Slumped

The real reason for the forty-hour work week

by with No Comment Future of Work

The eight-hour workday developed during the industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century, as a respite for factory workers who were being exploited with 14- or 16-hour workdays.

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

Interesting perspective.

I’m seeing this in my own life. Repeatedly working a strict 8-hour day (plus travel) leaves me tired, time-poor and far too quick to choose to purchase (food, electronics etc.) as a way to make things more ‘easy’ and ‘enjoyable’. Working a more flexible schedule with correctly-set priorities (focusing on my own health, family and community) leads to a much more satisfactory financial and lifestyle balance.

More > (well worth reading in full… h/t to Jon Husband for the link)

WOL Courses

A new 6-week course to help you Work Out Loud – June/July 2016

by with No Comment Future of Work

I am a great fan of Working Out Loud – John Stepper’s published approach to working in the open, transparently and with authenticity.  As he describes it:

Instead of networking to get something, you lead with generosity, investing in relationships that give you access to other people, knowledge, and possibilities. Part of the process is learning ways to make your work visible and frame it as a contribution.

The core community framework that sustains Working Out Loud is the Circle:

Circles help you develop a mindset and habit you can apply to any goal. These small peer support groups are now in 16 countries and in organizations ranging from multi-national firms to universities to humanitarian groups. The thing they all have in common is wanting their people to feel intrinsically motivated to be more collaborative and effective.

John’s book covers this well, but really there is nothing better than experiencing the power of WOL Circles in person.  Obviously you could just go ahead and set up a circle in your workplace (I’d love to assist you if so), but a better plan is to be part of a training circle in order to understand the potential, and the pitfalls, of Working Out Loud.  The good news is that there is such an opportunity coming up in just a few weeks:

WOL WebinarWHAT YOU’LL LEARN

You will both experience a Working Out Loud Circle, where you will decide on a goal to work on over the 6 weeks, and will be supported to use a step-by-step process to move towards this through expanding your networks, deepening your relationships and increasing your influence.

As well as being part of a Working Out Loud Circle, this course will give you the tips and tools you need to be a WOL Circle facilitator in your workplace or community.

HOW THE COURSE WORKS

The course runs over 6 weeks, each Thursday from 4 – 5.30pm. We’ll stay in touch throughout using Slack, a free App that you can use on your smart phone or computer. The Slack group will be open for 8 weeks – a week before the course to meet people, and for a week after the course ends.

All you need is a computer with internet and video connection, and a headset/headphones to take part. You need to participate in all 6 sessions.

BOOK YOUR PLACE

7 WAYS THIS COURSE WILL HELP YOU LEARN ABOUT WOL CIRCLES

  1. By experiencing a WOL Circle for yourself – with 4 or 5 other people (as part of the 90 minute sessions)
  2. By practicing facilitating a WOL Circle meeting
  3. By hearing directly from John – his top tips and insights on how to lead WOL Circles
  4. Through the weekly question and answer sessions, both online and through Slack
  5. Through reading and using the new updated WOL Circle guides
  6. Through reading Working Out Loud by John Stepper. This will be sent to you as soon as you sign up and pay.
  7. And by joining a growing international WOL community who are sharing their experiences and learning as they go

The course is being run by John Stepper and Helen Sanderson Associates, and the dates for the sessions are as follows:

Thursday 9 June – 4pm-5.30pm (BST)
Thursday 16 June – 4pm-5.30pm (BST)
Thursday 23 June – 4pm-5.30pm (BST)
Thursday 30 June – 4pm-5.30pm (BST)
Thursday 7 July – 4pm-5.30pm (BST)
Thursday 14 July – 4pm-5.30pm (BST)

The course cost is £350 including VAT, and you can register via EventBrite.

I will be attending myself, and would love to work with you in the WOL Circle that will result! See you there?

