How your brain collaborates with itself

How your brain collaborates with itself

Aug 7, 2019 | Collaboration, Marketing

 

Your left brain manages the quantitative, anything that can be reduced to a spreadsheet will be a left brain activity. It can be quantified, optimised, but always lacks the spark of originality, and creativity. 

Creativity, instinct, understanding, are all functions of the right brain.

We homo sapiens respond instinctively to the cues around us in our environment, a  function of our evolutionary drive to survive in a hostile environment. However, we do it using our ‘fast’ brain, which is not a specific location or hemisphere of the brain, but an instinctive response built into us by evolution, residing deep in our amygdala. It enables instant response, which may not always be right, but is a safer bet. For example, when our ancestors were walking across the savannah, they responded to that rustle in the grass as if it was a threat. If it turns out to be just the wind, nothing is lost, but if it turns out to have been a tiger, it would have been a grave mistake to ignore it.

We interpret everything around us through this ‘fast lens’, then are able to sit back and think about it adding a layer of more thoughtful response.

The creative stuff in our brain, residing largely in the  right hemisphere is the slower part, from where we draw on our experience, learning, and context of information and environment, to come to a conclusion. It takes time and cognitive energy to assemble the factors that apply, and consider them, rather than just jumping to a conclusion.

It is this ability that distinguishes us from other mammals, and indeed, all animals.

However, the right brain needs input from the left, it requires the raw material with which to work, and when the magic happens, it needs a way for the left brain to figure out if the outcome made logical sense, then refeed the data back to the right brain for reprocessing.

I would speculate that the advent of the digital tools of instant gratification have compromised our propensity to apply the cognitive energy required to leverage the creative capability of our right brain.  Our creative output appears to me to have suffered in direct proportion to the evolution of the fast twitch tools of  the internet, which demand an instant response, not a considered one.  This does not  enable  the right brain to do what it does best, seek out interesting and non obvious solutions to a problem or situation.

For anyone more than  superficially interested in this stuff, the must read book is ‘Thinking Fast & Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman.

When you want to understand how it all applies to the generation of revenue, give me a call.

Solopreneurs still need a network

Solopreneurs still need a network

May 29, 2019 | Collaboration, Small business

 

The numbers of those running solo businesses has increased dramatically as the world has changed around us. Employment for life is a thing of the past, relying on your own resources has become  the common way to succeed.

Many do so as solopreneurs, for lack of a better term.

This does not mean they are reaching for the stars, it just means they are one of  the hordes of small enterprises offering services to others that used to be offered by corporations, have been outsourced, or not offered at all. The digital revolution has created many of them, filling roles and providing services that did not exist a decade ago.

The downside, and there is always a downside, is the isolation.

Human beings are social animals, we need others not just to get stuff done, but for our emotional and mental health, and yes, to create the next generation. Meeting partners in the workplace used to be where the most relationships began, but no longer.

As a solopreneur for  the last 24 years after becoming a corporate refugee, I have always acutely felt the loss of the social, supportive side of corporate life. The freedom experienced as a solopreneur is terrific, but it can get very lonely.

Rotary was started in 1905 in Chicago as a means for diverse professionals to meet, exchange ideas and experiences, and give back to their communities.  Meetings of like-minded people have occurred through history. From the earliest times, people gathered in common places to do business, exchange ideas, and gossip. The Greeks evolved the sophisticated processes we have scrambled and called democracy, the Romans gathered in the forum, artists gathered in Florentine workshops sparking the renaissance, Isaac Newton first exposed his ideas in coffee shops around London during the enlightenment, and the Salons of Paris spawned the impressionist movement.

We ‘network’ for business, to become known, liked and trusted, so others will refer us to their networks. It is a powerful motivation, now underpinned by digital tools, but at a deeper level, there is a range of psychological drivers that we as humans need, that are more powerful than simply getting a sales lead.

We need others to help think about the personal and commercial problems we face, to provide social and emotional support, gain insights from the experiences of others, challenge our thinking and automatic responses to situations, as a substitute for the service networks provided in corporations. 

If on top of all that, we can make a dollar by providing services to others, that is great, but the outcome of successful networking is human, not just commercial.

Header Photo is of the Queens Lane Coffee House in Oxford, UK, established in 1650.

