Public Strategy

Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to

Two weeks away, one week back at work.  What have I achieved?

In two weeks away, some reflection, some reading, some thinking - or doing a part of my job which I enjoy (enough to relax by doing it), which I think is important, and which I do far too little of while I am actually at work.  In one week back, I have more or less wrestled my pile of emails into submission, had some useful conversations and had the very rewarding sensation of my team getting on with doing great things without me - but have not done any of a list of more substantial tasks which are less urgent but perhaps more important.

As ever, Seth Godin is pithy and pertinent:

When you're done with your email queue, are you done?

Do you spend your day responding and reacting to incoming all day... until the list is empty? ... and then you're done.

I'm noticing that it's easier than ever to have that sort of day. Online tools are arranging interactions in a line, allowing you to feel satisfied with a constant stream of incoming alerts and pings.

Years ago, I got my mail (the old fashioned kind) once a day. It took twenty minutes to process and I was forced to spend the rest of the day initiating, reaching out, inventing and designing. Today, it's easy to spend the whole day hitting 'reply'.

Carving out time to initiate is more important than ever.

In a slightly different context, Scott Rosenberg recalls advice he attributes to Howard Rheingold - to “Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to.”  Scott's interest is in how he is spending his 'media time', but I think the advice is better and broader than that.  Being alert about what is influencing your thinking and perception is always useful.  For those of us working in large organisations, that's particularly important, not least as a way of reducing the risk of group think, of doing things this way because this is how we do things.  It's also important as a way of measuring where we are in the constant tension between urgency (or at least expressed urgency) and importance - and as with so many things, measurement is necessary, though far from sufficient, if there is to be control.

One technique I have found useful is to think in terms of time budgeting.  How much time am I prepared to spend working.  Within that, what's the most important thing I need to do, and how much time should I commit to doing it.  Iterate until time is accounted for.  Of course in the real world that needs to take account of other people's needs and preferences - but it also leads pretty forcibly to the conclusion that responding to every clamour for attention from emails and meetings is a rapid route to perdition.  The analysis is one thing.  Putting it into practice is quite another.  But this is a useful reminder to have another go.

When you're done with your email queue, are you done?

Do you spend your day responding and reacting to incoming all day... until the list is empty? ... and then you're done.

I'm noticing that it's easier than ever to have that sort of day. Online tools are arranging interactions in a line, allowing you to feel satisfied with a constant stream of incoming alerts and pings.

Years ago, I got my mail (the old fashioned kind) once a day. It took twenty minutes to process and I was forced to spend the rest of the day initiating, reaching out, inventing and designing. Today, it's easy to spend the whole day hitting 'reply'.

Carving out time to initiate is more important than ever.

The future is uncertain, mostly because it hasn't happened yet

Most policies and strategies are based implicitly on the principles that:

• we understand what is going on now and the relevant factors which allow us to explain why it is so
• we understand the way the new policy strategy, or other intervention will interact with those factors, and therefore understand consequences of its implementation.

Put that way, the approach is self-evidently a  little odd.    Sociology, unlike physics, permits of description but rarely, if ever, of prediction.  That is not, as is often supposed, because it is a woollier subject, but because it is intrinsically a more difficult one.  But that doesn't stop policies and strategies from being developed, applied - and not having the expected effects.

John Kay applies a similar thought to the development of energy policy in his weekly FT column:

We should eschew forecasts, acknowledge unresolvable uncertainty and plan accordingly. The right energy policy is one of diversification - developing as many uncorrelated options as possible.

Uncertainty in energy policy is arguably greater and over much longer periods than the relatively trivial questions around government service delivery.  But the basic principle is just as relevant.  In designing our future, is there a way of developing uncorrelated options - essentially allowing us to back several horses at once?  Doing so is not cost free:  if we want several lottery tickets, we will have to pay for them, even if the price (and sometimes the currency) is not at all clear.  So the further challenge is in assessing the optimal number of tickets to buy:  too few and we may not adequatly diversify our risk; too many and our change capacity will be spread too thinly.

