WoW2021 - 'Ways of Working' or 'What a Week!'

Nationwide colleagues came together recently in celebration, reflection and to share learning of our journey towards increasing business agility. The week-long WoW2021 event combined talks and demos from teams across the Society, alongside perspectives from external thought-leaders on a huge variety of topics. The event allowed us to look both backward and forward at the evolution of our Society - celebrating learnings and providing energy for the potential of the coming year.

There was a collective sense of pride in the curiosity and courage of colleagues sharing their learnings with transparency and vulnerability. The level of interaction through the week was incredibly high and, with leading indicators of colleague engagement looking great, the lagging impact on business agility will be measured over the coming months and years.

In my own experience, it certainly helps me to pause, reflect and share my own learnings. Below are five reflections on themes from the week that I hope prompt conversation and to seek others' perspectives.

The power and fragility of Psychological Safety

Throughout the week, there were themes that traversed all the talks, awards and imbued the event itself - Psychological Safety being the most important in my opinion. Whether it be in the hugely powerful and uplifting talk from Linda Rising, or colleague conversations on the impact of lockdowns on mental health and the importance of self-care - the link from Psychological Safety to team health and performance was everywhere.

What was also clear beyond the power of Psychological Safety is its delicate fragility. The disproportionate impact of senior leaders' behaviour to enable and grow through empowerment, intent-based and servant leadership. The detrimental impact of command-and-control hierarchical management on teams' safety to experiment, learn and improve. In these incredibly uncertain times, the impact of leaders' actions is magnified more than ever before.

We have good examples already of the measurable impact on Psychological Safety in providing well-understood and safe paths for reflections and requests for help between colleagues, teams and our most senior leadership. In pursuit of continuous improvement and business agility, we will continue to share stories and patterns of success from leaders at all levels within our Society - nurturing openness, encouraging safe-to-fail experimentation and shared learning.

What are your reflections on Psychological Safety and its role in these uncertain, volatile and complex times?

'Diffusion of Innovation' - whilst you can't control behavioural change, the adoption pattern is consistent

Another consistent and powerful theme was the learnings from Everett Rogers's Diffusion of Innovation Model. This was eye-opening for me when I first appreciated its impact in the context of organisational change. For more on the background, Jon Smart does a brilliant job of explaining in both his talks and his book, Sooner Safer Happier.

The 'so what?' on how we consider this scientifically consistent adoption curve is profound. We cannot 'push' a change agenda on a pre-determined timeline. We cannot mandate new ways of working and expect this to result in a positive change in mindset or culture. Rather, change will be 'pulled' by colleagues and teams relative to their own position on the Diffusion of Innovation curve. There will be both Innovators and Laggards (or Sceptics) - this is human, natural and true consistently in all populations. Change adoption can be supported by leveraging Innovators and Early Adopters to help test, learn and adapt before Early and Late Majority engage and scale with the increased social proof and data. Change adoption can be suppressed by enforcing a rigid plan and mandating a fixed, closed period of evolution.

Incredible to think how far removed the logic and science here is from how organisations typically plan for culture and mindset change. The science leads us to a place where we would be better to commend, rather than command - to promote comment, rather than to promise control. Sharing stories and learnings from Early Adopters to provide safety for Early Majority and leveraging emerging social proof and data over time to support the Late Majority. I have a preference for the term Sceptics to Laggards in this context and will promote an environment of psychological safety to help bring valid, probing questions as opportunities to improve experimentation and adapt with data and measurement.

Reflecting these learnings, our WoW2021 event including a deliberate celebration and sharing of learnings and experimentation. With over 200 colleagues joining the first ever WoW Awards, our Chief Operating Officer, Patrick Eltridge, gave recognition to teams from across our Society in celebration of their experimentation and learning. The acceptance speeches were incredibly powerful and the cheers from colleagues were incredibly loud! This celebration and the associated individual and team stories will, I sense, have a markedly longer-term positive impact on growth in experimentation and continuous improvement.

How do you want to leverage the Diffusion of Innovation Curve to support rather than hinder your own change agendas?

