Decentralisation disrupting the workplace | Koen Delvaux | TEDxLiège

hello how are you today that's good to hear we're going to do something very exciting together now we're going to try to defy gravity and don't be afraid it's I know it's moonshots but it's not the kind of gravity that will make you rise out of your chair no it's the kind of gravity that people experience when they work too long in a company and they don't really realize anymore what their tasks are contributing to the work they're doing for the customers so when you want to realize this or when you want to experience this just go to the train station tomorrow and you need to observe all of these people who go to work you will see them like this like none of them like going to work they hate going there they don't feel well they don't realize why they are doing this probably just to earn some money and that's making me sad because our society is organized around work right we all go to work and work is making a lot of the people who go to work on happy so there's something wrong with that and we should try to change that and personally I changed jobs myself recently and in this changing of jobs you know then you need to do job interviews it was something new for me and one of the questions asked to me by one of the interviewers was describe me the management experience throughout all your career that you are most proud of and it's been a few years I had to think for a while and what I came up with was our Chrysostomos party when we were 18 years old we were in high school we were a group of 60 people and we managed to organize over the course of a few months a whole big event where a lot of people were present where we had a show where we had a big party we even managed to make a profit we had three hundred thousand Belgian francs we gained that night yeah very good and we didn't even fight over who should have the benefits of that so we managed to do all of that yet we were completely incompetent because we didn't have any training we didn't have any management framework we didn't have anything no processes no leaders no nothing yet we managed to achieve this big thing and we did it with a lot of pleasure so to me that was the management experience I said wow this was the perfect form of organization if work could be like that I would love to go to work every day and in fact I was very lucky because when I studied I I was an engineer when I came to work for the first time it was in the golden era where there was a lot of money for technology companies I landed in a company with 400,000 people worldwide where work was really play we could play with anything we wanted we could invent things we could put things together it was all very much fun but then a few years later when I grew a bit in the organization and I started to do things that were not so much execution but more towards decision I started to realize that all of the play weedeater wasn't so productive because there was another class of people in that company most of them would call them managers and they were playing another type of game they were making decisions and they were fighting over power and they were making sure that the right things happened to keep the shareholders happy and those people it appeared often threw away the work I did when I was playing with things and those were nice things so that's not so good so I started to become a bit unhappy and saying hey this is not the kind of game I want to play I don't want to be this big hotshot manager because all of this management is creating a distance between the people who do the work and the customers who benefit from the work so this was my first disillusion in my career I said well these big corporations these big structures they are not the future of work this is not how humanity should organize work but luckily we came into an era where something new happens something very exciting which we all use today we came into the era of the internet and the internet was wonderful not only because it's a new technology causing a lot of new possibilities for us but also because it's a new industry so you have new products you have new markets you have new business models everything is new so this whole Internet industry has everything to reinvent how we organize work and indeed it happened when you go to Google you see slice taking people from floor to floor that's really nice you see people taking care of each other you see people having all kinds of facilities on-site so you see wow this is a company I think everyone here would love to work for Google wouldn't you so that's the very best company to work for yet when you talk to people who work at Google and work there for some time they tell you well it has become a bit too big maybe we're not the future here maybe Google isn't the company we should be working for because when you look at Google or when I look at Google and I don't know how many of you have visited Googleplex already I got the impression when I was there that it was very much when I visited like when I visited the coal mines in Belgium you know we had this big industry here in Belgium taking calls out of the ground to create energy and how we did that we put up factories and around the factories we created housing for the workers and we created all kinds of facilities to keep them happy etc and what I saw there and Googleplex was actually the same thing as what we did to the workers here in Belgium in our factories so Google didn't really reinvent the management model they just applied it to a different industry they have a different set of rules but it's the same mechanism that is people making people unhappy they're still creating tasks that create a distance between what people do everyday and the value that is created for customer and that's making people unhappy so my second disillusion was yeah Google Facebook those companies don't have the answer to how we should organize work in our society but luckily and this really was a very good experience and everyone here who hasn't had the experience that I would warm heartedly recommend it to you I joined the startup I created a start-up and I got into the startup industry and working in a start-up is really terrific it's really clear fantastic experience that you can have when you go to work in a start-up every day you feel like you're changing the world you really feel like the two or the ten of you no matter how many people you are in a start-up you get the feeling what we're doing here is fundamentally changing everything in the world why is that because there's a