Notes from Culture2.0
Last week’s Culture2.0 was the inaugural event hosted by Sue Todd and Bruce Daisley.
A couple of weeks ago, they published a ‘New Work Manifesto’, with the intent to start a conversation about what workplace culture, after recognising that 2017 has been a true ‘year of reckoning’ as far as ethics, working cultures, organisations dynamics and just generally work being ‘less fun’.
I shared my thoughts on their manifesto here, and welcomed both the debate about how we can push it further, but also half a day to listen to a collection of speakers across a wide range of backgrounds on the topic.
The conference was easily one of the most engaging sessions I’ve been to in the past few years, and unfortunately, this resulted in me listening intently, and not taking particularly great notes. I’ve tried to decipher the scribbles the best I can — but if you’re interested in any of the themes below, I think the best option is to check out Bruce’s podcast, as many of the speakers from Culture2.0 have featured.
Dan Cable PhD opened the day with his thoughts on how emotions drive behaviours — and how many organisations pick the wrong emotions to create actions. Despite being the only creatures who innovate (“If an animal doesn’t have wings.. it just walks”), we’re awful at embracing change, and there’s a tension within business between policy and creativity, with growth and responsibility on the one side, and creativity and risk on the other.
Dan shared examples of how businesses like KLM approach innovation, with an inquisitive, curious, learning, answer-seeking behaviour, and how spoke about how creating environments where these positive emotions around innovation thrive — playing to the dopamine effects in the brain, over the cortisol effects of starting with threat and fear. Cortisol creates narrow focus, submissive behaviours, the opposite of creative, playful, experimental and learning behaviours desired, which dopamine encourages. When businesses wanted robots, people who just did simple tasks, fear worked, but the landscape of work has changed — and now we need emphasise people’s unique strengths and points of view, encourage creativity and ensure the ‘why’ of work goes beyond just money.
Next up, Andre Spicer, who opened with the observation that seemingly the closer you are to your workplace, the less work you get done, and there’s a long colourful history of the work place being thoroughly unproductive. Part of the unproductivity is encourage by Business Bullshit — those meaningless terms and processes which is simply talk empty of meaning. It’s easy to spot Bullshit. Is it empty of facts or is there any evidence of past success? Is there a plan for how it will actually work? Is it evading the real issue? It might make you look and sound confident though, and our economy is designed to create this sort of attention seeking behaviour — but it leads to bullshit jobs, politeness which means no-one ever calls out things going wrong, and layers of bureaucracy so you end up so far from actually doing your job. This leads to organisational stupidity, and overloads the organisation with the wrong jobs to be done. Andre asked us all to commit to cutting out one piece of BS every day.
We then had a much needed coffee break.
Ben Waber then took to the stage to talk about people analytics — we have no shortage of data on our people, and this gives us the opportunity to create AB tests in almost every facet of the working day, and smaller iterative test are far more effective than large re-orgs taking place. He shared the tons of data from various organisations he’s worked with, exploring interpersonal relationships and collaboration — looking at how groups within the same systems differ. He blew away some myths about remote working, and how it reduces the amount of communication between team members, and how it can lead to huge commercial downsides. He stepped through a ton of data on the complete lack of differences between women and men in the workplace, and how most of the problems around women’s progress is down to bias. He painted a picture of an office space which could mould itself around its people’s needs, or encourage serendipity — imagine the lift without buttons, which just took you to a floor where you’d benefit from an accidental meeting?
Finally, Oliver Scott Curry took to the stage to talk about Ethics and Morality as a form of cooperation, and the main attributes of whether someone is being ‘good’. He broke down moral cooperation in to a number of states, which seem to be globally recognised, such as mutualism, which explains why we feel bad towards people who resign. Oliver asked the question of whether organisations who are ethical at their core are better at cooperation, and how that maps against UK norms, and without doubt they do — companies which invest in CSR outperform their less ethical competitors, causally not just in correlation.
Sue Todd wrapped the conference talking about 2017 being a year of cultural reckoning — driven by two forces: the ability of technology to amplify voices such as whistleblowers, and the shift in leadership within organisations to a more diverse set of individuals, and hosted a panel about how organisations can do more to focus on positive cultures for its people, how leadership can foster these cultures (negatively as well as positively).
