Needing a new-way-of-working
How we work and what we get done are two sides of the same coin. Changing the former can be the most effective way to improve the latter.
According to the “transformation demand chain” (below): If talents and teams are asking new questions, needing new insights, leading to new experiences for the customer made available through new technologies and competencies then they need a new way to work to be successful.
Benefit
The benefit of redesigning work is more productive methods, processes, outcomes and collaborations leading to measurable change.
At the same time making changes to what the work is without changing how we get there will only lead teams back to their old work and outputs.
“If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.” — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Visualizing the work in a map makes actions, habits, tasks, outputs etc. tangible and much easier to talk about and find improvements.
#Example 1:
Working with Kristin Halvorsen all the way back in 2007 we were asked to help improve how advisers at a governmental agency delivered value to the organizations clients.
We designed a version of the service journey where we through several workshops mapped what tasks people did and how they solved them. This created a specifically detailed map for employees visualizing their work, process, actions, collaborations, needs, outputs etc.. It was helpful for the people and the organization to understand how things got done, what to amplify and what to dampen. Enabling them to share and standardize a best practice and improve how they work.
This was early days (18 years ago) and is common practice today.
#Example 2:
Seeing that the current way-of-working had grown into a messy mix with everyone doing mostly their own thing leading to redundancies and non-consistencies made it hard to improve productivity and invest in scalable solutions with sizable effect.
We worked with the team to map out their work, outputs and outcomes, then cleaned up the process making it more efficient and effective.
#Example 3:
Being capability centric is just as limiting as being product centric.
If you work in an organization developing competencies seeing the work through the lens of what you are making instead of the people who will be using it can quickly lead to inefficient, clunky or pointless tools and processes.
Now imagine hundreds of people potentially all seeing work only through the lens of what they are making (their capability). And then imagine the recipient of all these capabilities, having to understand why someone made them, how they work and then how to Tetris them into their own workflow.
Imagine having to understand why someone made this capability for you, understand how it works and then how to Tetris it into your own workflow.
To make sure we could avoid this problem Leonardo Armani and I collaborated on making the Marketer’s Experience. The intention was to create a map of the work the marketers need to do and then apply this as a lens for all marketing capability developers to use as a lens looking at and designing their own work:
If you are building something for the marketer that has no fit in the map, then probably it’s not for them. If you are making something that fits then how can you improve it? And finally, seeing every other capability that is also in the map, how can you make yours available and useful in a way that is as smooth and seamless or even invisible to the marketer herself.
