Badges for failure

Two themes that we saw, heard, and read lots about in 2012 were the value of 'failure' and the seemingly inexorable march toward 'gamification'. The failure theme is mostly about how you need to fail faster and more often, how you really only know you are pushing the envelope when you fail, and how lots of incredibly successful people have some pretty significant failures in their past. It is meant to make us feel better I guess, because if there is any one thing most folks can relate to it is failure.

But we can take comfort in failure I suppose. At least that seems better than the alternative, drawing the blinds, getting under the covers, and watching a 'Real Housewives' marathon.

The 'gamification' angle? Well that is mainly the idea that introducing mechanics and aspects of games, (points, leaderboards, badges, levelling up, etc.), to work and work processes will make them fun, (Yay for fun!), and make folks happier, more productive, and more engaged, (ACK, another 2012 buzzword), with their work.  

Whether or not you buy-in totally to either or both of these ideas, the value of failure, and the gamification trend; I bet I can convince you that just like other epic combinations, (chocolate and peanut butter, Sonny and Cher, Deron Williams and Jerry Sloan), combining these trends will result in an incredible result.

Just how does one combine failure and gamification?

With Demerit Badges of course.  Check out some of these 'awards' for failure, courtesy of Demeritwear.com:

Smartphone swimmingUtility Shutoff

Out of gas

Awesome right?

With the Demerit badges you get the best of both worlds - utter and total failure, (which we keep getting told is great for us), as well as one of the fun elements of gamification, i.e. some tasty and colorful badges. Think about all the career development and fun you can have handing out a few of these Demerit Badges at your next team meeting, or giving a 'hard truth' performance review to someone on your staff!

That is, in my best former consultant-speak, a Win-Win!

Have a great weekend!

Some 2013 Tech Trends - Micro-networks and Human Appeal

There have already been a slew of '2013 Tech Predictions' or 'Trends to Watch for in 2013' pieces already written, and no doubt the next few weeks will see scores more.  I'll probably chime in with one myself early next year, but would prefer to hold off for a bit and employ the classic 'Fourth Bidder Strategy' from the The Price is Right.  Essentially, I want to read as many of these 'predictions' posts as I can before weighing in with mine. I bid one dollar, Bob.

In doing research for my upcoming reasoned analysis of the big trends in technology in 2013, I did find this excellent presentation, (embedded below, email and RSS subscribers may need to click through), titled '20 Tech Trends for 2013' from the San Francisco design firm Frog Design. Take a look through the deck, and I have a couple of takes about the HR, HR Technology, and Workplace implications of the trends that Frog identifies.

2013 Tech Trends from frog

Some interesting trends and takes for 2013 I think. But there are two that I specifically want to call out as I think that they are pretty accurate and they do have some direct tie-in to the work we do in HR and HR Technology.

Devices with Human Appeal (starts from Slide 7) - These trends or predictions are a few different aspects of an emerging theme that posits technology, interfaces, machine intelligences.etc. are getting smaller, more ubiquitous, and have the potential to interact with us more seamlessly and more intimately. The suggestion for workplace and HR technologies are many - equipping field and customer-facing staff with more lightweight and intelligent (learning) apps, building tools that do more than collect information, but can interpret it and make subtle workplace adjustments, and technologies that feel more like apps - not in how they are accessed but how they perform, doing one or two things only, but doing them exceedingly well.

Specialized Social Networks (starts from Slide 29) - Some interesting contexts (in health care, community organizing), that highlight the fact that as networks continue to get larger and larger, than real value and opportunity comes from exploiting the sub or micro networks that from within them. Think of any large organization, (especially ones with multiple locations), not as a collective network, but as a collection of sub-networks.  There are definitely some important implications for HR Tech I think, from designing systems for local needs, to supporting more close-to-the-front-line technologies, and to developing for more flexibility and local adaptation and adoption.

Mostly these '2013 Predictions' pieces are kind of silly, designed for page view generation and such. But I really did like the set from Frog, as instead of simply extending incrementally the things we are doing today for another 12 months, these ideas challenge us as technologists and designers of the employee/customer/user experience to think a little bolder, a little more expansively.

