COMIC: Automation's slippery slope

Last week I had a take on The downside of measuring everything, for today, (kind of a slow, is it a day off of work or not a day off of work day, at least here in the USA), I wanted to share a really funny comic from XKCD on the topic of the downside of automation:

Pretty amusing, and also kind of accurate. Reminds me of the old line, maybe it was from Seinfeld?, 'It's funny because it's true.'

Anyway, it seems like as long as I have been around technology in the workplace folks like me have been promising HR and other business leaders lots and lots of free time and space to be able to focus on 'strategic things' once we've come in an automated everything else and beaten the old, manual, and inefficient processes into submission.

That has been at least partially true, but not completely. Primarily I think because there continues to be more and more processes that the technologists can and want to automate. The low-hanging fruit has all been picked, but the technologists are not stopping there.

But that is a subject for another day.

Happy MLK Day in the USA, and Happy Monday everywhere else!

VIDEO - On how ridiculous you 'big thinkers' sound

Take two minutes of your Friday to watch the video embedded below, (Email and RSS subscribers please click through), titled 'Outside the Box', by director Joe Pelling.

Outside the Box from Sherbet on Vimeo.

Classic.

Hysterical.

Familiar?

And hopefully a good reminder to any of us, (me too), who might occasionally take ourselves too seriously.

That's all I've got for the week.

Have a great Weekend all!

It was better the old way

Chances are pretty good that we've all accepted some version of one of following maxims in the last few years:

Business is moving faster than ever before.

The pace of change (technical, societal, economic) is rapidly accelerating.

Advances in technology continue to outstrip our capacity to adapt.

Even the personal technology that many of us have adopted - smartphones and tablets primarily, drive home this point almost every day. Once you have even a average number of Apps loaded on your iPhone, say about 20 or so, almost every day at least one or two of them has a new version for you to download.

And if you ignore that little visual cue on the App Store icon for a week or two, you'll likely be faced with perhaps a dozen or more updates queued up and waiting.  It's quite likely that the Apps you rely on every single day, (News reading apps like Pulse or Zite, social networks like Facebook or Twitter, image Apps like Instagram or Camera+), push a brand new version out every month if not sooner.

Even if any individual new App version by itself is not all that comprehensive or significant, when taken in the aggregate, and considering how many times per day/week you engage with these apps, that is a lot of technological change being foisted on end users. 

But wait a second, we are supposed to loathe change, right? Particularly technology changes that are forced upon us against what we believe are our best interests and preferences.

Push out a new Windows or MS Office upgrade in your organization and stand back to wait for the shouts of outrage.

Dare to migrate to a new ERP or HRIS system, even a 'better' one than what is currently in place, and prepare for 12 months of 'In the old system, I knew exactly how to get that information. Now - who knows?'

Try to migrate collaboration and interaction out from Email and into some new, 'Facebook for the Enterprise' tool and prepare for a long, slow, path to adoption, (if you ever get there).

Our collective and individual experience and affinity with the world of Apps - with their rapid iteration, incremental changes, and persistence in nudging us along to accept those changes I believe is making us less and less 'change averse', at least when the change feels small.

Push out a dozen small changes each year - to a technology, a process, a policy - and people get used to it, they worry less about the implications of each change, and they are more inclined to see you the creator as someone 'continually focused on making it right'.

Drop a big, hairy, massive change on people all at once - well good luck with that and let us know how it goes.

We hate change because too much of our experience with change has been the old way - like getting dropped into a foreign country with no understanding of the language or landscape. But chopped up and served in more incremental pieces - that is the kind of change we all are coming to expect and, maybe even embrace.

I think that's why your Mom tried to trick you into eating your broccoli by cutting it up into the tiniest pieces possible, or mixing it into something tastier.

NO ONE wants a plate of giant broccoli.

Have a Great Week everyone!

The Etch A Sketch and Letting Go in Order to Create

Over the weekend I caught the news that the creator of the legendary Etch A Sketch toy, Andre Cassagnes, passed away at the age of 86. The Etch A Sketch, with its iconic plastic red frame, gray slate 'writing' surface, and its dual white rotating draw wheels was an instant it from its debut in 1959.  Over 100 million Etch A Sketches have been sold since, and even in the age of computers, smartphones, tablets, and powerful design applications, the Etch A Sketch still remains popular, with a new batch of 'Sketchies', (I am not sure that is even a term, I might have just made it up), joining the ranks every year.

