It’s that time of year again to take stock of where we are, what we’ve done, and envision doing something different in the future. The popularity of setting New Year’s Resolutions speaks to our natural affinity for change.  According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, 45% of Americans set New Year’s resolutions, yet only 8% of those fully succeed. 

Whether you are in the ‘resolution setter’ category or not, would you like to really be successful at what you’d like to change?

I would! I’m a setter and I also fall in the 74% who have infrequent or no success at achieving their resolutions.

I am committed to moving to the ‘successful’ side this year. After studying neuroscience and change for over a year now, I know too much about how the brain works to allow myself to get into a failing position again.

My old way:
    •    Go Big.
    •    Set Audacious Goals.
    •    Write down big list of changes I want to make.
    •    Deny the long-held habits (dysfunctional as they were) that I’ve created over the years.
    •    Beat myself up in my journal for failing to make progress.
    •    Resolve to do better tomorrow.
    •    End the year no closer to where I want to be than I was a year ago.

What I’ve learned:
1. Changing Habits is like bending steel with your bare hands. Like the Grand Canyon shaped by the flow of Colorado River over centuries (Can You Move the Grand Canyon?). The brain naturally wants to line up what you are doing with something it has done before to leave more room for addressing the unknowns, thus defaulting to our well-worn habits. I remember reading that the best way to start a ‘quit smoking’ goal is to go on vacation. Back home the same triggers are there and the brain goes on auto-pilot in responding to them with a cigarette. On vacation, the pattern is disrupted making it easier to change your response.

2. The brain can only focus on one thing at a time. Tackling multiple changes, like any attempt at multi-tasking, makes you less effective than focusing singularly on one task. (Try this multi-tasking exercise to see what I mean). The more choices we have the more ineffective we are at making them. Customers offered a choice of 6 kinds of jam purchased a jar more frequently than those offered a choice of 24 kinds. (Lyengar and Lepper, 2000, cited in Barry Scwartz’s paper, “Can there ever by too many flowers blooming?’)

3. Right and Left Hemisphere Integration. We must engage both our Right and Left hemisphere to put all our resources behind the change. Especially in western culture, we tend to rely too heavily on the left hemisphere of rationality, logical, and structure. Lists of change tasks, tracking schedules, and the like are helpful but insufficient to motivate us for the long term. The Right Hemisphere, home to creativity and values, must also engage to put context and vision to how the change task fits in the bigger picture of our life. Vision boards, metaphors, and stories can give your resolutions a long life.

4. Making changes requires Neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to create new connections. The brain’s ability to make new connections is increased by these five actions: getting enough sleep, proper nutrition, physical exercise, novelty, and focus. If ‘exercising more’ or ‘eating less’ is one of your resolutions, now it is tied in to the bigger picture of long-term brain health. No matter what your change goal, we still need to support the brain pattern changes we want to make by providing a good environment for the brain to operate at its most effective.

5. The importance of DO and BE. As a society, we tend to focus heavily on the ‘DO’: “In order to lose weight I will eat salad for lunch.” That’s a Do, a task. Specific? Yes. Measureable? Yes.

But if having salad for lunch makes you grumpy the rest of the day, it affects your ‘how am I BEING?’ state. If I’m managing my diet to eat better or lose weight, how do I want to BE when I am doing that?
    •    Do I act grumpy and deprived?
    •    Do I make others uncomfortable by judging what they are eating or gloating my superiority that I perceive I am making better choices than them?
    •    Or do I savor each bite of food?
    •    Do I allow myself a treat now and then?
    •    Do I display positivity and engagement?
    •    Am I aware of the shift in my emotional state this new way of Doing is having?

Having a “BE” intention connects our resolution to an inner desire to act in a certain way. It engages the Default Mode Network, that brain network that allows you to dream and make new connections from the data points of your life. (The “Do” part of goal achievement activates the Task Positive Network). When setting a new course of change, you will need courage, engagement, and innovation to fortify your resolve. It is too easy to let anger, frustration, or disappointment in our own failures settle into our attitude. A “BE” intention provides a long-term context for the impact we want to have on ourselves and others, bigger than task accomplishment.