Robert Paterson - old culture has to die

The old culture has to die

by with No Comment Future of WorkQuotes

Most organizations remain bound by the old rules. The power systems all use the old models. Only a handful of organizations have made the move. To make this kind of change, the old culture in the organization has to die. – Robert Paterson

It’s so refreshing when I engage with an organisation that views collaboration, productivity and efficiency through this lens. Tools alone cannot change an organisation or its employees’ work styles. Technological improvements must always be accompanied (or indeed, lead) by cultural change.

Coffee Time

Using random meet-ups to build relationships and strengthen company culture

by with No Comment Future of WorkSocial Business

I love this idea…

One initiative we’re trying at the moment is CoffeeTime. CoffeeTime is an app, created in less than a day by Daniel, one of our developers. It works by pairing people up randomly, to meet and greet each other, often with someone you may not normally interact with. It doesn’t matter what level in the org chart, or role each person plays. Anyone can be matched up for a 30-minute chat (though people can choose to opt-out, of course). It aims to encourage the cross-team communication and serendipitous learning which otherwise happens naturally when co-workers share an office.

At its heart is the idea that the most important things to learn are often those you didn’t even know you needed to. By making more connections with the people you work with, it increases the likelihood that you’ll have access to someone who can help you further down the line. Maybe that person is having a similar problem or has experienced it before and can point you in the right direction. Or maybe you just end up making a new friend!

CoffeeTime visual

Either way, once a week CoffeeTime runs and you’re matched up with someone else in the organization. Each of you receives an email telling you who that person is. You then take it from there and arrange to meet in person or over a Hangout, to eat lunch or just chat.

The folks at Fog Creek who invented the CoffeeTime app have now open-sourced it and so you can try the concept out in your organisation.

I believe that any digital  transformation project needs to embrace and enable face-to-face as well as online relationships. I therefore think that this model has real potential in breaking down barriers, developing stronger cross-departmental ties and reinforcing an open and informal culture of collaboration.

What do you think? Would you consider running a similar app at your organisation?

New Clues!

The Clue Train is back!

by with No Comment BooksFuture of WorkSocial Business

For many in this industry, The Clue Train Manifesto was a seminal work in the evolution of the internet, and in many ways forecast the development of social media and social business.

As I noted in my Social Connections session in Stockholm, it’s incredible both how prescient the site was (written back in 1999), and also how 15 years later, so many organisations are still failing to take note of the theses it offered.

The Clue Train Manifesto book is front and centre on my bookshelves in the office, and it gets thumbed through at least once a month.  The authors have gone on to varied and greater things, and the site has still looks much as it did 15 years ago, so I thought that was that.

So, imagine my surprise when I came across this today:

New Clues!

Yep! Two of the original authors, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, are back with their thoughts on today’s internet.  Here’s the intro:

Hear, O Internet.

It has been sixteen years since our previous communication.

In that time the People of the Internet — you and me and all our friends of friends of friends, unto the last Kevin Bacon — have made the Internet an awesome place, filled with wonders and portents.

From the serious to the lolworthy to the wtf, we have up-ended titans, created heroes,  and changed the most basic assumptions about How Things Work and Who We Are.

But now all the good work we’ve done together faces mortal dangers.

When we first came before you, it was to warn of the threat posed by those who did not understand that they did not understand the Internet.

These are The Fools, the businesses that have merely adopted the trappings of the Internet.

Now two more hordes threaten all that we have built for one another.

The Marauders understand the Internet all too well. They view it as theirs to plunder, extracting our data and money from it, thinking that we are the fools.

But most dangerous of all is the third horde: Us.

A horde is an undifferentiated mass of people. But the glory of the Internet is that it lets us connect as diverse and distinct individuals.

We all like mass entertainment. Heck, TV’s gotten pretty great these days, and the Net lets us watch it when we want. Terrific.

But we need to remember that delivering mass media is the least of the Net’s powers.

The Net’s super-power is connection without permission. Its almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want.

