Upgrade Your Work
How To Avoid Becoming Irrelevant – Change is a’Come’n
Face it: it is very likely the way you work is outdated and much less effective than your competitors – um, I mean your peers’. Why?
We watch the rise and fall of businesses. Each week it seems an “established” company is going under, is filing for bankruptcy or is being purchased for a fraction of what it once was worth.
In the book The Innovator’s Dilemma Clay Christiansen took a look at why businesses rise to glory and then fail. (Fascinating book – it needs to be on your MUST read list.) He points out that as the consumer’s values change a new business is there to take them on. They fill the niche and in time they have a successful company. But soon the customer redefines value – again – and the company doesn’t change with it. They keep filling the original value (because some people stay there).
A great Forbes piece was recently written about this. The author writes, “..with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both (Google and Facebook) might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years.” Web 1.0 is overtaken with Web 2.0 is overtaken with Social is overtaken with Mobile is overtaken by…? What’s next?
So it is with the way we work. The way we have worked in the past is not sufficient for today – or tomorrow. It is mandatory that we change. If we don’t, as our companies morph they will place a greater value on work habits we have not developed, styles we have shunned and strategic thinking we are not capable of.
It doesn’t matter how smart, how charming or how innovative you are. If you don’t change the way you work to match what is needed, none of that will matter. The companies that fail have incredible people in them. But that doesn’t stop the company from the nose dive. We have all seen brilliant people fail at business – all because they were unwilling to change.
There are four main possible outcomes for you:
1) You don’t change the way you work. Others do, as does the company. The company grows and your skills are marginalized along with your paycheck.
2) You don’t change the way you work and neither do your peers in the company. The company is incapable of following the trends and the company suffers a less than pleasant fate.
3) You upgrade the way you work but your peers do not. You find a company that is ready to move in the right direction. You join them and sadly watch your former company fumble.
4) You upgrade the way you work, become a champion and influence your peers to the do the same. That culture drives the company in the new direction. You are the hero.
Be the hero.
Why Email Still Dominates the Workplace and Your Life
Careful. This one will make you nervously laugh because chances are (unless your Luis Suarez) you feel the same way, too.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) surveyed their employees & contractors over a year ago. The results came in, but I don’t know if many people noticed the comedy.
A question near the beginning asked how they feel about email. The answer was a resounding, “We can’t stand it. It is a time waster.” Then, another question at the end asked (paraphrased), “What is the best way to communicate information to you?”
The answer? Overwhelmingly EMAIL.
Ask yourself the same questions and, if you are like most people, you will probably have to admit that you would have answered the same way. (You may nervously laugh now.)
So why do we do what we hate doing? In an earlier post I said it was because of emotion and habit.
HABIT
In the comments of the above post, Spencer asked, “How is it that email continues to dominate the work environment as the power app? Why is that not changing?”
Good point. If we look at this problem logically, we notice that those entering the workforce don’t use email nearly as much as we, who are in the workforce, do. So, reason would stand that in a few years, because they bring their habits to the workforce we will rely less on email.
But when they join us they also adopt the email habit and work just as inefficiently as we do. Wha?!
Habit is not only personal habit, but also cultural habit. When a new person joins the workforce, they also join and buy in to the culture, processes and traditions of working. And, for the most part, they are not in a position of authority to make any changes. Thus, the habit continues. We continue to use email and love and despise it all at once.
STOPPING THE MADNESS
So, how do we stop the madness? First, I don’t believe email will ever go away. Just like the phone didn’t – and sending snail mail. It will instead be pushed into a more narrow focus of function.
The change starts with you. And me. And Luis. YOU must use the best tool and lead your organizations. It will take time. You will need to be bold.
It won’t stop until the habits of the organization changes. And who better to lead the charge than you?
I am not advocating recklessly ditching email. Instead, find alternatives that will work – even if they push the culture some. You might ease in. Although, if your culture will sustain it, drop it altogether like Luis did. Help others (because many feel the same way you do).
Teach by example. Lead the charge.