An intention sets a desired standard and also recognizes our human frailty. As an example, “I know this change will be hard and I accept that I will not always accomplish the task I set every time, AND I will approach this with courage to be a more positive me.” Courage becomes my intention and puts the task in context of the bigger change it is representing—courage to live differently.

How does this change how I am approaching this New Year?

To DO: I get bored easily if I am not seeing progress, and I also have more than one thing I’d like to work on this year. I am picking one area that I want to change each month and setting one micro-habit to change in that area. I am tracking my progress in following that change, on both a tactical and emotional level, and appreciating myself with something honored when I sustain the change. On the 1st of each month, I’ve scheduled a goal review and update to set a new one for the upcoming month, sustaining one and beginning another.

To BE: I am setting an intention of how I want to be this year: Energizing Joy. Living a joy-filled life is important to me. I experience many people whose energy and verve for living seem to be totally sucked out of them, usually by work that is not fulfilling. Energizing joy is me living meaningfully, mindfully, and purpose driven, and finding deep fulfillment from that process, and this radiates to others and energizes them to make the changes they want to make.

I’ll keep you posted on how this is working.  
On New Year’s Eve, I’ll be raising a toast to your change success in 2016!

I am coming back to a popular and dear topic to many here: e-mail vs. conversations (I’ll use ‘conversations’ loosely, to refer to ‘enterprise social’ platforms in general). The discussion that seems to occur most often in my own experience, is regarding the “WHAT” (e-mail or ‘social’ tools) but not nearly as often on the “WHEN”, "HOW", or even more importantly in my opinion: the “WHY”.

If your team is currently debating over whether to use e-mail, or a social tool like Yammer or Groups in Outlook (available to Office 365 users), my advice is to first think through and discuss at least the following:

• What is the Business Problem you are trying to solve?   Or, what are your objectives?
• What is your Strategy for meeting these objectives?
• What Tactics will you use, to implement your strategy?

Let's go with a not to un-common example I think, to illustrate why it is so key to start with these essentials, before jumping into the tools side of things.

1. Business Problem:  Due to current market pressures, you need to cut costs but your team is already very streamlined and processes are standardized and largely automated. There is little room for further cuts, or any remaining cuts having much impact other than temporary relief. Hence you decide to maintain costs as much as possible, while instead increasing productivity. You know that there are inefficiencies around e.g. decision making and problem solving between and within your teams, so you decide to focus on the organisational structure. 
2. Strategy:  The current organisational structure is hierarchical: decisions are made at the top (the Executives), routed there by middle management that does nothing more than enforce policies and routing decisions up and down the chain. At the bottom of this pyramid, you have the teams who are supposedly the subject matter experts but they are not empowered to make decisions, only to implement them. You decide as your strategy, to eliminate unnecessary lead time through in-efficient decision making, by flattening the organisation and empowering the experts (possibly those are the people facing your customers on a daily basis too), retrain middle management to support and develop their teams instead of routing decisions and giving orders. The executives will still make the strategic or critical decisions, but they will now make more educated decisions, as they will base them on input and advise from the experts.
3. Tactics:  This is where you build your Communications, Training, Incentive plans etc. You are implementing a major change, that impacts every single person in your organisation and you need to make the change happen together with them, not make the change for them (or even worse: do it to them!). Unless you have trained Change Management Professionals in-house, my recommendation really would be to train and certify some key staff members, or in-source an Adoption Change Management service. Change is not achieved by making the decision, informing your teams and forcing a new tool or rule book onto them.

Have you noticed? I still haven’t talked about implementing a single tool yet!

