part0017

Visualisations are a method for surrounding ourselves with information about what’s happening in the business and how we can contribute our special skills. But more than that they are the focal point for how to do work differently. They are the true medium for change. They allow collective intelligence to happen.

The more you visualise, the more people will learn simply as a product of their interaction around the business of the day. New information will become a built-in part of their visual and social landscape. The walls of the building will become a set of venues where the internal “crowd” can deploy its collective intelligence to shape success. Their work will be much more fully informed and they will have a setting in which to provide the kind of feedback real creativity demands.

Flow , as we’ve discussed in earlier chapters, is not just a methodology that gets applied to tasks and workflows. It is the toolbox for promoting the interactions that change how your business delivers value.

People in a flow culture are able to accept that many of the decisions guiding their work could change at any moment. They get excited by the presence of uncertainty, primarily because they are co-decision makers. They have agency in the process rather than anxiety about information that is cloudy or responsibilities that are vague.

Accepting what we said earlier about the need to make more decisions, these can be made in the flow . Decisions about features and products emerge from the social interaction of the people doing the work.

At any time, all projects, tasks, and works in progress are visible and tie back to strategic requirements of the firm and forward to the point of delivery. That makes it far more interesting to get up in the morning and make the commute. People can see, literally, the whole picture.

Flow trains intelligent eyes on important tasks and enables real-time decision-making on issues such as the relevance of a work task, its value, the workarounds or tools available to complete it, and so on.

In one respect, executive teams already use visualisation, though they don’t realise it’s entirely the wrong sort. In fact, visualisation is the most important reflection of complacency in the executive suite or the foyers of large organisations.

Normally the imagery falls into two camps. One will be of the company documenting its achievements, history, and dignitaries through plaques and founder photos. Some companies spend substantial sums of money maintaining these visuals, almost like old obelisks or graveyards with elaborate headstones and architectural tombs telling you about every member of the family.

Our message to you is that this imagery can be significant but it needs to have today’s work more clearly embedded or you are creating a museum.

The other camp uses art purchases. Tens of thousands (or even millions) of dollars worth of major artists’ work run along the walls of the executive suite and the atrium. The company and executives might also be benefactors of city art shows and museums. There is certainly nothing wrong with supporting artists. We applaud it. But multi-million-dollar pieces of art in the hallway can be interpreted as conceit by the people you are asking to be more creative for you in each of your departments. The message you send is, “We (the C-Suite) have made it! Please keep us in a style we’re accustomed to”. That is a very provocative message to people whose dedication and commitment you need.

The kind of visualisation we are promoting has nothing to do with the success of the firm yesterday or the self-aggrandisement of leaders today. Flow creates a visual landscape from the company’s projects and employee roles. We suggested earlier that employees should own the walls, especially Job Walls, Appreciation Walls, and Learning Walls (we will also talk about Cool Walls).

By visualising projects, tasks, roles, tools, and strategy, and by opening them to scrutiny, you increase the chances of success. That starts with the likelihood that you’ll be able to dispense with as much as 30 percent of current works in progress and free resources to bring in great new people to do more relevant work.

In essence, you are keeping many critical eyes trained on the company’s activities, from top-level decisions down, all with a view to improving them day after day by drawing on the incredible power of many people shaping the flow of information.

People don’t need to know every detail of how one hundred projects connect. But if they don’t see their part in the mosaic, they will very likely make poor judgments.

A major benefit of visualisation is to keep both the overview and the small details in front of talented people who have access to so much additional information. In turn, they get to play a bigger role and the organisation gets the benefit of their wisdom so that, in Levy’s terms, they can help shape the collective intelligence of the firm into ways to deliver better value.

Leadership roles have to pivot to refocus on scene setting, direction, integration, and sense making. To support real-time work and decision-making, leaders need to keep tuning up the learning model. The arrival of leadership as a shaping, nurturing activity reflects the emergence of the extreme visibility principle. As much as can be made visible should be. Here are some examples:

The reasons for keeping those real representations of customers we brought up in Chapter One are not idealistic. Realising value is a complex human process and has many gradients to it. When Google, for example, launched its Google Glass project, it looked as though wearables were about to go big.

