Building further on the insights of gamification guru Gabe Zichermann, let’s dive a little deeper into the definition and its components. Last spring I had the opportunity to interview him on the Techguru conference in Brussels. In an amazing 40 seconds he unveils the essence of gamification.

The Definition

In fact, there are different definitions for gamification, depending on who you talk to.

The use of game mechanics/dynamics to drive game-like engagement and actions in non-game environments (e.g. work, education, exercise, etc.)
- Michael Wu

Inventing new work and business practices that engage employees, customers and consumers as effectively as a good game.
- Jane McGonigal

The process of using game thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engage users.
- Gabe Zichermann

While all of these definitions demonstrate that it is about the use of game mechanics, I prefer to show all three of them because they use a slightly different emphasis. More precisely:

• That it’s about non-game environments (Wu)
• That it’s about engagement (McGonigal)
• That it’s about problem-solving (Zichermann)

Dynamics + Mechanics = A Process

As Zichermann pointed out in the above video it is essential to make a distinction between:

• Game dynamics: how we choose to think about the world, the way we solve problems, and how we interact with other people;
• Game mechanics: the tools we use to play games, such as points, levels, badges, leaderboards, challenges and rewards.

The art of finding the right mechanics to respond to the dynamics of a specific situation and creating a process over time is gamification. The below drawing shows some examples of how some mechanics respond best to some dynamics at hand (drawing based on this presentation of Michael Wu).

Game dynamics and mechanics are proving to be critical for the next generation of social networks. We will be witnessing a similar wave heading towards organizations with a delay of … well … ummmm … depends on how late your organization already is today in unlocking the potential of social media. As a rule of thumb: apply the same delay and the same change-pains caused by being a laggard.

As modern managers we know that the effects of a carrot-and-stick management style are limited to the short run benefits. In the long run the effects disappear as soon as the perpetrator of the punishment or the rewarder of the reward disappear from the scene. In the best case scenario, carrot-and-stick management leaves no traces, but most of the times it numbs people into employment and education systems that produce sheep.

Fortunately there are alternative ways to stimulate behavior change, other than rewarding or punishing. Instead of focusing on the behavior, we can focus on the context. The only problem with this approach is that changing a context is rarely sufficient for sustainable behavior change. Let’s have a closer look and see how we can fix that…

Shaping Context

If you think behavior is the problem, then you will only respond with measures that will alter that specific behavior and nothing else. Unfortunately, measures that are focused on behavioral change are not lasting because … they focus on the behavior! Let’s face it: behavior is a temporary thing that is determined by circumstances. As an illustration, have a look at this video of the musical staircase.

What we see in this video is that people are changing their behavior because the path – to be taken literary in this video – shapes the new behavior. These approaches to behavioral change are popular because they are measurable in time and volume. On top of that, the cause-and-effect relationship is very clear because the ‘stimulus’ and the ‘response’ are matching very well. Pavlov knew this. It’s called behaviorism.

But what happens after the round of applause? Ultimately, when the excitement of the newest and coolest thing has passed old habits take over and people will use the moving staircase again.

Reducing Context

In a closed setting it is possible to switch off the moving staircase and to force users to use the only staircase that is left. This is what we often do in major ERP projects: we disable all other legacy software that was previously used to get the job done. That way the users have no other choice but to use the new software that was installed.

Later you may hear that we did excellent communication work, but what we did in reality was produce a branded one-way information stream geared at making sense of the changes that we forced upon the people. Goebbels knew this. It’s called propaganda.

The problem with a closed setting is that the times are changing: even IT systems and HR policies will have to open up eventually. In a changing world there will be moving staircases everywhere. Herding the people by means of narrowing down the is not an option anymore. In fact, it is a time bomb because, not only will this waste your energy in controlling, policing and monitoring what people can and cannot do; it will also make sheep out of them. It’s just another carrot-and-stick technique – and a harmful one. Pavlov knew this as well. It’s called learned helplessness.

Shaping Habit

So if rewarding, punishing, shaping or impoverishing a context are not guaranteeing sustainable behavior change, then what is? A while ago I underscored the importance of rituals and habits. A ritual is a way of shaping reality so you can deal with it. And if you and your community fellows have that thing in common it becomes a distinctive feature of your community.

A habit is the same as a ritual, but on the individual level. It’s how we deal with reality. We do certain things our own way. Little things. And it’s the sum of a million simple things a day that give us a sense of security and identity. Habit is the daily victory of forgetting that the nature of reality is unpredictable and groundless. It’s never the same river twice, but through our habits make it so. We would go crazy if we were to approach reality without rituals and habits.

If we want a behavior to stick it is essential to break through to this level. The one thing you need to remember is  that there is only one gateway to mold a behavior into a ritual and later into a habit, and it is called identity. People will only permanently adopt a new behavior if:

• it is shaped by the behavior of peers (i.e.: a ritual)
• they can identify with this behavior (‘this is who I am’)

A great example of such a behavior change is the Don’t Mess with Texas anti-littering campaign that is illustrated in the best seller Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers. Texas had a roadside litter problem — and it was diagnosed to be conflicting with­ the self-image of Texans. Instead of running an ad campaign pre­sent­ing new facts about the damage litter causes, they re-framed con­cern for litter into a matter of Texas-pride, where Texan celebrities came out against littering, say­ing “Don’t mess with Texas.”

This quickly became a favorite bumper sticker, was known and could be recalled by 73% of Texans just a few months after the campaign was launched. Roadside litter in Texas declined nearly 30% within a year. The campaign was so effective that the state abandoned other expensive anti-littering campaigns, and five years into the “Don’t Mess With Texas” campaign, roadside litter had decreased 72%. Identity seems to be the gateway to anchor behavior into habit. Instead of shaping a new context like the musical staircase, or reducing the context, the campaign focused on the identity of Texans.