After you start driving the change within your organisation and people start to adopt to the new requirements and opportunities, you may realise that to enable your now empowered teams, you need better communications and ways for your teams to co-operate within and across teams. You may also find that people need better and quicker access to information and new ways to share their knowledge, to be able to make decisions on the front lines. You now need to develop a Collaboration Strategy and a plan for how to implement it. At some point one of your tactics will surely be, to find the knowledge collaboration (Knowledge Management; KM) solution that meets your needs, and best supports the knowledge sharing and collaborative team culture you have evolved.

So what is my key take away here? What is the point that I am trying to make? A simple Pareto analysis, based on my own experiences of driving adoption change management in the KM and Collaboration space for almost 3 years now, and the learnings my team has made, which says: it is 80% about people and process (culture); and only 20% about the tools or technology.

Learn more about how we work with Knowledge Management internally, in Microsoft Enterprise Services, from this brief customer success story: Microsoft Services Reimagines Knowledge Collaboration with Cloud-Based Platform (Campus). It also emphasizes the importance of leading this as a people- and culture initiative first and foremost, following with the solution. We have presented our own learnings at several international KM conferences, and shared and exchanged knowledge, with many of our global customers already. And all seem to agree: it’s 80% people & culture – the rest is technology.

PLEASE NOTE:  1)  The views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer; 2)  The Business example is freely based off of the story about how "flattening the pyramids" was Jan Carlzon's key strategy, to turning SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) around in the early 1980's. He shares his story in Moments of Truth (Riv Pyramiderna!). I just re-read it and guess what... It still applies, just in a different dimension.  Thank you for inspiring a few generations of leaders, and aspiring leaders, by now @Jan Carlzon!

We now want the same digital experience and service levels at work as we get in our personal life

The world of work is undergoing significant change. Worker expectations have shifted in so many ways. Employees want to use their own devices and applications to get their work done. They expect to have their views and ideas aired and to get rapid feedback. Access to information and to decision makers is often more important than financial remuneration. Transparency and Collaboration are the new corporate mantras.

Why has all of this happened so suddenly? Is it the rise of the so called millennials? Or is there something more widespread at play here?

The clue to understanding this profound shift in workers and the workplace lies not inside the organisation but rather what is happening outside company life.

Start with yourself. Examine the way you manage your life today and the service levels you expect:

• You want to find information from your local council or give instruction to your doctor’s surgery. You go online and within seconds you are able to execute on those needs.
• You want to move money from A to B, you cut through any bureaucracy and complete the transaction quickly, silently and often on the move.
• You want to research a holiday but avoid the sales and marketing machine of the provider. So you go to a site like Trip Advisor where you can compare notes with ‘people like me’. Trusted sources obtained for free and on demand.
• You want to solve a problem or plan for a situation that pertains to both your private and organisational life - e.g. travel updates and bookings, weather checks in multiple locations, route planning, dining arrangements, car hire - all of these actions you now source an application for and execute from your smart phone.  

Now at work you become frustrated with the relative poverty of the communication tools at your disposal. You want to collaborate with a group of co-workers to get a project or task completed efficiently. You know how to do this in your private life – e.g. you have a Facebook group for local child care sharing or what’s app group for organising football training. So you explore collaborative technologies for the workplace and find that there are indeed similar tools available that are focused on your work needs and objectives.

In this world of self-service, the idea that the IT department (or any other department) can continue to prohibit employees from using collaborative tools of their choice to get work done is both impractical and ultimately self-harming.

Workers now demand the same digital experience and service levels at work as they get in their personal lives.

And this is where we arrive at what is known as the Social Knowledge Management imperative. If disparate group of employees go off and start collaborating on a self-service basis then they are in a sense destroying the very thing they are seeking to remedy. Several collaborating groups with no obvious visibility of each other are in fact creating new organisational silos. Valuable company knowledge and learning opportunities which were once (or are currently) locked away in hard to access folder structures are now trapped in multiple uncoordinated collaboration groups. This situation will not work and someone (and their team) has to take responsibility to get this right.

