Sometime in the mid-eighties I listened to a presentation on cassette tape (those where the days) that unlocked something inside me. On the cassette Donald McGilchrist, who would become a friend and mentor some years later, unpacked his skilful thinking about global trends - a new concept for me. Ironically, analysing social trends has since become a bit of a trend!

But the art has evolved. In those days, the analysis was based to a large extent on the trajectory of the past and extrapolating into the future in light of current realities. Today, the sheer speed of change means that future-casting looks more like the work of a professional gambler …. analysing the myriad of possibilities and mixing objectivity and gut intuition to land on a prediction. (Coincidently, as I write this in a hotel lobby, the TV screen is blaring at me about Apple’s new TV technology - and I wonder whether it will ‘change the way we watch TV’.)

Future-casting has become more than an obscure intellectual past-time. The pace of business evolution has ushered futurists to centre stage and mainstream business media is constantly feeding leaders with ideas about what is ahead. In fact, understanding the things that will shape business for this year is now no longer good enough, we need to be preparing for the factors that will shape our business context next year and beyond.

This month’s Harvard Business Review includes its ‘breakthrough ideas for 2008′, referred to simply as the HBR List. It contains some fascinating insights. I want to comment on one because of its relevance to our business at Ergo Consulting.

In October last year, to coincide with an office move, we virtualized our team. This means we said to everyone, ‘there is no obligation for you to be at a particular place, at a particular time … unless of course the customer requires it or there is a face to face conversation you are invited to’. Our new place has no allocated desks, rather a number of different styled spaces (Hot desks, library, meeting room, kitchen/dining, outdoor area etc) While we might be on the front edge of this trend, we are certainly not radical. According to the HBR (for example), 40% of IBM employees have no official office.

Our experience has been a positive one. Although some of the team need to keep more typical business hours because of the customer facing projects they are on, the flexibility to work from home, in café’s, or wherever, means greater focus for those with some choice. We have installed a number of habits we call ‘connection disciplines’ to ensure that everyday people are connecting with each other and can be contacted at any time.

A parallel trend is to measure performance based on tasks and outcomes rather than effort and time. My experience is that while most managers agree with the principle of moving to an outcomes orientation, few are willing to bite the bullet and move to an approach that gives this more than lip service. Despite the benefits of providing incentive based on outcomes, it remains ‘safer’ to control effort within a time period. Counter to the hopes of managers, this custom has led to an extraordinary volume of ‘busy work’ … unproductive workplace activity that fills in the hours of the day but is undisciplined, lacks focus and is disconnected with the strategic imperatives of the organisation.

One of the other ‘ideas’ from the HBR relates to physical exercise and brain function. We can expect greater integration of exercise with workplaces. Improved brain function after physical exercise is clinically proven. Those of us who manage to do regular exercise know this is true. Board rooms with treadmills, mandatory exercise breaks during the day … who knows?

I think we are on the cusp of another industrial revolution. Two things will drive it … the first is the groundswell of demand for workplaces that allow people to operate as human beings rather than cogs in a machine. The second relates to the imperatives associated with moving to a society with dramatically less carbon emissions. (I was involved in a conversation on Friday that included a suggestion that our whole transport system would be radically different within 10 years … who knows?)

All this means that stability is an illusion and the effort to establish it is ultimately a liability. The future belongs to the agile and those who Otto Scharmer describes as ‘listening to the future as it emerges’.

(BTW … the HBR List contains some much more interesting ideas - peer to peer banking, cheating from honest people, appreciating the difference between competition and opposition … and stacks more.)

I was talking with a neighbour over the weekend, as you do when the weather is perfect for pottering around in the yard and you live in a cul-de-sac. He volunteered that he had some challenging management issues coming up this week, which, when I probed a bit further turned out to be redundancy conversations. Ouch.

It arrested my attention away from carting hard rubbish onto the nature strip ready for the annual suburb junk shuffle (where people cruise the streets collecting each others’ discards to store in their garages until next year’s hard rubbish collection) to the times when I had been in his position. Unfortunately, it has been a few times.

There was one in particular that still makes me feel sick. We had been through an extensive interview process and made a mistake I have since vowed not to repeat … hiring the best candidate despite them not meeting all the criteria. We had done all the ‘right things’, documenting performance, having hard conversations etc in the first couple of months, but despite our best efforts (and his), he was not going to make it past probation. What made it emotionally even more challenging was that he had previously struggled to get a job, was a single parent and was doing it tough.

There have been other times, when, as we matured as a business, we had developed a way of operating that helped significantly in this ‘most difficult’ conversation. In a nutshell - financial transparency. Inspired by Jack Stack (A Stake in the Outcome, Great Game of Business) we adopted open book management. Open book management is an approach to business that opens the books to the staff team. It means that all the numbers are available to people who want to see them (including salaries) and there are some numbers which are intentionally bought into the open so that people understand the financial health of the business. There is a lot more to be said about this approach (maybe in later entries). For now, it is enough to say that when people have visibility of the ‘vital signs’ of the financial health of the business, they have a deeper level of appreciation of even the most challenging conversations.

I deeply admire the courage of two people said to me independently, “As difficult as this is for me, I know it is the right thing for the business.” Are you kidding? You are not supposed to say that.

