Locked, blocked, stirred or primed

Locked, blocked, stirred or primed.

It's how I see people, teams and business on awareness of new ways of working. Work keeps evolving and customer needs do too, so we must adapt and respond to these forces. This is agility.

🔒 LOCKED - Unaware of old ways It's easy to stick with old ways of work not thinking anything is 'wrong' with them. But that view is most certainly fixed, locked.

█ BLOCKED - Unaware of new ways If you're not learning, reading, thinking and listening more about how work is changing, this is most certainly a block to success and progress. Are you waiting for someone to do it for you?

☕️ STIRRED - Aware of old ways With this new ways of work talk, many of us can get stirred up, rattled, wondering 'what does this mean?', or 'what will I have to do?' Just realising there are old, last century ways of working and newer this century ways, is sure to stir. And that's ok... because:

👍🏼 PRIMED - Aware of new ways You can't un-know stuff. Once you come upon the way clever leaders, teams and businesses are doing things in this new world of work, you're primed, pumped and ready for change.

ACTION: Plot yourself, your leader, team and the executive or board on this model - and have a conversation about it

Start talking about it - new ways of working

If agility is on your company's agenda, then start talking about it.

→ What does agile mean to you?

→ Why is it important to you?

→ What are your customers expecting?

→ What things can you begin to shift and adjust as you move towards newer ways of working?

→ What older ways of working might need to go?

Too many organisations impose change that disrupts employees and leaves them wondering ‘why’. So much so that no amount of town hall meetings or ‘ask me anything’ sessions will resolve or temper the uncertainty.

When agile or agility is on the horizon, or is underway, start talking about it - at all levels across the organisation and with all sorts of people.

Secretly configuring a change or transformation in the background that will be ‘rolled out’ across the organisation as of x date isn’t agility. It’s prescription and control - sorry, that’s still an old way of working.

Develop, discuss and explore the need for agility in your business and engage with people on it, talk about it. You might need to be willing to hear some uncomfortable questions and uncertain objections.

Action: Put agility on the agenda of your next meeting. Kick off with a conversation about it. Find out what people think. 

Don’t outsource your culture change

Adopting new more agile ways of working is on the agenda for businesses - large, small, corporate, not for profit, government - responding to the needs of customers and the changing ways of the world. If a business needs to change how it is working, the culture will need to shift too.

You can't hope to make changes to the way work is done without looking at what the culture might need to be like. Yet many organisations engage or outsource to a company to 'come in and do it for us'. It's ‘let’s get someone in, they’ll make it happen and we won’t have to do it'.

Yes it can get messy and complex and tough, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

Any cultural shift in your organisation will take time. It’s not a mandate; it’s a conversation, a demonstration, and a commitment to try on whatever new ways of working appeal.

New cultures are created, meeting by meeting, conversation by conversation, task by task, person by person. They don't switch over like summer time or flick on like a light.

So start now. It doesn’t need to be perfect and you don’t need to have it all ‘worked out’ first.

Action: Get your people together and start a conversation on the culture they'd like to work in.

New ways of working: what to do with those insights and ideas

New ways of working: what to do with those insights and ideas.

✅ Customer insights are on hand.

✅ Ideas have been generated. It's time to do something, to get into action with your good work.

Too often we think we need to find out more, keep working on something, finding out more more more. This is known as 'maximising', and it's not a good thing. It's linked to perfectionism, so no, not good. Rather, put those ideas out there and IMPLEMENT something; an experiment, a test, a pilot.

See if something you've thought of has value for your customers. Experiment and watch what happens. Once the experiment is done, take those insights and ITERATE; improve on your idea and go again with another experiment.

✅ There are plenty of customer needs.

✅ We have endless ideas.

New ways of working are focused on delivering value to customers, sooner. What counts is trying things out; not delaying or getting distracted.

To do this we need to:

1️⃣ Involve customers

2️⃣ Ideate possible solutions

3️⃣ Implement tests and experiments

4️⃣ Iterate and improve on the solutions.

What project you could apply this way of working to? 

New ways of working: let's 'ideate' and come up with ideas

New ways of working: let's 'ideate' and come up with ideas. Creativity is a must, a survival skill says the World Economic Forum, the Institute for the Future and other predictors of skills for the brutal future.

Celebrate this skill of human ingenuity we have, to make up stuff that solves tricky problems. Our customers need us to do this.

We gained insights from the INVOLVE stage (see yesterday's post) so it's time to come up with ideas about the insights. Ideas happen when you form a mental image of something that isn’t present or isn’t yet real. That's a concept or plan, a program or suggestion, a whim or a hunch ... or something more detailed.

Rod Judkins in the book 'Ideas are your only currency', says that ideas are our only currency! 😆

In a world where Netflix-ing, Uber-ing and Spotify-ing are an everyday thing, remember these are the result of ideas. Ideas that someone had, they created and put them into the world.

New ways of working need us to stop this 'I'm not creative' sh*t (it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, by the way) and bring ingenious solutions to tricky customer problems.

You're clever and your customers need that.