Improving the process of improving the process

It's hardly news that Toyota are the leading lights of lean.  But some of the literature explaining what that means is a little bit heavy going, and there is an inevitable tendency to reinterpret the Toyota experience through our own organisational culture and collective management style - even though those are the two things which most need to change if it is ever to become more than Just Another Management Fad.

A recent article in Fast Company gives a really good (and fairly short) account of life in one of Toyota's US factories

So you can buy the books, you can hire the consultants, you can implement the program, you can preach business transformation--and you can eventually run out of energy, lose enthusiasm, be puzzled over why the program failed to catch fire and transform your business, put the fat binders on a conference-room shelf, and go back to business as usual.

What happens every day at Georgetown, and throughout Toyota, is teachable and learnable. But it's not a set of goals, because goals mean there's a finish line, and there is no finish line. It's not something you can implement, because it's not a checklist of improvements. It's a way of looking at the world. You simply can't lose interest in it, shrug, and give up--any more than you can lose interest in your own future.

That means the game is played on many levels:

The work is really threefold: making cars, making cars better, and teaching everyone how to make cars better. At its Olympian best, Toyota adds one more level: It is always looking to improve the process by which it improves all the other processes.

Well worth reading the whole thing.

Strategy delivery principles and a certain Chinese encyclopedia

Jorge Luis Borges is famous for the classification of animals supposedly to be found in the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

For no readily accountable reason, that came to mind this afternoon looking at a list of customer needs groups.

What do consultants do?

There are clear fashions in consultancy as in so much else - one of the industry's selling points is that firms can identify something called best practice in one organisation and apply it to others.  But that assumes, of course, both that the first organisation's success is actually a function of the behaviour identified as best practice, and that to whatever extent it is, the success can be duplicated by duplicating the practice.

James Surowiecki (author of the Wisdom of Crowds) puts it down to over generalisation from very small samples - often samples of one - and humans' tendency to generalise.  In a neat article in the New Yorker, he generalises from comparisons between Boeing and Airbus to conclude that:

Because we underestimate how much variation can be caused simply by luck, we see patterns where none exist. It’s no wonder that management theory is dominated by fads: every few years, new companies succeed, and they are scrutinized for the underlying truths that they might reveal. But often there is no underlying truth; the companies just happened to be in the right place at the right time. In 1999, after all, it was hard to find a business book that didn’t hold up Enron as the embodiment of one important principle or other. Of course, some strategies and structures work better than others, but real meaning emerges only over the long term.

Plans don't make anything happen

As we move into post-budget strategising, with the ambition of translating not-yet-developed strategies into hardly-yet-dreamt-of plans, it is worth reminding ourselves that planning (and, for that matter, strategising) doesn't actually achieve anything.  We can describe, and plan for, the glorious world of March 2011, and the still more splendid world of 2015 and beyond - but we should not delude ourselves into thinking either that wishing will make it so, or that even in principle we could describe 2011 in ways which could be translated into a plan to take us from here to there.

Slow Leadership is on the case, with two linked posts here and here:

Conventional planning requires these assumptions:

1. You can predict the future in fairly close detail, maybe several years ahead.
2. It’s possible to impose your will on events, and therefore outcomes too, by sustained and disciplined action.
3. Closely following a pre-defined set of actions is the best way to produce the result you want.
4. You can deal with the unexpected by setting up measurements in advance to chart progress and trigger action to reassert control.

All of these assumptions are false.

'Slow Planning', by contrast, has rather different characteristics:

1. Patiently develop understanding.
1. Watch, reflect, consult and explore.
2. Open your mind to many alternatives besides the obvious.
3. Wait for recognizable patterns to emerge.
2. Review as many possibilities as you can.
1. Stay open to the unexpected.
2. Avoid becoming committed prematurely.
3. Challenge all assumptions and previous thinking.
4. Watch for a preferred response to emerge from the best available thinking.
3. Take swift, direct action.
1. Keep decisions as close to events as possible.
2. Act swiftly and decisively once you've chosen a course of action.
3. Let go of failing actions quickly. Never waste your time trying to rescue something that is past help.
4. Stay flexible, get as much feedback as possible and use the results to improve future understanding.