What this means for Organizations

The one thing we should remember is that behavior is not the problem, identity is. As long as we think behavior is the problem, our actions will be focused on rewarding punishing or, at best, shaping or reducing context. What we should search for instead is the gateway to identity in order to shape rituals and habits. They are the ultimate context to anchor sustainable behavior change.

So how would this alter your rewarding strategy, your branding, your employer branding and ultimately: your employee branding? One thing is certain: you will have to look for the different ways for people to connect than the reporting lines and boxes of the organization chart. No identity gateways there. Instead, visualize the social architecture of your organization. Chances are you will find plenty of gateways to communities, rituals and habits in there.

For more than 37 years I have been looking at the world from a different angle. Not sure about the purpose of education or the justice of homework. Lost in dreams and finding comfort in drawings. Around the age of 12 the majority of my teachers had given up on me. That was OK, because I had lost interest in them as well.

It’s All Wrong

Somehow I gathered the courage to make it through highschool and even attended college. Two degrees later the system had straightened me enough to think I wanted a ‘normal’ career. I ended up as a business consultant – not really knowing what it all meant.

During that period I came in touch with the most complex methodologies one could ever imagine. Planning and calculation of projects and programs like there was no tomorrow. Fancy books on how to impress customers and how to hide the fact that you are extrapolating assumptions instead of … well … just asking if what you think is correct.

This worked for more than a year. But then old symptoms came back: the different angle, and the resistance to conform to a behavior that kept me out of trouble. The solution was to go freelance, that is: breaking free as a last resort. Until now this kept  me out of even bigger trouble, i.e.: away from the investigations from the man in the mirror.

But since a few days, the man in the mirror is back, and he has three questions. Apart from the “What on earth are you here for?” question – of which we both agreed to keep for a more critical point in time – these three questions are business related.

The First Question

The first question was inspired by the observation that I spend about 90% of my day ‘planning’ things. Therefore, the man in the mirror thought it was fair to ask: “Why are you planning?”

• On first sight the answer is straightforward: we plan in order to ensure time, money and manpower are spent as effectively as possible;
• But then why do we always come up with such complex plans, estimations and deadlines?
• Most of all: why does the majority of our plans fail to meet those complex criteria?

The man in the mirror was right. What’s the point in planning if most of the times we are not able to stick to the plan?

The Second Question

So he popped the second question – on April 1st to be precise: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ You can imagine my reaction to that one: ‘Are you kidding me?’. He was not.  In fact he was reminding me of an article by Seth Godin on the Lizard brain.

The right answer to that question is: the chicken crossed the road because its lizard brain told it to. And that’s when I realized that 90% of our planning activities are done because our lizard brain told us to. Most of the times, we plan because:

• everybody else does it;
• we feel insecure without a planning document;
• it is a ritual we cannot do without
• we need something to hide behind

Sometimes it seems like detailed planning and procrastination is the way a plan should be made. I’d rather say it’s a form of resistance. To quote Tom Peters:

They say plan it; I say do it.

The Third Question

The third question was the real question: “So if planning does not result in reliable plans, then why should we even bother to plan at all?”

Answering that part was actually pretty easy to do. I just had to think back at the times that I was excited about a plan or the results of a project. It is not so much the analysis and distribution of manpower, money and time that made the difference, but rather the spending of a fourth resource: attention.

Planning matters when:

• it is an instrument of communication – keeping different parties on the same page at the same pace;
• it creates momentum
• it is simple, straightforward and easy to understand
• everyone around the table is able to translate it into their own words

Finally, he asked if I was saying that time, manpower or money don’t matter? No. The only thing I said is that if you don’t take care of that precious resource ‘attention’ in the planning process, you might as well forget about the  accuracy of other three.

And that’s when the man in the mirror finally said: “Go to bed Luc, you have some planning to do tomorrow”.

Bednet links 6 to 18 year old children in Flanders who are suffering from long term and chronic diseases to their own classroom through the Internet. This way, they can follow as many courses as possible during their absence and stay in touch with their teachers and class mates. Bednet is carrying out pioneers’ work in this field and is working on a structural solution for all children with long term diseases.

Therefore the time and effort that would otherwise go to the creation of a card was now spent on the creation of this video.

Also have a look at the below video (in Dutch) explaining how Bednet works. It is a project worth talking about and it is managed by a team worth boasting about.

Happy New Year,

Joeri & Luc.

The way we run our companies and projects today was inspired by the logic of a 120 years old Scientific Management.

Command-and-control was the slogan that would create economic growth. And it did. Without any doubt, our economy, our society and our well-being would not have progressed to the current levels of prosperity without compliance and obedience.

What Got us Here Won’t Get Us Any Further

In fact, the compliance to strict rules and procedures was the shortest path to productivity. Without any doubt, carrot-and-stick leadership is the best way to get things done in a predictable economy based on scarcity and competition.

Creative concepts such as empowerment and co-creation may be fun, but they don’t bring home the bacon. This trade-off of the traditional economy is demonstrated below:

But the good old economy isn’t what it used to be. The traditional economy is sputtering and it seems to be more than just an innocent cough.

The digital economy has taken over and its dynamics are radically different:

1. The means of production are available to anyone in the digital economy;
2. Transaction costs and shelf-space costs are close to 0 in this digital economy;
3. “Wisdom of crowds“: your brand is no longer a logo or a slogan: it is the story your customers tell about your product.

Does this mean that productivity is no longer the straightest path to success? No. Instead, this means that compliance is no longer the best way to be productive. Productivity is still the bottom-line, but we need to redefine what it means.

