More Than Just Work: Innovations in Productivity to Inspire Your People and Uplift Performance

By David Hodes

"A great stimulus for both thought and action." Sir Mick Davis, Former CEO, Xstrata

 

"Read this book if you're serious about creating high-performance organisations. David's authority on the subject stems both from his experience and knowledge." Sanjeev Gupta, TOC-ICO Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

 

Everyone has the right to be well managed.

 

And it is possible to be "just" at work—to treat others as you would be treated.

 

These are radical propositions. When you live by them, the people you lead through your management hierarchy understand the context of the work they're doing. They feel connected to the overall purpose of the enterprise and are aligned to its vision and values. They work to arrive rather than arrive to work. They are empowered with the requisite authority over the resources they need to acquit all of that for which you hold them accountable.

 

You know what you have called for is both reasonable and possible, given the human and material resources you place at their disposal. Your people have a deep sense of the significance of what they are doing and experience the world as a better place for their being in it.

 

More Than Just Work will show you how to give your people and organisation this sense of worth and purpose while improving productivity and business outcomes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Hodes
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648879923

Book preview

I

Why Change?

A Powerful Question is More than Half a Good Answer

It is not your duty to finish the work, but nor are you free to desist from it.

Rabbi Tarfon, Ethics of the Fathers (2:16)

Figure 1: Systems Thinking

Figure 1: Systems Thinking

The Airbus A380 is the largest commercial airliner in the world—the icon of our jet age. What a potent symbol of the progress we humans have made in harnessing technology to shrink the planet. And I was on board, hurtling comfortably from Sydney to Singapore where I would lead my team in the early phase of a very large project I’d won for my company. Having quickly racked up miles to platinum status, I was delighted on this trip when the attendants called me aside at the departure gate and quietly upgraded me to first class.

So there I was, all creature comforts taken care of, pampered by the very best of hospitality the flying kangaroo crew had to offer. Singapore was the centre of the universe for that project; the centre of all that was being designed and built to transform our client’s company and vault it from a mere industry benchmark, into the pantheon of the commercial gods. Their ambition was to be thought of in the same exalted terms as those global names who at different times inspired whole economies: Toyota, Sony, IBM, 3M, Microsoft, Boeing and Apple. All of them eventually lose their sheen, but what a privilege it felt, here in first class, contemplating how I could make my contribution to doing something of such scale and grand vision.

Many years before that moment, I had graduated as a mechanical engineer, with a final-year project looking at the performance of turbines on jet engines. I leaned back in the soft nap of the seat, closed my eyes and listened in to the gentle undercurrent roar of the mighty turbofans turning flawlessly, thousands of times, minute after minute, hour upon hour.

I marvelled at the power and fury of the combustion of Jet Fuel burning in the engines, so humanly brought under control to be put to productive use without breaking our flying machine in the process. How profoundly had we all changed through technology! How far since we first tamed fire.

Just over 100 years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, here I was on a flight that would take me more than 6,000km from home, and all I had to do was sit back and enjoy. In the blink of a historical eye, the human race had gone from incredulity that anything heavier than air could fly to taking for granted a global aviation industry. That transformation made it a reality that even the most remote locations on our shared earth can be reached within 24 hours, and most of that by regular commercial airlines. To the primitives I was a God enthroned in the heavens above. But for the modern world, of which I was a part, I was no more than a corpuscle of commerce, flowing through the veins and arteries of our interconnected world.

And then I stared out the window, round about when our flight was directly over the middle of the Australian continent that is now my adopted country. Below I could see the clouds, and it instantly brought to mind the Africa of my upbringing.

I was born and grew up in Bulawayo, a city of about one million people in what was then Southern Rhodesia. Every year the main rains would be carried on the winds that gave rise to the ‘inter-tropical convergence zone’, marked by giant cumulonimbus clouds. They brought with them the smell of a soaking, the sight of violent flashes of lightning and moments later the sounds of cacophonous blasts of thunder. What sheer joy it was in the unfettered freedom that was the gift of my youth to hold tight to an inflated tractor tyre as the storm waters rose in increasing swells on the Matsheumhlope River. In the dry heat of summer, that unheralded stream was no more than a sand bed. But with those drenching rains, it was a highway to excited adventure for my mates and me. A symbol of life itself.