It is therefore not time to lean back and consume the oh-so-tasty junk food created by Fools and Marauders as if our work were done. It is time to breathe in the fire of the Net and transform every institution that would play us for a patsy.

An organ-by-organ body snatch of the Internet is already well underway. Make no mistake: with a stroke of a pen, a covert handshake, or by allowing memes to drown out the cries of the afflicted we can lose the Internet we love.

We come to you from the years of the Web’s beginning. We have grown old together on the Internet. Time is short.

We, the People of the Internet, need to remember the glory of its revelation so that we reclaim it now in the name of what it truly is.

There follow 121 new clues. I have no idea if they’ll be as influential as the first set were all that time ago. However you owe it to yourself to take 10 minutes out to read and digest…

Esko Kilpi

Learning from open-source developers

by with No Comment Future of Work

I have belatedly come across a fascinating 15-month old post by Esko Kilpi on ‘Emergence and self-organization‘:

What takes place in open source projects is typically not the result of choices made by a few (powerful) people that others blindly implement. Instead, what emerges is the consequence of the choices of all involved in the whole interconnected network, “the connective“, as Stowe Boyd puts it. What happens does not follow exactly a plan or a design, what happens emerges. It is about the hard to understand process of self-organization.

After an insightful description of why the open-source development model is so powerful, Esko looks over the wall into organisational structure (emphasis mine):

Emergence is often understood as things which just happen and there is nothing we can do about it. But emergence means the exact opposite. The patterns that emerge do so precisely because of what everybody is doing, and not doing. It is what many, many local interactions produce. This is what self-organization means. Each of us is forming plans and making decisions about our next steps all the time. “What each of us does affects others and what they do affects each of us.”

No one can step outside this interaction to design interaction for others.

An organization is not a whole consisting of parts, but an emergent pattern in time that is formed in those local interactions. It is a movement that cannot be understood just by looking at the parts. The time of reductionism as a sense-making mechanism is over.

What we can learn from the open source ecosystems is that organizational sustainability requires the same kind of learning that these software developers already practice: “All work and learning is open and public, leaving tracks that others can follow. Doing and learning mean the same thing.”

The biggest change in thinking that is now needed is that the unit of work and learning is not the independent individual, but interdependent people in interaction.

This switch from thinking of independence to interdependence (and thus from hierarchy to wirearchy) is one of the fundamental cornerstones of  ‘the Future of Work’. Esko does a great job of describing the complexity of working together in 21st century organisations, and why self-organisation and the capacity for life-long and every-day learning are such important personal attributes to identify in new employees and community members.

I also really appreciate the concept of an organisation as an ’emergent pattern in time’ (and thus always in flux), and finally the line ‘Doing and learning mean the same thing’. Great post!

Shift happens

by with No Comment Future of Work

Really enlightening post from Katryna Dow on Ello and the evidence for a major shift in the tech industry:

As Ello states, they don’t have an exit strategy. Maybe we are returning to the days when the journey can be as important as the destination?  Were the great inventors and founders of the past only concerned with flipping everything they invented?  Might changing the way society functioned, creating new forms of value or championing rights have motivated them?  There is an amazing reward in seeing what you create find a place and purpose in the world.

Not everything can be reduced to monetary binary value. What about the public good or greater good? What about the generations to come? If we only ever considered the return on investment for everything then would we risk falling in love, or having a family? We don’t do these things because they make a lot of economic sense; we do it because the experience is the reward.

Katryna mentions a list of people and organisations that validate this trend:

It is people and thought leadership that is forging the architecture, prediction and practical application of the shift that is happening. People and organisation that inspire like the following:

I really do believe that Katryna is onto something here, and that the ‘Greed is Good’ approaches of the 80s and 90s should be something of the past for at least the majority of startup organisations.  That’s not to suggest that I’m naive enough to fail to recognise that there will always be startups and funds that are purely motivated by making a buck as they are floated.  However, as we’re finding in all areas of this industry, the treatment of users as products and shareholders as customers are not the only, or indeed the best ways forward.