Nancy and I were eating at Jolly Good in Melbourne, talking about everything, like we tend to. In the background, the music they were playing was incredible. The first song I noticed was Streets of our town by The Go-betweens, followed by Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane, Tin Soldiers by Stiff Little Fingers, with a couple of great songs I’d never heard before mixed in — Italy by Rain Dogs and Magic of Meghan by Dry Cleaning.

When the Dry Cleaning song came on, I said to Nancy “There’s no way an algorithm made this playlist!” All the songs were great, but there was no thread between them. No era, no genre, no single nation of origin (a Spotify favourite). I’ve listened to enough algorithm-generated playlists to be pretty confident that this wasn’t one.

As we were paying our bill, I asked the owner what the music was. Her response: “Oh, it’s playlist our friend Craig put together for us.” See? I told you.

What Pulls it Together?

It reminded me of a great mix tape (props to anyone reading this old enough to remember or to have made one of those!) It also reminded me of when I used to do radio shows. By the time I graduated from college, I had done several thousand hours of radio shows on the campus radio station. Some jazz, some reggae, a very tiny amount of classical (I was never let on again after I started a show I was filling in on an emergency basis by saying “Today we’re doing to take a look at 5th symphonies, starting with Dvorak…”), but mostly I played rock — punk, garage, proto-goth, what eventually became “alternative”, that sort of thing.

At the end of each show, I had a sense of whether or not I thought things went well or not, but I couldn’t explain why. One weird thing that I noticed was that on the days that I thought hadn’t worked well, I had just as many people tell me they liked the show as I did on the days when I thought everything was clicking.

How could that be?

I’ve only recently come up with a good hypothesis about this, many years after the fact. For most of the people giving me feedback about the shows, the only criteria by which they judged them was “Did I like the songs?” If they did, they told me it was a good show. Fair enough — that’s the whole point of radio, especially if at least one or two of the things they liked were songs they hadn’t heard before.

But to me, great music was a given. I was always in the booth with the monitors on loud, dancing around, and generally making an idiot of myself in private, until I went on mic to announce the songs, when I would make an idiot of myself in public. So it wasn’t the music that was making it work or not work for me. There must be something else.

At the time, I thought it was a sense of flow. I always had an inherent sense afterwards if things had “fit together” in a way that made sense to me. That’s something that has carried over to a lot of things in my job now — lectures, public talks, workshops, and all the different kinds of writing that I do. Part of it was definitely flow.

But there was something else too.

Wholeness

I now think that it was what Christopher Alexander calls wholeness in his books series The Nature of Order. Alexander is best known for his early books that re-thought architecture. A Pattern Language laid out 253 patterns that make buildings and towns more amenable to living full, rewarding lives. The Timeless Way of Building then explains the actual methods to follow to achieve these patterns. This work had enormous influence not just on architecture, but other fields as well, particularly software engineering.

In The Nature of Order, Alexander is even more ambitious. He tries to go one level up to see if there are general rules that generate the 253 patterns that he found in his earlier work. In doing this, he grapples with the intersections between complexity theory, architecture and design, and other big ideas. Like I said, ambitious. And he does find some general rules — fifteen of them, in fact — that generate what he calls wholeness. These are the rules:

Here’s a good blog post that explains each of them with some examples from nature. In thinking about my shows, I actually think that the tacit knowledge bit that I was trying to explain is exactly this – wholeness. It turns out that a number of Alexander’s rules apply to what I thought of as a good show.

Here’s a small example: Rule 9 Contrast. To me, a great show was one that touched on a wide range of genres and eras, different speeds and moods, some loud songs and some quiet ones, and so on. Contrast is really important. And there’s an art to putting together contrast. It’s relatively simple to put together one set that’s fast and loud, while the next one is quiet and calm. That’s good, but it’s even better if you can find a way to blend between these extremes within a set.

Here’s a great example of how you might do this. It’s from my most-listened to songs list from last year**

I love both these songs, but they’re very different. The Agnes Obel song is quiet, slow, and beautiful. The Propagandhi song is, well, none of those. But it starts quietly before it kicks in. So when you play the songs in this order, you can shift from quiet to loud without it being too jarring. Contrast!

There are probably another 8 or so of the rules that I was unconsciously using to pull together a good show. Since reading The Rules of Order, I think that this explains where the good shows were coming from. The rules that were incorporated created patterns that lead to a good show as an emergent outcome. And I think there’s a LOT of value in working out how we can do this more consciously.

Where Does Wholeness Come From?

This isn’t really a post about AI, but I guess in some ways it is, since I started with machine learning algorithms. Christopher Alexander’s work is a good example of doing things that AI can’t do well (at least currently). Once you define the 253 patterns, AI can identify examples that reflect them. Machine learning can identify patterns, and it can cluster ones that appear together frequently (correlation), but the reason that Alexander’s work was a breakthrough was that he identified the patterns using creative thinking, and, more importantly, he made the distinction between patterns that are good, and generative, and those that are bad, and limiting.

That’s based on values. And on thinking based on values.

