Read on for the one thing companies need to achieve big hairy audacious goals.
Do you believe in a world without diseases? It seems hard to imagine, right? Still that is the highly ambitious goal that my company put forward. If you look at the progress we’ve made for preventing, intercepting and curing diseases, it may seem unlikely today but not impossible in the future.
This World Without Disease is an excellent example of what some call Big Hairy Audacious Goals (‘BHAG’). These are visionary, and unconventional goals. Often, these BHAGs are decided at the top of the company, but require everyone to think and act differently than the way they have always done. In other words: they need to change.
Even if people agree with your BHAG, change is always painful and that’s why Conversation @ Work matters. In this story, I will share how working out loud helps to realize Big Hairy Audacious Goals, how complexity and chaos contribute to that, and how it all fits together in one single framework.
The Pain of Change
Let me start by looking at why change is painful for people. David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz describe that much what people do in the workplace is part of routines. When you try to change those routines, people feel some psychological discomfort and want avoid the change that stresses them out. “Old” methods like carrots and sticks just don’t work, nor does trying to persuade people with rational arguments. That’s why it is useless to identify all the specific changes that individuals need to make. Still we do that all time to employees (and by the way: also to our children).
“Old” methods like carrots and sticks just don’t work.
What does work well for instilling change? According to Rock and Schwartz, it’s much better that people can come to their own answers and insights, and that they stay focused on finding solutions instead of just being told what to do. In a company, this requires a continuous dialogue at all levels and between all levels. In that sense, conversations are the smallest units of change.
(See footnote on the neuroscientific claims that Rock and Schartz make at the bottom of this story.)
Start with Conversation @ Work
A dialogue always starts with people. These “conversation starters” may share an idea, an opinion or a draft document. They may talk about something they learned or recently achieved at work. Sometimes, they ask publicly for help or feedback. In other words, they share openly what they are working on.
When you share your work in such a way that it might help others and you are building a purposeful network, you are “working out loud”, as John Stepperrefers to it. For making ‘working out loud’ succeed, it needs to become a habit. It’s not by writing a single blog post or liking a message on Twitter that you are working out loud.
Purposeful Conversation
When a company is striving for a BHAG like a world without disease, working out loud is just the first step. Yes, we want conversation starters, but that is not enough. You can Tweet or Yammer as hell, but it’s pointless if nobody is listening .What you share with others only receives meaning through reciprocity, namely when others listen, reflect and react to your work.
You can Tweet or Yammer as hell, but it’s pointless if nobody is listening.
For contributing to a BHAG, your conversation needs to be purposeful. From an individual perspective, it’s great if you can build a professional network by sharing your work. For a company, it is even more interesting once its employees activate their network for contributing to the company’s mission.
A Keystone Habit Triggering Chain Reactions
Charles Duhhigg wrote in the Power of Habit how habits are created through a habit loop and that you do not need to change dozens of habit to achieve goals. Changing a few keystone habits may be sufficient to initiate a chain of events. Working out loud is such a keystone habit that has such a ripple effect for individuals but also for companies. Let me give you a few examples of how purposeful conversations can trigger a series of chain reactions:
- People build new connections, get access to unknown experts and new knowledge can be developed, shared and formalized. Especially when lessons from past projects are shared, the organization learns and adapts.
- Connections are established across departmental silos by which organizations operate in a flatter structure than according to the official hierarchy.
- When everyone feels comfortable to express ideas and opinions, the diversity of those ideas and opinions will increase with people feeling respected and valued for who they are.
- In an inclusive corporate culture, people will speak up when they see deficiencies and come up with initial ideas to solve those. Other people will be triggered to build upon those initial ideas, add their perspective and gradually contribute to the final solution.
Complex Systems
All the chain reactions catalyzed by Conversation @ Work, seem chaotic at the surface but I believe that chaos is the real power in this equation. Therefore, you need to consider large multinational companies as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). According to Jun Park: a CAS thrives at the edge of chaos.
“There is enough stability to have repetitive and predictive elements in the system, but just enough instability to generate novelty without creating anarchy and dispersal.”
Multinationals need to find the right balance between order and chaos. What is successful today, may not be in the future. For instance, my company used to be very decentrally organized with strict product classifications like pharmaceuticals, medical devices and consumer products. Nowadays, the lines between those product classifications are blurred (e.g. is an adhesive patch with chronic pain medication a pharmaceutical product or a medical device?). The company adapts itself and creates new organizational structures and communication lines across the former product classifications.