Why We Need Co-creation

In a world where information is no longer scarce, productivity is about connecting customers and employees in a different way. Customers own your brand by advocating or disliking it.

Like it or not, the internet has shifted the ownership of your brand to your customers. The real value of your marketing efforts is in the message received by your customers, and no longer in the initial message as it was intended by your company.

Here is the twist: when consumers own your brand, productivity depends on your ability to include customers into the story of your product. The same goes for projects: ownership demands for inclusion into the creative process.

As a consequence, compliance is no longer the shortest path to productivity. Have a look at how the power-laws have shifted since the internet has liberated information out of scarcity.

Without any doubt compliance is still the shortest path towards a stable objective. It calls for well-defined function descriptions and performance reviews. And did you notice that it also makes sheep out of your workforce?

Get Dumber, Not S.M.A.R.T.er!

In an earlier article, I have underscored why SMART top-down controlled organizations with diligent employees are in trouble. They functioned well in an environment where the amount of information was fixed. The manager receives the information, interprets and processes it and then hands out the instructions. In fact, this has been the secret of growth in our economy over the past decades. And it has a huge downside: learned helplessness.

But now a shift is happening: the amount of information is overwhelming and most people, teams and companies are paralyzed by the flood of information. The result for SMART corporate decision-making is painstaking: as a central commander you need to process even more information faster. No matter how hard you try, you will always be too late in this new information-driven economy.

The advice for leaders is clear:

1. Get dumber by distributing the intelligence in the community of your brand (big deal: giving up control), and
2. Redefine intelligence: it’s not in the manual but in the interaction.

The Good News

The good news is that the same dynamics that have made information abundant have also made it easier to connect with customers. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, wiki’s, etc. have taught us a new form of interacting.

Without being aware of it, customers have picked up a new form of literacy and interaction; that of the digital economy.

This even goes for internal projects serving the ‘internal customer’, because just like your customers, your employees know how to navigate these platforms.  Being an employee does not undo the social and navigational skills we picked up on social networks. That is why blogs work really well inside companies too.

The Bad News

If you came across the previous paragraph without uttering “yes but”, chances are that you have never seen a company from the inside.

So let’s be honest: having clarity on the need for co-creation will not make it happen. There is a price to pay, and it is the same price as in any transformational change endeavor:

• Sponsorship: Leaders who lead by example;
• A Clear Vision: Pulling a straight line from the customer to the CEO;
• Ownership: Hosting the community of your brand;

By the way: the good news for organizational change practitioners is that this is what we are good at; the only difference is that the territory of this kind of change initiatives is uncharted territory.

Now, the failure rates are as high as 70 % according to McKinsey. For those ready for a heart attack, Oxford based research by Chris Sauer finds failure rates as high as 93% when the measure is ‘On Time, On Budget, On Scope (OTOBOS) and intended results are delivered.

Why do we keep doing projects that might fail?

It is rational to do so in most organizations: it gives people a job, it allows sponsors to be seen to be active and it is often politically very dangerous to suggest that a project might really fail. Who wants to be the messenger and shot?

Warning signs on a risk register are one thing, but to call out ‘this project has a 15% chance of success’ is another. On the other hand, who wants to hang around a failure? Particularly if they are avoidable – which they are when you know what to look for.
We also tend to hope that this time will be different and that our good intent and better planning this time will be sufficient to over come the cynicism, agendas, and background cultural issues that get in the way.

Change is the Only Constant

At the human level, this is costly – frustration, doubt and cynicism at change, leadership intent and whether anything good will come of a project this time around. From the business perspective – it’s also costly. By one estimate, a minimum of USD 330 billion dollars was wasted on projects in 2008. That’s an astonishing amount.

Failure rates of this level have been around for decades. So have successful projects. It’s not all bad news.

The reality is we all change all the time. Most of us have picked up an iPad (new this year), use a mobile phone (my first one was a brick in ‘98) or surf the internet to book a flight or check out a restaurant (me last night – and I couldn’t have done that a decade ago). The thing is, all these changes have helped me in some way or other – connect with those I want to, excited me or given me choices I didn’t have before.

At the personal level, a few years ago I was dissatisfied with my life and I’ve consciously taken on a personal journey of transformation – and in truth, while there were periods that were black, I’m far closer now to who I wish to be than I was. I’m counting the process as a success.

With longer term transformations, the process is as much part of the ‘result’ as the official goal be it an individual or an organization.

If as individuals, we can change (a new phone) or transform (choose to become fundamentally different), as a human collective organizations can and do too.

As a long time project and change manager of assorted business projects (SAP, CRM, outsourcing, shared services, vision & mission, cost-cutting, re-engineering…) I got curious, what were the common factors of successful projects? What undermined success?

The Facts

For data oriented logical types:

• Up to 93% of projects fail to deliver their intended results
• This is the equivalent wasting of up to 70% of the investment
• Those that invested in adequate organizational change management delivered 46% higher returns
• 80% of the issues that undermine results from projects are identifiably and addressable up-front

(For more on the rational side of setting up for success, see Chapters 2 & 3 of The Success Healthcheck for IT Projects. Yes, it’s about business projects based on IT as IT is a pervasive source of change in our lives – and 99.9% of these require organizational change management!)

To put this in human scale terms, getting a successful project is like dating and staying married:
Meet a lot of people with only a small minority working out (assuming one is dating with the anticipation of a long term relationship).

• Numerous dinners, speed dating events, emotional roller coasters etc that seem to amount to little until Ms/Mr Right is found. Divorce is even more expensive option when a relationship finally comes to an end.
• Continued investment of emotional energy is needed to keep the relationship alive.
• Our friends and family can often tell us if it’s a fit very early on if we care to listen and act.

