Organize events or meetings with fixed cadence, which prepares minds and increases predictability.
Ensure that physical space forces employees to walk by each other frequently but also allows them to maintain privacy, if preferred.
Promote a culture where people feel safe and can express themselves freely.
Keep in mind that bureaucracy and complication are increased if activities with high Enterprise Social Visibility are replaced with activities that generate less social information.
If a company executive wants to know how an organization with high Enterprise Social Visibility works, organize a visit to another company that excels in this area. This will provide the curious executive with more information than you could by explaining the concepts.
Remember to ensure that there’s at least one simple way to measure the improvement of Enterprise Social Visibility in you company.
The Complexity and Complication Pattern
You have probably visited a place where everything seemed too complicated. If so, you’re not alone.
It isn’t only a company’s processes or the steps for performing a task that are complicated. The techniques that our brain uses to solve a problem can also increase complication.
Say you face an unknown event. Your brain will instinctively want to control what is happening and simultaneously justify the actions or steps you use to solve the problem. It will attempt, by all means possible, to establish processes that order your surroundings, making what happens next more predictable. Consider how this human predisposition might condition the way your company works.
Suppose that abrupt changes are affecting your company. A new player has appeared in the market offering products with higher quality or more features than the ones you offer. Because of this unexpected disruption, you’ll experience a period of uncertainty during which your company will face two new conditions, or corporate requirements, that must be met if your company wants to survive:
Your products must be of higher quality.
You must offer characteristics that are equal or superior to the competition.
Traditional organizations will usually respond to external changes by increasing levels of complication. You might be wondering, What exactly is complication?
Complication is the increase of processes, strategies, rules, coordination, approval forms, roles, and procedures to solve a problem. With such actions, these companies think they’ll be able to control what happens around them and ensure that what happens next remains predictable. This is a standard response for which we are normally wired.
Going back over a century, many traditional organizational theories indicate that adding structures and processes will have a direct and predictable impact on the positive performance of a company.
If you look at how your brain works, you will see that it is biologically predisposed to seek comfort. When something changes abruptly, the brain tries to add steps, processes, or structures that give it comfort.
While this might seem sensible, experience tells us that the practice of adding processes in response to new corporate requirements can be counterproductive in the era of exponential market acceleration.
Logically, stacking one procedure over another, when many of these are contradictory, will only cause procedures to further multiply, adding more obstacles.
Don’t confuse the complexity and complication concepts used to solve problems (you can refer back to Chapter 2). The definition used here represents the response to corporate requirements.
Here’s an example I experienced firsthand. Albert was a Product Owner in a company that used Scrum. He wanted more time for executive tasks unrelated to the Scrum team. To reduce his workload, the company assigned Christian, a functional analyst. Every day, they would meet and decide who would be responsible for what tasks, and at the end of the day they would meet face-to-face for an update.
During the first weeks, everything seemed to work fine, and Albert had more free time. But then something happened. They gradually began increasing their interactions to clarify situations that occurred at different times of the day. When Albert was not available, Christian tried to make the decisions or communicate his personal perspective.
This led to misunderstandings, and both decided to add a couple of meetings each day as well as rules to dictate how to act in different cases. In addition to establishing new guidelines, they had intensified their interactions to meet the same number of needs they previously had. In the end, everyone was busier, and nobody knew why. They had fallen into the trap of complication!
As you can see, complication comes in different shapes and colors. More processes, more structures, or the unnecessary multiplication of interactions were required to respond to the same corporate requirements. This increased the complication index.
If things become more complicated, you will have less capacity for adaptation and innovation. With added complication, your product or service will also be more expensive to produce. In other words, the value you offer the customer will be lower.
But don’t think that having structures isn’t important! Keep in mind that solutions should be based on keeping levels of complication low. To achieve this, there are different recommendations at different levels of the organization.
The problem is not the corporate requirements but rather the way in which the company deals with them. It is impossible to have enough structures, plans, rules, or processes for solving the problems of an exponential company. For that reason, the answer lies in simplifying everything so that adapting becomes easier.