Apart from the immense publicity Google acquired from it, the Google Glass project fell apart because there was effectively no market for Google’s version of wearables. Despite Google boasting that its decisions are “based on the data” and that too few companies have as much access to data as Google, the company found no market for what it had developed iteratively with the developer community. (Would it have gained more traction if it had gone to a wider customer base?).

Niche suppliers of heads-up displays (HUDs), such as Epson (HUDs for work) and Recon (ski goggles), capitalised on a growing and tangible interest in wearables but these were intrinsically customer-centric projects (such as how to give skiers more information). Virtual reality got a boost, too (it’s an area Facebook bought into). Snapchat is heavily promoting its own Spectacles video camera.

The point is that value comes in surprising ways.

What customers will latch onto and come back for can be extraordinarily unpredictable. What chance do you stand, really, if your walls are covered in art or your projects are solely focused on code?

You need the face of the customer in front of you because you are second guessing, to some degree, what these good people will want. How will having their actual faces, tweets, or other messages allow for this kind of knowledge? Normally, it is a visual cue that triggers our brains to consider what those people might want.

The additional benefit of the Customer Wall, we use Customer Insight walls, Customer Segmentation Walls and Customer Issue Walls, is it focuses developer and marketer interest on the many new segments we can now identify thanks to better data. Today’s businesses are driven by scale and scope, the latter representing a substantial broadening of the products we have to offer to a long tail of customers in a cost-effective way. These segments need to be on display and a focal point for a debate. Are the segments an accurate reflection of customer interests? Could we segment more and provoke more thinking about value? If you are not asking these questions you do not have a startup mentality. You are vunerable to disruption.

The Executive Portfolio Wall is leadership by example. As we discussed earlier, the primary purpose of it is to review how closely works in progress support corporate objectives.

There are times when the fit between objectives and projects is good but there will always be projects that serve no real goal, ones that need to be buried and those that are uncategorised and therefore suggest that a shadow agenda is alive and kicking.

We emphasised earlier that executives typically send bad messages with their visualisations: vintage artwork or modern, expensive art that is a statement of one thing only, that the executives have arrived.

The executive suite has to become a place where the walls are full of work and reflect executive engagement with the businesses they run.

In the course of drawing up the Executive Portfolio—or, more accurately, redrawing it—the Wall should reflect projects that deserve to be live. There will be several of those that are new. They will be migrated from ideas to active status. The feasibility or market analysis will be over and they now have a green light. These go to the Project Wall. The flow has begun.

Of course, you may get push back on the whole idea of an Executive Portfolio Wall. You may touch on sensitivities that threaten your confidence or even your career. At the very least bring up the idea of Visualisation, if not physically in the C-Suite, then for starters at an off-site. If you continue to get pushback on the idea of exposing and reviewing projects, chances are transformation is not going to work.

The Project Wall is the place where work is broken down into components that can be handed over to teams who will then break those down into tasks. In reality, there are two parallel Project Walls: one where project dependencies are visualised and one for initial work breakdown.

The latter is really a place to understand a project in as much detail as can be imagined by experts who ponder the technical and business value and the process implications of the work.

To get a sense of the Project Wall, take as an example the use of drones to inspect car damage, providing insurers with an independent verification of the likely cost of repair.

Few people have worked with drones, which means this, like so many other projects, has a large element of the unknown about it. But many of us have worked with wireless communications and we all have a background in some form of GANNT-like planning. This new project, then, can be broken down as follows:

The goal is to explore the use of drones. The first task is to break work down into components that will deliver value quickly, such as:

Many of these facets will go through a feasibility study on the Executive Portfolio Wall. Once they come to the Project Wall, the job is to specify detail. The technical detail will then go to the Team Kanban Wall, while the business detail goes to the analysts or marketer who will have an eye on the Go To Market plan.

