by Jakkii Musgrave

As founding members of the Digital Disruption Research Group (DDRG), it is our great pleasure to be involved each year in our annual DISRUPT.SYDNEY™ conference, co-hosted by the University of Sydney Business School and Sydney Business Insights. This year’s conference was held on Friday 20 September 2019 at the University of Sydney Business School campus in Castlereagh St, Sydney, centred around the topic of “rethinking success”.

Throughout the morning talks at Disrupt we heard varying perspectives on the topic:

From Kai Riemer in his opening remarks, a reminder of paradox, perspective and the big picture: what looks like success on the one hand may spell disaster on the other – for example, our drive for economic growth and prosperity often comes with increasing inequality. What does success mean in such a context, and by whose yardstick do we measure it? The rich? The poor? The aspirational middle class?

From Andrew Baxter in his opening keynote, a move away from defining business success as increasing shareholder value, and toward creating and retaining trust and balancing value for the organisation, their employees, their customers and their communities.

From Connie Henson, a critical need to provide psychological (and physical) safety in order for people to thrive. Once that’s in place, a need to enable and empower connectedness (relationships with others, including those who constructively challenge us), control (autonomy, predictability, and fairness) and contribution (fulfilling needs to give valuable and valued input).

From Paul Farragi, a rejection of the paradigm that success means only money (profit, revenue, income, etc), where resources are deemed infinite in our calculations of success. A sole focus on ‘money’ leads to “corporate myopia”; instead Paul argues we need to find our balance between profit, people and planet.

From Sandra Peter in her keynote, who says “success is not always what you think” and challenges us to shift our perspective from every angle – the big picture nation states; the organisations; the individuals. From economic policy to regulation to ideas and ‘how we do things’, how we have defined success in the past won’t work in the future – if you even accept that it’s working now.

From Rob Hackett, who found the measures of success in hospitals lacking when it comes to patient safety and patient outcomes and who created movements and a network to shift the dial on these in a hyper-hierarchical, hyper-competitive environment (spoiler alert: it’s very much a work in progress).

From Andrea Myles, who challenges us to rethink our outdated ‘Western’ notions of China and accept that China is already a leader – and soon we’ll all be following their lead. We need to rethink what success means for our nation in the era of China and other huge Asian economies dominating the landscape, and to stop resting on our laurels on the misperception that our geography gives us an advantage we don’t need to work for or work on.

And, to wrap up the day, another chapter in the Disrupt story on digital humans, with a look at “deepfakes and the future of information (arms race)” including how far deepfakes have come (as seen in the below tweet, used in the presentation). Are we more or less successful when we can no longer tell if a video, image or audio file is real or actually a deepfake?

Fittingly, on the day of the global climate strikes, throughout the talks and panel discussions, several of the speakers discussed the need for businesses to play a role in social change, without waiting for governments to take the lead or simply being forced to through regulation. Again, a different perspective on success: developing institutional and corporate trust through supporting communities and employees, and taking a stand on important issues.

The day once again provided great discussion and different perspectives on the conference topic. For businesses and individuals – and, frankly, for societies and governments too – there’s a lot to reflect upon with regards to success in an era of disruption, and while facing large scale issues such as rising inequality, economic slowdown and climate change. There are many hard conversations and few easy answers in moving forward, but as the dial begins to shift on defining and measuring success, businesses who refuse to adapt their thinking may find themselves facing extinction.

It is with the big picture in mind we must think about how we define success for our businesses – balancing people, profit, and planet (and shareholders) – and then look back at our systems, processes, policies and guidelines and determine whether they’re actually supporting success in these terms. Then, are we enabling our employees to thrive through providing psychological (and physical) safety, connectedness, control and contribution? Does our digital workplace have the right tools and systems in place to support employee enablement and effectiveness in order to deliver on success as we’ve defined it? Once we know what success is in our context, then we can define how to measure it – qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

PS: Here are some recent articles aligned with some of what the speakers had to say that you may be interested in for a bit of further reading:

• Learning for good: how multinationals must learn to solve global social problems
• Social issues are no longer fringe for business or their customers
• Tech CEO tells employees he’s obligated to accept any government contract regardless of morality
• Sainsbury’s till-free retreat is a timely reminder to retailers that digital transformation goes at the customers pace
• Winning-at-all-costs in the workplace: Short-term gains could spell long-term disaster
• The future of work means managing through disruption
• Workplace culture contributing to ‘psychological harm’
• In pursuit of China: Google supercharges its mobile payment app in India with WeChat-style mini apps
• The emergence of super apps in Latin America
• Why travel makes you smarter and wiser, and how to exploit that fact
• These fake images tell a scary story of how far AI has come

Originally posted on the Ripple Effect Blog: https://rippleffectgroup.com/rethinking-success-disrupt-sydney-2019-wrap-up/

by Connie Henson, Learning Quest

“You are really not going to like it,’ observed Deep Thought.

