rapport across cultures / cross-function, listen, empathise, understand, learn, then 'influence without authority', plus continually assess the status against the vision and successfully iterate on the strategy and implementation over time.
• Initial leaders would need the imagination to go against the grain of what the institution rewards, be willing to pilot it (start small and think big).
• Importantly they'd need the commitment/perseverance to stick with it, to allow the project to benefit from the 'Chinese bamboo tree' style phenomenon described on p37 (little growth in first years, explosive growth / return in five years). They might need to influence up too, to ensure their project was provided ongoing support.

 

Major Jim Gant, you say you're not a writer, not a strategist, not an academic - but I found this very thought provoking from the perspective of strategy and change (and applied cultural anthropology). Plus I was compelled to read to the end. I hope others do too.

I'd love to hear what has happened since 2009 - and what was learned along the way. I vaguely recall hearing from David Meerman Scott that the US Army is transforming in line with the digital/social communications revolution, perhaps along the lines of parallels drawn above? I wonder if this might have helped.

 

Interested to hear others thoughts too.

 

P.S. Tip of the hat to Luc Galoppin (as he would say) for telling me about the ebook.

Agile Progress - an experiment in driving open, collaborative, sustainable progress

The seven billionth human will be born today. This population level is currently unsustainable. Whose responsibility is it to regulate human population numbers - and solve other problems facing humanity and our planet? Is it the responsibility of governments? Of organisations? Of individuals?

Population is a complex topic that relates to individual choice, education, standard of living and other factors. Aren't all the big areas we humans want to see progess in* the collective responsibility of all of us; individuals, organisations and governments?

*E.g. the topics from the Worldometer statistics page: Population, Government & economics, Society & media, Environment, Food, Water, Energy, Health.

Today, individuals from around the world can collaborate with each other - and with organisations and governments - to solve our greatest challenges and drive ethical, sustainable progress. We have the technologies: Web 2.0 has provided power to the people.

What if we each participated and followed a process like this:

1. Each participant signs up to participate voluntarily (for this experiment, via the form below). Each participant selects a topic they are knowledgeable about and willing to contribute towards.
2. Secure an overall Program Leader leader for each topic, plus Project Leaders to neutrally facilitate collaboration and project management on specific project efforts (not implement activities).
3. Project Leader to gather a team of voluntary participants (enlist more participants where required, communicate the overview and process).
4. Each Project Leader to work with the participants that volunteered to collaboratively develop wording an ethical, sustainable vision for the future of that topic. This would become their Project vision. (Note: Multiple topic>visions would require multiple Project Leaders - many different projects may form under one topic, each with their own vision.)
5. Each Project Leader coordinates wording, with participants, of a SMART* short term goal (outcome) to work towards - in line with the collectively defined project vision. This could take the form of a ‘user story’, a step used in agile development process. View Agile Alliance video, ‘Agile in a nutshell’.
6. Each project team that defined a vision and an outcome collectively participates, with whatever resources and influence the leader, participating individuals, organisations and / or governments can muster, to work towards implementation of this outcome, coordinating efforts using collaborative software. Together their efforts form an Agile Progress project.
7. The project team reviews their progress against the SMART* short term outcome developed in step 5. Team leader notes and communicates learnings.
8. Wrap back to step 5. Iterate over time for continuous improvement in progress toward vision developed in step 4.

*SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound

By working together in project teams, each contributing our individual actions, skills and resources to the collective effort and mobilizing other individuals, organisations and governments, perhaps we could drive open, collaborative, sustainable progress in these important areas.

I’m keen to set up the functionality to enable the creation of Agile Progress projects, as an experiment, then involve more people. We can iterate over time, based on feedback and measurable outcomes (optimise the concept and individual project efforts based on what works / what doesn’t work / the trial of new ideas). I’d like your input and participation. If you’re reading this, you qualify!

To set this up, I’d like your feedback on:

1. The ‘Agile Progress’ concept. Please view and edit this simple first draft of the concept incl.: Who, What, Where, How on Google Docs. 
2. What topics you feel most knowledgeable / passionate about (in form below). This will provide important information to help determine where to start.
3. Which free, scalable collaboration tool(s) would best meet the requirements listed on Google Docs? (I use some of these tools, but don't have visibility across all options.)
4. What challenges do you foresee - and what solutions might overcome them?

