Productivity rediscovered

In parallel with rediscovering how to think, I'm rethinking what it means to be productive.  (This unemployment thing seems to be starting a series...)  It's very much the same theme - let's be less busy, and do stuff better.


I'm thanking the chaos of the Freshly Hacked weekend for this one.  It's amazing on an intensive weekend (like a startup weekend or the design jam that kicked this whole thing off) how chaos and productivity are combined - or at least amazing for someone who aligns productivity and busyness.

Beautiful post on chaos not quite so lovely

The melee


It's not just that chaos promotes creativity, because realistically most of what is achieved, in my experience, is not 'creative'.  Most of the good work is refining, turning the indefinite into definite, synthesising diverse sources into coherent solutions, and diverse voices into a simple message.  A lot of the creation has happened before the weekend, with the backgrounds people bring, and is just teased out.


With a dedicated focus and pressure-cooker time restrictions, prioritisation is ruthless.  Deciding what not to do or include, or when to stop, seems tougher and more important than working out what to do in the first place.  Testing, refining and iteration are more effective ways to chart a course through the chaotic uncertainty than a busily refining linear approach.


Working better


The main message I took is that being productive requires not to work harder, longer, or to do what I'm doing more efficiently - but to work better by doing better things, and doing them properly.


Personally, I need to learn to not just do things that are 'better' themselves, but understanding when to do things, by having a better sense of my mood and motivations.  I also need better focus on what I'm doing, which will hopefully flow on from the first point, so that I can dedicate myself properly the first time.  'Smarter, not harder' - it's not new.


I'm good at planning, and much of the time it's very useful, but it does break down sometimes.  I need to stop finding myself doing things because they're on the todo list, and making the todo list instead match what I should be doing.  When my time was more constrained it seemed to make sense trying to manage my motivation, but in the meantime I've lost some of my ability to listen to it, and with more unstructured time it seems increasingly important to get that back.


I think in part this is because motivation, energy and inspiration are far more important resources than time. Time is handy, but only when these can be applied to it.


Productive chaos


A lot of time is spent chasing false solutions, working unproductively, realising you've just gone way too far, or too far off the mark.  It seems over the course of the weekend that a lot of your time was 'wasted' - but you know that what could have been avoided in hindsight nevertheless needed to happen.  I got home at after midnight on Saturday and spent around three hours doing a presentation that got scrapped, and redone from scratch on Sunday - in about half an hour.  But the final version was so beautiful it hurt, and would never have happened without the first one. (And I'm now a prezi pro, to boot.)


Despite so much time going anywhere but forward, you look back over a weekend and it seems amazing how far you've come.  As it turns out, being really productive is composed mostly of activity that is 'unproductive' itself.




And then, I get back into the real world, and need to make these realisations work for me on an ongoing basis.  It's easy to work differently for a weekend, but hard to effect lasting change.  You'll have to wait and see how that turns out.


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John Baxter
www.jsbaxter.com.au
@JohnSBaxter

Network-centric approaches to transforming systems

I've recently been nutting the value out of a great approach for working towards a long term vision within a complex system.  The approach was described as a 'network-centric approach to transforming systems' by John Blackburn.

I can't find much online, but John presented at a Collaboratory Melbourne meetup last November - these words are necessarily interpreted and regurgitated.

Applying a network-centric approach

It was described mostly in terms of organisational vision and capacity, but the principles fundamentally apply when:

• we have a broad-scale, long-term objective that requires systemic transformation (e.g. carbon neutrality)
• the system is complex (one we can't fully understand the operation of)

Transforming complex systems is a challenge because our understanding of them is never good enough to fully predict the outcomes of our actions.  This is why detailed, linear change plans will never work for this sort of change.  Nevertheless, we might know where we want (or need) to get to.  The network-centric approach starts by determining the key characteristics of the future you want to create (but not specific details).

Some change required is relatively simple, despite a complex context - for example increasing school attendance.  Traditional top-down policy implementation does not solve these because the context is too complex for a one-size-fits-all approach.  Nevertheless developing and prototyping local solutions (e.g. a design methodology) can make good progress because the extent of change required is more modest.

When transformation is needed, however, we need to use the system to catalyse changes - the extent of change required is too great for simple solutions, no matter how ingenious or well resourced they might be.  John referred to this as a 'pull' approach to working towards a vision.  In an organisational sense it was like implanting 'viruses' which disrupted the system to shift it onto a trajectory better aligned with the vision.  It isn't possible to know exactly what any given intervention will do, but persistently intervening can transform the system in ways that no amount of 'push' will achieve.