And the symptoms of conventional planning can be tested fairly easily.  The question of whether the following applies to anything in our universe is left as an exercise for the reader:

Managers often have much of their personal credibility invested in the plan, so it’s not surprising work often continues in defiance of reality, only to be finally abandoned when the inconsistencies become too great to paper over. You need only spend a short time inside most large organizations—and many smaller ones as well—to see how often projects are abandoned only after lengthy, wasteful and pigheaded efforts to deny a reality anyone unbiased could see long before.

That's an easy snark, of course.  Much more interesting - and much more difficult - to identify and, dare I say it, plan for the implementation of what would need to be different.  What would that look like?

Radical Incrementalism - without the radical bit

We operate in an organisation with tremendous inertia.  Changing the whole thing feels impossible; changing small parts of it can feel irrelevant.  There are two temptations which come from that.

The first is to look for quick wins.  They can have their place, particularly if they are small parts of a longer whole (even if the whole is not or cannot be fully defined at the outset) and if the whole clearly fits the strategic direction. But it becomes tempting to to do them anyway. Slow leadership thinks this is a bad idea:

Our culture is obsessed with action: for "making things happen." Thoughtfulness is dismissed as "unrealistic" or "impracticable." It's usually rather easy to make something happen; making the right something happen is the tough part. But the dedicated proponent of the quick fix relies on being well away from the danger area long before it becomes clear the action he or she brought about made things worse.

The second problem is almost the reverse of the first. It's tempting to counter the inertia by the siren call of the doing syllogism:  something must be done; this is something; therefore this must be done.  I was reminded by one counter to that in the comments to the slow leadership post, in one of Einstein's great one liners:

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Four (or five) principles of [e]Government

Having spent a long time in total denial at the prospect of speaking at the eGov Summit (!), not least because I think they missed out the stage where I actually accepted their invitation to speak, I needed a presentation in a hurry.  The obvious answer was to use a pantomime horse approach - the back end of one presentation, the front end of another, and hope that the joins weren't too obvious.

That worked fine for the first half, taken in pure form from the presentation Joe did at Stockholm, but I was reduced to attempted originality for most of the second half.   I was billed as talking about an e-government roadmap, but that felt far too much like dangerous territory.  Instead, I dreamt up these four principles, which are fairly breathtakingly obvious, but seemed to work quite well - and did so less about e-government, and much more about customer and efficiency focused service delivery.

The slides give a bit more context (but not much, this is definitely more show than substance).  Are there other candidates to add to or (better still) replace some of these?

The fifth principle, by the way, was 'e-government is over', which shouldn't really be news any more - but then this was the e-Gov Summit.

Strategy in four blobs

A wet afternoon at Lords yesterday, so the conversation naturally turned to e-government.  I was only there for two sessions, one of which was my own, so didn't get a great feel for the event as a whole, but I did get to see Michael Stephenson - the Technology Director (and CIO) for DfES.

His presentation was striking for the slide which he described as being the strategy - the picture on the right is the full model.  DfES are in a very different game from us, of course, both in terms of what the technology is for and in terms of the points of service delivery (23,000 schools, for a start), but it is a powerful and succinct framework. 

They are now going through their project portfolio to group in terms of these four areas and then to prioritise activity within them.  It sounded as though it we a version of what we want to achieve through the golden rules.

We're in the danger zone

Guy Kawasaki also says:

The root cause of mission statement-itis is that most organizations are run by people who have either gotten an MBA or worked for McKinsey—or both.

He is more positive about 'mantras':  'a mantra is three or four words long. Tops. Its purpose is to help employees truly understand why the organization exists.'

The ultimate test for a mantra (or mission statement) is if your telephone operators (Trixie and Biff) can tell you what it is. If they can, then you’re onto something meaningful and memorable. If they can't, then, well, it sucks.