‘Tell us!’

‘Alright’, said Deep Thought….

‘Forty-two,’ said Deep thought, with infinite majesty and calm…

Forty-two!  Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?…

I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Leadership has traditionally been about knowing the answers. Likewise, in business, we have rewarded leadership styles that exude calm certainty about what is ‘known’.

However, expectations are changing and similar to our heroes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we need to shift the way we think to thrive in a world where we rely on machines for answers.

Computers already have superior memory and vastly better calculation capacity than the human brain. The impact on knowledge workers is – and will continue to be – significant. For example, why do we need:

• A finance team to crunch numbers and produce a few financial models when a machine can produce a dozen different models in minutes?
• Doctors to memorise a few hundred diseases and their symptoms when a machine can learn thousands and quickly compare symptoms across any number of circumstances to arrive at an accurate diagnosis?

So, if the human beings’ job is not to know the answers, what is it? Is there a job for us?

One thing we positively need now and in the future is leaders asking questions to deeply understand the challenges, risks, needs and opportunities faced by individuals and businesses. We also need these professionals to understand ‘the answer’ and to work with us to figure out how to apply this knowledge.

If asking – versus telling – seems like a new requirement for you, then consider the many instances where we know the answer but can’t seem to make it work for us. For example, who doesn’t know that eating right and exercising will make us more fit? Or that faster adoption of new technology at work will give us a quicker return on investment (ROI)? Or that we really do have to reduce our emissions for the planet to survive?

The real challenge for leaders and knowledge workers today is helping people make the adaptations that are required to implement the answers.

Asking questions is one way to foster adaptation.

Did you know that neurologically questions are powerful ways to create learning and inspire behavioural change? Asking the right questions helps us overcome resistance to implementing new ways of working and living by prompting us to:

• Think deeply about our real needs and goals and build the resilience to cope and thrive even as the world shifts
• Develop the empathy to recognise that people may be unequally impacted by changes and figure out ways to fairly manage the losses associated with making required changes
• Dig deeper to understand precisely why implementation is hard
• Work together to creatively find a way through complexity and uncertainty.

The reason that this technique is so powerful is because questions cause us to think and process things more deeply. Answering questions make the insights more personally meaningful and therefore memorable.

So, what is the challenge you are facing right now? Whom do you want to engage to find a way through? What is the question you will ask today?

At this year’s DISRUPT.SYDNEY we ask questions about managing innovation, disruption and change from within. Join us at this year’s conference to hear a diverse range of views and share your own!

Dr Connie Henson is a member of the DDRG and author of BrainWise Leadership. Connie designs change leadership programs informed by the latest neuroscience research through her company Learning Quest. Follow Connie on Linkedin

by Natalie Hardwicke on behalf of the team at Ripple Effect Group.

You’ve likely heard of the “fourth wall” concept before. The term is used as a metaphor to describe the invisible or the imagined wall that separates an audience from a performance they are watching. For example, if you were to go to the theatre and watch a rendition of Hamlet, you would be watching actors perform as characters on a stage, telling a story and disclosing a world in which those characters live in. You as an audience member watch the performance through the invisible fourth wall – the veil of illusion that supposedly separates you from the actors, whilst the performances on stage unfold as though the wall does not exist. The actors pretend that their characters are real within the world of that stage, and you the audience are not there watching. In other words, the actors pretend the stage has all four walls up and only the world of the performance exists.

But what about those instances when actors acknowledge your presence as an audience member, or they break character? This is otherwise known as “breaking the fourth wall”. In cinematic speak, it would be when actors accidentally or purposefully talk into the camera lens, or in literary circles, when a narrator stops mid-story to address the reader. This break is seen as an interjection that suspends, temporarily, the illusion of there being a performance taking place – of lifting the veil in which the only boundary that exists between the audience and the stage is the one we imagine as being there.

