In so much of my previous working life, I’ve been told what to do. The task has been set, usually with a written brief, and it’s been fairly prescriptive: Do this and end up here. Creativity became almost like a recipe to follow, which to me feels like the opposite of creativity.
Once I was free from the shackles of doing the same work over and over again, I got to think more about why this seems at odds with being an adult and the responsibility that being a grown up within a workplace brings (or should bring). Over time that consolidated with the idea that work is more about formations than patterns.
You see, when birds fly in skeins, the leader isn’t always the same. Each bird has a role within that formation, swapping them when their skills are best suited to the conditions. Similarly, with formations built over time, like those in geology, each stratum has a clearly defined role, but there are no formulae to follow in constructing those layers.
Formations, therefore, became a thing for me. They still are.
There’s always an I in team
‘We’re a team’ is the old adage used to demonstrate that we’re working together. Except someone else is usually pulling the strings, deciding who does what and when. Subordinates get told what to do. Perhaps in an email, or in a meeting. Someone else is deciding what they should do, and there is little sense of why they’re doing it. Sheila creates a spreadsheet of data; Bob creates a presentation about the data; Wendy writes a report no one reads. By and large, none of them know why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s just ‘work’.
So, what if the person in charge was decided on in context of the task? What if it could be changed, swapping them over when their skills are best suited to the conditions? What if teams could be formations?
How would that work in reality?
At the shallow end of this thinking is process. If we create a process that allows people to be flexible, then surely this will work? I fell into this trap early on. Except process is end-to-end and doesn’t really change. It has a start, a middle and an end. It doesn’t matter if you’re creating marketing communications or you’re a brain surgeon, the stages of the process are fairly similar:
- Discover what’s wrong – people prefer this margarine over that one because of price; there’s a lesion in the brain.
- Plan on what you’re going to do to solve it – devise a campaign around health benefits that helps to convince price sensitive consumers that paying extra is worth it; operate.
- Execute that plan – run the campaign; complete the operation.
- Analyse and feedback – did sales go up (or not) and why? Amend the next campaign; has the lesion gone, is the patient healthy?
While I’ve massively simplified this (apologies to brain surgeons reading this, but also it’s clear that marketing communications isn’t brain surgery, or rocket science for that matter), we give these names and say we have a unique process. We start with Ignite!, then we Ideate!, then Create! and then Optimise!
Or perhaps we Build, Learn, Measure…
While I’m not suggesting that these frameworks are useless, none of them really helps teams work best. They give structure to what things get done, but they don’t offer guidance on how they get done.
Practice vs. Process
While conducting my own research this past year or so into how I worked, which I titled the How of Work, I realised that it’s not the process that makes one person, or company, better than the other. It’s their practice.
It’s not what they do but how they do it.
Practice, therefore, becomes really important. Not only to completing the task, but also to working within a team. If one person’s practice is better, the team should adopt it.
Except, the practice, is most modern workplaces, is also determined by someone else. The manager of the team, or department, or the process. Who Nilofer Merchant calls in her book, The New How, The Chief of Answers.
Less What, More How
Having spent a year purposefully talking to people and listening carefully to their answers to understand where they’re stuck with work, reading lots of books and articles about the future of work, staring out the window, analysing my own output and the work I’m doing with teams and organisations, experimenting with ideas, and so on, I’ve come to the conclusion that the what is less important than the how.
What you do is not your focus.
How you do what you do is.
Less What. More How.
While this is likely to be my new proposition at Formation London, it’s not the end of the story. Rather, it’s the beginning. There’s a lot of related things that I’m working on that spring forth from this thought, all of which will see the light of day soon.
Some are already out there, like the Manual of Me, which has since become an online tool thanks to Matthew Knight and the Leapers community. However, there are workshops, work programmes for teams and organisations, and models to use and build upon, and a multitude of other ideas and thoughts to come soon.
All of them are designed to help put the right person in control at the right time. As I have said previously in this post, it’s about swapping [people into the leadership role] when their skills are best suited to the conditions. To bring context to teams’ work, to align practice with outcomes and to relegate process to its rightful place, the background.
So, who’s in charge? How is.
Image used is Different Directions by Matthew Benton, used under Creative Commons Licence.
