There is a lot of new content this month. I spent a lot of time in September creating the page “How to Make Work Better“, which is a summary of all our ideas and knowledge on how to do this stuff. There are 17 “snippet” extracts of specific topics published as flip-book PDFs, and a few videos as well. There is also a Google Slides deck with all the content on it, cross referenced by slide number to a reference page with further information and links. Building the reference page led to a lot of new posts to define concepts.
Some news:
Yesterday was the day an AI floored me. I used Google’s NotebookLM to review the manuscript of our upcoming book,
Ever since my first book sixteen years ago, people have asked about audio books. I looked at it several times over the years but the effort and cost weren’t justified for our tiny sales numbers. Not any more.
Here is our second cut of an Open Work Manifesto
People stuff:
We use the terms Alpha and Beta management, as do others.
Managers, governors, and leaders must serve those who create value.
The phrase widely used is “servant leader” but we prefer “servant manager”. Not all managers are leaders and not all leaders are managers. “Servant leader” actually talks about how to manage.
Invert the pyramid.
better ways of working require better ways of funding the work.
Invitational Management seems to be our term at Teal Unicorn – nobody (?) else is using it. Let’s define it.
What do we mean by knowledge workers?
Establish a guild, or chapter, or community of practice, or whatever you choose to call a group with common skills.
Corporate Rebels shared this excellent picture of the key attributes of a social network,
Advancement stuff:
In the Northern Hemisphere they talk about a North Star or a Pole Star, but those terms don’t mean much up here in the South, so when refering to guiding principles or goals, I like to use “matariki’. Matariki (capital “M”) is the Māori name for the Pleiades, which was a navigational constellation for them for their extraordinary Pacific journeys.
Krishna Kumar wrote this as satire on LinkedIn, but actually, I dream of the day when this is real… It has an IT flavour but it’s applicable to all.
Don’t measure yourself against some perfect ideal.
One of the Teal Tribe, Charles Lambdin, reminded us of Prestcott’s Pickle Principle: “The pickle gets more brined than the brine gets pickled”. If your organisation is the brine, then any great idea you introduce is the pickle. And yet the brine does taste of cucumber.
One of the components of the change “machine” that we put in place at a client is a working group.
The Working Group provides a way for like-minded individuals to find each other and provide mutual support, but it is loose. A stronger construct is to form triads of peers:
When we advance along the bell curve of adoption, there is a chasm we can fall down.
People can and do change their behaviors—they simply need to be “ripe” to do so. That is, the right conditions and psychological factors need to be in place for them to be open and willing to change.
Hacks are an effective way to cut through the noise to get to a resolution. They are a structured version of swarming.
When you need a high-level indicator of progress, it is important to focus on outcomes, and not to have too few metrics. No metric is perfect: they all distort behaviour as people optimise to the indicator, not the outcome. Portfolios of multiple metrics smooth out this effect. Teal Unicorn prefers a Balanced Scorecard: multiple portfolios (there are usually four quadrants) of metrics.
Methodology stuff:
Lean is a huge field, well documented. Lean is a key part of Open thinking
Value stream mapping is a tool that helps visualise how work flows, not what work is flowing.
“Shift Left” means do it earlier in the flow, and bake it into the flow. “It” can be quality, controls, accountability, risk…
p>Controlling functions should be part of the workflow, not off in isolation. How do we do that?
A common collective term for all sorts of work on vertical surfaces is wall-boarding, but we say “work murals”. You may also like “wallwork”, “information radiator”, or “drywall spreadsheets”.
Another variant of work visualisation is an obeya room: a space where strategy and programmes of work are made visible. An obeya room is the macro view, the “bridge of the ship”; whereas a Kanban board is a local view.
When consulting, Teal Unicorn recommends this variant of Kanban that we think best suits our business clients.