Providing a well-thought-out space for company collaboration, a digital place that accommodates rising employee expectation and marries with organisational objectives is not something that can ever happen of its own accord. Social KM managers (and their team) have to act as custodians of Collaboration Culture. They have to plan, plant and nurture the Company ‘collaborative garden’ with tremendous attention to detail, to both business and individual needs and they have to do this over a long term.

Rooven Pakkiri will be covering these topics in his Social KM course February 22-23, 2016 - London, UK.  Course details posted soon.  Contact KMI for details.

The course is aimed at anyone in organizational management or leadership who is trying to figure out how to meet worker expectation or executive directive for increased transparency and collaboration in a business context. Throughout the 2 days the course moves continuously between theory and hands-on practice as participants get to experiment with collaborative technology in a safe and bespoke business focused arena.  (NB: a Wi-Fi enable laptop is essential for this course)

 . . . and an essential driver of Business Transformation!

I had the great opportunity to sit down with two CxOs from a European police organization a couple of weeks ago. The topic for discussion was to share experiences and discuss the common challenges and opportunities, that the business transformation of moving into a Mobile-first, Cloud-first world creates.

This was a 2.5-hour discussion, in a casual setting, with no slideware. My favourite kind of meeting, as there is no technology to hide behind or slides that create unnecessary barriers, for a free-flowing conversation and open dialogue.

So what can a Professional Services organization have in common with a police force, you may ask? Quite a lot actually, as it turned out. I am sharing some of the topics and questions we discussed below, as it builds upon a previous blog post, by adding more perspective and detail to those initial high-level points.

We had agreed on the following talking points beforehand:

• Business Transformation to a Mobile-first, Cloud-first world
• Project Management, processes & methodologies
• Change Management, progress tracking and success metrics

The world is transforming rapidly & we need to transform with it! As touched upon in my last blog, most companies and corporations are facing an environment and market pressures, where productivity gains and cost reduction (hard savings/gains) by streamlining the organization, no longer does the trick. We need to find other ways to improve productivity and maintain/grow margins and actively driving Knowledge Management (‘KM’) is one area, where many organisations (unknowingly?) are sitting on large unrealized potential gains.

The rate at which the business is currently changing, means we need to shorten Time To Decision and Time To Execution/Release, substantially. The traditional waterfall-approach no longer scales and the search for the holy grail that is perfection, is starting to undermine ROI and consume margins faster and faster. So we need to work smarter as working faster isn’t a realistic option in most cases.

Here are some things to consider, when trying to help your work-force work smarter:

1. Agile methodologies There are great advantages in running agile projects but there are also challenges as with any approach as one size never fits all.

• Simplicity and flexibility – as you run short development sprints, test, release and adjust, you can better incorporate user experiences from an early stage. It allows you to start simple and add complexity as needs arise and business requirements are identified.
• Incremental documentation – not necessarily less documentation, which many think is the case, but it is different from the traditional approach where documentation is created up front. There is a risk that development starts going in circles, unless requirements and decisions, including business reason for making them, are well documented and structured.
• Better user experience and easier adoption – assuming that users are involved from early on, as it enables you to ‘start small’ (or keep it simple) and add functionality as needed rather than design the entire solution before test/release.

2. Project Structures   Not only how a project is structured and scoped is essential but so is how it is governed. For larger project initiatives it may be much better to break projects up in smaller chunks and coordinate through a Program Office or PMO. Orientation should be by business owner/area and aligned with all up company strategy. This puts additional pressure on governance and best practice is to have each Business (process) Owner/Business Decision Maker represented in a formal Steering Group, with the objective to make business-based decisions and prioritisations between projects as applicable.

This applies to waterfall, as well as agile projects but the traditional multi-year waterfall projects should be avoided, as the changes in the business environment/market are so many and so fast, that in most cases running 2-3 year long projects doesn’t work. Neither do monolithic-style SW implementations, where development goes on for years before anything is actually released to the end users by the way…

3. Business & Solution Requirements  Teams need to be able to quickly and effectively connect, and easily collaborate on documentation and other content, to keep up the pace. By re-using knowledge and content, quality can also be maintained/improved, in spite of the faster pace, and avoid endless review cycles and revisions. 