We previously covered implementing positive collaborations and increasing the flow of knowledge throughout the company. We also saw how to create work environments that radiate information. For all of this to work better, it’s essential that the company reduces levels of complication.
The Boston Consulting Group has been investigating this for several years through its complexity and complication index. They have surveyed over one hundred Fortune 500 companies from the United States and Europe, their objective being to understand why many organizations have low productivity despite being well aligned and possessing excellent technology tools.
FIGURE 7.11: The response to complexity according to the Boston Consulting Group
According to the Boston Consulting Group, complicatedness or complication entails the processes, structures, and approval chains for satisfying a corporate requirement (complexity). This has increased between 50% and 350% in the last fifteen years. When spread across the last five decades, the result is an annual increase of 6.7%.
If in 1955 you required one process to satisfy a corporate requirement, today you would have to establish 5.8 processes (35/6). The Boston Consulting Group indicates that a manager in an organization with high complication spends 40% of the time writing reports and 30% to 60% of the time coordinating jobs.
Such high complication attitudes can also exist in large corporations embarking on long business transformations. Levels of bureaucracy and processes are already extremely heavy, and trying to add a new methodology or framework will further increase levels of complication. In turn, this will make employees less happy, and they might choose to abandon the initiative and return to their previous forms of work.
Enterprise Social Systems clearly identifies the complication trap with the complexity and complication pattern so that people can be aware of this when creating a new plan, technique, or framework.
The Complexity and Complication pattern entails behaviors that increase complication (number of procedures, rules, bureaucracy, vertical layers, and coordination teams) to satisfy a corporate requirement (quality, price, performance, and time-to-market).
Here are some ideas for decreasing complication rates in your company:
Use face-to-face communication as much as possible. In addition, any technique that contributes to increasing Enterprise Social Density
will generally help reduce complication.
Try not to create new roles or departments when you have a new organizational requirement. Use cloud tools to simplify your IT architecture, automate the need as much as possible or use artificial intelligence and robots. When the latter is not possible, have an existing team take care of the requirement instead of creating new structures or processes to solve the problem.
If a few employees regularly break a company standard, do not add new rules or processes to control them. Look for creative solutions that do not increase bureaucracy.
In any new plan or initiative, ensure that managers do not focus on managing people but focus instead on actively removing obstacles from the system (organization, team, etc.).
Keep in mind that products with low or fluctuating quality increase complication.
Ensure that people are not multitasking. How can you ensure that this does not happen during a new plan, process, or change initiative?
Have frontline employees, those in contact with the client, make their own decisions and bear the responsibility for their decisions. They should be able to make small adjustments to processes without having to ask management.
Keep in mind that complication increases in meetings that require a final decision but end without consensus. Begin to build group consensus before the meeting so you can arrive at a decision by the end of the meeting.
If you are scaling up a process, methodology, or framework, ensure that the teams involved have lower levels of complication (low bureaucracy, metrics, rules, etc.).
People who work over 80% or 90% of their ability increase blockades and the need for coordination. Therefore, they also increase complication.
Let teams self-organize instead of controlling and coordinating them. This will reduce complication to a minimum and stimulate collaborative intelligence.
At all levels of the company, ensure you have people who are exclusively responsible for removing obstacles. If you are creating a change plan, consider including this role from the very beginning.
Ensure that individuals feel safe in their work environment and that there is high visibility for where the organization is heading.
For any change plan, use frequent reflection sessions (retrospective) to improve processes and human interactions, remove blockades, and provide feedback to the company.
Reduce knowledge silos in teams. This can be done using techniques such as pairing sessions.
Now that you know about complexity and complication, go back to Chapter 3 and reread my friend Peter’s story on decreasing complication.
Enterprise Social Systems in Action
The nature of complexity makes it difficult for a single person to find the best practice or technique to solve a problem. The best results are the product of collaborative work.
To maximize the impact on the four pillars of the organization, Enterprise Social Systems simultaneously uses the five components as part of a specific game. This adds new types of reasoning to your company and enhance the employees thinking skills. It also improves interpersonal and social skills.
When people are part of a game, they enter a parallel reality or play time maintained from the beginning to the end of the game. During this, people don´t require permission and they can use different rules than those normally used in the organization.