The truth is that 2013 will look and feel a lot like 2012. But I suppose it doesn't have to. And for the most successful organizations and people, it probably will look radically different.

We will be unprepared, we will be uncomfortable

As 2012 winds down its final days, (we finally may even see some snow here in Western NY, and by the way, what has happened to Winter?), it is pretty common and natural to start thinking past the holidays and celebrations and look ahead, just a little bit, to the future. For most of us, 'planning' consists of at the organizational level preparing a set of 1 or 2 or 5 year forecasts for basic metrics like revenue, profit, headcount, locations, etc.  And in our personal development, plans (such as they are), often involve attaining that next step on an existing career path, achieving additional expertise or certifications, and maybe even some non-work goals like getting into better shape, or seeing the Taj Mahal. In both contexts, organizational and personal, these exercises are necessary and sometimes even helpful, but they are certainly kind of routine and often fail to adequately prepare our organizations and ourselves for radical or disruptive change that we know is coming, but we think we lack the framework or capacity to plan for.

Recently Google made news with the hiring of prominent 'futurist' Ray Kurzweil, who is most noted for his prediction that by 2045 human and machine intelligences will merge into something he calls the 'singularity', a state whereby superhuman machine intelligences and people will co-exist in a previously unimagined state of being. Other firms besides Google have engaged futurists as well, and some commentators like this one quoted in Business Insider, recommend that every corporation needs a futurist.

I think the key reason for organizations to spend a little bit of time, if not actually engaging a 'futurist', but at least thinking expansively and creatively about the future are best summarized in the BI piece from Peter Bishop:

"There will be significant change within our tenure within any position within our lifetime for sure, that we will have to learn to live in a new world — to some extent. It's not completely new the way some futurists will say. But it will be new enough that we will be uncomfortable, we will be unprepared, and that we will have to learn new skills and new techniques in order to be successful in that future compared to how we are being successful today, or indeed how we were prepared to be successful when we were in school or training."

What are some of the wild, speculative types of questions you should consider asking as you think about next year and beyond?

What if the levees don't hold, i.e., what if some remarkable external action or event renders us unable to operate?

What if our largest competitor starts giving away the product/service that accounts for 64% of our sales?

What will we do if the CEO, CFO, C-insert-any-letter-you-like-here-O resigns unexpectedly? And goes to our most-hated competitor?

What if our VP of Marketing approves a TV commercial that is so off-key that our Facebook page and Twitter feed are inundated with outraged customers?

What if Kurzweil is right, and machine technology advances incredibly quickly, making existing ideas about manufacturing, distribution, and marketing mostly obsolete?

I don't think that any credible 'futurist' or any forward-looking and curious Talent pro like you can credibly get away with endless blue-sky postulating on some of these really unlikely or fantastic scenarios. But, I do think it worthwhile to carve out just a little planning time and energy, (10%, 5%, maybe even 2%), thinking about the future not just as an incremental extension of the present, but as a potential wildly and radically different environment from today.

While you might not want to get a reputation in the office as the 'Kurzweil' or out of touch dreamer, I would also submit you don't want to be known as the 'status quo' person.

We KNOW things will change. It's (part) of your job I think to figure out what.

Happy speculating.

Insourcing and Building Internal Capability

Insourcing, the practice of returning previously externally contracted operations, processes, or other business functions back to internal management and control has been in the news quite a bit recently. The Atlantic has a great piece titled 'The Insourcing Boom' that describes several examples of what might be the start of an insourcing trend by US manufacturers. As the Atlantic piece describes, the manufacturing of products of all kinds, from dishwashers to elevators and even frisbees are being returned to US facilities for a number of reasons, primarily that the absolute cost advantage of offshore manufacturing has been eroding over the last several years.

In the manufacturing context the trend towards increased insourcing is certainly driven by costs as well as concerns about product quality and enhanced customer service. But these are not the only reasons and the only kinds of industries that have to think about the mix of what capabilities they need to maintain internally and what kinds of things they outsource. Even in the digital age, organizations that trade in information and data also have these kinds of decisions to make, and often, as we see in a recent example from the USA Today, the drivers are not cost or availability of resources, but rather an assessment of what kinds of capabilities are true differentiators for the organization.