Imagine, now, this fourth wall concept being applied to a workplace context. For example, employees of an organisation going to work every day and “performing” on their workplace stage. The audience, as the observers of these employee performances, are the internal departments trying to implement digital solutions onto these performers; such as Human Resources, Internal Communication, and the C-Suite team. The people from these areas seek to monitor and observe what it is that employees “do and say” on the workplace stage. However, and much like any staged performance, the story the characters (in this case, the employees) tell is one in which the audience do not control the action. They can only observe and in turn infer meaning, for themselves, of what the story being told is saying to them. Once they have some meaning, they can decide to do something with their newfound knowledge.

Let’s pretend then that you as an audience member are someone working in one of these internal teams. You watch the performance of employees and you notice that some of them are not talking with each other. As a result, you tell the Director and the writer – the people behind such performances – that something needs to change. You suggest that new props be added on stage to help make communication and interaction easier for these employees, such as placing a watercooler in the corner, and even bringing in new characters to help shape a new stage performance. The audience has essentially given feedback for what could make the play “better”, and so the Director decides to hire some “cameo” performers, and buy some new props, to help achieve this end.

Now, in writing this post, I myself need to break the fourth wall and speak to you, the reader. What I have just described to you is how some of our clients, at the Ripple Effect Group, have approached their organisation and our work. They have viewed their organisation from an audience perspective, and believe their employees need to communicate and collaborate better with one another on the workplace stage. The solution our clients have for this is to introduce social networking technology, and we as the consultants specialising in this area, have been hired as the cameo cast to help change employee performances. We are, in theatre speak, there as improvisers – so our ability to engage with employees means their current role, in this particular scene of the organisational story, is still being played as one of employee. They simply will be, from the audience perspective, acting in the role of workshop participant. So, let’s return now as the curtain call has just been made.

We as the cameo consultants enter the stage and begin to interact with the employees. We want to understand their world and the character roles they play on stage, but we also want to hear how each of them perceives the overall story being told. In organisational speak, this would be the company’s vision and its direction. When we start responding and interacting with these employee performances, we begin to realise that employees are already communicating with each other – they’re just not doing it in a way the audience can (or wants to) see. To again break the fourth wall, the employees are using shadow IT. So, what we do as cameo performers, is decide to speak to the audience directly. We yell out to them as they sit observing us, and we ask them why they want to change the stage props when, from our point of view, the story on stage is making a lot of sense.

From the audience perspective, we have just committed the cardinal sin that you’re not meant to make in theatrical performance, and that is to break the fourth wall. The audience, as a result, begin to squirm in their seats. They don’t know if they are supposed to answer us back, or whether they should be demanding a refund at the box office. The story they are now being told is not the story they paid to see – their expectations of character performance are not being met. Not only that, but the observation of us breaking the fourth wall is something the employees on the stage with us also observe. They too begin to break the fourth and act out of character – of behaving outside of the organisational employee role they are expected to be performing. They too begin to say and do things their job description says they cannot say and do, and they too start speaking to the audience directly; all the while the play itself continues to go on. The Director cannot yell “cut” as we are all still on air during the 9-5 performance grind.

What has happened, in such a scenario, is that the audience are having their assumptions and expectations challenged. Their view of reality is being disrupted. Yet, funnily enough, this is exactly what a stage performance is meant to do to its audience – whether the fourth wall is broken or not. Whenever you go to the theatre to watch a play, as an example, the message you are meant to take away is never about the explicit story being told. In other words, what you see and hear in the performances on stage is something that is intended to change you as an audience interpreter. In the organisational scenario, it would be like those internal audience teams realising that the fourth wall does not actually exist, because they too are meant to either be on stage with the employees, or they are backstage supporting the performance.

The idea of employees and consultants breaking the fourth wall – of challenging how organisations shape and interpret their own story – is a key idea that will be explored at the DISRUPT.SYDNEY conference. Come and join our workshop on “Saying what is not said: using personas to convey meaning rather than achieve a technological end”

by Simon Terry

Our organisations learn how to manage human behaviour to productive ends from many aspects of society. The history of management shows many examples where it has borrowed from coercive human relationships, such as the organisational structures of military, the practices of slavery or the corrections system, because of the shared themes of control and coping with the complexities of human relationships at scale. If we are to create workplaces that have the necessary degrees of freedom to enable people to address the complex challenges of digital networks and realise their human potential, we need to be aware of these influences and to challenge control for its own sake.

This post examines an example of how the influence runs in both directions.  The tide in the business press is running against the supposed productivity of open plan offices. At the same time we welcome an open plan prison.

Your Cubicle For Life

If anyone doubted the parallels between the modern office environment and a security state, the NSW Government just opened a new high security prison in Cessnock in the Hunter Valley. The facility has 400 beds in dormitory pods. The radical innovation of the new facility, which has been borrowed from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, is that it has done away with cell walls and with privacy. Anyone will recognise the formats of those pods as cubicle arrays in an open plan office.

