When I tell people about that we recruit people with no IT experience and teach them to be IT consultants, they frequently ask what it's like working with people without experience. After doing it for a couple of years, I can honestly say, it's no different than working with anybody else. This is frequently a surprise to people who think people without experience won't know how to behave or how to do anything. They think we'll have to be firm, or 'cruel to be kind,' to get results and to keep them from dropping off the apprenticeship.
We understand this view, but don't subscribe to it. We don't want to be the same as other companies, so we don't treat them the same as other companies. Ours is a company where we value autonomy, mastery, and purpose. We use a cardwall to ensure everything that needs to be done is visible to the whole company; break things into pieces to give us a chance to iterate and constantly improve; don't judge other's behaviour; and ensure we always focus on the area that needs our attention the most.*
This changes things. In an organisation that keeps information hidden, people can't learn how to behave, or what to do, without making mistakes, or being told (which frequently takes the form of 'behaviour management'). By opening up the needs of the organisation so everybody can see them and can choose what to work on, we ensure that even people with no experience can find something to do that needs to get done, and which they're willing to take on. This appeals to their desire to achieve mastery, and their autonomy, and we do it for everybody.
Our process comes with risks. Sometimes people get lost. They don't know what to do, or they don't know how to structure their work so it's achievable. Our job (regardless of experience level) is to help people figure out what needs to be done, and how to make it possible. Sometimes that's me asking apprentices questions, and sometimes it's them asking me questions. It's a give and take based on equality and respect, where experience and length of service mean less than empathy and learning, and the more you know, the more likely you are to spend your time helping people who know less.
Sometimes people make mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable, if you're learning, and pushing boundaries. For us, the important thing is to learn from those mistakes - to reflect on the process that lead to the mistake, rather than who is responsible for making it - so we can do things differently in the future. We approach every project, every task, every need as the current step in an iteration. Learning is an ongoing process which never ends. Our apprentices start out shadowing more experienced consultants and working on a service desk. Over time (6-9 months), they pick up enough experience to run their own small, supervised projects. In the next 9 months, they start running projects on their own and mentoring new apprentices. Within 18 months, they go from knowing nothing about IT to running their own projects and taking responsibility for the results, challenges, and learning.
It is my sincere privilege to watch them grow and change, learn and improve, and to embrace and unleash their own potential. They learn to look within themselves for their self-worth, and I couldn't be prouder of them for it.
*How we do these will (probably) be explored in later posts. As with everything else, this is an ongoing work in progress.
You can read my follow-up post here.
Tuesday 17 February 2015
Thursday 12 February 2015
Strategic Learning
I saw a really good talk this week, at a London Funders meeting, about strategic learning. It was defined thus:
Learning isn't reserved for the SMT; it's something that is at everybody's fingertips. If you look around your organisation and ask yourself who knows the beneficiary's needs best, it's more likely to be the front line than it is to be the SMT. The SMT has a number of responsibilities, but day-to-day operations with program beneficiaries isn't usually one of them. This makes them well placed to identify overall trends in their sector, upcoming organisational challenges, and opportunities. It doesn't make the SMT particularly well suited to make decisions about how to best serve program beneficiaries. Therefore, anything which helps the front line to learn, share that learning, and propagate those things throughout the organisation is to be embraced, while things which do the opposite are to be avoided.
Doesn't moving learning to the front line risk moving strategy out of the hands of the SMT and result in chaos? Realistically, no. Embracing learning as an organisation means changing the role of the SMT from that of decision-maker and policy-setter to that of enabler; from enforcement of a strategy to facilitation of thinking, learning, and experimentation. Learning and improvement become the strategy, and as beneficiary progress is the only true measure of progress, beneficiaries become the real heart of the organisation - not just in words and thoughts, but also in measurement (and what gets measured is what gets done).
In a system where learning is embraced, the SMT's primary responsibility is to help people figure out how to learn, how to interpret what they've learned, and how to continually find new ways to learn, grow, and challenge themselves, in service to program beneficiaries. When I ask myself which I'd rather have - one person responsible for strategy who is removed from day-to-day operations, or 50 people who know what impact the organisation's decisions are having on beneficiaries, the decision seems clear to me.
(This post is loosely linked to The Outsider's Experience)
Strategic learning is the use of data and insights from a variety of information-gathering approaches—including evaluation—to inform decision making about strategy.