 

The ‘Collaboration trap’

The ‘Collaboration trap’

Dec 3, 2018 | Collaboration, Leadership

 

Collaboration has become a standard mantra, ‘do it or die’.

I see all sorts of collaboration being put in place, most of it leads to wasted time, energy, lost opportunity, and suboptimal outcomes.

Why

The collaboration teams are thrown together from a pool in an enterprise where everyone thinks in a similar manner. There is little diversity of thought, and often those co-opted are the ones who appear to have the time to do a bit more, or alternatively they are really effective, so they get given more to do.

You know  the old saying, ‘to get something done, give it to a busy person‘.

Utter nonsense.

We are collaborating too much, but rather than real collaboration, we have groups of people  in close proximity who are not adding value.

What we need is ‘Disciplined Collaboration’.

Collaborating teams that are constructed for diversity in skills and thinking styles, such they  can all add value, and the scope of the collaboration is set by a planned outcome of some sort.

To get a useful result from a collaboration, you need people  who have the capability to contribute to that outcome, not just someone who happens to be walking past at the time a seat needs to be filled.

You need a focus of activity, a problem to be solved, and intent, not a series of meetings of individuals who are not really sure why they are there.

 

 

The four parameters of collaborative success.

The four parameters of collaborative success.

Jul 23, 2018 | Collaboration, Strategy

Collaboration in all sorts of guises, from casual cooperation to formal agreements and even mergers and acquisitions,  is becoming more and more common. Digital tools of communication appear to make it easier, which they should do. However, the tools themselves do not address the basic causes of collaborative failure, a failure to agree on a common outcome that is in the best interests of all parties, and to act on that agreement consistently.

Most collaborative structures fail, sometimes after initial success is unable to be repeated or scaled, even in the face of a compelling logic.

Over the years I have put together a number of alliances, in several industries, with vastly different objectives, from buying simple manufacturing inputs together, to jointly entering export markets with high barriers.

While the nature of  them is different, there are four challenges that simply must be addressed before the collaboration has any hope of survival let alone success.  These four common characteristics of all of them need to be acknowledged and managed.

Profit potential.

The collaboration must be seen by both parties, sometimes all parties where there is more than two (as is often the case in agricultural alliances) as being worth the effort. The potential value must be positive for both the alliances and every individual member of the alliance. This is always a fragile calculation, and the tragedy of the commons always comes into play.

In areas where there is no profit motive, such as between government departments, finding a unifying motive is even harder, and usually in my experience succumbs to politics and ego even faster than  in the private sector.

Complementary skills.

The chances of success are enhanced when the strengths of the parties are complementary, the strengths of one serves to fill in the weaknesses of the other. There is always overlap, sometimes considerable.  At each point of overlap the parties should be asking themselves if that particular area is of significant strategic importance to them, is it a key part of their value proposition and differentiation. Where it is, and there is overlap, trouble follows.

Common view of the outcome.

Differing expectations of the outcome results in stresses that kill off any collaboration. In the absence of a very clear and common view of the outcome of a collaboration, both for the collaborating group and its individual members, it will fail. This is a challenging proposition, as all sorts of human characteristics and frailties become enmeshed in the manner in which they all behave. This common view of the value and outcome of the collaboration must be clear at all levels in all  the collaborating enterprises, and the resources of all focussed at least to some extent on making the collaboration work.

Governance of the collaboration.

Managing an enterprise where there is the opportunity to exercise institutional power is hard enough, it is geometrically harder when the institutional  power is absent, or significantly diminished as it usually is in a collaboration.

Collaborations vary as noted from one-off transactions to  financially, operationally and strategically merged entities, with most residing somewhere between these extremes.  There must be governance rules that define the appropriate behaviour of the parties to  the agreement in all sorts of situations that can be envisaged, as well as those that cannot. These rules must go beyond the scope of applicable regulations, as we are dealing with people. The role of Directors and senior management is to enhance the value of an enterprise, and given there is mountains of data demonstrating that collaborations, particularly at the M&A end of the continuum destroys value, the governance of any form of alliance is critical to its commercial success and longevity.

Normally there are common concerns that can be agreed up front, but there also needs to be agreement on how to manage those situations that are not specifically a part of the initial agreement, but that pop up in the course of operations.