But Bulawayo had a much grander claim on history than my youthful adventures on the Matsheumhlope River. It is the final resting place of that icon of the British Empire, the man who gave the country its name, Cecil John Rhodes. And Rhodes had a vision—to build a railway line from ‘Cape to Cairo’—to paint the map of Africa British Colonial red.

So here I was, the product of an Imperial dream, safely ensconced in a brand new A380, reflecting how in that age the world had been similarly transformed through technology. For my generation, it was the age of mass aviation; for theirs, the coming of the railroad. No technology, no progress.

There was, however, a problem with this perfect world of mine, and as I got to an age when I could better understand how things actually were, it became increasingly obvious that a great injustice had been perpetrated on the people native to my home. The boon that Rhodes brought with his colonial train was not equally shared by all those who had a claim on it.

If you were white in my country of birth, you had highly privileged access to education, healthcare and land. If you were black, you were disenfranchised, stripped of your best land, and lived under the curse of having to earn a livelihood almost exclusively through the sale of your labour in the factories, mines, fields and houses of the white man.

It wasn’t as if all was harmony before the white man colonised that corner of Africa. The two major tribes, the Shona and the Ndebele, were often at war with each other, and made a habit of stealing each other’s cattle and enslaving their women. This, though, was on my watch, and the Jewish faith in which I was raised was unequivocal when it declared in the book of Deuteronomy, ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land your Lord is giving you.’

By the time I got to my 17th birthday, I faced a stark choice—be drafted into the army of Prime Minister Ian Smith and fight a war to preserve white privilege, or leave the country, complete my schooling in England and come to know what fate that path had in store for me. I chose the latter.

Now I’m on this magnificent aircraft, 40,000 feet above sea level and cruising at more than 1,000km per hour. I am on my way to a very big workshop, the success of which would be vital to the broader success of the project. I’d been asked to design and facilitate the event with the help of my colleagues, but I knew that it was going to take something much more from me than I had ever delivered before. Though I was being given a shot at a play in the major leagues, I felt clueless as to who I needed to be and what I needed to do to succeed in that setting.

After all, there would be 70 people in the room for two days, including all the top leadership of the project. That room would be filled with really smart people designing a complete system of management to run one of the world’s largest companies. This was going to have to go way beyond an exercise in left-brain thinking. I needed a new model. What had served me so well for so long just wasn’t up to the task I had ahead of me.

From my reclined position, I start doodling on a cocktail napkin, drawing three intersecting circles. These, I realise, put my ideas about people, process and structure into sharper focus. I push the button to bring the chair upright, and pull out the table and my notebook. The circles represent the great systems of thought I had incorporated into my consulting practice.

The top-left circle was the realm of operations management—projects and production, hard measures and the science of getting work done. The top-right circle was the realm of organisational learning, addressing what Deming called the ‘psychology of people, society and change’. And in the bottom circle were all the elements of organisational design and how management is exercised through an accountability hierarchy.

I’d had this model in mind for some time, each circle representing a progressive evolution of my philosophy around how to make a meaningful difference to the experience people have of planning and performing their work. In my early years as a mechanical engineer, the science of designing and implementing better ways to do better work had an obsessive rational focus. But I soon discovered that people are not convinced by reason alone—we are emotional creatures, carried further by how we feel than what we think.

So while I felt both good about, and committed to, the implementation of high-performance processes as necessary for creating repeatable results, I realised process alone is not sufficient. We need structure. To be effective, we need to know what we are accountable for, and we need to be given authority over the resources required to acquit the work with which we’ve been charged. We also need to do work that is the right size for our capabilities. I liked the three circles both for their symmetry and simplicity. With this framework in mind, I paused for thought on a couple of questions.