(Photo Credit: ABC News)

As with any open plan office, the facility has no privacy and a focus on monitoring of behaviour.

“Correctional officers monitor inmates around the clock from first-floor corridors overlooking the pods and with infra-red cameras for night monitoring; and Immediate Action Team officers are stationed within the facility to provide a 24/7 response to critical incidents.” – Cessnock Advertiser

A key focus of the new facility is to use the new openness and flexible spaces to foster interaction and relationships between inmates.  Instead of sensory deprivation, the inmates will now need to deal with an excess of human interaction.

“For many that is culture change. The previous thinking has been minimal interaction with inmates.” – Newcastle Herald

The pitch is not that different from co-working giant, WeWork’s own residential facilities, WeLive. Of course, WeLive facilities have a scheme that includes colours other than grey.

“From mailrooms and laundry rooms that double as bars and event spaces to communal kitchens, roof decks, and hot tubs, WeLive challenges traditional apartment living through physical spaces that foster meaningful relationships. Life is better when we are part of something greater than ourselves. Whether short term or long term, WeLive has flexible options designed to meet your needs.”

And so the lines between those space concepts blur.

In any case, employee engagement is the focus of the modern office. Productive use of time will be carefully managed in this new open plan environment.  Employees will be guaranteed 5 hours of productive work, which is more than most open plan environments:

“The inmates’ days have been carefully structured in a way that focuses on intense participation and access to education, employment, programs and activities.” – Cessnock Advertiser

Recruitment processes for this new office will also be intensive to ensure an appropriate cultural fit and to sustain the desired levels of engagement in a vibrant collaborative culture. Like any good employee fit process, those who fail the test are subject to exile but we won’t discuss where.

“Mr Severin said inmates will be carefully screened – and if they don’t fit the profile, will be placed elsewhere.” – Cessnock Advertiser

So, the real rationale for the new office appears to be its low cost and rapid construction. Never let real human relationships interfere with a low cost property strategy, right?

It is only a matter of time before the innovations in Cessnock cross back into our living and working. Expect to see technology giants leading the way removing flexible working, requiring their employees to use their working for greater productivity and to restore human relationships.

Is it such a distant step to living facilities in a subtle elegant shade of metallic grey? Or to WeWork’s laundry room bars? We will just need to remember that privacy terms and conditions apply and this lifestyle will be available only to approved applicants.

Simon Terry will be speaking at DISRUPT.SYDNEY 2018 to elaborate on these themes in his talk “If your company was a country, would you live there?“

by Ella Hafermalz

I’ve tried and failed to catch an Uber with my puppy. You have to quickly message your driver to ask if they’ll accept you with your pet. My pup and I were rejected repeatedly before giving up and going home. The next time we had to get somewhere I booked a taxi in advance. The taxi driver arrived on time and was happy to help.

Getting around town with a puppy is a pretty niche problem, but what about people who have other requirements, like a child seat or space for a wheelchair?

Taxi companies are required to provide a solution for customers with these needs. But Uber with its slippery relationship to regulation has no such obligations inflating its costs.

Why should the puppyless bear the cost of cleaning Ubers? Fair question…but applying this logic to other kinds of needs reveals a gloomy step backwards in how we treat one another.

For example when you stay at a hotel you pay a little extra to fund a wheelchair ramp that only a few guests need. Airbnb properties don’t have to offer this kind of access. That represents a saving that Airbnb passes on to you in the name of innovation.

Now imagine a future where Airbnb is so successful that hotels go out of business. No properties are required to provide wheelchair access. They only have to uphold a general commitment to inclusion and respect.

Of course there are still a handful of properties in every city that are wheelchair accessible. Low supply plus a captive market equals higher prices – and a niche market is born.

Perhaps a new business starts up to cater specifically to customers with wheelchairs, or guide dogs, or babies, or puppies. In this future everyone is catered to…for a price. The user pays, or stays home.

Distributing the cost of accessibility seems like an achievement that we should be proud of. We need to continue to protect transport and accommodation options for those who don’t fit a standardised mould. Getting around with specific needs shouldn’t be a luxury.

Regulations are not just a ball and chain holding back innovation. Sometimes they can make it easier for us to look out for one another. As we build the future let’s not forget past battles hard won.

Dr Ella Hafermalz is a postdoctoral researcher in Business Information Systems at the University of Sydney Business School.