There are always the courageous ones who will shoot for the ‘A’ even at the risk of admitting to possible failure.

They asked me, “So if 80% of the risks to results from my project can be identified early on, what should I as a practitioner look for to do a Success Healthcheck?”

The Checklist

As an organizational change practitioner, there are 8 elements you should focus on. They are:

1. Is the Intent Clear? If we don’t know what we are aiming for…    Like in the search for Mrs/Mr Right specificity is good. There are eight areas that require definition – including the experience of the project;
2. Is the Business Case Robust? If the funds are there, great. If they are not sufficient…   Then political will and executive sponsorship under-estimate what is required for success or the project is not high enough on the bigger priority list.
3. Is the Results Delivery Process Reliable? If we don’t reliably deliver results from projects, why is this time different (ok, yes, you are involved, but aside from this, what else is needed?)    Where things have been simplified (KISS) so far that the KISS no longer reflects reality. My personal favorite over-simplification: “let’s assume that all the people are motivated by the same things and respond in the same way”
4. Is the Motivation Energised? If the change is working with a groups motivation … or not    If a change is not in the personal interests of individuals, why would they be enthusiastic? Resistance is someone refusing to do what they are told – often as it is not in their interests. That’s a sensible lack of motivation! It’s rational at the individual level and dysfunctional for the organization.
5. Does the Project Align to Current Strategic Position? The bigger the gap between current reality and the project’s strategic vision, the bigger the job (and the more the business case needs to be sound). And the more risky it is, the more things are likely to change and the more complex. Exciting, stimulating – and less likely to succeed.
6. Does the Operational Context Support the Project’s Intent? Operational rules in many parts of an organization are like the challenges of a golf course: roughs, water traps etc. You can play a game, but it is harder and requires more skill. Where you are going to have to do more work is in the organizational practices that – while often well meaning for a stable environment – are not supportive of a dynamic environment.
7. Does the Flow Favor Project Intent? Does the flow of organizational memory and history favor your project? Are there recent good experiences that you can build upon? On the down side, is there left-over cynicism that your project needs to deal with from past failures?
8. Are the Balancing Dynamics Aiding Project Intent? This is the home of complexity and dynamics and systems and ‘absorbable stages’. Be attentive to areas where people or events can convert state from being neutral to enthusiastic or to being against. Finally, also look for areas in the organization where burnout or turnover will affect performance and thus your projects.

Now, having identified a few ‘health risks’ you can make an active choice… to return to our dating/marriage metaphor…

• To get the support and advice you need to address risks to the project/relationship
• Decide there are too many risks and that this project is a bad date or a divorce waiting to happen and quit now by closing out the project
• Wait and see.

Or you could get a copy of the Success Healthcheck for a colleague and give it to them with a note to say ‘let’s have a healthy project’.

___________
Check out the Cool Friends page on this blog for Joanne’s profile.

It all started in 1809, when Carl Friedrich Gauss published the monograph  “Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientium” (now repeat that one more time with your eyes closed…) where among other things he introduced the normal distribution. This is a bell-shaped curve where most values cluster around a mean, while outliers can be found above and below the mean.

For example, human height often follows a bell  curve, with outliers who are unusually short and tall and the bulk of people being concentrated around a mean height, such as 70 inches (178 centimeters) for American men. When data which follows a normal distribution pattern is graphed, the graph often resembles a bell in cross section, explaining the term “bell  curve.”

These Normal or Gaussian distributions can be found in a wide variety of contexts, and if you ask me: they are everywhere! As you go through these 10 bell-shaped thoughts you will note that I am recycling some stuff I have published over the past three years. Also, I am mixing in some new elements. Old wine in new bottles if you will – but for me it does the trick.

1. The Diffusion of Innovations

What is it?

For starters, in a 1962 book called The Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers stated that adopters of any new innovation or idea could be categorized on a classic bell-shaped curve as described here:

• Innovators (2.5 %) Venturesome, educated, multiple information sources, greater propensity to take risk;
• Early Adopters (13.5%) Social leaders, popular, educated;
• Early Majority (34%) Deliberate, many informal social contacts;
• Late Majority (34%) Skeptical, traditional, lower socio-economic status;
• Laggards (16%) Neighbors and friends are main information sources, fear of debt.

Why is it important?

If you are about to introduce and organizational change you will find the exact same diffusion of crowds inside organizations.

How do I use it?

In short: I use it as a compass. Rogers found out that this diffusion – and these proportions form a reliable pattern. Therefore, this chart gives me patience and reassurance in difficult moments.

Imagine you have just kicked off an organizational change program and you get nothing but very bad reactions. Of course there is some feedback in there, but chances are that you just landed your change vehicle in the middle of the laggards’ nest. So stay positive and keep looking for the other slices of the curve!

2. The Chasm

What is it?

Building further on Rogers’ observations, Geoffrey Moore’s key insight is that the groups adopt innovations for different reasons. According to Moore, early adopters are technology enthusiasts looking for a radical shift, while the early majority wants a productivity improvement. Both groups are divided by a chasm. According to Moore:

• Technology Enthusiasts (Innovators) are explorers;
• Visionaries (Early Adopters) are more geared towards exploitation. They are not especially bothered by the fact that the product doesn’t work. They are willing to make it work;
• Pragmatists (Early Majority) want a product that works. They want a 100% solution to their business problem. If they get the 80 % that delighted the visionary, they feel cheated, and they tell their pragmatist friends;
• Conservatives (Late Majority) buy products because they really have no choice. They are not reassured by having books about the product, because the existence of books implies the product isn’t simple enough to use. Conservatives will not tolerate complexity;
• Skeptics (Laggards) are not going to buy, though they may talk other people out of buying.