This is even more true for the work he did in identifying the fifteen rules that generate these patterns. This is in part because these are examples of abductive reasoning – inferring the best explanation for observed data. When you combine abductive reasoning with values-based thinking, you have something that is still uniquely human.

Values, judgement, and inference lead to wholeness, and so do love and care. These are what made my good shows good, and they were there in the Jolly Good playlist too. These are small examples, but Alexander’s are bigger and more important. These examples show how applying simple rules at a local level can lead to good emergent outcomes at a higher level. We can do this in a range of contexts, though it might be particularly important to keep these ideas in mind for the work we do that actually involves AI.

We can ask of any new idea: would making this real increase wholeness, or break it?

*I don’t think that me playing songs from Eternally Yours by the Saints was foreshadowing a move to Brisbane 15 years later, but I guess you never know…

**This is kind of algorithm-driven, but in theory at least, the list is just based on a stack-ranking of the songs I listened to the most, so both of these were in my top 20 last year.

Note: it’s been a few years since I’ve written anything here (thanks to Jason Fox and Nilofer Merchant for the prompts to get back to writing). I do have a number of ideas I’m trying to work out, so I’ll be showing up here a bit more frequently. Your interests may well have changed since my last post, so if you’re getting this via email and it doesn’t resonate, or if you can’t even remember subscribing in the first place, I won’t feel insulted (or even know!) if you hit the unsubscribe link.

       

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“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“After I used the term sympoiesis in a grasp for something other than the lures of autopoiesis, Katie King told me about M. Beth Dempster’s Master of Environmental Studies thesis written in 1998, in which she suggested the term sympoieisis for “collectively-produced systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change.””
-Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble

It’s not a stretch to say that people are complex. We are. We are staggeringly complex. Whitman’s idea of the “I” as a container of multitudes is apt, and each of those multitudes is shaped by interactions with others. We become ourselves as parts of sympoietic systems.

The only way we can make ourselves is through making each other. And we always have a choice in how we make others. Do we do it using generative, both/and, mutually thriving stories, thoughts, and language, or do we do it using narcissistic, better-than, zero-sum ideas? The choices we make for how we make others drives who “we” are.

All this might sound a bit abstract, but it’s really important. Think about all of the networks that you belong to, and all of the interactions that make up the culture of these networks. These interactions often fall into patterns, and then might even firm up into protocols.

We have these protocols in all of the groups of which we are members. This can be small groups of just two people – a partner, friend, child, parent, or co-worker. Or even a nemesis! This can be larger groups of people – a family, team, club, or group of friends. If we’re lucky, some of these groups will be crews that help us create new things, and that help us thrive. This can be even larger groups – a clan, congregation, movement, or state.

In all of these different types of groups, we have our protocols for interacting. This is culture. We can view these protocols as constraints, as things that act to control us. And the protocols that we have at the large group level influence how we interact as pairs. If we meet in public, there are protocols for how far apart we stand, which directions we face, whether or not and how we touch each other, what we’re expected to say. And all of these protocols are different for each of our groups. Sometimes subtly different, and sometimes shockingly so.

Even as simple a question as how far apart do we stand when we meet for the first time has very different answers in Stockholm, Manhattan, and Tokyo.

You might say that each of us is the sum total of all of the protocols that we know and can enact in all of the different contexts that we might find ourselves in.

But – and this is very important! – we aren’t just made by protocols. We make them. We make them all the time – creatively, joyfully, sneakily, fearfully. There’s constraint, but there’s also enablement.

And if we don’t like the way one of our larger systems (cultures) is working, the only way to change it is by changing the protocols that we use.

Here’s a practical example. When we were building the ON Program to increase research impact, the core tool was stakeholder interviews. We asked each research team to have in depth conversations with, ideally, at least 100 stakeholders – people that could use their science, one way or another.

This ended up changing a lot of protocols for the researchers, including:
• Who to talk with – added “stakeholders” to the more normal “other researchers.”
• Who talks to stakeholders – changed from “Business Development people” to “everyone on the research team.”
• What do we talk about – changed from “pitching our ideas” to “learning about the needs and desires of the stakeholders.”
• Where do our great ideas come from – added “stakeholders” to the more normal “our team” and “the research literature.”

These changes in protocols ended up changing the emergent outcomes of the research process/culture. One big change is in impact. The number of research-based spinouts from the hundreds of teams that have gone through the program is over ten times higher than what we would normally see from the same number of teams doing business as usual.

This also ended up re-making who the researchers are – they changed too. They are more widely and deeply engaged with their broader network of stakeholders. They feel they have more agency in driving impact from their work. In other words, their culture has changed. Consequently, their impact on the world has also changed.

That’s a business example, but the same things happen as we interact within all of our networks. And so – we’re made by protocols, and we make protocols. We’re made by ourselves, we’re made by others, and we’re made by making each other. It’s why we have the potential for surprising change.

*Note* this post has been influenced by lots of conversations I’ve been having recently with Nilofer Merchant, Jason Fox (and The Coterie), Kim Lam, Joe Lightfoot, Kate Morrison, and Richard Bartlett and Nati Lombardo’s work on Microsolidarity, among many others!