 

It is always best to hammer those out and put them in writing, irrespective of the goodwill that may exist at  the outset, as both people and circumstances change. Tiny molehills that emerge tend to rapidly become mountains unless addressed in a consistent manner, early.

 

There is considerable benefit in working on a ‘code of conduct’ at the formation stage. This can be an agreement over coffee of two sole trader entrepreneurs to a several day workshop of the parties to hammer out the agreements against a pro forma that covers the areas necessary for success.

Such a pro-forma must cover a range of areas, the most important being:

  • Expressions of the specific outcomes each party expects.
  • Definition of what is in, and what is out of the collaboration.
  • Definition of the roles and responsibilities of each of the parties.
  • Creation of joint decision making processes, and the means by which they will be communicated, evolved and managed.
  • The investment requirements of the parties, including non-financial investments, the area where the most challenging disputes can emerge, and how these differing investments will be valued over time.
  • What happens to the assets of the collaboration in the event of a dissolution of the collaboration.
  • A specific list of governance rules and the investments required to maintain them.
  • Specifically set out to build and maintain trust, without which all  the foregoing is a waste of time, and trust is always a function of behaviour, it has to be earned, rarely is it just given..

 

A final point upon which all collaborations hang, and have always hung since the beginning of people living together in some sort of interdependent manner. A collaboration,  or co-operation can only succeed over time when all parties to the agreement see that their best interests are best served by serving the best interests of the group before their own.

Cartoon credit: Scott Adams creating Dilbert, and his wry commentary

Four strategic questions raised by Manufacturing Week and CeBIT

Four strategic questions raised by Manufacturing Week and CeBIT

May 16, 2018 | Collaboration, Governance, Marketing, Strategy

 

The juxtaposition of two trade shows, Manufacturing week last week, and the current CeBIT, have raised some questions in my mind about the road on which we are travelling.

I spent the best part of two days at Manufacturing week, and yesterday at CeBIT, talking, observing, getting caffeinated, and  generally trying to question the preconceptions that seem to be driving the activity I saw. I arrived at a small number of questions that I think  need to be addressed.

How do we overcome the myth of Silicon valley?

Simply put, it seems that the general view is that an ‘App’ or digitisation of something will be the panacea. The VC’s will emerge from their caves and fund the next big thing that will solve all the problems, despite much of the stuff I saw looking a bit like an App in search of a problem to solve, particularly at CeBIT.

There needs to be, in my humble view, more focus and understanding that the improvements in manufacturing will come more from the improvements in material science and engineering than from a  VC funded miracle cure.

The developments that make a real difference are long term ones, basic science that bounces around often for decades before a commercial application is found, a timeframe that requires public funding, as the VC’s will not be interested. A case in point is the development by CSIRO scientists of the wireless LAN technology we all now use every day.

Where do we find the skills to compete?

We are a small country, so graduate numbers in STEM subjects are low by international comparisons, but apparently dropping as a proportion of graduations. Numbers vary, as do definitions, but to be globally competitive we need to increase the number of quality graduates, ensure their funding, and focus their activities on areas where Australia has some sort of competitive advantage. Logically the first two should be an outcome of government policy, sadly lacking, and the latter an outcome of commercial forces over time. Currently we import a substantial percentage of STEM employees and entrepreneurs, a fact demonstrated clearly, albeit qualitatively, at the two trade shows.

How do we build genuine collaboration between Government, Academia and Industry?

This collaboration gets a lot of air time and ‘polly-speak’ but seems lacking. There are a lot of government programs around to assist industry, but most are not well understood, are hard to access, and have demanding guidelines that alienate time poor manufacturing management. To be fair, we all want to see out taxes spent sensibly, but sometimes you have to take a leap of faith, and make the funding more accessible, and not so risk sensitive to the bureaucratic, risk averse funding bodies. This requires additional expert, non  bureaucratic resources at the early stages of project development and assessment.

The problem with academia holding IP remains a huge stumbling block. I delivered a session at a University recently, for free, on the understanding that I would be given a recording of the session. I put a lot of work into the session, the Professor concerned assured me that the recording would be forthcoming, but it is tangled up in the Universities IP policy, and I have not got it. Next time they ask for help the answer may be different, and this was just a simple exercise of me passing on the wisdom of my experience, not leveraging the IP of some advanced research project in which the University had a hand.