The singular feature and benefit of the Etch A Sketch is it's impermanence - don't like the way a drawing was turning out, simply stop, shake, and start all over. You'd literally 'wipe the slate clean' and could begin anew. Today that doesn't seem like a big deal, in this modern age of the digital 'undo' and where the marginal cost of saving one more version or taking one more digital image is essentially nothing. Back in the 60s and 70s this was a really big deal - the toy's ability to reset itself and allow the creator to start over without wasting any raw materials was a massive benefit.

But the impermanence of the Etch A Sketch worked the other way as well - if you managed to create something valuable and meaningful with the toy, (admittedly, not that easy to accomplish), you'd be tempted to set the toy down for a while, to show your creation to friends and family, and to make sure NO ONE got too grabby with your creation, lest some inadvertent jostling destroy your art.

Eventually though, you'd be forced to let go in order to continue to play with the Etch A Sketch, for as fantastic the device was, it could only 'hold' one creation at a time. To continue to create, to explore, to perhaps develop something new that could exceed in beauty or cleverness the prior effort, you'd have to bid farewell to the old and set off on creating something new.

It's an interesting dilemma really, one that many of us face today, the desire or tendency to cling too long and too fast to what we've done in the past that can constrain us from looking at today's problems and tomorrow's opportunities with fresh, unclouded eyes.

The Etch A Sketch forced you to let go in order to move forward. That was it's limitation and it's charm.

Have a Great Week!

Innovation as a choice

I'm just back from Taleo World 2012, (ok, I admit to being a little biased, but it was a tremendous event), and wanted to share a short bit of wisdom from one of the concurrent sessions I attended, given by WellPoint, one of the largest health benefits companies in the United States. With over 37,000 employees operating in a highly-regulated industry and with the added complexity of operating via numerous subsidiary companies, WellPoint is a classic example of the kind of large corporate environment many of us work in or have been a part of at some point in our careers.Taleo World 2012

And what are some of the things that come to mind when thinking about working in really large, complex organizations?  

We generally think of these corporate giants as lacking agility, with dense and difficult to traverse organization structures, a lack of drive and urgency, and at times the tendency to get consumed by process, entrenched ways of thinking, and lots of 'Not invented here' syndrome that taken together can slow or even halt innovative ideas of transformational projects even before they begin.

While it is certainly true that as organizations get larger and more complex in structure additional rules, policies, and sometimes bureaucracies have to emerge to simply manage the processes associated with organizing that many people, across that many locations, and operating under numerous and evolving external forces and requirements, the smartest of these large organizations are not letting size, complexity and inertia impede their ability to adapt, improve, and innovate.

And while their are reams of books, articles, seminars, and big thinkers all focused on the subject of innovation, still for large organizations, fostering innovation can be really, really hard - maybe even impossible. But during WellPoint's presentation about their purposeful and aggressive approach to reinventing their Talent Management processes, they offered one of the clearest and simplest ways to get past those legacy or inherent barriers to innovation.

Simply put, they decided to be innovative. 

The specific mantra their Talent Management team adopted was 'We can sit and wait, or we can choose to innovate.'

Sure it's basic. Sure it even sounds a little naive. And yes, no one can really effect significant change by simply making a choice, but the choice itself is the start. 

The choice to innovate becomes a conscious one that can support all the difficult decisions that have to be made in order to effect change at large organizations like WellPoint. The choice allows you, even empowers you to think about the big picture and the real reasons and benefits for the hard work you are doing. 

The choice enables you to start to let go of the organizational baggage that often has to be dragged along with you on every new project.

In another Taleo World presentation, Bertrand Dussert mentioned a fantastic quote from Roger Enrico -

"Beware the tyranny of making small changes to small things."

WellPoint's 'choice' and the Enrico quote both remind us of the importance of thinking big, not allowing the past to be a barrier to progress, and that often a simple change in mindset can be the beginning of a fantastic journey, even in the largest and most seemingly resistant to change environments.

Thanks to everyone at Taleo World for what was a superb and inspiring event.

Have a Great Weekend!