For many years USA Today has run a popular Super Bowl related program called the Ad Meter, where members of the general public weigh in and rate the commercial advertising that runs during the game. The Ad Meter has grown since its inception in 1989 to become a really influential measure of relative success or failure of the high stakes/high cost world of Super Bowl ads. Last year USA Today partnered with Facebook to expand the reach and participation of the Ad Meter program, but for this year's game has elected to go it alone. USA Today's reasons to end this partnership, and essentially 'insource' this social element to the program are explained below:

USA Today decided not to repeat the Facebook partnership partly because it plans to expand the Ad Meter and related elements beyond the Super Bowl, Mr. Kramer said. "We want to do this ourselves because we're going to do a lot of these," he said. "We need to build the apparatus ourselves so we'd own it."

"Look, Facebook is great and we like working with them, but if you look at this organization today top to bottom vs. a year ago, we're a lot more digital," he said. "And we need to build that internally."

Not that complex, right?  If the capability, (in this case enhanced social engagement and expansion to more digital platforms), is considered core, essential, or otherwise what the future of the organization really rests on, then that capability must exist internally. It probably doesn't matter to USA Today if in 2013 that Facebook could exercise the program better, if USA Today can't eventually execute on their own, then well, there probably won't be much of a USA Today left in a few years.

I think in 2013 and the years after that we will see in organizations increasing tension and discussion about the relative balance of outsourcing vs. keeping capability (and talent) in-house. While it has become much easier to simply enter into external relationships with companies and individuals for the provision of services and functions, many organizations will have to ask themselves if they have moved too far to the outsourcing side of the pendulum.

What do you think? Has cost-cutting and the less risky decision to outsource capability in the last several years left organizations with a kind of self-created talent gap?

Google on Competition, Creativity, and Gut Feel

Last week Fortune ran an extremely interesting interview with Google co-founder and current CEO Larry Page that covered a wide range of subjects related to the tech giant's business. It is a fascinating and enlightening read, and I'd definitely recommend taking a few minutes sometime this week to read it through, but since I know you are busy, I'll pull out a few of the most interesting parts for your consideration.

Larry Page on competition (and how much he and probably you should be thinking about it:

Obviously we think about competition to some extent. But I feel my job is mostly getting people not to think about our competition. In general I think there's a tendency for people to think about the things that exist. Our job is to think of the thing you haven't thought of yet that you really need. And by definition, if our competitors knew that thing, they wouldn't tell it to us or anybody else.

This is a super observation and warning - spend too much time thinking about the competition and run the risk of just copying what they are doing, and not enough time creating the next, new, and innovative thing. And creating the 'next' thing is where the action is, and as we will see in the next point, how you attract and retain the best people.

Page on how Google chooses which projects to pursue:

Choosing what to do. We want to do things that will motivate the most amazing people in the world to want to work on them. You look at self-driving cars. You know a lot of people die, and there's a lot of wasted labor. The better transportation you have, the more choice in jobs. And that's social good. That's probably an economic good.

Really interesting observation about how business strategy (What projects should Google be working on?), is informed and even driven by talent strategy, (What are the things that great talent wants to work on?).  Mostly organizations have this reversed - strategy is set and projects are picked, and THEN the organization seeks or attempts to convince people to work on them.

Finally, and possibly the most notable aspect of the interiew given Google's famous reputation as a data-driven organization, how Page assesses the progress his teams are making:

You kind of have a feel for it, but it's hard to measure really accurately. But I think a lot of things have improved. We had a measurement of our rate of how we check in code. We've seen some improvements in that, which I view as a good sign. But I probably put more weight on just an intuitive feel.

The takeaway here is, for me, a bit of a warning to not let management and leadership simply devolve into a numbers game. Whether it is the influence of Moneyball, the last election and the cult of Nate Silver, or the inevitable calls for leaders to leverage 'Big Data' for decision making - Page's admission and inclination to trust his intuition is in a way refreshing. 

Besides, the robots have not (yet) learned how to manage by intuition.

Have a great week all!