How do we participate meaningfully in the next wave?

Forget today, it is already too late. However, the next wave of development, artificial intelligence, IOT, human/machine interfaces, in short, industry 4.0, the combination of advanced manufacturing and digital technology, is just around the corner.  Australian of the year Professor Michelle Simmons leads a world class quantum physics team,  but I wonder if there is the supporting infrastructure and political longevity of will to leverage the break-throughs that appear to be coming. In addition, there is really only the one team, competing against the world, as well as collaborating with it, and I suspect both are insufficient.

 

As a final observation, and this is a ‘groan’ from a marketing bloke. The quality of thought that has gone into the leveraging of the investment made by the organisations of all sizes with stands at both exhibitions is rubbish.  After Fine Foods last year I penned this post that outlined 18 strategies to leverage the substantial investment required to be present at a trade show. I was astonished, particularly at CEBIT yesterday, the digital tech show,  at the number of times I was allowed to move on after a conversation without the stand staff getting any of my details, even in instances where there was obvious genuine interest, and therefore some potential value in a follow up.

Photo credit: CeBIT via Flikr

 

 

 

Your network is the second most valuable asset you have

Your network is the second most valuable asset you have

Jan 17, 2018 | Collaboration, Marketing

Networking in this modern age has been digitised, so it is made easier, but is it more effective?

Probably not, when most of the time the so called Networking’ is little more than an opportunity for a sales pitch.

Over my time, the most value that has evolved has come not from those I know well, but from those I know not so well, or at all, but who are in the networks of those in my networks.

When I first left corporate, one morning after another barney with the MD (never a career enhancing move) 23 years ago, the first thing I did the following morning, after processing the fact that I had a young family, with heavy commitments, and suddenly no income, was to write down the name of everyone I knew  with the intention of ringing each of them to let them know I was now looking for a job.

The really surprising fact was that the greatest level of support came from those I did not know well, but with whom I had interacted in some way. They not only offered me the support I had assumed would come from my closest connections, but they were the most valuable source of new connections. With hindsight, it is obvious, those I knew well were less likely to be able to offer valuable new connections, as I already knew them all.

The networks of your networks are of enormous value, if you treat them with respect. The weak ties they deliver are more likely to create the unexpected than those you know well.

Over the years I have discovered a few things about networking, which is the source of 100% of my activity, as it has always been  since the first consulting gig came 22 years ago. This came from a vague acquaintance to whom I had offered some insights in the course of a general conversation I did not remember,  but he did.

It is not about selling, it is about trust.

When an approach is with the objective of selling, most can smell it a mile way, and run for the hills, we hate to be sold to. Networking is about being valuable to others, which builds trust, which eventually leads to a transaction, in a tiny percentage of cases. You always need to give a bit before you can expect to get anything of value back.

Networking is highly personal.

Human beings are social animals, but having said that, we like to be social with others who are ‘like us’. There has to be some human connection before we will allow somebody new into our personal circles. This is where most of the digital platforms fall down. A ‘Like’ on Facebook is utterly meaningless, except to Facebook as a track along which to send more ads. A generic ‘let’s connect’ message on LinkedIn is much less likely to attract a positive response than one that is personalised, and the more personalised the better. After all you are more likely to trust someone who has taken the trouble to do some basic research and sent a personalised note, than a random generic connection request which you know in most  cases will be followed by a sales pitch.

Networker or connector?

Being a networker implies that it is all about you, who you know, and what you can make happen as a result. A better outcome is to be a connector, someone who ‘knows who knows,’ and in this way can add value to two other parties, which will build trust, and the likelihood that both of the connected parties will remember and return the favour, usually in spades.

Networks work as clusters.

Because we are pack animals, who tend to stick together, once we are in a cluster, we can ‘work’ the cluster, but there are always a few who have connections beyond the cluster, the ‘connectors’ referred to above.  Being the connector between these tight clusters is a position of great influence. The more diverse the connections you have access to, the greater the potential for that the one piece that completes the puzzle is likely to be in there somewhere.

And, your most valuable asset: your health of course.