Figure 2: The Ensemble Way

Figure 2: The Ensemble Way

‘More than half of a good answer,’ said one of my first mentors, ‘is a powerful question.’ What remarkable difference will I make in the world if I give myself over to successfully plaiting the strands of each individual concept into an organised whole? What if I approached the challenge on a grander scale than a mental concept represented by a doodle on a cocktail napkin? Could this produce an innovation in productivity that could fulfil my desire to make a significant difference in setting the world to rights?

I was a voracious reader of articles from the global associations that represented the three circles I was working with. I’d attended conferences and workshops about each of them: the Theory of Constraints International Certification Organisation (TOC-ICO), the Society for Organisational Learning (SOL) and the Global Organisational Design Society. But the conferences had dealt only with the single topic. I was convinced that if I could synthesise each individually powerful idea, the whole could be far more than the sum of its parts.

I felt the whine of the jets drop a couple of notes and the aircraft’s nose start its descent to Changi Airport. Over the sound of the announcement to fasten seatbelts and get ready for landing, I came to from my reverie. I was lost in the tantalising possibility raised by my questions. How, now, do I ground my ideas in this landing strip of the future?

Over the many years since that transformative experience, I have managed to distil most of what I have learned into a framework I call the Ensemble Way, represented in Figure 1.2. It’s primarily an aid to deep listening. Listening with the Ensemble Way in mind is a key to coming to understand how progressive ideas flow through an organisation, and what bottlenecks block the way of repeatedly and reliably turning those ideas into additional value and wealth.

The Ensemble Way is a model for engaging in a structured conversation about how to sustainably increase the flow of innovation. It helps clarify, through dialogue, an understanding of the complex interplay of all the domains described in the graphic. No organisation exists without these domains at play, regardless of whether they have been examined as separate parts, or as an interlinked whole.

We know that technology is changing faster than ever. By this, I don’t mean only information technology, but anything that applies scientific knowledge to practical purposes. There is no field of human endeavour untouched by the massive increase of scientific knowledge being generated in these early decades of the 21st century: health, education, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, engineering, finance, communications, transport and more. To win results, then, we must be willing to profoundly transform through technology, for no progress occurs without change in both technology and the way people engage with it. Systemic innovation is the core achievement, but it cannot be realised to its fullest strength without developing the amazing in people, supported by the engineering of seamless processes. It is at the confluence of people and processes that art meets science, where the subjective informs the objective, and where the humanities meet technology. These three components at the top of the spaceship—people, process and technology—are universal engines of progress and growth.

Powering it all is the rocket fuel of winning ideas. Without innovation, organisations die. Getting the most out of the best ideas depends on how well you understand and can exploit your knowledge of the other domains of strategy, culture, language, organisation, resources and operations. How they interact in your value-creation engine—and what to do about the bottlenecks that inevitably arise—is the central question when looking to achieve your goal and win results.

1

Technology: Enabling the Ensemble

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Figure 3: Technology

Figure 3: Technology

‘Technology,’ wrote American sociologist Read Bain, ‘includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them.’ The word technology, from the Greek techne, ‘art, skill, cunning of hand’, and logia, ‘the study of’, is really the science of craft.

Until relatively recently, it was believed the development of technology was restricted to human beings. But recent studies indicate that other primates and certain dolphin communities have developed simple tools and passed their knowledge to other generations. Barring these exceptions, what marks us out as humans is our ability to apply reason to the work of our head and hands and in so doing fulfil a human purpose.

From the wisdom of the ancients through to the heroes of our present day, what makes us most human is our inescapable connectedness—our ability to form tribes, from the strongest blood ties to communities based on village, region, nation, religion, race, interests and myriad other identities. And, of course, the tribes we belong to in order to do the work filling our days. Our most noble and timeless virtues revolve around the idea that we are at our best when we serve a purpose that is bigger than ourselves.

When one is not lost to the outer edges of the normal range of human temperament, we long to do something significant with our lives. To know that the world we leave behind is a better place for us having lived in it and that our endeavour has made a contribution to growth and progress. We will likely never all agree on the question of what kind of progress constitutes a better world, but it seems to me that the virtuous impulse I mention has its deepest roots in that moment our species first became