       

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The Herman Miller company became one of the world’s first manufacturers of sustainably-produced furniture almost by accident. Back in the 1950s, as the company became one of the biggest furniture manufacturers in the US selling now iconic designs from Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, and Alexander Girard. At the time, DJ de Pree, the founder of the company, made a couple of key decisions that still influence the way the firm operates today.

The first is that he believed that the company should make the most of the unique talents held by each of their employees. This is embodied today in their value for inclusion and diversity, which says “We’re all extraordinary.” In practical terms, this value led de Pree and subsequent CEOs to implement a participative management structure within the firm. This meant distributing decision-making authority much further down the corporate power hierarchy than normal. It also involved giving all employees an ownership stake in the company.

These moves support a second company value – ensuring quality. This is done through a unique decision-making structure where many important actions and strategies are initiated by teams of ordinary workers and mid-level managers, who DJ’s son Hugh referred to as Roving Leaders.

The final two company values at Herman Miller are Doing Good Well, which sets corporate targets for community service from the firm’s employees, and We’re All in This Together, which includes a pledge that the company will be an environmental sustainability leader. DJ de Pree said in the 1950s that the company “will be a good corporate neighbor by being a good steward of the environment.” Today, the actions that the firm takes to act on this value are impressive.

It started in the late 1980s, when a small group of Roving Leaders formed to support their shared commitment to environmental sustainability. The group quickly ended up playing a bigger role in the firm than they expected when they discovered a very unsustainable process in building one of their most popular products. Bill Birchard tells the story in his book Merchants of Virtue: Herman Miller and the Making of a Sustainable Company:

“Rosewood was the object of particular reverence. It adorned the celebrated Eames Lounge Chair a product so loved by designers and high-end furniture buyers that it still sold steadily after 45 years. A cradle of molded rosewood lined with irresistibly soft calfskin cushions, the chair was the company’s signature product. Though [expensive], its appeal luxuriousness, and iconic status – synonymous with Herman Miller – made changing its wood almost unthinkable.”

But the team of Roving Leaders did have to think about it. The rosewood came from trees that were becoming critically endangered in the rapidly dwindling Brazilian rainforest. It took several years, but the Roving Leaders Environmental team convinced first the CEO, then the Board, then the rest of the company that sourcing something other than rosewood was the right thing to do – even if it wasn’t required by legislation or a ban. If you buy an Eames Lounge Chair today from Herman Miller, or any of the other classic Eames designs that use wood, your choices in wood veneer are sustainably harvested cherry or walnut.

When the firm made the switch, they were concerned that it could kill the market for the Eames products. After all, they had been protecting these designs and manufacturing to them faithfully for more than 50 years – authenticity was a big part of what they were selling. The commercial results ended up surprising Herman Miller. Sales went up. A lot.

It turns out that a lot of their customers also care for the environment, and many of them will go out of their way to make sure that their purchases reflect not just style, and comfort, but the value of sustainability as well.

Over the next 25 years, Herman Miller continued to move towards more sustainable manufacturing. The first version of their famous Aeron Office Chair was made from 2/3 recycled materials. The proportion went up substantially in the second version of the Aeron, and this version was also 90% recyclable at the end of its lifespan – Herman Miller had instituted cradle to cradle manufacturing. Other environmental initiatives included eliminating solvent emissions, converting to 100% renewable energy, and the implementation of the Design for the Environment scorecard used to evaluate the sustainability of all of their products.

The drivers of this change were unusual, as Birchard points out:

“Surprisingly, the journey to sustainability at Herman Miller did not take root because a single top manager or the CEO demanded it. At Herman Miller, people like [the Roving Leaders], who worked deep within the organization, desired it. Because the company had a culture of giving its employees the power to make change – an approach it called “participative management” – the change emerged all over. Mid-level leaders, not just hot-shot bosses, led the campaign to bridge the sustainability gap.”

As they’ve done this, this devotion to their organizational values has led to great financial reward for Herman Miller. The company has continued to grow, even surviving the Global Financial Crisis more effectively than their competitors, in large part because they defend their values even more fiercely than the defend the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames.

Mary Parker Follett was one of the world’s first organizational theorists in a business school, and back in the 1920s she wrote:

“Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader – the common purpose. The best executives put this common purpose clearly before their group. While leadership depends on depth of conviction and the power coming therefrom, there must also be the ability to share that conviction with others, the ability to make purpose articulate. And then that common purpose becomes the leader. And I believe that we are coming more and more to act, whatever our theories, on our faith in the power of this invisible leader. Loyalty to the invisible leader gives us the strongest possible bond of union, establishes a sympathy which is not a sentimental but a dynamic sympathy.”

If we are trying to make our organizations more creative, and more innovative, shared purpose is essential. It is this that enables us to operate flatter hierarchies – and this empowerment of lower level employees is a key driver of innovation. Along with cognitive diversity, value-driven business isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the best way to excel.

Purpose-driven Innovation from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo.

The video is from an online course I made that is currently one of the three that the University of Queensland Business School is offering as close to free as we could make it. I know there’s a lot going on right now, but if you have the bandwidth and desire to build your skills, all three courses are worth checking out.