In other systems this intervention will take different forms, but the principle is the same: understand the characteristics you're aiming for, and intervene in ways that will disrupt the system and align it with those characteristics.  For example, trees planted along the bank of a river may hold the banks in place, encourage other greenery and plant life, and clean the water - much of which may be impractical to be created by force.

Apply to the individual

The Power of Pull was referred to that evening, and while it bears little resemblance to the content of the talk (unfortunately), it reinforces what I had been thinking - our 'careers' are sufficiently complex to approach them like this.  It might seem like we are in control and that a linear planning approach will work - this may be the case for some people. But in a highly networked, ever changing and unpredictable world, where job opportunities are more likely to open up by chance than design, it just doesn't work like that.

In part, that's the philosophy underpinning my employment policy and the way I'm going about sorting out my future in general - like this blog.

But what intervention?

What John didn't explain well was understanding what interventions to make.  Just because the impact can't be predicted doesn't mean all interventions are the same.  I'm still trying to nut that out, but I think that's where things get messy, and the simplicity of the approach breaks down.  I can't avoid the need to understand the structure of the system (e.g. that trees are an integral component of the river ecosystem, but that the kangaroos, while important, are secondary).  Your choice of action is only as good as your understanding of the system.  On the upside, if you can map them out then complex systems can have relatively simple interventions (Berlow TED talk - short but fantastic).

A complex system graph.  Times like these I'm grateful to be a mathematician!

On the other hand, your understanding might depend on actually getting off your backside and trying something. I guess that means I should get going!

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John Baxter
www.jsbaxter.com.au
@JohnSBaxter

Some things you might want to start with

Things you may or may not know if we haven’t been in regular contact recently.

Source: from soneone's blog

I have informally given notice of leaving the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office where I work.  I call myself an analyst of public administration systems (public transport) - my title is ‘analyst’.

Am looking to pivot my experience towards something more focused on innovation and understanding how to manage systems, particularly systems of public administration (e.g. regulation, social services), to deal with what the future will be throwing at us.  Particularly interested in design-focused innovation types like TACSI.  So yes, I’m looking for work!

Have been inspired by some of my recent experiences like the global sustainability jam, and a few others that I’ll look to post about over the next couple of months...

Am trained in literature and mathematics, and have a particularly analytical approach to understanding systems.  I’d be suited to economics, if only economic theory wasn’t so void of accuracy or moral value - soapbox posts to come on this no doubt (though I’m thinking of a separate blog along the lines of Economic Philosopher - how’s the ring?)

Currently live in Melbourne, but I'm not wedded to any location.

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John Baxter
www.jsbaxter.com.au

Newer beginnings

I often end up back to the Global Sustainability Jam weekend when talking to people about what I’m up to.

The Jam is a weekend developing a concept for a service, and a pitch for it, following an abridged service design methodology.  It was a great fun weekend, meeting a lot of interesting new people.

More than that, personally, it was an eye opener.  We may not have reinvented the wheel, but we did do things so far beyond what I’m used to that we may well have reinvented me.  It may not have happened overnight - but it has certainly catalysed a process akin to some pretty magnificent shampoo.

This process may speak more to my experience and employment than anything else.  My current employer, the state audit office, has offered great experience, but I don’t think it’s a very conducive environment to further growth or - at this stage at least - effectively creating value.  It is a deathly quiet environment, extremely product-focussed and in my experience largely anti-collaborative - not conducive to the sorts of skills I need to work on.  It is hierarchical and bureaucratic despite its size, and while at the local level there is lots of freedom with the work, it is difficult to generate value more freely.    It is also driven according to processes made to maximise vertical accountability and minimise risk, which don't necessarily deliver on value.

As someone relatively intellectual, analytical and mathematically trained, who prefers to work independently, it could almost be a perfect fit.  Indeed, if I hadn’t had a few Jam-like experiences over the last couple of years it would seem natural to me, and I might never have seen the light of day.

There were a few components of the Jam that made me sit up and ask whether the world really needs to be like that - almost in shock...

We worked together - collaborative working.  You know, a group of people working together towards a somewhat common idea, making decisions based on discussion and agreement, sharing and testing ideas, contributing where we could.  No signoffs or boundaries around our roles!

We just did it - we worked with things for long enough to be able to give them a crack, prototyped, and refined.  It didn’t matter if they weren’t perfect the first time round, or we didn’t elaborate plans to mitigate the risks of uncertainty.  We did it, and learnt more by trialling than we would have by analysing it all to death

I could do it - the biggest surprise was not so much that it was possible to work differently, but that I was able to!

And I liked it!

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John Baxter
www.jsbaxter.com.au