The future of work and the impact of technology – implications for leaders

A presentation for the BCS, November 2006

Dr. Gerry McSorley

Centre for Health Improvement and Leadership

What I don’t want to do

• Bore you silly with a' off-the-head-brain-’dump

• Hide behind futurology clichés

• Indebted to the work of John Knell, Michael Moynagh and Richard Worsley

What I do want to do

• Stress that as leaders – doing the future better is important

• Particularly the future that has already happened but is not here yet!

• That getting much of the future wrong is inevitable

Getting the future right is a bit tricky

‘Peace in our time’

Chamberlain, 1932

Crisis, what crisis’Callaghan, 1979

Anyone who thinks the ANC will rule South

Africa is living in cloud cuckoo land’

Thatcher, 1987

‘In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable’

Dwight D. Eisenhower

What I’m going to talk about in respect of technology

• The rise of self-service and outsourcing

• Open source innovation and public value

• Technology & networks

The rise and rise of self-service

• First Direct• Fifteen years ago only a telephone bank• Now 70% of its customers operate their

accounts online or through text messages• Headcount stable whilst customer

numbers have risen 10% to 1.1 million in past year

‘Meet your airline’s, your phone company’s, and your bank’s latest

employee:

You

The Economist

• Self-service + automation + offshoring = a triple whammy for ‘low value’ work

• Government is likely to begin offering a wide range of financial incentives to encourage users to carry out as many of their public service transactions as possible online

• Globalisation bites - from out-source to off-shore – call centres now – professional services next (Indian radiologists reading the X-rays of American patients)

• Innovation is therefore a necessary condition for survival

A new vision of the customer – Open source innovation and public value

A new vision of the customer?

• Customer as user, critic and partner• A ‘Customer Plus’ model if you like• Choice, personalisation and support• Advocates and joined up services• Co-production• Public value their control

Technology & Networks

Technology, networks & social capital

• Technology, and particularly new ICTs, really do change everything

• Pace of change is both incredibly rapid (penetration of mobile phones) and slow (everywhere wireless connectivity)

• ICT creates new possibilities for the social organisation of networks, for how work happens and our conceptions of offices, cities, health and social care

• Technology changes the scope of personal networks and the way we communicate

• The 1990’s were not spectacular – low bandwidth, low connectivity and little mobility – but:

• The current and next phase of technological development will deliver upon the promises made in the last one (proper wireless internet, always-on high bandwidth connections to the home, different and better types of software, particularly social networking software [MySpace, UTube])

Mobile phones matter - pervasive wireless connectivity is coming

next• Mobile phones have become a truly pervasive technology

• From status symbol to ubiquitous necessity• A fashion accessory• As the motorcar was to the boomer

generation, so the mobile phone is to current teenagers and tweenies – we need to understand current and future generations who are ‘growing up digital’

• We’re becoming accustomed to screen mediated living

• All this new technology is giving us unheard of abilities to multitask and micro-manage

• For the 40% of workers work use ICT, this is a big story

• However, most of us aren’t that enthusiastic about it

• If new ICT is creating a new work future, we are embracing it very tentatively

Labour saving devices that don’t save us

• ICT seen as cranking up the pressure – eroding the divide between work / home / life

• Both hero and villain in the contemporary work story

• From Blackberry to Crackberry

Key execution challenge – getting ICT to deliver

• Organisations continue to struggle with the ICT revolution

• Two elements:– How you use ICT to transform the way you

work– How you use ICT to transform the way you

reach and serve your customers

• You have to support people to work differently – giving them new kit is not enough

• ICT investments only deliver productivity improvements if backed up by corresponding investments in people, culture, and process

• IT systems don’t enable organisations – new types of work and information flow do

Why all the fuss about networks?

‘What I call a network society is simply a society made up of networks. It is a society in which everything that counts, the economy, technology, politics, media, social movements and interpersonal relations, is increasingly made out of information technology powered networks’

Manuel Castells, Author of the Network Society Trilogy

• Hot social and business networks have become the prerequisite for a successful career

• Organisations that are ‘networked’ derive competitive advantage

• Organisations are increasingly concerned to hire ‘networked, externally focused, leaders’

• What bureaucracy was for the beginning of the last century – so networks will be for the 21st

• Yet, our understanding of networks, and how they interact with ICT, remain under-developed

Networks and public sector delivery?

• National Service Framework for Mental Health specifies how mental health provision should be organised and delivered – implications:

• Need for seamless collaboration amongst Health professionals, voluntary sector, social services and police – multi-agency working

• So, a Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN) will have to lead, inform, and involve a care team from across a range of agencies to deliver healthcare in a local community

• Management of networks, knowledge-sharing etc hasn’t traditionally been a competency requirement of professionals in this context

• Likely to be a requirement of more public servants in the future

The operational reality for public and private sectors

• All organisations have two sides: doing existing things better; doing new things

• Preoccupied with improvement• Performance management and delivery• Lots of structural change• Under pressure to innovate and to develop

more effective service models

Public sector context in more detail – the glass half empty view

• Current approaches to public service reform may be reaching their limits.

• Service providers bemoan central targets that drive performance.

• Professionals complain about poor pay and heavy workloads.

• Users complain of poor quality, lack of personalisation and services that do not join-up.

• Ministers and senior civil servants worry about improving large and complex systems that are difficult to control.

• Innovation is widespread but difficult to propagate.• Attempts to make the public service machine work

harder, produce their own backlash.