Why is it important?

Now that we know that different crowds come to the surface each time you introduce a change, Moore’s observations tell us where the real challenge lies: crossing the chasm; i.e.: winning the hearts and minds of the 85% who want solutions and convenience. The problem in crossing the chasm is that the visionaries aren’t good references for the pragmatists. They provide tales of heroics. Pragmatists want references from other pragmatists.

How do I use it?

In short: I use it to keep my head out of the clouds and to get my feet on the shop floor. It is obvious that the innovators and the early adopters will never oppose or object the changes you are implementing. Another word for the left hand side of the chasm is a project cocoon: a safe group of like-minded people. On the right hand side of the chasm you will find people who want solutions and convenience. And they represent 85% of your target population!

The challenge of organizational change management is to get your ass to the other side of the chasm. And it takes a great deal of emotional intelligence to cross the chasm. The interactions you have at the other side increase the quality of the solution you are building – to the same extent as they are grinding your nerves. Just remember: the best work is done with the heart breaking or overflowing.

3. The Tipping Point

What is it?

In his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell investigated what determines the moment of critical mass, the threshold, or even the boiling point of a marketing effort.

Wikipedia describes it even better: “the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.”

Why is it important?

Once you hit a tipping point all the dynamics change. All of a sudden your product, idea or trend you have been pushing starts spreading like a virus. What once seemed impossible now all of a sudden has become unstoppable. Inexperienced project managers are often taken by surprise when the tipping point pulls them into an ugly acceleration.

In times of ugly acceleration hanging on to control will kill you. Experienced project managers know that ‘control’ is the way to the tipping point, but they also know that they need to switch to coordination and trust once their project becomes unstoppable.

How do I use it?

In short: managing expectations. I integrate the expectation of “ugly acceleration” into my approach. Tipping points are points of no return – the very times when procrastination ends. From here on it’s action, so one should keep it simple and make sure to be on the same page.

Each project – big or small – has a tipping point, and it occurs when your deliverables hit solid ground: usability testing, user training, physical changes on the shop floor, etc.

That is when you meet the pragmatists face-to-face. They want solutions and convenience. You no longer need to tell WHY the program exists. Instead, you are prompted to explain in detail HOW it is going to work. They won’t let up until it makes sense to them.

Wanna know another lesson learned? Don’t over-promise. It is painful to be applauded for announcing or demonstrating a feature only to discover it won’t be part of the solution. Trust me: on large scale projects this happens all the time.

4. Broken Windows Theory

What is it?

The broken windows theory is a notion that comes from the same book by Gladwell. Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Scientists in the field of criminology found that disorder invites even more disorder and that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality.

Why is it important?

Litter encourages more litter. A broken window is a crack that allows negative behavior to slip in. And human beings are herding animals: we resonate to the influences nearest at hand.

As Gladwell notes:

Why was the Transit Authority so intent on removing graffiti from every car and cracking down on the people who leaped over turnstiles without paying? Because those two trivial problems were thought to be tipping points-broken windows-that invited far more serious crimes.

How do I use it?

People who work with me know that I’m a neurotic when it comes to broken windows. When I see a crack, I want to repair it instantly. Right now. An unpleased customer, a deliverable missing a beat, a target group we forgot to involve, or resistance brewing underground (mostly you pick that up accidentally standing by the coffee machine).

Attention here: fixing a broken window is not the same as denying it. Saying it ain’t so won’t solve the tension; neither does jumping to conclusions. Fixing the broken windows of dissatisfaction is done with respect instead of judgement. The broken windows theory reminds me to be sensitive for cynicism and indifference and to provide platform for these emotions to turn into contributions.

Final note: the strange thing about change management broken windows is that they are best fixed by the inhabitants. Your role is to spot them and to provide the means, the time and the space to do so.

5. The Red Monkey

What is it?

Jef Staes introduced the concept of a red monkey. According to the latest insights in biodiversity, new species do not start in the middle of a forest but at the edge. At the edge! – where different species from different ecosystems ‘meet’. That’s when Jef created a metaphor of a brown monkey from the jungle who meets a red fish from the sea (an adjacent ecosystem). Through their conversation a new confrontational idea is born: a red monkey.

Why is it important?

What would happen if that confrontational idea would be dropped in the middle of the jungle? It would be killed immediately. Jef notes that the same thing happens with confrontational ideas that are ‘dropped’ in the middle of an organization … they get killed as well. Innovation ‘never’ starts in the middle of an organization but on the edge, where ecosystems meet.

By default your red monkey disturbs the balance in people, teams and organizations. It tilts the stability of an ecosystem, and therefore it will get killed if there is no critical mass to protect it in order to survive and mature.

How do I use it?

Think of red monkeys as your next innovation project. And think of yourself as the one responsible for its survival. It takes a serious amount of conflict handling skills to coax a red monkey to the right hand side of the chasm. This is a step-by-step process and it requires a different view on resistance. One thing is sure: you should start at the edge and move gradually to the middle.

When I look at my job that way, I tend to see it as a vocation and myself as a linchpin instead of a cog. And this – in its turn – radically influences my persistence and the quality of my work.

6. The Elephant Dilemma

What is it?

Just like Jef Staes constructs theories involving monkeys, I do the same thing with elephants. It started when I was attending a phone conference that lasted too long. I started drawing randomly and without knowing it uncovered an elephant out of my favorite bell-shaped curve.

Why is it important?