Around any office doing good Agile, there are hundreds of Post-it notes related to projects and the different tasks in progress. Anyone can see them. That of course is good Kanban, and it’s a sufficient starting point for getting people out of their own personal silos and into the flow of interaction that good work demands.

Team Kanban Walls are perhaps the most important focal point for discussing work allocation, the value of each task and the tools that are going to deliver value quickly.

Teams use this Wall on a daily basis. It facilitates a ritual, a daily stand-up where insights are shared, problems and issues raised, decisions are made, work is allocated, and blockers are unblocked.

The company needs employees to function actively around the Wall not just take a task off and go to code.

Demonstrate that a small program or API (Application Program Interface) could reduce the code base and make life easier because the flow hits less friction.

Very often, projects will hit levels of complexity that need smoothing out, so somewhere in the flow a manager might make the decision to push a problem into open source in order to get even more eyes on it. They may commission complexity reduction internally, or use external developers, a University project, or a hackathon or jam.

Here, any member from any team can raise risks and issues that teams need to address, everything from a delay in acquiring new servers to concerns about a process or a lack of resources. The leaders, in turn, must either address the risks or accept them for what they are and take their chances. You may not always be able to fix everything but here is a chance for leaders to respond publicly to risk.

This is also a chance to bring up issues with your team. Is it short of resources because the CMO keeps pulling people away? Show you can stand up for your team. Bring the CMO in to explain herself. That, too, boosts confidence.

Not all extreme visualisation needs to be process based. “Look across our office,” says Fin, “and you will see a Jobs Wall (as described in Chapter 2 ). It is a space announcing vacant situations in the company but it’s more, too. Employees can come here and request a job, note what they would like to work on next, and post their ambitions or where they want to go next. It is a social interaction space for the most important components of our success: the people who work for us.

There is also a Thank You Wall. It’s important that people’s appreciation is just as visible as their tasks. If folks want to say ‘thank you’ to colleagues they can post it here. In that way, people know that they are appreciated, and others can see that appreciation.

I’m currently working on a concept called the Cool Wall (inspired by the TV show Top Gear), whereby team members can post things they feel are really cool and that we, as a company, should investigate. In IT, that could mean new development environments, such as containers, scalable programming languages, or DevOps. In marketing, it might be new social tools, new techniques to scale a Facebook campaign, or a metric that shows the relative losses and gains in traction between Pinterest and Instagram.

Programmers play with this stuff in their spare time long before it hits corporate consciousness. It’s what they do in their open-source communities or pick up from mates in startups. Marketers should be equally interested in the tools of their trade and feel a sense of reward in sharing that.

A Cool Wall will celebrate innovation and creativity and bring it out from shadow activities in order to make it real. However, the other end of the wall (not so cool) may actually contain many of our existing assets, stuff we’ve built or started and isn’t appropriate any longer but that no-one has had the time, gumption, or insight to kill off. I’m thinking about that as a point of comparison. I’m not too sure if it will create negativity. But we’ll try it and see.”

There used to be a division between marketing and IT. In many cases, there still is but it has to be bridged. The Digital Business Wall is one way to do that. Most marketing functions are increasingly dependent on some form of technology and therefore some form of software development.

In recognition of that, you now see the great consumer goods organisations of the world (Unilever, P&G) trying to figure out ways of creating a technical ecosystem where marketers and IT people interact on equal terms. In the old days, a company could hire an ad or marketing agency to do its work but today you are lost unless you are familiarising yourself with AI, chat bots, automated customer service and social-media analysis, and automation. These are essential technical tasks that marketers bring their own unique cultural insights to.

Unilever has pioneered The Foundry as a way of creating an ecosystem of tech companies that can help with these innovations. Tech companies can propose any number of solutions to The Foundry, which acts as an innovation hub for Unilever’s business lines. Think of it as a hub-and-spoke model with innovation coming into the hub from aspiring tech companies and going out to the business lines.

There is only one problem with this model: it needs a point of integration. It needs a visualisation where the whole potential of the tech community is visible as part of a process. What might the new Unilever marketing process look like?