       

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What’s the best way to respond to covid-19? There’s still so much uncertainty, it’s almost impossible to know. There are people and institutions that urgently need help – and first priority has to go them.

But there’s also value in taking a longer-term view in times of turbulence – I gave a talk last week on this topic, and you can see it here:

I won’t recap the whole thing, as it’s all there on the video. But here are some of the key points.

In the first half, I talk about some personal strategies we can use to think about things. One of the key concepts here is an idea that I raised in my last post: pace layers.

This is a great talk where Stewart Brand explains the origin and meaning of the pace layer idea, and then Paul Saffo expands on it.

There are two books that have helped me think about how to best take the longer-term perspective. One is How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. She looks at how to connect back to your local region as a method for combating the attention economy. The book came out of this post, which is also excellent.

The other set of ideas comes from Tyson Yunkaporta and his book Sand Talk. He talks about how the current world looks through an Australian Indigenous perspective. It’s a good way to start thinking about the 1000 year view of things.

In the second half of the talk I look at what we can do at an organisational level. The first key idea is that having a risk averse culture actually increases risk – it makes our organisations fragile.

One of the ways to think about this is to use the Cynefin Framework, developed by Dave Snowden. He also hosted a fantastic session on addressing covid-19 challenges using complexity-based approaches with a great panel that included Alicia Juarrero, Valdis Krebs, and Ann Pendleton-Jullian, moderated by Sonja Blignaut. All five of them are top tier thinkers, and it’s an interesting session.

We also included information about two sets of resources from the University of Queensland Business School. The first is a set of three of our classes on the edX platform at a greatly reduced rate – more information here. One of the three is the course that I put together on Design Thinking and Creativity for Innovation.

Even though there are no clear cut answers to questions about what we should do right now, I hope that all these resources can help us think a bit more effectively about how to best proceed.

And I hope that everyone that sees this is doing as well as you can under the current circumstances.

       

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The Core Problem of Management Today

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n. 1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy…

Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The problem that Shoshana Zuboff outlines in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is one of governance. As technology races ahead, the norms and institutions that we need to support (or contain) it lag behind.

Scott Brinker frames this problem as Martec’s Law:

When technology is changing rapidly, the fact that norms, managerial practice, institutions and cultures change at a much different pace creates substantial problems. The disconnect between technological change and organisational change (norms, managerial practice, institutions and culture) can be called a Governance Gap.

Bridging this Governance Gap is one of the core problems of management today.

I’ve used this diagram in classes and lectures, but as I think about it more, I think it’s incomplete. One important missing part is time.

Innovation and Pace Layers

Stewart Brand looks at what makes ecosystems resilient, and builds a model for societies as well in his book The Clock of the Long Now. The system has layers of differing scales, with differing rates of change. Some are shallow and fast, while others are deep and slow. He says:

Consider the differently paced components to be layers.  Each layer is functionally different from the others and operates somewhat independently, but each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient.

From the fastest layers to the slowest layers in the system, the relationship can be described as follows:

Fast learns, slow remembers.  Fast proposes, slow disposes.  Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.  Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution.  Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.  Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure.  It is what makes them adaptable and robust.

Stewart Brand

The overall system looks like this:

When you think about it this way, then Martec’s Law makes perfect sense. Of course norms, managerial practice, institutions and cultures change more slowly than technology does – they are all part of the slower pace layers.

When new technologies or new techniques arrive, there are many different versions around as people try to solve the technical problems involved. This is technology operating at the layer of Fashion.

Once the technology becomes relatively stable, a new business model emerges – this is the conversion of the rapid, almost frantic level of innovation going at the Fashion layer into a more stable version at the Commerce layer.

Infrastructure moves even more slowly. If you were an early user of Twitter, you’ll remember the Fail Whale – this popped up every time Twitter’s servers crashed. Up until about ten years ago, just getting enough servers online to support a rapidly growing website was close to impossible. Then, Amazon came up with Amazon Web Services, and other Server-as-a-Service businesses emerged. When this happened, the Infrastructure layer had caught up with the Fashion and Commerce layers.

The problems that Zuboff outlines in her book are the ones that arise when the Governance and Culture layers have not yet adapted to the new business models generated by firms like Google and Facebook. Her book lays out the case for the problems that are being caused by the rapid technological change that is out of synch with innovation in governance – a perfect example of the Governance Gap.

Innovation happens at all of the layers except Nature. Nature is the generator of change to which all the other layers must respond. So what happens when innovation at all of the layers is synchronised? According to Carlota Perez, that’s when we see a Golden Age.

Bubbles and Golden Ages

So here’s how I think we need to use Martec’s Law a bit differently. We need to realise that it’s true over the short term, and it describes the challenge of synchronising change between pace layers.

But if we take a longer-term view, a couple of things become apparent. The first is that technological, or any kind of change, never accelerates exponentially forever. It eventually flattens out – it follows an S Curve.

The second thing is that, as discussed, once change flattens out at one of the faster layers, the slow layers innovate to stabilise, and they catch up.

This process is documented very well by Carlota Perez in her absolutely brilliant book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. In it, she looks at how major technological revolutions get embedded at the deeper, slower Governance and Cultural layers.