Predict the Adoption of Your Social Business Initiative – Part 2
Now that you know the five factors to predict the rate of adoption of your initiative (whether it be social technologies, cultural change, etc.), let’s put this into something that will give us a measurement.
First, you have to pick your target audience. Know who you want to evaluate a tool. Then, take each one of the five and evaluate your initiative against it. Next, rate it – 0 through 5, with 0 signifying that it does not satisfy the factor at all, and 5 signifying that it is very strong in fulfilling this need.
Then mutilply the first two factors, Relative Advantage and Compatability, by 1.5 and the others by 1. Why? The first two hold more weight and are particularly telling (according to Rogers). If they all scored 5 then the total score would be 30.
I thought about ranking the results (1-30 = Weak …. 85-100=Strong), but I don’t feel that it is needed. Anyone who sees a 75% can tell that there is room to grow and will know where to focus to make is stronger. Again, it is not so much a crystal ball as it is a gauge to help us know where to focus our efforts to increase adoption.
Solving Real Work Problems
Two strengths of this tool are: 1) To quickly find where the holes are and 2) Explain in simple terms why an initiative was or was not (or will or will not be) adopted.
As I have used this, I have found that there are two types of adoption to account for. One is Initial Adoption, the other is Sustained Adoption. They are both very different and can show different results.
As an example, there is one particular technology I have heard many employees at different companies talk about. It spreads like wildfire at the beginning. The executives get excited that it is working: many people sign up and start using it. But not long after, usage drops off and only a very small fraction of people use it. (In one company with 2 years of using it, there are over 6000 registered users, 25 regular users and 35 using on any given day). Not only is management frustrated, but so are the employees. The result: it isn’t used often.
To explain this phenomenon, I evaluated it using the Adoption Index.
Looking at the above analysis (although this version does not go into depth for display purposes), you can understand why it is initially adopted quickly. Yet why is it not used after initial adoption? Why do employees drop it? Again, I use the Adoption Index to explain this.
There is more behind this analysis, but these are the bare basics. This is only one example of how the Adoption Index can help explain why an innovation or technology will or won’t be adopted.
This tool will give you direction on where you should spend your efforts. For example, if your score is low in complexity, you will know where to spend your time and how to focus to make your initiative more successful.
I have used this with initiatives to simply explain to executives and management why their products or initiatives were not as successful as they had hoped. Unfortunately, I have not used it to show why their efforts were much more successful than they anticipated, only because this rarely happens. But I hope to one day.
Feel free to use and give suggestions on how to make it better. I hope it will help you explain past initiative’s adoption rates and predict future ones. Here it is in PowerPoint format.
Adoption Index by Kevin D. Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers.
Predict the Adoption of Your Business Initiative – Part 1
If only we could predict how quickly our initiatives will be adopted! Then we could focus on those that will yield high returns and we could reduce the risk of failure. But… those people! They always mess things up! Even when we think we have the perfect product / technology / purpose / program, people mess it up!
While I can’t give you a crystal ball, I have found a useful way to evaluate initiatives and determine a rough prediction of the rate of adoption. To be honest, this could be for anything – any product, process, technology, social initiative, chore chart program for your kids… But let’s focus on making major changes within your company.
The Adoption Index
One of my favorite books is Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers. Although this largely academic book was originally written in 1962, it hasn’t lost any of its usefulness. It explains why innovations and technologies – in the true sense of the word – are adopted, or not, and at what rate. Rogers explains that there are five factors which have the most weight in the outcome. I will briefly explain each in context.
1)“Relative advantage is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes. The degree of relative advantage may be measured in economic terms, but social prestige factors, convenience, and satisfaction are also important factors.”
To many, social technologies are just another thing they have to check. Rather than realizing that it supersedes anything, they see that it is an addition to what they already have to do. And they already don’t have enough time! Convenient? No way! Satisfaction when there is perceived information overload?
How do we combat relative advantage when it comes to implementing initiatives at your company? Contrary to popular belief, an ROI will not convince them. It will help them get over an obstacle, but I have never seen someone walk away from a presentation on ROI energized and excited to tackle a new organizational project. At this point it is stories and examples and case studies which spark their imagination. In a large part, it is a process of education and perceived application.