In all organizational change programs there is a moment when the work ahead looks so massive that you don’t know where and how to start. Those moments are paralyzing and you feel pretty small. Project managers refer to this situation as the ‘how to eat the elephant dilemma’. The elephant is hidden in the target population and the chunks of the elephant are the audiences that you encounter while introducing a new product or initiative.

The secret?  On the drawing above you go tail first: making sure that the innovators and the early adopters (most of the times this is your own core team and the sponsor of your program) get through that change cycle first. Once you have won their minds and hearts they will help you to attack the next big chunk: the pragmatists (these may be key users or testers of whatever you are implementing) and so on.

How do I use it?

The elephant reminds me that I can shape the path of the project just by channeling the emotions and the energy towards the main deliverables. If you think people will whine or be angry you should make sure that they ‘whine forward’ or ‘complain forward’ People make sense of the change as they react to the prototype of your deliverables.

The solution is to provide a series of deliverables that people can shoot at, nicely ordered in the same direction: forward. Not only will this improve the quality and the accuracy of the deliverables, it will also get their minds in motion and their noses pointed in the direction of the program.

7. Warcraft Wisdom

What is it?

In the chapter “On The Beach” of his 1993 book Accidental Empires, Robert Cringely talks about the three distinct groups of people that define the lifetime of a company: Commandos, Infantry, and Police.In my opinion these forces all represent the management styme that is needed as you progress through the lifecycle of an innovation.

For instance, the destructive (literally: ‘ground-breaking’) work of commandos who prepare territory for the infantry is described by Robert Cringely as follows:

Commandos parachute behind enemy lines or quietly crawl ashore at night. Their job is to do lots of damage with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware that they exist.

This is exactly how difficult and large change projects kick-off: they have been planned and budgeted for long before they officially kick-off. Once the path is cleared, changing can start. Now you will need an infantry of agents to get the job done: blueprinting, designing, testing, training, collecting and cleansing data, etc.

Finally, the new structures are in place, you will find that there is still the need for a military presence by means of local coaching (often referred to as ‘hypercare’). These are the UN peacekeeping troops, a remainder of the infantry (note: you will find nothing about UN peace keeping troops in Cringely’s book – please allow me to stretch the concept). Their only purpose is to stabilize the new order and eventually to hand over to the local peacekeepers: the police.

Why is it important?

You need a commando style in order to create the circumstances for change.  Whether it is to obtain commitment for blueprinting, design, testing, training or go-live, without the commando actions the efforts will be ignored as long as there is no pressure or hard evidence that things will change.

For the infantry the most important thing here is to take on a structured approach. In the words of Cringely:

While the commandos make success possible, it’s the infantry that makes success happen.

How do I use it?

The one thing to remember is that it takes different team styles: the commandos are the agents that make success possible, the infantry make success happen and UN peace keepers and police are needed to refreeze the new structures and habits like a stabilizing force.

8. Mapping the Added Value

What is it?

After reading Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, blogger Thomas Baekdal wrote a wonderful piece on what you should plan, do and support. He calls for a strategy with 4 layers: plan and prepare for the future, work in the present, support what you did yesterday, and ignore out-of-date ideas. To illustrate this, he tops the bell-shaped curve with a value curve.

Why is it important?

The value curve illustrates where you should focus your energy and resources. If you want to be successful, then most of your time must be spent on what Baekdal calls ‘the next thing,’ and the rest should be maintained and automated to the best of your abilities.

How do I use it?

This is what your project plan should look like from a time management perspective:

1. Actively devote attention to your future plans and test out new ideas
2. Spend most of your time making sure that your deliverables cross the chasm and get picked up at the other side.
3. Continue to support the project phases that you launched ‘yesterday,’ even if they are no longer an active part of your dashboard. As Baekdal puts it: “Answer people’s questions, provide tips and gently push them towards your new ideas.”
4. Finally, you need to unhook your attention from the laggards (usually they are experts at sucking up your precious time for futile details that add no value what-so-ever.)

9. The Long Tail

What is it?

The long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a Gaussian distribution. The term has gained popularity in recent times because it identifies the digital economy and the effects of the internet on business as we know it.

In his book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson does a very good job at explaining these dynamics in depth. According to Anderson, the internet flips some basic economic theories of Adam Smith, Vilfredo Pareto, Karl Marx and very basic concepts such as transaction costs, distribution, shelf space and (above all) scarcity.

Why is it important?

The long tail of normal distributions has changed since the internet mainly through three dynamics:

1. The means of production are available to anyone in the digital economy;
2. Transaction costs and shelf-space costs are close to 0 in this digital economy;
3. “Wisdom of crowds”: your brand is no longer a logo or a slogan: it is the story your customers tell about your product.

The point is not that you should no longer try to get into the top position of big hits. Since the internet the niches have become the new big. But in order to survive in the niches you should be a platform for these niches instead of a final big hit destination.

How do I use it?

Being platform  (aka: ‘crowdsourcing‘)instead of a know-it-all destination is a good thing. Rather than seeking uniformity, and the full control of one single ‘hit’ destination, the long tail tells us it is better to be a platform for a crowd of alternative solutions.

10. The Three Strategies

What is it?

Building further NYU professor Clay Shirky’s statement that ‘Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.’ More specifically, Shirky refers to how the media industry is incapable of changing because they are solving the wrong problem.

Let’s face it: newspapers are the solution to the problem of … news gathering and news distribution. AND THAT PROBLEM NO LONGER EXISTS. That inspired me to identify three strategies to cope with the reversed dynamics of the digital economy: No Problem, Extrapolating the Problem, and Reinventing the Problem from Scratch.

Why is it important?