The argument in the book is summarised by this diagram:

This process is described by Jorge Camacho in a terrific post on the future of design:

Following the so-called “big bang” of each technological revolution, there comes a period of ‘installation’, lasting roughly 20 to 30 years, in which the economy, as it were, explores the new space of possibilities. This is a period of ‘creative destruction’ marked by an increasing concentration of wealth and rising levels of inequality, i.e. a ‘Gilded Age.’ All the capital flowing into the new technologies eventually cause a bubble that bursts into a crisis and recession in the middle of the cycle. This variable period is characterized by high levels of financial speculation. After this turning point, there comes a period of ‘deployment’ in which capital finds its way back into production thus leading to a widespread application of the new techno-economic paradigm in society at large. This is a period of ‘creative construction’: a ‘Golden Age’ characterized not only by sustained growth but also, most importantly, a more equal spreading of the benefits across society.

Jorge Camacho

It’s important to remember, however, that none of this happens automatically. There are no deterministic rules that say “the slower layers always catch up to the faster ones.” We need to actively work to bring that about.

What Should We Do Now?

All this long-term thinking is fine – but right now, today, we have a lot of Governance Gaps to deal with. The technical change curves haven’t been flattening out yet for things such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybersecurity, robotics, autonomous vehicles and drones, blockchains, industry 5.0, the internet of things, and augmented and virtual reality.

The fact that some of these have applications are still in the very frothy Fashion layer means that a lot of the ideas around these technologies are just noise. The first thing we need to do is to get better at figuring out for which ones this is true. One clue to look for here is emergent business models – these are a sign that a new technology is starting to coalesce around a dominant design, that may well have some legs.

The second thing to do is to get better at business model innovation. This is the avenue over which new technologies get embedded into the normal function of our existing organisations. If we’re in an industry experiencing change, business model innovation is a core skill.

Finally, it makes sense to think about how to use these new technologies responsibly. It’s been well-documented that when new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are used in areas such as hiring and other HR functions, the provision of healthcare, and access to education, there is a strong tendency for the algorithms to reinforce existing social inequalities. At the personal and organisational levels, we must ensure that our use of new technologies decreases existing inequalities rather than increasing them.

At the social level, we can use these technologies and approaches to try to achieve fairer outcomes through work on increasing sustainability in management, or addressing disparities in opportunity. These are the areas that Perez has moved to now, with an emphasis on the role of the state in addressing these issues.

If we think about these issues as we deploy new technologies, and use them responsibly, it makes it much more likely that our organisation’s business model will synch with the deeper, slower layers that will ultimately determine how these technologies will be used over the long run.

And this is crucial, because, over time, slow has all the power.

       

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There are a number of major challenges facing the world today. Poverty, climate risk, war – the list goes on. In 2015, the United Nations released a list they called the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. It was an agenda of actions and targets to reach by 2030.

In announcing the SDGs, the UN said:

This Agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. It also seeks to strengthen universal peace in larger freedom. We recognise that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan. We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet. We are determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path. As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind.

https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs

Pretty hard to argue with that. So hard, in fact, that all 193 UN Member nations have signed on to the goals – it’s one of the most truly global initiatives in history.

There are seventeen goals in the Agenda, with 169 targets, which include specific measures of progress. Vicki Saunders, the founder of an organisation called SheEO, calls the SDGs “the world’s to-do list.”

All of the goals are simple to state, but challenging to achieve. For example, the first goal is “No Poverty – End poverty in all its forms everywhere.” For this goal, there are seven targets, and eleven indicators, or measures of progress. The first target is:

By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day.

And the target is for this is:

Proportion of population below the international poverty line, by sex, age, employment status and geographical location (urban/rural)

Each year the UN reports on progress against the indicators. In the 2018 report, they say:

The proportion of the world’s workers living with their families on less than $1.90 per person a day declined significantly over the past two decades, falling from 26.9 per cent in 2000 to 9.2 per cent in 2017.

Each of the remaining sixteen SDGs has a similar set of targets and indicators, as well as reports on progress. The seventeen SDGs are:

1. No Poverty
2. Zero Hunger
3. Good Health and Well Being
4. Quality Education
5. Gender Equality
6. Clean Water and Sanitation
7. Affordable and Clean Energy
8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
10. Reduced Inequalities
11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
12. Responsible Consumption and Production
13. Climate Action
14. Life Below Water
15. Life on Land
16. Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
17. Partnerships for the Goals

It’s an ambitious set of goals, to say the least. But if we can meet them, the world will unquestionably be a better place – for all of us.

Which raises an important question. If innovation is making new ideas real, to create value – then shouldn’t an important measure of the value we create be the contributions of our ideas to making the SDGs real?

This is an objective that Saunders and SheEO take seriously. SheEO was started to address some of the Gender Equity issues raised in SDG number 5. The program is designed to support female entrepreneurs – specifically, to support women that are developing ventures designed to address some of the other SDGs.

Here’s how it works:

SheEO is a radically redesigned ecosystem that supports, finances, and celebrates female innovators.