2)“Compatibility is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with the existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters.”
When I work with companies, this is often referred to as CULTURE. What values, traditions, beliefs to employees hold to tightly? And how does the new technology match up with the culture? This is an especially tricky one because with social technologies within the workplace it almost always matches up well with the values of the company. Yet the operative word in the description above is PERCEIVED. How are social technologies perceived? As time wasters, one more system to learn, a fun platform, full of noise, and the list goes on.
One way I have broken past this is to show the Party Planning video. It breaks down preconceived ideas and they suddenly get it. They had a different perception of what “it” was. Suddenly they get a peak into what it REALLY is and they realize how well compatible the values really are.
3)“Complexity is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to understand and use.”
This, now so much more than before, is increasingly important. In this world of clean and simple UIs and Twitter, we feel we should be able to look at something, or read it, or experience it and instantly understand it. If it takes time (precious time that employees don’t want to give up) to understand, then often it is not worth the effort.
And then if they try and it is as difficult as they thought, this creates another obstacle. They gave it a try, it wasn’t worth it and so they go back to the old way of working.
4)“Trialability is the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis.”
Not all innovations can be experimented with. For example, a new organizational structure often just needs to happen, rather than be experimented with. And again, our modern culture has set the expectation of free trials, subsidized technologies and throw away products, ideas, and methodologies. The danger here is that the latest so-called fad is not experimented with deeply enough to understand it. We tend to cover the surface, hoping that the learner will dive in deeper. But they too often do not.
Yet the easier it is to dive in, try it out and come back to their safe place, the more likely it is to be experimented with. The more this happens, the easier it will be to process into their own values.
5) “Observability is the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others. The easier it is for individuals to see the results of an innovation, the more likely they are to adopt.”
Not only are they looking for the stated result, but they are looking for the unintentional results sometimes even more. For example, rather than agreeing to forgo a vacation policy and allow each person to keep track of their own, they want not only to know the financial impacts, but if people will abuse the new policy. To them it may be obvious – again we are talking about perception.
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I must point out that this is only skimming the surface. To really understand this (and make the tool more useful) I would suggest buying the book and going through at least the first couple of chapters.
In the next post I will explain how we can use these factors to guage the rate of adoption of your initiative. There will also be examples of how I have used it to show adoption rates.
Pandemic Failure – Failure Unabaited
A couple weeks ago I gave a keynote speech at the Enterprise 2.0 conference entitled, “Embracing your E2.0 Failures” (watch the video here). There I talked about three different types of failures, Pandemic, Catastrophic and Intrinsic failure.
At the beginning of the keynote I showed this video I created which exemplifies the most dangerous of the three failures: Pandemic Failure:
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olSIMc4j5Sg’]
Pandemic Failure has three main characteristics:
- It runs rampant within a culture.
- It is obvious to most within that culture and it is often discussed and complained about.
- Rarely does anyone take action to make the needed changes.
This is the most dangerous because bad behavior becomes an acceptable way of working or accomplishing a task. For example, when was the last time you were in a meeting you didn’t really need to be in, but felt obligated to be there? You didn’t lend any real advantage to the meeting nor did you take away much. Not that it was completely worthless – you probably did get some good information out of it – but what you did get was not an hour’s worth of your time. You could have received it another way in only about a minute’s time.
But we too often work this way and it is acceptable.
Pandemic Failure leads to apathy and diminished effectiveness. And this is why it is the most dangerous type of failure. It allows for growth while at the same time stifles it and can bring down whole subsets of cultures. It gives a false sense of security and at the same time an overall uneasiness.
Overcome Pandemic Failure
How do we overcome pandemic failure. Like anything else, we first need to recognize it. Then, we can’t just let it go. We need to actually do something about it. And it probably won’t be comfortable because it will be part of the culture. It will take guts because you are challenging the status quo. Everyone will be on your side, yet no one may back you. It will be a very strange situation to be in.
Yet if you let it go, you become a victim of an annoying culture trait. And I don’t know about you, but any time I become a slave to something that is ineffective, I feel I must change it.
So here is to all you Change Agents!