Please provide your feedback on items 2, 3 and 4 via the short form below:

Name:

Email:

Topic of interest:
Human population
Government & economics
Society & media
Environment
Food
Water
Energy
Health
Recommended tool(s):

Challenges & solutions:

 

This idea is in early concept phase. It excites me, because if it can be made to work, perhaps we (individuals, organisations and governments) could define shared visions and work towards open, collaborative, sustainable progress together. I’d appreciate your feedback – via the form fields above or by leaving a comment below. My next steps will be guided by your input.

I am seeking others to collaborate with to develop/modify the concept.

 

The Power of Open: 2.0 Public, Private and Community Sectors

In September, the Open Government Partnership formally launched with a series of high-level meetings highlighting the transformative nature of open governance.
 
Events included a day-long multi-stakeholder discussion, "The Power of Open," that brought together governments, civil society, industry leaders, academics and the media in a series of panels and networking events. The launch page states, these were “focused on the role of openness in improving responsiveness, fostering accountability, creating efficiencies, promoting innovation and growth, fighting corruption, improving performance, and capturing dispersed knowledge in support of smarter policies.”

As part of this, Eight nations (Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the US) formally endorsed a broadly-worded Open Government Declaration, all of them openly asserting that their goal is to achieve “greater prosperity, well-being, and human dignity in our own countries and in an increasingly interconnected world.”

This is something I feel incredibly hopeful about - I see increased 'Openness' in the public, private and community sectors as a huge step towards ethical, sustainable, agile progress. Last year I had a (somewhat radical) rant on the need (and possibilities) for crowd-sourced democracy here.

Watch President Obama’s opening address from the meeting, along with comments from multiple countries:


Highlights:

• The UK has ambition to be the most transparent government in the world. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, gave an extremely articulate speech and call to action (at 46:59).
• Rakesh Rajani, one of the civil society representatives used his moment well.
• President Obama's closing remarks included a pertinent comment on the challenge of being a human being in a position of power.

Read Susan Crawford’s detailed blog post on the topic, including how you can get involved in the US: http://scrawford.net/blog/

In the private sector:

• The power of the consumer is well known and is being leveraged in the marketing space ('Customer-made' became a trend back in 2006).
• In the B2B space, collaboration between internal and external experts, prospects and clients is becoming commonplace too.
• In large organisations, 'jams' are providing opportunity for internal crowdsourcing, for example, IBM's ValuesJam in 2003 gave its workforce the opportunity to redefine the core IBM values for the first time in nearly 100 years.
• These initiatives have generally been led from the top.

The community sector now has the power to lead and drive big change from the bottom up:

• Nathan Winograd made San Fransico the first 'no kill' state for shelter animals in the United States and went on to make the same change in other places (see 01.45 in video).
• A different example of community leadership is the collaborative, bottom up, coordinated research effort of the distributed http://occupyresearch.net project. Anyone can participate. A team led development of the wiki, which describes itself as "an open, shared space for distributed research focused around OccupyWallStreet / OccupyTogether". They are sharing ideas, research methods, tools, datasets, with a view to writing, analysing, discussing, codesigning new tools, and otherwise developing theory and practice together.

 

So, becoming more open (and finding ways for people from all sectors to collaborate on shared interests, beliefs, ambitions) is perhaps inevitable, since everyone now has a voice and anyone can drive change.

I see two keys to smooth progress in this area - the exact two challenges mentioned in my previous post; imagination and leadership. Scalable technologies have emerged that permit collaboration top down and bottom up. The question is, can a leader find constituents including experts who share interests, beliefs or ambitions - and lead them to;

• define a shared vision that represents ethical, sustainable progress (a 'win' for all constituents)
• and then work towards it in a coordinated way?

The project leader and participants would need imagination and leadership (internal and external) to commit to the possibility of a shared vision and to willingly, consistently collaborate and coordinate with each other over time to achieve win/win progress.

If you’re interested in hearing what OpenGov experts and enthusiasts have to say, feel free to follow this OpenGov Twitter list.

Lets hope the power of 'open' culminates in constituents with expertise collaborating to drive ethical, sustainable progress more transparently and democratically in all sectors.

‘The Hero’s Journey’ – implications for leading change

I was reflecting yesterday on the roles change agents play within the 'hero's journey' and the implications of the hero’s journey for leading change (note I am using the term 'hero' to refer to both males and females).

First, let me define those two things:

Change agents are people who attempt to positively influence change through his or her actions, or influencing the actions of others (i.e. most of us in our day to day lives, plus leaders of organisational change).