Rather than trying to fit women into the existing models and systems and level the playing field, we are creating an entirely new field.

The model brings together 500 women (called Activators) in each year’s cohort, who contribute $1100 in CAN, US, NZ and AU, and £850 in the UK, each as an Act of Radical Generosity. The money is pooled together and loaned out at zero percent interest to five women-led Ventures selected by the Activators. All Ventures are revenue generating with export potential and are creating a better world through their business model or their product and service. The loans are paid back over five years and then loaned out again, creating a perpetual fund which we will pass on to our daughters, nieces and granddaughters. The 500 women Activators in each cohort become the de-facto ‘team’ of the five selected Ventures bringing their buying power as early customers, their expertise and advice and their vast networks to help grow the businesses.

https://sheeo.world/about-us/

To me, this is one of the most interesting new business models for venture funding that I’ve seen in a long time. Since their launch in 2015, SheEO has signed up over 4000 Activators, and made over $4 million in loans to 53 new ventures. These ventures have on average grown very rapidly, and over 70% have gotten further impact venture funding – an incredibly high hit rate.

Overall, SheEO-funded ventures are addressing all seventeen of the SDGs! The goals of Good Health and Well-Being, Decent Work and Economic Growth, and Responsible Consumption and Production are all spaces where lots of SheEO-funded ventures are working.

This quite substantially expands our set of stakeholders. And it’s not a completely new idea. People have been talking about triple bottom line accounting for many years now. This business approach includes specific objectives for achieving social, environmental and financial outcomes. More recently, the idea of a For Benefit, or B Corporation was developed. These are corporations that have triple bottom line objectives formally written into their articles of incorporation. Many of the SheEO ventures are following this route.

Value creation is at the heart of innovation. If we are going to innovate responsibly, we have an obligation to take things like the Sustainable Development Goals very seriously – I’m not sure we’re innovating at all if we don’t.

Doing this makes building our new business models even harder. But it also greatly increases the rewards and impacts we achieve if we’re successful.

Note: If you’re in Australia and interested in the SheEO program, the deadline to sign up to be an Activator or a Venture is December 3rd. And if, like me, you can’t join up yourself, you can still encourage and support the women you know in joining the program!

       

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I’m not a very good photographer. I love the idea of being a good photographer, but, sadly, I’m not one.

The main reason is that when it comes right down to it, I’m not willing to do the hard work. You need to know about shutter speeds, and apertures, and framing, and all kinds of arcane stuff. And it takes a lot of practice.

Sometimes, I’m tempted to try to skip the work and just try to get better by buying a really nice camera. But that never works.

There are a lot of things like this – where we love the outcome of a process, but hate the process itself. Being fit versus working out, being an author versus writing a book, being innovative versus managing ideas to create value.

I ran across a great example of this in Indi Young’s fantastic book Practical Empathy. Here’s what she says:

Empathy is a noun—a thing. Empathy is an understanding you develop about another person. Empathizing is the use of that under-standing—an action. Empathy is built through the willingness to take time to discover the deep-down thoughts and reactions that make another person tick. It is purposely setting out to comprehend another person’s cognitive and emotional states. Empathy then gives you the ability to try on that person’s perspective—to think and react as she might in a given scenario.

This use of empathy is what most people confuse with empathy itself. People try to act empathetic—to take someone’s perspective, to walk in his shoes—without first taking time to develop empathy. This leap is problematic when it comes to your work. You end up with business decisions based on expectations about how others are reasoning, not based on knowledge.

Empathy is another thing on our list – people often want to act empathetically, but they don’t want to put in the hard work needed to actually build empathy.

This is one of the reasons that most new ideas fail to have impact – we skip the empathy building, and just assume we know what people need. Most of the time, we don’t. And we can’t outsource this – we can’t let someone else build the empathy for us. As Charles Eames said: “Never delegate understanding.”

This is one of the things that bothers me about a lot of the business advice we get – everyone wants efficiency, to reduce friction. But friction can be good! The only way I’ll become a good photographer is to seek out some friction while learning all the stuff I have to learn.

In fact, the only way to build a capability that makes you different is to embrace friction, and do the hard work. There are no secrets to this – we just have to dig in. We need to do the hard work.

Empathy and Why It’s Important from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo.

The video also addresses this idea – it’s part of a Micro-masters that we have made on Corporate Innovation. There are four units in, all four are open for enrolments right now, and you can do it for fun, or for credit. Please check it out.

Of course, if you want to really get the most out of it, you’ll have to do some hard work.

       

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Language Warning right at the start!

I recently gave a talk at a workshop for the International CFO Forum in Singapore. After it was done, one of the participants came up to me and said: “Can I ask you a question about your slides?”

“Sure,” I replied.

“By all the objective principles of good slide design, they’re shit. But, they’re REALLY effective. How?”

Here’s what I told him.

Me, duplicating the pose of my stick figures (Photo by Nicole Hartley)

First, I think visually. Even when I’m writing academic papers, I work out the tables and figures first, then write the story of those. I used to draw all the time when I was young, then gave it up when I decided I didn’t have drawing skills. It’s a pretty familiar story.