• Demanding consumers have produced demanding employees – non deferential, entitlement driven

• Web based campaigns, 24/7 multi-media world, values based perspectives – all of them can lead to individual and brand reputations being damaged quickly and decisively

Work - Hard Times & Hardened Hearts

• Work is becoming more intense and demanding

• ICT developments are allowing work to pervade more of the working day and every location

• The death of loyalty - a broken psychological contract

• Growing fears of job and pension insecurity• Stress and absenteeism remain headline

issues

People paradox at work

• Job tenure stable• HRM and other sophisticated management

techniques spreading across UK workplaces• Rising living standards• The rise of creative and knowledge work• YET• Feelings of insecurity, stress, over-work and

dissatisfaction are on the rise within UK workforce

• Employee commitment more actively sought, yet more difficult to gain

The rise and rise of the demanding consumer

‘The latter half of the twentieth century has bred consumers and citizens so demanding that corporations have been left in their wake: “people have changed more than the organisations and institutions on which they depend”. The result is a double “crisis” of competence and confidence.’

Shoshana Zuboff and James

Maxmin, The Support Economy

Organisations under pressure

• Product ranges and service offerings changing more quickly

• Constant imperative to offer more differentiation and choice

• Customers expect high quality service at speed, when and where it suits them best

• They often know more about your products than you do – how do you enlist them as partners and critics?

• Creates pressure for greater devolvement and intelligent accountability inside businesses

• As we have become more demanding customers in the market, we have become more demanding employees at work

• We need to innovate not just to meet customer need, but the needs of our employees

Performance versus support

• Most organisations are getting better at performance management than support

• Let’s ask a question – over the last five years has your organisation done more to improve the performance context or more to improve the support context?

Moving to the upper right

Bureaucracy Agility

‘The Office’ Adhocracy

Low High

Experimentation,

discovery, flexibility

High

Direction, stability, order

Low

Agility blockers

• Line managers often lack the skills in job design, performance management, and in delegating accountability and responsibility to make agility happen

• Command and control and hierarchy are very resilient

• Risk and reward are often poorly balanced creating conflicting imperatives

• The use of ICT and technology remains tentative

• We’re still more time bound than time sovereign

• The leadership challenges are enormous

Leadership

‘Leadership is a difficult craft because the expectations are always so high, the blame so swift and harsh, and leaders have less impact over what happens to their organisations than most people imagine’

J.Pfeffer & R.I.Sutton ‘Evidence-based Management’, Harvard Business Review, January 2006

‘Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology’

• McAfee (Harvard Business Review, November, 2006) suggests that there are three key categories of IT, each of which provides different organisational capabilities, and different management interventions.

Functional IT Network IT Enterprise IT

•Will any of the new software on the market enable our staff to do their jobs more efficiently?

•How do our people collaborate?

•In what ways are our current processes not supporting the needs of our business? Which ones need to be redesigned? Which ones should be extended to customers and suppliers?

•Are our function technologies outdated? If so, why? What has changed?

•Do we have ways of letting qualitative information internally flow up and down and back and forth with our customers

•Are there best practices that should be embedded in our IT endeavours so they can be deployed more widely?

•If we wanted feedback on an important topic, how would we do it?

•Are there important business activities, events, trends, that we should monitor? If we aren’t monitoring them, why not?

•How do we know what our people are working on and what they think the hot topics are?

He goes on to suggest that Leaders have four critical responsibilities when it comes to IT:

1. They must help choose technologies2. Smooth the adoption of those

technologies3. Encourage their exploitation4. Look beyond the individual projects to a

broader view of how IT is likely to affect the organisation

The New Deal for Leaders

• Employees now expect their leaders to be visible, accountable and responsive

• How leaders meet their commitments is at least as important as whether they meet them and is often more important

• Did they do so in ways that strengthened their organizational and people capacity as a whole or weakened it?

Emerging truths

• The cult of the ‘heroic CEO’, with the odd rare exception, is dying

• The cult of execution – steady, pragmatic stewardship – is on the rise

• Engaging people, and getting things done through others, is becoming more, not less, important

‘People think of execution as the tactical side of the business, something leaders delegate while they focus on the perceived ‘bigger issues’. The idea is completely wrong.’

Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan; 2002

• Leaders don’t delegate the people thing• Your followers are bright, ambitious and

skittish – so your leadership challenge is a big one

• The holy grail, and least understood area, is how best to attract and manage creative individuals and teams

• All of which is producing new templates for key leadership traits, behaviours and approaches

• Tough empathy

• Knowing authenticity

Tough empathy

• Caring intensely about the work your people do

• Giving people what they need, not what they want

• Challenging inappropriate behaviours and inviting challenge back

• Asking tough questions and fostering robust dialogue in the business

• Engaging people to confront reality, embrace new challenges, adjust their values, change perspectives, and learn new habits

Knowing authenticity

• Know thyself

Even if you don’t like the answer

Stanley was deeply disappointed when, high in the Tibetan mountains, he finally found his

true self.

• Know thyself• See yourself as others see you• Reveal your differences and find your own

leadership style• Do what you say• Be clear about your core principles and

beliefs• Don’t collude with the culture• Change the business rather than ‘play the

game’

• DON’T worry about:

• Charisma• Personality• Strategy

• DO worry about:

• Teams• Execution• Reflection• Learning• Trust• Courage

‘There are two sorts of leader: Those that are effective and those that appear to be effective. You are better off in the former category because there is less competition.’

I Ghandi