That’s an important question, and the answer will be continuously unfolding. If that answer is left in a spreadsheet or report, it will not be understood by enough people. It has to be equally visible to the internal IT shop, which will invariably have a role in integrating new solutions.

Earlier we talked about the Customer Wall. The Customer Wall allows companies to visualise new market segmentations. A similar segmentation can be constructed for new technical solutions. The start point can be the Customer Wall: Given these new customer needs, what are the technical solutions? Or it can begin with the question: Given the inevitability of AI in the consumer-facing organisation, what processes will be most affected?

Other questions might include: Where do we have to rethink our approach to marketing? What will the new steps look like? The task of identifying these new steps belong both to marketing and IT.

The Digital Business Wall is a different view of the change process. The IT shop is primarily focused on what comes off the Executive Portfolio into the Project Wall. Marketers and business analytics have a role in defining the breakdown of a project at that point. But marketers and IT have to take a view of transformation as a whole, and negotiate what digital processes mean for how employees work together.

Of his Obeya wall, Fin says, “My ultimate dream was to have a room where I could visualise all the critical projects in progress and provide a white space for ideation, innovation, and interaction with people from all over the business. That would make it a channel for permeation.

I now have this where I currently work and it provides a forum for making key decisions. It is in constant use and spans a number of critical initiatives. Obeya is the forgotten poor cousin of the lean world but one which is vital to overall process. The biggest obstacle in most companies is finding a room!”

Remember the golden rule of flow is that learning often means capturing the way a group shapes information to serve customer needs.

Most organisations treat learning as a dish they serve cold to employees by way of conference attendance, workshops, or webinars. This is so stale it’s unpalatable. People assimilate partial information from hundreds of sources (meetups, jams, websites, wikipedia, blogs of every description, authoritative magazines, social media, and so on). The most useful thing you can now do is shape this information through good interaction. And just as you use a pen and paper to sketch out ideas, you can use Walls, especially the Academy Wall, to give shape to the incredible flow of information around you.

An example of what goes onto the Academy Wall comes from what we call Friday Story.

Reflecting publicly on project issues is important but it harbours dangers, especially in Agile. We are opposed to Retrospectives, a technique that Agile adherents use to reflect on what has gone wrong on a project. Retrospectives often exist to blame people.

In place of those, we give people an opportunity to tell stories. One key story technique is Sail Boat (see Chapter 11 ). Sail Boat is a less threatening way to expose the shortcomings and errors of a project and to identify the key learnings that can go onto the Academy Wall.

Equally, we like to see routine evaluations of cool tools and workarounds. These can be taken off the Cool Wall and their owners asked to tell a story about how they have used them successfully. The team then gets to vote on whether a cool tool should become part of the overall mix of techniques for securing value.

There are other Walls. Companies need a Wall where they expose the stage of cultural transformation. They need a Wall which keeps options in front of them, as not all projects are going to go through the IT shop to delivery. And companies need a Wall where they can see the status of their overall transformation from legacy systems to the right-hand column of our Culture Wall in Chapter 2 . But so far, we have just given you a taste and a good starting point.

In many work environments, people assume that a degree of structure, in the traditional sense of the word, will guarantee quality and delivery. But structures as we have known them require a lot of planning, agreement, and sign off.

The fact is that we are are moving at such a fast pace now on many fronts that there isn’t the time to create plans and update them in the old way. You need to be in the flow. And, to recap, that means:

Your team is made up of people who are comfortable with ambiguity. (We should note, however, that most people won’t come to you with this trait fully developed. They’ll have to learn as they go, and it’s your job to help them by creating a supportive work environment that teaches them to excel at real-time planning in the face of uncertainty.)

You have your team’s attention and engagement. After all, they’re the ones who will spot mistakes, see new and different solutions, and suggest improvements.

More than anything else, you need a flexible system that lets you easily integrate what the team learns. This integration should happen not just online but at conferences, in conversation with startups, and while bumping into others at the Wall.

We all have to admit that we are a work in progress and just go with the flow.