Another area which is absolutely critical is to capture and manage business requirements, as most users are becoming much smarter, hence pickier, by the week. At the same time documentation of requirements need to be balanced with the shorter lifecycles and shorter Time To Release, so the traditional 120 pages long Vision Scope, may not be ideal, although a high-level scope and shared vision is critical.

Technology is transforming even faster – “I can’t keep up….!”  But it is not only the speed of change that is adding pressures on our organisations. It is also the growing complexity of the environments and eco-systems we operate in (I will intentionally exclude financial- and market pressures for sake of simplicity and focus on topic). Everyone can no longer be an expert in everything, so we need better ways to connect people and information, as to leverage the experts in our organisations wherever they may be located.

You may think this is where the sales pitch comes, pushing Office 365 and SharePoint Online for effective collaboration? But it is not. I am focusing this piece solely on the people and process dimensions of KM as a vehicle for Business Transformation; not the Tools aspect. Implementing a KM solution, is our own experience 80% about People and Process and a mere 20% about Technology/Tools.

Shifting your organization to a true Knowledge organization, is a cultural change effort – not an IT project, or even a process implementation. It’s a cultural shift which requires every single individual in the organization to adopt some new mind-sets and leave some old behaviours behind. Here are a few:

1. Knowledge is no longer power – knowledge is a commodity and information hoarding no longer puts anyone at an advantage. Collaboration and knowledge sharing however, does.

2. Perfect is the enemy of good  - A common mind-set is that any document or artefact (solution) has to be absolutely perfect, before it is put in front of the intended audience/end user. Wrong! Users bandwidth is shrinking as fast as our bandwidth and most would rather get something fast that is continuously improved, than get nothing for 6 months. The more people who can review and provide structured input, throughout the process, the better the outcome and quality of end product but it is key to organise all input well as to avoid chaos

3. User centric approach - This is an absolute must in a day and age where, at least in the US, the Millennial portion of the population has now exceeded the Baby Boomers. The requirements on speed and ease of accessibility across any device or platform, is therefore becoming more and more critical, as user behaviours start shifting towards Mobility and Cloud as primary choices.

It is hard managing this type of intangible changes – like mind-sets and principles – that a cultural shift requires. And it is even harder to track progress and measure business impact as data is correlative, as opposed to causal, at best. Hence the need for many of us, as well as our Business Decision Makers, to start acknowledging and accepting that perhaps not everything can be tracked by hard numbers?

Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Your comments are as always very welcome!

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

We are now operating in a world where the commoditisation of IT is fast becoming a reality for the current workforce. And it will be totally non-negotiable for the future workforce. BYOD is rapidly becoming BYOA. In this brave new world of Internet 3.0, the playing field has shifted - company size and history is less important than responsiveness and agility. The now legendary story of Blockbuster's rejection of the Netflix offer to form a partnership is instructive. The way in which talent finds its desired company and the terms on which it wants to engage are evolving rapidly. Going forward the single greatest differentiator for a company will be its ability to consistently leverage the talent and knowledge of its workforce to the maximum. Companies who are bound by tradition and hierarchy will struggle to compete and many household brands will become obsolete.

In this presentation, Rooven discusses this shift and talks about how he is helping clients to transform the way they engage and empower their workforce with digital strategies based on ‘Social Learning’, ‘Talent Insights’ and 'Decision Sourcing'.

Icon uk 2015 from Rooven Pakkiri

Join KMI and Rooven Pakkiri in London for a 2-Day Course on "Social KM"

February 22-23, 2016

Click Here for details!

What You Will Learn

This hands on course will enable you to:

• Understand the implications that social KM has on your organization
• Examine collaboration tools – blogs, wikis and forums to determine effective collaboration platforms for your own community of practice
• Drive the role of the community manager to gain and sustain user adoption
• Develop a strategy to create and manage your own community platform