Things from Flux

Change & Evolve

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Circular Org Design

Inspired by https://filmfreeway.com/project/464133

**Jim to write the article**

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Managing Company-Wide Innovation

“Great ideas can come from anywhere in the business.”

We hear statements like this all the time. And I think they’re true. It’s essential to include your staff in a process of continual business innovation. You don’t have all the answers.

But how might this work in practice? Here’s something you can implement today, inspired by Pip, founder and CEO of The Dots.

Pitch Days

Host a Pitch Day every 3 months.

Each coworker can bring 1, 2, or 3 ideas for new product, service, or business innovations (depending on the size of the team)

They do a 2 minute pitch in front of the whole company

The company asks questions, Dragons Den style

Then a small group places each idea onto a matrix on the wall. The axes are labelled “effort” and “impact”

After all of the pitches have been placed, take the “low effort, high impact” ideas and immediately assign owners, set deadlines, and give a small budget to support their development.

Take the “high effort, high impact” ideas and assign ownership to the relevant leader or department for further discussion and development.

Discard the rest of the ideas

Repeat!

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Dealing with a Post-Agile Business

How do you make sure that rapid prototyping and agile business development doesn’t destroy your focus?

Every smart company works in a more agile way now. The software development methodology has now become the default way of doing business.

But rapid prototyping and continuous delivery can make a real mess of your product, service, or organisation. Failed experiments don’t get cleaned up, new ways of working can be semi-adopted, and you can loose some of the focus that your older, slower, legacy-model company once had.

We encourage an Organisational Reset after any extended period of experimentation. Go back to your purpose, values, and vision. Gather together the key leaders in the company and ask yourselves these questions:

Do we still exist for the same purpose?

Do we have the same values as before?

Are we aligned around our original vision?

Your company has probably evolved beyond its original purpose, values, and vision. Make sure that the way you talk about what you do accurately reflects what you actually do.

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Alienation In The Modern Workplace

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour - your capital. 

The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the store of your estranged being.

In the 19th Century Karl Marx wrote about the damaging effects that capitalism had on working people. They lost control of their own lives and destinies; they felt powerless in the face of their leaders; they had little say in how they worked; and they saw little of the value from the goods and services they produced.

Of course Marxist political thought took a dark turn in the 100 years following that statement. But not much has changed in the lives of working people.

The capitalist, consumerist machine drives us forward. We are disconnected from the products of our labours. We spend our days sending emails, sitting in meeting rooms, flicking through Facebook, and barely producing anything of tangible significance.

Reflect on that for a few minutes. The re-watch Daniel Pink’s RSA Animate video on the truth behind motivation at work.

It requires just 3 things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

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Are Your Employees Mature Enough To Deal With Freedom?

We hear this kind of question all the time at Flux:   

I want my employees to be free. I think that’s a good thing to work towards. But how can I trust them to do what’s right? What if they end up destroying my business? 

You will gain their trust by showing that you trust them. You have to let them experience true freedom in the workplace before they will know how to make the most of that freedom.

In Noam Chomsky’s On Anarchism he paraphrases the 18th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant: 

“Freedom is the condition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved."

Your employees don’t need you to control them. They need you to remove the barriers in your organisation that stop them from doing great work.

Set them free, and they’ll learn how to be free.

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Change the People by Changing the Structure

This episode of the amazing Invisibilia podcast explores how our personalities aren’t as fixed as we think. 

In fact, our personalities are constrained by the situations that we put ourselves in. If families, jobs, and routines never change, then we will never change. 

This reminds me of the misattributed Einstein quote:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Change is hard. Doing things differently is hard. But you can change the people and culture in your company by changing the structures and environment.

Be brave. Liberate your people. 

Check out the work of David Eagleman, Lee Ross, and Walter Mischel for scientific studies backing up this insight.

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4 Lessons From Our 72hr Startup Sprint in Dream Valley

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The age of the internet has precipitated a new worldview - one that can contemplate the possibility of distributed intelligence instead of top-down hierarchy

frederic laloux, reinventing organisations

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People don't resist change. They resist being changed.

Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

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Password Reset > Behaviour Reset

This guy posted how he used a password to get over his ex-girlfriend.  His password was ‘forgive her’.

As we setup up Flux, we had to setup loads of new accounts and therefore passwords. To mark the occasion I chose passwords which force me to change my thoughts.

I recommend you do the same. Change it to a resolution or a helpful thought or something.

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Responsive Cafe

CONTEXT This is a little session I created for HEC Exec MBA Digital Transformation Majors. I now use it to allow groups realise fundamental shifts. Talking about it can feel a little pushy or theoretical, so creating a space for them to discuss themselves makes more sense. I’ve used it quite a bit to get an organisation undergoing ‘digital transformation’ to define the term ‘digital’.

POSSIBLE PURPOSES This workshop can be used to: - Create an ambitious idea of the future - Get people behind this idea by coming up with it together - Figure out what new beliefs might be needed, and old ones could be forgotten

FURTHER READING This tool will make more sense if you check out: - The beautifully pithy ResponsiveOrg manifesto - Hosting tools like World Cafe / Open Space technology - Edgar Schein iceberg model (or anything theory which understands that beliefs shape behaviours)

GUIDE TO RUNNING A RESPONSIVE CAFE

1. Gather 5 different examples of Responsive Organisations - either prescribe these or ask the group to crowdsource them using post-its or a tool like Mentimetre - when I’m prescriptive, I tend to use  stories similar to the 5 right hand spectrums in the ResponsiveOrg Manifesto. Examples I often use are: Anonymous, Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Wikipedia, Linux, Patagonia, Zappos, Buffer, Spotify, Buurtzorg, Holocracy

2. A table per story: - each table has a story has a group (of say 5 people) - each table has a table host whose role is create dialogue and capture

3. Discuss beliefs - groups should discuss the story and be curious about it, focussing on uncovering the beliefs that organisation would have to hold in order to behave that way - each group spends 10 mins at each station (total 50mins) - each time they switch, the table host should run them through a summary of what’s been said on the topic so far (1 or 2mins)

4. Make it real - groups go back to their first table - each group creates a thing (like a flipchart) which includes: >>> a belief statement: We believe that ... does ... for ... e.g. WikiLeaks that openness keeps us Good >>> small behaviours or initiatives to manifest this new belief

5. Present & combine You should end up with 5 pretty pithy belief statements which will create a manifesto. I sometimes ask every group member to sign a flip chart at the end to see this as a contract for the way they will work together.

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New Business Idea Generation Technique using a URL generator