Let’s take my favorite example: the dying newspaper industry. Nowadays if we all want news we simply go to Google to get it.  Who published it isn’t nearly as important to readers any more.  Nor is the packaging. There are 3 strategies for newspapers to react to the downturn in their business:

• NO PROBLEM: This is where most newspapers and magazines are today: Do nothing unless the competition forces you to. Paper is the main business and the internet, well… because we have to.
• EXTRAPOLATING THE PROBLEM: these companies know that printing will be out of business some day, so they just make the technical switch to a new medium (the internet and e-readers). However, they have fallen in love with the problem that no longer exists: they still view themselves as gatherers and distributors of news (and what sucks even more: they still package the news on these e-readers in ‘pages’ and ‘issues’ – a constraint that was due to the printing press!)
  Note on the drawing:  be careful here because this area splits in half:
  - The left part is EXTRAPOLATING the problem that no longer exists.
  - The right part is what one could call the LONG TAIL
• REINVENTING THE PROBLEM FROM SCRATCH: Today’s problem is an abundance of news and a need to make sense of it all. So the future is to be a platform for sense-making. This will require the newspapers business to let go of their attachment to the producer-consumer model. Only then will they be able to search for new revenues and growth.

How do I use it?

To me these three strategies are a razorsharp analysis tool to separate wanna-be innovations from real innovations. The three strategies open my eyes to the fact that each product and each project has a lifecycle and that you have the choice to:

• Do nothing and – to you own amazement – die at the end of the lifecycle;
• Try out a new lifecycle but with both feet firmly anchored in your current world-view: you will never be a leader in your segment;
• Take a risk; jump; and invent your own game.

11. What’s In a Bell?

As I was writing this article it became obvious that there is more to my bell-shaped world than this. Have a look at the following dilemma’s which somehow- will fit in a bell-shaped world, but I still need to map them on a chart to discover what is holding us back.

• Money as an exchange mechanism versus the revival of the gift economy. Let’s face it: money has not been there since the beginning of business and trade. And in the beginning it came into being rather as a side-effect of some smart traders.
• Fossil fuel versus renewable energy sources. How and when will we switch? Someone pointed out that this is a classical example of the prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is a fundamental problem in game theory that demonstrates why two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so.

Fascinating … to be continued!

(but I think it’s enough for now…)

In a previous post I have argued that the internet is not making us stupid, and I even claimed that the contrary may be true: there is evidence that the internet is making us more intelligent.

The same is true for gaming and learning.

What’s So Special About Games?

‘What a waste of time’ – that’s what I often told myself while I was observing kids playing games and having their attention sucked-up by their Nintendo, Playstation or any other screen. Seemingly numbed by the flickering screen, these games are bleeping their attention into infinity.

I used to think that life is passing them by and that they’d better learned something decent – like math or history.

It was only until recently that I started to ask a different question about gaming: what’s so special about it?

So I started to play some computer games myself, and pretty soon I found out:

1. that there is excitement and an immense motivation to master the rules of the game as quickly as possible.
2. I like the instant feedback of a game and I don’t take it personal.
3. When a game is over I curse once and I eagerly start a new game – without remorse or resentment. The only thing that is on my mind is to do it better than last time.

That’s when I started to think: what if all learning would be like gaming? And what if we could start to look at our daily lives through the lenses of a game-world?

Gaming is Advanced Learning

In the book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith refer to the three methods by which kids relate to games: playing, hacking, and programming.

• Playing – the first level – involves ‘learning by doing’.  This is nothing else than mastering the rules of the game As the authors put it:

‘They’re playing the game as it was intended, the way the game designers made it, the way it was originally conceived to be played.‘

In the beginning you learn by failing a lot, just like falling is part of learning to ride a bike.

• Hacking – a different word for ‘finding another way around’ – is usually what happens when kids get bored of playing and mastering a game. They want to be challenged again. After a while, hacking gets boring too, so players seek to develop their own quests and build their own games. They turn into programmers.
• Programming – the ultimate step in this learning cycle – means creating alternative versions of the original game.

As an adult who never gamed the layers of hacking and programming were unknown. Yet, when I look at them from a learning perspective, this is what natural learning is about: compliance to the basic rules is only the first level. After that it gets interesting. However, we were not educated to look any further.

Incrementalism In Vain

Blogger Adam Hartung writes about market place disruption and the need for breaking the holy grail of focusing only on improving what you are doing.

According to him, repeating a past success by making sure you do more of it better, faster and cheaper than anyone else is no longer a safe place.

Competing in 2010 is nothing like competing in 1975. Today the basis of competition can change within months. The above graph makes his point pretty well. Apple demonstrates the value of seeking out new markets.  “The iPad is Already Bigger than the iPod – and Half as Big as the Mac”. That is how fast markets are moving nowadays. And that is why focusing on efficiency like an obsession is a dangerous game to play.

We Desperately Need the Gaming Generation

Too often we find business trying to cope with this “Great Recession” by doing more of what they have always done – hoping customers will for some reason flock to their old way of doing business (i.e. getting better at playing the old game).

Efficiency by itself this isn’t bad or wrong, but often it goes at the expense of looking for different ways to get the same things done (that would be hacking), or even inventing a new market (that would be programming, like the launch of the iPad).

Game Over For Our Generation

Our companies need a different type of learning; the advanced learning of hackers and programmers. Only with a mindset that surpasses ‘getting better at what we did yesterday’ will we be able to compete.

The gamer’s mindset is the only way to keep our economy afloat. And that’s hard for us to swallow. We have been conditioned to think that mastering the rules of the game is the highest level. We got rewarded with degrees. That’s why our kids need to know their math and history. But for their degree to be worth something in practice, it will take tinkering, the skill of finding alternatives, creativity and the guts for re-inventing the game.

________

I want to thank @ddejonghe for pointing me to the work of Adam Hartung.