This is a fabulous definition. It encapsulates what's needed, what's done with it, and how you can tell you're doing it. I think the biggest risk is with the words being defined. Use of the word "strategic" risks making learning loftier and more exclusive than it needs to be.It occurs when organizations or groups integrate data and evaluative thinking into their work, and then adapt their strategies in response to what they learn.
Learning isn't reserved for the SMT; it's something that is at everybody's fingertips. If you look around your organisation and ask yourself who knows the beneficiary's needs best, it's more likely to be the front line than it is to be the SMT. The SMT has a number of responsibilities, but day-to-day operations with program beneficiaries isn't usually one of them. This makes them well placed to identify overall trends in their sector, upcoming organisational challenges, and opportunities. It doesn't make the SMT particularly well suited to make decisions about how to best serve program beneficiaries. Therefore, anything which helps the front line to learn, share that learning, and propagate those things throughout the organisation is to be embraced, while things which do the opposite are to be avoided.
Doesn't moving learning to the front line risk moving strategy out of the hands of the SMT and result in chaos? Realistically, no. Embracing learning as an organisation means changing the role of the SMT from that of decision-maker and policy-setter to that of enabler; from enforcement of a strategy to facilitation of thinking, learning, and experimentation. Learning and improvement become the strategy, and as beneficiary progress is the only true measure of progress, beneficiaries become the real heart of the organisation - not just in words and thoughts, but also in measurement (and what gets measured is what gets done).
In a system where learning is embraced, the SMT's primary responsibility is to help people figure out how to learn, how to interpret what they've learned, and how to continually find new ways to learn, grow, and challenge themselves, in service to program beneficiaries. When I ask myself which I'd rather have - one person responsible for strategy who is removed from day-to-day operations, or 50 people who know what impact the organisation's decisions are having on beneficiaries, the decision seems clear to me.
(This post is loosely linked to The Outsider's Experience)
Wednesday 11 February 2015
Why do charities need IT help?
I'm sitting on a train, traveling to Manchester, reflecting on what I do. I spend my time split between two roles at the same company. I work with young people, teaching them IT, and ensuring they have the knowledge necessary to be outstanding IT consultants. My other role is why I'm traveling today. I'm on my way to visit a company that's expanding. They're based in Manchester and have just opened an office in Liverpool, with plans to open a few more around the country. There are a few challenges inherent in expansion, and the one I'm concerned with is IT.
I work with charities. Charities work with the vulnerable and the needy. They're started by people with passion, and a burning drive to do something good. They're rarely started by people who understand IT, let alone how IT can facilitate or inhibit organisational growth, change, and improvement. That's where I come in. My role is to help charities understand what IT means. Not necessarily in the day-to-day infrastructure sense of the word (servers, support, etc), but in the sense of IT being a fundamental part of how the organisation works. Like fundraising, management, or finance, organisations can run without IT for only so long before they become unwieldy. This is what I thought when I first started working with charities - that if I could help them understand IT, things would all work out.
It turns out, I was wrong. My role as originally envisaged doesn't work. If the focus remains on IT, then there is rarely any openness to the idea that what needs to change is how the organisation thinks (about IT, about systems, about itself). What does seem to work is going through a process, which is the same between charities but which plays out in very different ways, of mutual learning and growth. Through my understanding of IT, systems, and management, and their understanding of how their organisations work, we learn how to make changes, and test them, in ways that ensure the continual improvement of the charity, long after I'm gone.
The end result of successful consulting, is not a delivered project, or a report, but a changed system, where it seems obvious that the new way is an improvement, and nobody is interested, or capable, of going back to the way things were before. IT plays a part in this story, but it's not the hero. The hero is the charity. And like any hero, each charity goes through its own hero's quest, first encountering challenges, and then slowly learning how to overcome them, until at some point, it looks back and is astounded by how far it's come, and how much better things are now than they were.
I work with charities. Charities work with the vulnerable and the needy. They're started by people with passion, and a burning drive to do something good. They're rarely started by people who understand IT, let alone how IT can facilitate or inhibit organisational growth, change, and improvement. That's where I come in. My role is to help charities understand what IT means. Not necessarily in the day-to-day infrastructure sense of the word (servers, support, etc), but in the sense of IT being a fundamental part of how the organisation works. Like fundraising, management, or finance, organisations can run without IT for only so long before they become unwieldy. This is what I thought when I first started working with charities - that if I could help them understand IT, things would all work out.