You're never done Learning and the importance of Community

Last week provided a platform for a huge breadth and depth of insight and learnings - as well as the environment to engage with curiosity and questions. Whilst the content was incredibly diverse, the themes were consistent - providing complementary perspectives on common challenges. Whether it was Helen Beal understanding behavioural change through neuroscience or Alec Grimley introducing us to the Outward Mindset and self-deception, we sense these common threads through the narratives. For all the colleagues who shared views on the role and positive impact of Cynefin, Lean, Agile, DevOps, OKRs, Design Thinking or Chair Yoga - there was respect, psychological safety and openness to welcome all views as grist to the mill.

If I were to limit myself to one learning highlight (a tough, tough ask!) - it would be the ongoing and growing interest and engagement in our Book Club. We are currently reading Sooner Safer Happier - it is an incredible honour to have the co-authors (Jon Smart, Myles Ogilvie, Zsolt Berend and Simon Rohrer) sharing their time generously with more than 50 colleagues over eight sessions to reflect on each chapter and its relevance and impact to our Society.

Having the opportunity to talk to the authors directly in an environment of psychological safety, colleagues from across our Society are engaging, reflecting and challenging with the right intent to sense, probe and respond. The easy manner in which Andrew Woolford asks questions and helps open these to the attendees and authors is fantastic and I've loved hearing others' points of view.

My reflection here is simply that (to quote from Sooner Safer Happier) "you're never done learning" and it's the act of having the space and time to engage with these topics from many differing perspectives that provides the traction to help shape and run experiments to test, learn and adapt.

If you were running a Book Club for colleagues - what would your next read be?

Navigating uncertainty and driving continuous improvement through Visualisation, Measurement & Experimentation

Another very, very common thread through the week was the use of the word "experiment". Even the simple fact that this is becoming more common-place is, from my perspective, reassuring and positive. Recognising and responding to uncertainty by taking an increasingly hypothesis-led approach to change is key. Our lives at home and at work are effectively being shifted inexorably (thanks to David Snowden and cynefin for framing this) from Complicated to Complex (and sometimes even Chaos) by virtue of the increasing 'unknowable-ness' world we live in.

Through the sessions with Jon and detailed beautifully in Sooner Safer Happier, the best 'treatment strategies' for each of the domains are framed and, with increasing awareness and adoption of this 'sense-making' framework, there is a common language emerging that reflects and respects the terrain.

Experimentation - particularly in this emergent context of Complex - is relatively new for us, with the growth in its use giving a leading indicator of the growth mindset and psychological safety that is being nurtured. So many of the in-house teams who wanted to share learnings or were nominated for awards referenced experimentation as key to their progress.

An increasingly popular WoW Accelerator provides the Measurement & Insight that underpins teams' experimentation. As we mature our understanding of flow, bottlenecks and impediments - we can see an increasing adoption of this scientific method for continuous improvement based on baselines, hypotheses and leading/lagging indicators.

My reflection here is on the power of framing experimentation through cynefin, alongside the positive impact of visualisation and measurement to support a continuous improvement mindset. We can see viral growth in teams' adoption - a veritable 'crossing of the chasm' at team-level. More interesting still, is senior leadership interest as an emerging 'customer segment' - seeking to promote empowerment through democratised, rather than weaponised data in support of teams' learning and experimentation.

How do you visualise and measure flow - does this support continuous improvement through test, learn, adapt cycles?

Shifting to Outcomes over Outputs

My final theme is the shift from 'project to product', from 'output to outcomes', from 'measure of performance to measure of effect'. Almost all talks and content referenced this journey - it is clear that we unlearning by doing for many of us schooled in milestones as measures of performance. There is growing interest in the role of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to empower teams to set incremental, measurable results aligned to strategic priorities. This shift in approach and mindset is supported by colleagues shifting to coaching rather than policing, and through the creation of content such as the Value Toolbox.

Change resulting from this journey traverse our Society - empowering teams and driving up high autonomy with high alignment to strategic goals and organisational purpose. We can see the shift most visibly in our pivot to Missions - providing strong alignment through Member Needs (Purpose), with Communities providing the skills (Mastery) and focus on Accountable Freedom (Autonomy).

My reflection here is that we are, in WoW2021, sensing only the foothills of this profound, positive impact. I'm excited to see where this emergent journey of empowerment and experimentation takes us and feel hugely proud of the progress and learnings so far.

What are your thoughts on defining and measuring value? Do your teams promote high alignment and high automony?