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

Rediscovering thinking

One of the great things about hitting the road again has been rediscovering thinking.

The expectations of working and being productive tend to lump on us the need to be think-doing certain sorts of 'productive' (aka 'busy') things.  For someone who want to get lots of things done this means I'm typically think-doing well beyond 9-5. When you have so little time outside work and life's necessities, you really need to squeeze those last couple of hours a day.  I suspect I'm not the only one who pulls out their phone whenever they have a five minute wait for the tram, so they can cram it with something useful, like checking emails, or twitter, or just mindlessly flicking through notes.

I'm still pretty busy for the time being.  I got back from Adelaide last thing Thursday, barely in time for a full weekend at Freshly Hacked, and there are lots of bits and pieces to get on to. I'm way behind regular things like the news, events, blogging and my emails.  But things are different - I feel more relaxed regardless, I feel like I have time to do things like think.

Having a lot of unstructured time gives everything a different flavour.  Especially when you can't use it for busydoing.  Being on the bike in particular is great for that.  It's always been meditative, but at the moment it is also very productively contemplative - I noted down a couple of thoughts when I stopped every hour or two, not for the sake of doing something, but because the thoughts were worth following up on.  And mostly the sorts of generative, creative or insightful thoughts that busywork prevents you from having.

What I'm getting at is the value of different ways of thinking.  We know we have different personality types, but I haven't really appreciated different ways I myself think in different contexts - probably because of an overvaluation of busythinking.

Even today, on a day of 'doing things' I've taken a much less orchestrated approach.  I'm not doing it very well yet, but I'm learning.  It's never too late!

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John Baxter
@johnsbaxter
www.jsbaxter.com.au

A systemic approach to unionism

Many will be familiar with the love/hate opinion I have of unions.

I love unions because fundamentally supporting employees is important.  We live in a world where the agency of the individual is limited compared to the risks and importance of the workplace to our lives.

But unions are unconvincing in their approach to addressing this - and in my experience as a member unpleasantly unprofessional to deal with to boot (I can only imagine what it's like being involved professionally).

The complex, networked world we live in does not fit well into an oppositional approach to industrial relations - an 'us' vs 'them' perspective.  This is truer in some workplaces than others, and some unions get it better than others.

Learncalifornia.org

Yes sometimes a hard line is and will always be necessary.  But when?  How do different approaches contribute to a better workplace and better lives?  What role do unions have in education and improving transparency?  Finding employment?  Supporting networking and bringing people together?  Supporting individuals to improve their value, through training or otherwise?  Career planning?

All of these things contribute to good workplaces, but how they contribute is not easy to understand - the world of work is complex.  To understand what to do to best deliver a better employment situation for employees requires a sophisticated understanding of this world.

Do unions have this?  Do they take an informed approach?

Unions do some valuable work, but I'm yet to find evidence that they're doing it well.

(Written on thinking about John Quiggin's recent post on unions.)

 

John Baxter

www.jsbaxter.com.au

@JohnSBaxter

The impossible role of government

Peter Shergold spoke very well a couple of months ago on the challenge for government to meet contrasting expectations.  People expect government to leave them well alone to do what they want, but they also expect government to provide all this fantastic stuff, like flawless social services.


Like the Herald article last week on people's attitudes to toll roads - in the main, people expect not to have to pay for it, because that's the "government's problem"!

At the core of this is our perception of the role of government.  It is a logical conclusion of 'new management' approaches to government, founded in free market liberalism but with social democratic values, and a capitalist-liberal philosophy of the individual (who can and should pursue their own interest).

As Shergold explained, we need a more reliable model for the role of government, and also an alternative narrative, to displace this catch 22.

PEO

Organisations refining the idea of a 'thriving' society and how to deliver it (like TACSI in Adelaide and Participle in the UK) are providing a way to reconcile liberal and social values, but as yet it's only a start. The british government are going to need to build a model and narrative around this approach if their Big Society agenda is going to have any success - and indeed public administrators around the world will be hoping they can learn from the experience.

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John Baxter

www.jsbaxter.com.au

@JohnSBaxter

Responsibility in a complex world

Happy Australia Day!  I hope you all survived okay.
Many of you will be familiar with my philosophy on responsibility - essentially that we are responsible to do what we can, whatever that may be.  I like to reflect on this on Australia Day, and what this means as an Australian citizen.

I've been thinking lately about how responsibility and leadership work in a complex world.


Leadership often comes up in discussion of 'Australia' - usually bemoaning a lack thereof.  The leadership we can't see is that from the top.  The sort of nationalism-building narrative Paul Keating might praise, and demand from our political leaders.

ENS

But do we really need more leadership from the top, from a professional politician?


Innovation isn't effectively generated from the top.  The organic mess of local interactions is needed to generate the new ideas and understanding required.  Outside of the usual 'filtering up' philosophy, people study the generation of innovation in distributed systems.


Leadership in distributed systems is much less widely considered, but it's no less important.  Ideas are just potentials until something actually happens as a result, and you need leadership to deliver.  Sometimes you will be able to filter the idea up to someone else to lead - maybe your manager, or theirs.  In a complex world this isn't the best approach. When life gets challenging, the best point of action is likely not the top, but somewhere nearer the source of the idea.  Leadership needs to be distributed too.


And my point?  An increasingly complex world requires distributed innovation and leadership.  A system of distributed leadership requires us all to take responsibility.  Not for playing follow-the-leader with those above us, but for local leadership.


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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

Acting on motivation

I have done a bit of brainstorming lately on public administration and my interest in it.  It has lead me to think about a motivation>action combination which seems like a very useful starting point - not only in terms of public administration, but personally as well.

To understand the scope and space of different ways of working I needed to relate different methodologies to one another.  How can one talk about options between traditional and design approaches to policy development without being able to relate these methodologies?

Different methodologies all have different components and labels, seemingly irreconcileable, but have strong parrallels.  Starting points including problems, opportunities, policies, objectives and outcomes.  Finishing points include plans, policies, programs and actions.  So many different methodologies have vastly different interiors, but nevertheless start at something like this, and finish at something like that.  They're processes, they all start, and they all go somewhere (though they don't all finish).

TACSI working backwards approach

But they don't all start at different places.  It's not like design starts at a drawing board, but policy starts at a polling booth. Each one of them starts at some sort of motivator.

They all end at action - or at least at some sort of a program for action.

Motivator > (program for) action

So now we have some sort of a reference point to relate these different methodologies, and at least a conception of how to choose between them.  Identify your motivator, and work out what methodology is the best approach to realising it.

Unfortunately, methodolgies aren't determined by a judgement of the best approach.  They are determined by things like precedent, experience or profession.  Or where none of these are present there is no structured response at all!

What are your personal motivators?  What approach do you take to realise these?  Does this make sense considering the importance of your motivators and the options available?

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John Baxter
http://www.jsbaxter.com.au/
@JohnSBaxter