It turns out, I was wrong. My role as originally envisaged doesn't work. If the focus remains on IT, then there is rarely any openness to the idea that what needs to change is how the organisation thinks (about IT, about systems, about itself). What does seem to work is going through a process, which is the same between charities but which plays out in very different ways, of mutual learning and growth. Through my understanding of IT, systems, and management, and their understanding of how their organisations work, we learn how to make changes, and test them, in ways that ensure the continual improvement of the charity, long after I'm gone.
The end result of successful consulting, is not a delivered project, or a report, but a changed system, where it seems obvious that the new way is an improvement, and nobody is interested, or capable, of going back to the way things were before. IT plays a part in this story, but it's not the hero. The hero is the charity. And like any hero, each charity goes through its own hero's quest, first encountering challenges, and then slowly learning how to overcome them, until at some point, it looks back and is astounded by how far it's come, and how much better things are now than they were.
Friday 6 February 2015
Teaching and Corporate Responsibilities
I've heard a lot, over the last few years, that students are leaving school unprepared for the world of work, and the solution is to teach work-specific skills to students before they graduate. On the surface this makes sense, particularly if we only look at the last 20 years of employment. However, if we go a bit further back, we'll find that this argument doesn't make any sense.
60 years ago, even 40 years ago, work-ready meant something else. When my parents were starting work, their companies took them on, fresh from university, expecting to have to train them. That was how businesses got employees that knew what to do - they taught them. This was true whether someone was hired for management or the mailroom. The new person was always taught by someone with more experience. What they were taught, and how intense the training was depended on the company and the position, but the basic fact of training was a part of the job.
Sometime between about 1975 and 1990 we seemed to lose sight of the fact that employee training is an employer's responsibility. This was fairly predictable, as a new generation of management graduates had been taught that shareholder value was the most important thing to consider, and training seemed like an undesirable expense. This is the same school of thought that brought about the end of pensions, and the end of employee/employer loyalty.
Employers are really good at convincing governments of their perspectives (Adam Smith warned against allowing them to do this as far back as 1776). It's even easier when they own the newspapers and are allowed to sway public opinion in their favour. It didn't take long for government to start talking about how schools are failing our children, by not getting them ready for the world of work. It's rhetoric that took 20 years to stick, but has a growing base of support among government, people, and business, despite there being no evidence that educational quality has declined since employers stopped taking responsibility for training.
Like the banking crisis, making people 'work-ready' is another way of making costs and losses the responsibility of the taxpayer, while diverting ever-increasing profits to a smaller and smaller number of people. Allowing businesses to frame the conversation will always result in the public losing out, and will over time, result in the public not knowing there was anything to ever lose.
Our education system isn't failing our children, we are. We allowed it to start, we have allowed it to continue, and at the end of the day, we are the only ones who can stop it, thereby leaving a better world to our children.
60 years ago, even 40 years ago, work-ready meant something else. When my parents were starting work, their companies took them on, fresh from university, expecting to have to train them. That was how businesses got employees that knew what to do - they taught them. This was true whether someone was hired for management or the mailroom. The new person was always taught by someone with more experience. What they were taught, and how intense the training was depended on the company and the position, but the basic fact of training was a part of the job.
Sometime between about 1975 and 1990 we seemed to lose sight of the fact that employee training is an employer's responsibility. This was fairly predictable, as a new generation of management graduates had been taught that shareholder value was the most important thing to consider, and training seemed like an undesirable expense. This is the same school of thought that brought about the end of pensions, and the end of employee/employer loyalty.
Employers are really good at convincing governments of their perspectives (Adam Smith warned against allowing them to do this as far back as 1776). It's even easier when they own the newspapers and are allowed to sway public opinion in their favour. It didn't take long for government to start talking about how schools are failing our children, by not getting them ready for the world of work. It's rhetoric that took 20 years to stick, but has a growing base of support among government, people, and business, despite there being no evidence that educational quality has declined since employers stopped taking responsibility for training.
Like the banking crisis, making people 'work-ready' is another way of making costs and losses the responsibility of the taxpayer, while diverting ever-increasing profits to a smaller and smaller number of people. Allowing businesses to frame the conversation will always result in the public losing out, and will over time, result in the public not knowing there was anything to ever lose.
Our education system isn't failing our children, we are. We allowed it to start, we have allowed it to continue, and at the end of the day, we are the only ones who can stop it, thereby leaving a better world to our children.
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