A few years ago, I decided I should start drawing again. So I did. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’re probably pretty familiar with these drawings by now. It turns out, drawing out the main points first made both my writing and my public speaking a bit sharper. So now I use lots of my own drawings in my talks.

That’s why I make them, but why do they work?

The definition of innovation in primitive figures.

I think the drawings work for three reasons. The first reason is that it models good innovation behaviour. Many people wait until they think things are perfect to show their new ideas to others. Often, this means that they never share their ideas with anyone.

By putting out primitive drawings that mostly look like prototypes of other, better drawings, I’m trying to demonstrate the value of getting things in front of others early. The drawings aren’t great, but they usually get the point across. It’s enough to tell if I’ve gotten the idea right or not.

So the bad drawings are a public form of prototyping – something that all of us should be doing more.

The second reason the drawings work is that they’re novel. Everyone is pretty used to powerpoint presentations by now. But no one expects an entire talk filled with stick figures. I’ve always been drawn to lo-fi art, and this is lo-fi powerpoint.

The novelty gets people’s attention.

The answer to “What app do you use to make your slides?”

A surprising number of people have asked me what app I use to make my slides. The process goes like this: first, I draw the slide on an Artefact Card – check out that link, I love their story! Once I have it right, then I take a picture of the card with my phone, and transfer that photo into my slide deck.

Three tries to get a slide right.

It’s a very manual, slow and awkward process. But that’s part of the fun. And the craft. But it also makes another point – we often associate innovation with technology. This is a very low-tech process, yet people still view it as innovative.

So the third reason I use these drawings is they show that innovation isn’t all about tech, but rather about thinking about things in new ways.

I have some version of this discussion after nearly every talk that I give. One interesting thing is that when I explain the reasoning behind the drawings, most people were getting those messages already – the explanation resonates.

Here’s the final point: If I can travel around the world showing people some of the worst drawings ever, then surely you can share your great new idea with someone too. It’s worth a try.

Coming soon – a whole post about this problem!

       

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“I was looking for work that would make my heart sing.”

Jamie Ford said that recently at a UQ Business School alumni event as she told us about the path her career has taken. She said that her current role as Head of Customer Experience for Uniting Care Queensland does exactly that.

Jamie was one of the people that I interviewed for Design Thinking and Creativity for Innovation which is a free online course – please check it out! One common thread across the people that I interviewed was that nearly all of them described their career path as weird, or unconventional.

Mine has been too.

I do a lot of public speaking, and several time recently at these events, I’ve had people say to me something like “That was a great talk – you’re a natural!”

I’m very much not a natural public speaker. Not even close.

When I was younger, I was painfully shy. Just being able to talk to people in the first place was a skill I had to build over a long period of time. The thought of speaking in front of a group was petrifying. so how did I end up in a job where speaking in front of groups is a huge part of my responsibilities?

It started at my campus radio station – WPRB – when I went off for university.

Me, a loooooong time ago.

I was passionate about music – it’s a pretty good hobby for a shy introvert. But within my high school, my taste was weird enough that it was rarely a bridge to others. When I first heard WPRB it was a revelation – they played the same stuff that I loved! So I signed up for DJ training.

Being a radio DJ is interesting. It is unquestionably public speaking, but you can’t see the people you’re addressing. That made it a bit easier, but I still hated the talking part. I just wanted to play stuff I loved, telling everyone what it was just came as part of the deal.

In those early days, if someone was in the booth while I was talking, I could barely get words out. But I wanted to keep playing music, so I figured I had to get better at the talking part. So I practiced – a lot. I taped shows and tried to find ways to improve, and I spent a lot of time in the booth with the really good DJs, so I could learn from them.

After a few hundred hours of doing shows, I became comfortable with the talking part. After a few hundred more, I was actually pretty ok at it.

It was one of the first experiences that shifted me from primarily having a Fixed Mindset (believing that our capabilities are inherent, and not very changeable), to having a Growth Mindset (believing that our basic qualities can be cultivated through effort). Growth Mindset, based on great research by Carol Dweck, is a core innovation idea for me now – mainly because I’ve seen enormous changes in myself come about through directed practice.

This is important in relation to Jamie’s point too. The things that make our heart sing aren’t always things that we’re naturally good at. In fact, they might be like public speaking was for me – something that was painful to learn, and slow.

I went through the same process when I started work at UQ. My radio experience had been great, and it helped me become less shy. But I still wasn’t anywhere close to confident in front of actual people. Out of curiousity last week, I added up all of the public talks I’ve done over the past ten years. This doesn’t count anything I’ve done that has been teaching in a classroom – just talks that people have invited me to give at workshops, industry events, panels, and so on.

It turns out I’ve done about 175 talks in that time, to around 12,000 people. That’s why I’ve laughed every time someone has called me a natural. I’m not. Not even close. It took a lot of work to seem natural and be authentic when I talk. And now it makes my heart sing.

If you knew how terrible I was at it when I started, and how scared, that might make you realise that there’s a whole lot you can do too with effort, and practice.

       

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Note: this was originally posted on Harvard Business Review Blogs, with terrific editing by Sarah Green Carmichael.