The hero's journey is a basic pattern found in many narratives from around the world.

Joseph Campbell describes it quite wonderously: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

This chart shows the hero's journey of change (graphic in public domain):

I've taken a few writing courses, during which I learned that the backbone of a typical fiction includes;

• Identifying a gap (usually something that is shut down or out of balance within the main character), then
• Going through the adventure of the hero's journey to overcome blocks to transformation. The character’s inner journey is usually facilitated by an outer journey - which contains multiple change agents - some genuinely trying to steer them towards this transformation, others providing an environment they can change within (incl. providing the challenges / resistance they need to overcome, to make their inner journey meaningful). The hero is also a change agent on the personal level in that they make the choice to change within the environmental/situational context (and, since the outer journey reflects the inner journey, they transform their environment/situation in the process).

 

What roles do change agents play within the 'hero's journey'?

Looking at the hero's journey chart above, I'd argue that every phase could be played by change agents:

• providing a call to adventure i.e. articulating a vision - step 3 of Kotter's 8 steps to change management
• being the 'supernatural aid' i.e. communicating the Vision for Buy-in / helping them see and feel the vision and reason for change - step 4 of Kotter's 8 steps to change management
• providing the threshold i.e. urgency & felt need for change - step 1 of Kotter's 8 steps to change management)
• being the helper i.e. effective follower - as defined by Kelley
• being the mentor i.e. coaching leader - as defined by Goleman
• providing challenges i.e. opportunities for the hero to learn experientially incl.: overcoming resistance, undertaking training, inviting them to step up to achieve a goal / attain something of value
• facilitating the hero through seeing the revelation i.e. the emotive 'clunk' of understanding about what needs to change and being able to let go of the old & embrace the new - this could involve influence tactics such as rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation (Yukl), creating interventions (Bandura, 1997 in the context of developing self-efficacy) / facilitating experiential learning workshops, incl. processes to support consolidation of learnings
• supporting the return to a new status quo i.e. consolidating gains and making change stick - step 8 of Kotter's 8 steps to change management

 

What are the implications of ‘The Hero’s Journey’ for leading change?

Isn't this the most intuitive approach for understanding change management?

Based on its pattern throughout global narrative history, ‘The Hero’s Journey’ is arguably the intuitive, natural approach to change that moves people. However, it does not match the approaches espoused by change theorists, such as Kotter’s 8 steps (1996), Kanter, Stein and Jick’s 10 commandments (1995) or Nadler and Nadler’s (1998) recipe for organisational change. The key differences:

1. When you consider that every human being has a life story and is in the process of learning (i.e. life), it becomes clear that every person is within their own hero’s journey (i.e. everyone is running their own change agenda).
2. Heroes / personal change agents must become aware of their own personal biases (personality type, perceptions, beliefs, cultural norms, values, motivations etc) to ensure they do not make incorrect assumptions / have blind spots or biases in relation to their change efforts, in order to be effective. Every hero’s journey / change effort will involve peeling back new levels of awareness - and adjustments will need to be made on an ongoing basis, to take account of new information.
3. Where a human being is interconnected with other humans in any way, there are multiple change agents / heroes, each working on their own journeys (change agendas). In other words, everyone is trying to implement change, but their 'change' is probably different to the one you are trying to lead and implement. In order to get the people you are trying to influence to buy in to your hero's journey / change agenda, you must find a way to align their agenda with yours, or yours with theirs. In other words, find out what motivates them - and what shared interests, beliefs or ambitions you could align on. If they are ‘shut down’, then it becomes necessary to re-establish their belief in themselves and the value of contributing to the world around them (not just their self-efficacy for a task).
4. In a work of fiction, as in general life, a lot of change is serendipitous - each 'hero' (i.e. every character) is finding their way on their own journey as well as playing a part in the story of each other character. The change agents are each embroiled in their own hero's journey as well as in each others journeys. We each pick ideas for the next 'scene' in our change journey from the smorgasboard of stories around us.

 

In summary, the existing models of change don't address the concept that everyone is a change agent on their own journey. The existing models are linear, based on a the premise of a static external environment, whereas in real life (as in the hero's journey), the change journey is unknown at the start. It can't be known at the start, because the process involves deriving more awareness (incl. eliminating personal biases) - and playing the roles of helper, mentor, transformer and consolidator in other people's journeys, whose life scenes form the external environment we are attempting to change!

I need some more time to reflect on this – meanwhile, I’d love to hear any comments.