Diversity is Key
One of the keys in complex adaptive systems is diversity. Only through a large diversity of opinions and information sources, a company truly adapts successfully. In that context, I want to point out a diversity paradox which was researched by David Rock and Heidi Grant when looking at unconscious bias in the workplace. They found that people feel more effective and confident in homogenous teams. However, when measuring task performance diverse teams are smarter and more creative.
Diversity and inclusion can be the keys to unlock your BHAGs.
So, if you have ambitious goals and when — like me — you want innovation and quality to flourish in your organization, start with looking at how your company deals with diversity of opinions and making people feel heard. Diversity and inclusion can be the keys to unlock your BHAGs.
Conversation @ Work is no perpetuum mobile
In the Middle Ages, alchemists were looking for perpetual motion machines, called “perpetuum mobile” in Latin. None of them succeeded. For a machine to continue operating, you always need energy. The same is true for Conversation @ Work. Although individuals contribute autonomously to purposeful conversation in the workplace, conversation does not happen automatically. You need a a few enablers that provide the fuel for your conversations.
#socialtech
Once office designers thought that open plan offices would be great for collaboration. Now we know they are not. I have seen situations where people rather work from home than in a large noisy office. Luckily there are today a multitude of enterprise social networks (ESN), like Yammer, Slack or Workplace. These social technologies do exactly what open plan offices were meant to do, namely stimulating collaboration across boundaries. There is one major advantage: their scale. Thanks to ESNs, I can now communicate with colleagues in 60 countries.
I often have my most creative moments in our lounge area with a decent cappuccino.
Of course, technology is not the only answer. Companies need to find the right mix between spaces where people can either focus or where they can gather and drink coffee. I often have my most creative moments at work when engaging into a conversation in our lounge area with a decent cappuccino. So, the spaces and tools in the workplace should enable the conversation. When they don’t, there may be some savings in the short term (eg. because of less office space) but with a detrimental impact on innovation and long term revenue.
#generosity
For Conversation @ Work to succeed, you need a culture where generosity is valued. In that context, John Stepper talks about small gifts such as recognition and appreciation, showing gratitude, giving credit and positive feedback, letting people know you’re thinking of them. When you are creating meaningful relations with people, chances increase that they want to help you in the future. Of course, generosity can only flourish in a culture where it is valued. If you work in a hyper-competitive corporate environment, don’t expect social technologies to work for you.
#leadership
Leadership has a significant impact on the corporate culture. Managers will determine if generosity has a place in your company. Therefore it’s critical that all levels of management participate in Conversation @ Work. Moreover, they should participate during work and not thereafter to avoid that these conversations should happen after hours.
“Post your problem on Yammer, and I’ll answer.”
Leaders can also blur the lines between offline and online conversations by bringing a difficult problem from a team meeting to the network, or by highlighting during team meetings new ways of working that were shared earlier on the network. I even heard manager say: “Post your problem on Yammer, and I’ll answer.”
#skills
To create meaningful conversations, you need some skills. Of course, people need to learn the technology, but that’s not enough. They need to master a whole new language: a micro-blogging language. People need to learn how to write concise but still actionable and information-rich messages. In that context, I recommend what Geert Nijs writes about microblogging in the book Social Technologies in Business: Connect, Share, Lead.
#purpose
If you have the right tools and spaces, the right generous culture, the right leadership and the right skills… will Conversation @ Work succeed for you? Maybe. But, what you really need is a clear purpose. Why should people use your enterprise social network? What are the conversations you want to enable? Remember, it’s not just informal chit-chat, it’s about purposeful conversation. That’s why Big Hairy Audacious Goals help you. These goals give purpose to your organization, to your employees and to their conversations.
The Conversation @ Work Never Stops
The topics that I discussed in this story were already for quite a while in my head: not as an all-inclusive framework but as separate pieces of information where I believe in. Then suddenly — on my bicycle — I had an “aha moment”. Finally, I understood that the many things I have been working on lately fit perfectly together, and that it’s no coincidence that I am so passionate about those topics.
We should never stop talking about our work.
You may now think that conversation is the common denominator in the entire framework. That’s just at the surface. At the heart of the framework are people and the belief that everyone — not just the management — can contribute to transformational change. When people at all hierarchical levels feel part of a corporate community, that’s when things start to move in a company. That’s why we should never stop talking about our work.
Footnote
There is a lot of debate about neuroscience (1, 2) and its impact for learning in the workplace. What some see as brain facts, is considered as psychological or pedagogical facts by others. The same may apply to changing behaviors. That’s why I don’t refer to any specific neuroscientific claims as evidence for changing behaviors at work.