The point is a simple one. Transparency builds trust. As Jack Stack suggests, the workplace is the last place in our societies where we continue to treat adults as children, withholding important information from them as a matter of custom based on the idea that only managers have the capacity to deal with certain things. This approach effectively draws lines through the workplace setting up ’us and them’ power dynamics all through the organisation.

This is not about cheapening the value of data by scattering it indiscriminately through company communication channels. To open the books requires a great deal of thought and skillful leadership. It is essentially about recognising that when people understand the connections between their contribution and company numbers, they are able to make decisions that align their own interests and the common good. And they have a better appreciation of management decisions that affect them.

Of course transparency is risky from a manager’s perspective, but it also puts appropriate pressure on decision-makers to ensure that their decisions do make sense under the scrutiny of the staff team. Our experience is that not all, but some people rise to the challenge of engaging important financial decisions by providing valuable insight to those who are ultimately accountable.

I don’t look forward to difficult conversations. I don’t know anyone who does. I do know however, that challenging discussions have better outcomes when they are had in a context of transparency, where the relevant data has been accessible to all the stakeholders.

To my neighbour … and the employees, I’m with you in spirit.

“He’s the kind of bloke you’d give your right arm for.” A friend of mine was talking about a high profile figure with whom he had been recently working. One of the reasons the comment struck me was that I’d heard someone else, in a completely unrelated context, describe the same person in similar ways. I wondered what it was about this leader, now a federal politician, that caused others, very significant leaders in their own right, to respond to someone in this way. In this case:

1. He stood for something. His vision for society was compelling and contagious.

2. He had integrity. In the television interviews I had seen with him I saw a person whose personal disciplines and home life reflected the values he espoused for the community.

3. He was a ‘genuinely nice bloke’.

I want to perch for a minute on the last of these. What place does being a ‘nice bloke’ have in the cut throat rough and tumble of business? I regularly come across well managed businesses that are poorly led. By that I mean that the capacity of the leaders to generate outstanding effort from their teams is incidental rather than intentional and strategic. Huh?

For example, let’s think for a minute about performance appraisals. As positive reinforcement guru Aubrey Daniels says, ‘If the purpose is to motivate employees, it does not. If the purpose is to help people improve, it does not. If the purpose is to avoid legal problems with poor performers, it does not.” Yet performance appraisals remain a cornerstone of most business calenders because of a management rather than leadership mentality. The ‘management mentality’ typically expresses itself with a certain relational toughness that dismisses the vulnerability associated with being ‘nice’. But Daniels goes on, “You can be nice and ineffective, but you cannot get discretionary effort without being liked.”

Being ‘nice’, it turns out, has got a lot to do with employee motivation, particularly when we are talking about going the extra mile. This is not about a sugar-coated, superficial, manipulative relational style. As illustrated above, this is about the a moral quality that compels people to follow.

Perhaps the natural business resistance to being ‘nice’ is related to the commonly associated practice of failing to have difficult conversations. ‘Nice’ people are soft. They don’t, won’t or can’t address tough workplace issues. Good point. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be the case. In fact I would argue that the mix of being ‘liked’ plus the resolve to address issues through embracing tough conversations as the need arises, (mixed with a vision worth sacrificing for - the elements above) is a potent leadership cocktail.

If you are naturally nice, the trick is to become better at embracing difficult conversations. If you resist being ‘nice’ at work, try being more personable and over time and observe the difference.

The capacity to motivate people, to help them tap into the depths of their natural talent, to solicit from them the kind of effort that puts your organisation ahead of the pack should be part of leadership 101. At the end of the day, as the cliche goes, the most valuable asset in any business is the people. Being ‘nice’ might have more going for it than most business people allow themselves to believe. It is certainly not the only thing, but without the kind of relational quality that invites people to willingly go the extra mile, your business is missing a vital ingredient.

(Aubrey Daniels quoted from the Feb 2008 edition of the Australian Financial Review’s Boss Magazine.)

I find myself pretty excited about the summit that Kevin Rudd has called. There will always be skeptics (John Faine did his usual job this morning) but I reckon the idea of getting good thinkers together to tackle the big questions is exactly what this country needs. In the wake of a season where we (or more precisely, the economy) have been ‘managed’, it is good to see the activities that are typically associated with leadership.

Of course getting people together to talk will not automatically mean we will see good outcomes. I think the success of the summit will to a large extent depend on the capacity of the participants to practice what I call ‘collective listening’.

It is a well known pop statistic that people rank their of fear public speaking above death. There is any number of training courses and coaching out there to help us speak more effectively in public. All good. But there is a dearth of an appreciation of the need for public listening, let alone practical support to help us do it better.

Public, or collective listening is the foundation of public dialogue. Without collective listening, you get a series of monologues where you come out with a bigger set of ideas, but no new elements. Genuine dialogue moves us into new territory rather than simply exchanging ideas.

At its core there are 3 sequential pieces that form the foundations of genuine dialogue:

1. suspending judgement - choosing not to filter an idea through our existing paradigm

2. presencing - allowing diverse, even conflicting ideas to sit, facilitating the possibility of emergence, the coming of new possibilities

3. realising - experimenting and testing the application of the new

So I hope the summit will move beyond (i) Politeness: shared monologues, through what William Isaacs calls, (ii) Breakdown: controlled discussion via (iii) Inquiry: reflective dialogue to (iv) Flow: generative dialogue.