Love and work bring meaning to life. The hardest part to align them according to our strengths. Happiness turns out to be about knowing our strengths. But first things first: what is it exactly we are after?

Reframing the Question

In the last chapter of the book the Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt underscores the importance of asking the right question.  It makes sense to pause and examine the kind of answer we are expecting whenever we ask for the ‘meaning’ of something.

To ask “what is the meaning of life” is not asking to define life. Rather than expecting a direct answer, we are hoping for some enlightenment – or an aha experience. An insight in which things we have not understood before begin to make sense.

So what we are really after is not the purpose OF work but the purpose WITHIN work. So we will not get hooked into a debate on ‘do you live to work or do you work to live?’. Instead we dive a little deeper. The below paragraphs and drawings are all inspired on the last chapter of Haidt’s magnificent 2009 best-seller – more in particular: the paragraph called ‘Love and Work’.

Job, Career or Calling?

Recent research suggests that most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career or a calling.

If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money and you tend to look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead.

If you see your work as a career you have larger goals of advancement and promotion. The pursuit of these goals often energizes you and you sometimes take work home because you want to get the job done properly. Yet at times you wonder why you work so hard.

If you see your work as a calling however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling. You see your work as contributing to a greater good. You have frequent experiences of flow during the workday and you don’t have the desire to shout ‘Thank God It’s Friday’.

Growing Instead of Fixing

Peter Senge pointed to the mechanistic mindset of change initiatives when he said “We keep bringing in mechanics–when what we need are gardeners. We keep trying to drive change–when what we need to do is cultivate change.” The same is true for work itself and the way we look at work.

When you approach employees as plants to grow  instead of robots to fix, you will easily find that you can’t fix a plant like you can fix a robot. You can only give it the right conditions: water, sun and soil and then… wait. It will do the rest.

Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants. People have this intrinsic need to contribute beyond themselves. According to Jonathan Haidt, the craving for a realization of love and work can even be found in Maslow’s pyramid as Esteem – which is mostly earned through one’s work. The question we should ask ourselves is ‘what is the best way to tap into this energy so that people can find self esteem in their work?

Aligning Instead of Alienating

The search for purpose within life turns out to be a matter of aligning love and work in your life. Getting the right relationship between you and your work is not easy. However, if you think that blue-collar workers have jobs, managers have careers and the more respected professionals (doctors, scientists and clergy) have callings, you are wrong. In his book Haidt cites research that suggests that ‘occupational self-direction‘ is the determining factor.

In earlier posts I have described this occupational self-direction as ‘job control’ and ‘job autonomy’ and came to the same conclusions. Nevertheless, I would like to quote the inspiring example he used  to state this fact. In a study of hospital workers, Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at Yale University, found that the employees who cleaned bedpans and mopped up vomit, sometimes saw themselves as part of a team whose goal was to heal people. They went beyond the minimum requirements of their job description, for example by trying to brighten up the rooms of very sick patients, or by anticipating the needs of the doctors and nurses. They viewed their work as a calling, and enjoyed it far more than those who saw it as a job.

The conclusion coming out of this research in positive psychology is that most people can get more satisfaction from their work. In this respect, Haidt cites the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Vital Engagement, described as a relationship to the world that is characterized by both experiences of flow and meaning.

The first step is to know your strengths. Look for the aspects in your work that make use of your strengths. Haidt advises to re-cast and re-frame your work in order to reflect your strenghts even if that would involve some extra time. Sadly, I have experienced first-hand that the opposite is also true: focus on your weaknesses and you are spiraling downwards: zombies at work.

If you can find your strengths in your work you will find more gratification in work. If you find gratification you will shift in a more positive mind-set. Finally, it will be easier for you to see the bigger picture and the contributions you are making. Your job might turn into a calling. The meaning of work then becomes connection, engagement and commitment. 

Work done with love is the meaning within life. Love and work are crucial for human happiness because they can draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves.

Instead of laying the full responsibility for change in the hands of the leaders of our organizations, we now see a shift of attention towards things that are within the reach of everyone.

In a recent book called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein explore the psychology of our every day decision making and argue that we make poor decisions due to the architecture of how choices are presented to us.

Choice architecture is the careful design of the environments in which people make choices. According to Thaler:

“If anything you do influences the way people choose, then you are a choice architect. Choice architects must choose something. You have to meddle. For example, you can’t design a neutral building. There is no such thing. A building must have doors, elevators, restrooms. All of these details influence choices people make.“

Question: why on earth should you care about architecture as an organizational change practioner?
Answer: Because every interaction you have with your target group is an intervention – like it or not. Every time you interact you are shaping the response unknowingly.

There are three key features about choice architecture that you need to manage:

1. The Default “Default is what happens if you do nothing, such as leaving your computer unused until the screen saver appears” Thaler says. “The main lesson from psychology on this is that default options are sticky. Whatever you choose as the default has a very good chance of being selected. If you are the choice architect, you need to spend a lot of time thinking about what those default options should be.”

2. Feedback People respond to feedback; for instance, someone designed light bulbs that glow darker shades of red as homes use higher levels of energy. According to the authors, such devices helped reduce energy use in peak periods by 40 percent in Southern California.

3. Expect Error By expecting error, the authors point to the design of the Paris subway card, which allows users to insert it into an electronic turnstile in any of four ways to gain entrance to the subway. “Compare that to exiting the parking garages of Chicago,” they say, “You have to put your credit card in and there are four possible ways up, down, left, right and exactly one works. This is the difference between good and bad design.”

Remember: you are no longer an ‘organizational-change-management-theory-brainiac’. From the moment you take action, you are a Choice Architect!