Maybe you’ve heard the old cliché – if you’ve got “too many chiefs,” your initiative will fail. Every time I hear it, I wonder, “Why can’t everyone be a chief?”

For instance, the Second Chance Programme is a group that raises money to help reduce homelessness among women here in Southeast Queensland.  It’s achieved impressive results since being founded in 2001, and is run by a committee of about ten people. In the early days, a management consultant used the familiar chiefs/Indians line to predict they’d fail.

This kind of thinking assumes:

• You need a hierarchy to succeed.
• The people that do the work are of lower status than those that decide what work to do.
• Organizations that don’t follow the norms are likely to fail.

I think that all of these ideas are wrong.  Second Chance has certainly been very successful with their flat, non-hierarchical structure.  They have achieved a great deal, while keeping their overhead close to $0.  If the structure of the management committee was a problem, they would have failed by now.

But maybe this kind of structure only works for not-for-profits?

Nope.  About 20% of the world’s websites are now on the WordPress platform – making it one of the most important internet companies.  And yet, Automattic, the firm behind WordPress, only employs a couple hundred people, who all work remotely, with a highly autonomous flat management structure.  GitHub is another highly successful firm with a similar structure.

So, maybe this structure only works for not-for-profits and software firms with open source platforms?

Well, Valve is a gaming company that makes Half Life, Portal and many other popular games.  Their software is proprietary.  And they are famous for not having bosses at all.  And 37Signals has a structure that looks a lot like Automattic’s, while building software that enables distributed collaboration, such as Basecamp and Ruby on Rails.

Ok, then, flat structures work for not-for-profits and software startups. But you surely can’t run, say, a big manufacturing firm like this, can you?

Actually, you can.  Take a look at W.L. Gore.  Gore is one of the most successful firms in the world.  They have more than 10,000 employees, with basically three levels in their organizational hierarchy.  There is the CEO (elected democratically), a handful of functional heads, and everyone else.  All decision-making is done through self-managing teams of 8-12 people: hiring, pay, which projects to work on, everything.  Rather than relying on a command-and-control structure, current CEO Terri Kelly says:

“It’s far better to rely upon a broad base of individuals and leaders who share a common set of values and feel personal ownership for the overall success of the organization. These responsible and empowered individuals will serve as much better watchdogs than any single, dominant leader or bureaucratic structure.”

They’ve had challenges in maintaining their structure as they’ve grown, but the remain one of the most innovative and most profitable firms in the world.

But all of these examples have had flat structures from the day they were founded – you couldn’t do something like this in a firm that has been operating for a while with the normal hierarchical structure, could you?

That’s exactly what Ricardo Semler and his team at Semco did when he joined the firm in 1983.  In the 30 years since, the Brazilian conglomerate has continually worked at distributing decision-making authority out to everyone.  One of the firm’s key performance indicators is how long Semler can go between making decisions.  The time keeps getting longer, while the firm has maintained around 20% growth for nearly 30 years now.

All of these are examples where everyone is a chief.  The flat organizational structure can work anywhere.  This works best when:

• The environment is changing rapidly.  Firms organized around small, autonomous teams are much more nimble than large hierarchies.  This makes it easier to respond to change.
• Your main point of differentiation is innovation.  Firms organized with a flat structure tend to be much more innovative – if this is important strategically, then you should be flat.
• The organization has a shared purpose.  This is what has carried Second Chance through their tough times – their shared commitment to the women they are helping.  While the objectives may differ, all of the firms discussed here have a strong central purpose as well.

There is a growing body of evidence that shows that organizations with flat structures outperform those with more traditional hierarchies in most situations (see the work of Gary Hamel for a good summary of these results).

But while we are seeing an increasing number of firms using flat structures, they are still relatively rare.  Why is this so?

It’s not because people haven’t heard of the idea.  There have been more than 200 case studies of Gore and Semco alone, and I would bet that nearly every MBA program in the world includes at least one case study looking at a firm with this kind of structure.  But there are other obstacles:

• Many people don’t believe in democracy in the workplace.  Even people who adamantly oppose small amounts of central planning in government are perfectly happy to have the strategy of even very large firms set by just a handful of people.
• Even if you do believe in democracy, it can be hard to imagine work without hierarchy.  The “normal” structure is so deeply ingrained, and so widespread, that it can challenging to even think of an alternative in the first place.  That’s why these case studies are so important.
• Fear of the unusual.  John Maynard Keynes said, “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”  Unfortunately, this is still largely true today.
• It’s hard to change organizational structures.  Despite the positive example of Semco, in reality it is very hard to change organizational structures.  Even with Semco, it took a financial crisis to trigger the change in thinking.  It takes a strong belief in democracy in the workplace along with a resistance to criticism to stay the course and execute such a change.

However, as digital technologies make it easier to work in a distributed manner, and we enter the social era, flat structures will become increasingly common.  There are sound business reasons for treating people with dignity, for providing autonomy, and for organizing among small teams rather than large hierarchies.

It’s time to start reimagining management.  Making everyone a chief is a good place to start.

Notes: Here’s a related post that explains where the image comes from.

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