Companies are all about processes or “ways to get things done.” There is a debate in some areas of IT right now over whether in fact companies do need processes. Leaders at the streaming-video service Netflix argue that smart employees will always find the best way to do things. Companies introduce “process” when they lack real talent.

Netflix believes process is in fact a consequence of growth. As you increase your hiring you need more and more control mechanisms because you take in people who are naturally less autonomous.

This is a fascinating proposition. It acknowledges precisely what we say, that many areas of work are entirely new to everyone. You cannot have a process that lays down the how-to for something nobody has done before. All you can have, or more significantly, the power of what you can do is to unleash people to experiment and find the right way to work, at low cost.

But that in itself is a process. So, the “no-process” argument will always fall down even though process-lite companies can argue that setting guide rails for smart people to work freely within is very powerful.

We argue that the more you can make visible, the more chance you have of capturing the best ideas from the talent you have. For as long as work is hidden in laptops you cannot interact around it. When it is up on the walls, it generates discussion. It becomes a focal point for intelligent social interaction.

For that reason we have emphasised visualisation over and over. Visualisation is a process, of course. More importantly it is also a meeting place. The benefit of visualised processes is that people can talk about them and co-decide what will work and what might not.

In today’s firms we see more and more new technologies, techniques or tools being introduced - microapps, microservices, AI, big data and so on. All these require an old process to be replaced by something new. They require process redesign. That becomes an opportunity to loosen the reins as well as give people the power to decide how to work.

By and large we have confined our visualisations to customer segmentation, customer interaction, strategy and portfolio management, project definition and work allocation, and social interactions around jobs, appreciation and learning.

However, the same techniques is useful when it comes to mapping out how new technologies might be introduced. We produced such a visualisation for firms adopting Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. It is relevant to the discussion earlier on Digital Business Walls.

If marketers and developers are to collaborate successfully, as they need to in AI projects, they have to combine their skills in order to redesign processes.

In many companies, over the past decade, new technologies such as social media have failed to bring IT and the business together even though success depends on cooperation.

The newer generation of technologies, such as AI and the Internet of Things, are going to prove very difficult if they do not act as a venue for internal collaboration (and actually for internal-external collaboration).

Visualisations of process can also help shape how internal development projects function (developers know where their work might fit into a new process), or point the way to the right tech partnerships (securing cooperation with strong startups that are more expert), or a combination of these.

Visualisation can help people to design processes for a major innovation like AI.

By laying out the steps visually, we can debate whether the company can add value or not through its internal resources or whether there are shortcuts or whether there are micro-outsourcing options available that can accelerate innovation.

In the visualisation you see here, we have simplified the AI adoption process to give marketers and developers a point of focus. You’ll see the four major steps at the top, each with its own subsidiary activities. In fact, any one of these could be broken down again (and will be as the marketers and developers discuss an AI-adoption program).

With a skeleton visualisation like this, the door is open for marketers and developers to get out their Post-it notes and embellish, enlarge, and expand. In the process, they will be reaching agreement on what needs to be done to build a custom process around AI for their company’s particular needs.

There are additional elements to puzzles like this. AI has strong ethical implications, such as where one might retain human agency or what are the appropriate uses of customer data. One of the first things good firms do is use those ethical issues to set guide rails for the adoption team.

On the Digital Business Wall, we advocate simple steps to get people going:

Study new processes at other workplaces. It’s rare to be the first to create a new process from scratch. For this one we interviewed 30 executives on their AI-adoption plans and a number of practitioners on how they were going about adoption.

Create the visualisation as a work in progress. It’s never finished but it’s a place people can rally around to see and discuss what’s emerging.

Use the major blocks to identify partner opportunities. Will you ever be great at data normalisation? Probably not, but there are people out there who live and breathe it. Can you really devise a watertight AI-adoption business case? Perhaps, but there may be someone who can do it better.

In our world we use visualisations to build the social interactions that surface these options. When you have innovations that have dozens of new steps, as AI does, no leader will be able to produce a foolproof plan for it. By walking hand in hand, however, everyone can lend a hand in making life better.