To do this, you must clearly state the rules and establish the start and end of the game. This way, people will feel safe and be more receptive when they experience new concepts or ways of thinking.
To perform this game, you need several tables that can each comfortably accommodate five to six people. There should also be enough sticky notes and pens for all. The duration of the game will depend on the problems you wish to analyze. In my experience, you’ll need at least ninety minutes.
At the beginning of the game, ask participants to use sticky notes to write the problems they want to solve or that they believe have not been solved properly. Explain to them that these problems should be as specific as possible, since the idea is to find specific actions that can be used when the game is over.
Provide three minutes for the teams to write one or two problems they are facing and place their notes in the center of the table. Then explain that each group will have fifteen minutes to select one of the problems and collectively create a plan with the necessary steps for solving the problem.
The steps for solving the problem should be as detailed as possible. The objective isn’t to implement the solutions later but to compare the results of the current forms of reasoning to those that will be produced with the new techniques. Once time is up, give each team two minutes to share their solutions with the rest of the participants.
Next, deliver a different sheet of paper to each member of the team. On it will be the name of their new role, an explanation, and examples:
An expert in reducing Enterprise Blocking Collaboration.
An expert in increasing Enterprise Social Density.
An expert in increasing Enterprise Social Visibility.
An expert in reducing the complexity and complication pattern.
An expert in decreasing the Permission-to-learn pattern.
Optional: a facilitator to inspire and encourage conversations among members.
Each person will become an expert in a particular area, and any plan created from that point on should follow the recommendations of the experts at the table.
FIGURE 7.12: A team using Enterprise Social Systems roles
Ask each person to read the description of their role in three minutes. They should each then look for an individual from another team with the same role. They will have ten minutes to exchange ideas and clarify how experts in that area think. This will not only allow them to abandon doubts, but it will also enable them to help each other and establish a clear sense of community.
Use the Enterprise Social Systems game for people to safely experiment with new ways of thinking. You can download the description of each role at Innova1st.com/ess
Back to the teams, members will have thirty minutes to analyze the previously created plans using the new perspectives. For example, the person in charge of the Permission-to-learn pattern should make suggestions so the new plan improves in that area. If the person is an expert in Enterprise Social Visibility, the person should ensure that the execution of any plan includes specific recommendations about the layout of the office.
The new forms of interaction will result in different conclusions, and this will make it easier for everyone to compare the differences between the initial plan and the new one. The result should be powerful plans that impact on the four pillars of the organization.
Remember to modify the game as you consider necessary and thank the participants for their collaboration at the end of the game.
What You Have Learned
The differences between Agile and Business Agility.
The differences between the types of thinking of the traditional company (linear) and the exponential company.
The effects of working in pairs.
The meaning of the attraction of tools.
The four pillars of the organization.
The five components of Enterprise Social Systems and how they work.
Do you remember the differences between Agile and Business Agility?
Which pillar is considered most important when creating a change plan in your company?
How could you magnify the impact of a change using the four pillars?
In what specific way can the five components of Enterprise Social Systems help you change how people think in your company?
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
Lud
wig Wittgenstein, Philosopher
In Chapter 6, I explained how to make a change in the company using a transformation team. We will now embark in another direction and examine the ELSA and DeLTA change frameworks.
You can’t always count on a transformation team or gain access to the leaders of the company, and you might not have a clear sponsor for the initiative. Many people prefer to postpone the implementation of a change plan until they are in a more favorable situation, but this isn’t a suitable alternative in our fast-paced world.
Some choose to wait until the perfect leader can help initiate the change. In this case, I suggest that the following are the characteristics perfect leaders should have to be truly effective:
Leads by example and inspires.
Makes time for others.
Generates empathy and is transparent with their thoughts.
Maintains focus during difficult times.
Inspires confidence with their actions and words, and shows passion for their work.
Identifies logical connections between proposals.
Draws correct and well-informed conclusions about necessary actions (corrective and for the good of the company).
Distinguishes between what’s complex and what’s complicated.
Identifies relevant data and converts it into useful information.
Leading Exponential Change Page 24