very short distance between the things you do in the morning and the features or the functionality that your customer is using in the evening that's what's making you happy you see the immediate result of your work so to me a start-up is a very nice organization it's a very good forum to let people collaborate and have product if I have a productive day together the only disadvantage of a start-up is that it's a good organization but only to find a new business model only to discover things it's not a good organization to execute things and executing things is where it boils down to when you want to grow and when you want to grow in a start-up you create things like what we now know as growth hacking I don't know if you're familiar with the term growth hacking but startups used to say we don't do marketing that's for the big companies with our big budgets who can buy television advertising that's not what we do we work for our customers and they tell it to each other and then we have more customers and that's how we grow in reality also startups are competing against each other and what you see is that they want to compete better so they start to engage well they don't want to call it market ears they call them growth hackers so they start to engage people who introduce activities who are not really beneficial to the end-user if you're sending out mailings to thousands of people to say hey we have a new feature maybe that's not always the optimal experience for the end user so when you start to introduce these kind of activities you start to see within the startup culture and I coached a whole lot of startups you start to see within this startup the same discontentment and the same mechanism that you see within the big corporations so also in the startup world we didn't really find the answer so where does that leave us I have three disillusions I have these corporate organizations well that's not really how the future of work should look like I have the Internet companies and I have the startups well to meet it are only a few things that matter it's not really the organization that matters what matters to me is attitude when you can give people the right attitude I believe they will do the right things by themselves a lot of people are naturally inclined to do positive things to do the right things when you get put a call center operator in a call center and you make him take calls from customer and the customer tells a story and the operator says yeah I really understand you this is something we screwed up we'll fix it for you they will do that automatically but when you give them a set of rules and you take away their autonomy they will no longer do that and it will take the rules for granted and they will do that so whatever the form of organization we use to organize work we need to make sure that people have a degree of autonomy so they can realize the right attitude and they can gain the right attitude through culture so that's something we need to ensure our form of organization that we're going to event needs the right attitude the second thing and this is not so easy you need to ensure that your organizational form has scalability if you don't have scalability you can't grow if you don't have scalability every new employee that comes in needs to learn the same lessons that the previous employees learned so you need some kind of a mechanism so to take the lessons that you learn for example how should I invoice a customer correctly to describe them in some way and to transfer them to new employees so that's something you need to do introduce mechanisms for scalability and the third thing you need to introduce and I hate to say it because I'm not a big fan of hierarchy but definitely if you want to create an organization where people do productive work I am now convinced after all these years of experience you need hierarchy hierarchic models didn't appear by chance if you look to the history of humanity of humanity and history of nature you will see that it always has been some kind of hierarchical structure and this is because not everyone is like you because everyone in this room you are the thinkers that you work with your head and you think of how shall we do things you're not to do worse if you were the tourist you wouldn't be sitting here you will be at work now in it so you are the tinkerer so for you this doesn't matter the hierarchy but the doers for them is very important because if there is no one who is thinking about what they should do everyone is going to do something different and they will be at a standstill so they ask someone hey can you tell us what direction we should go and then you get a form of hierarchy so you need that hierarchy otherwise the doers don't know what they need to do so these three things you need and well I have personally made a sort of a model around that I call it a liquid organization model I will not explain you the whole model here for that you need to read the book but I don't write book so you can't read the book but I explain you the three steps that you can take yourself if you work in an organization today tour are three simple steps that you can take to apply let's say 90% of the results that my model is is causing so for me that is how we can defy this gravity this thing that is waiting up on our shoulders and saying ah no we can't change anything because this is what how gravity is defined within these big companies they say well you have a certain degree of freedom this you can decide there's a certain degree of influence you can have if you have a friend there and he understands you you might be able to influence him but for a lot of things you can't change them if you don't like them just forget about it they are what they are that's gravity just accept it and that to me is what it's making people unhappy and that is what I want to change in the corporate organizations model so the three steps that you need to do to achieve that to defy this gravity the first one is truth telling truth telling is very simple I love simple things you don't need to learn a lot for it to give you to illustrate what truth-telling is when you go home in the evening and you talk about your day your family will well hopefully your family will listen for starters because a lot of people in management tend to Babylon and describe things in a very difficult way but if they understand what you're saying they will reply with something like or your kids will reply also mom and dad so all you did actually was this you say well yeah if you want to put it that way okay so true telling to me is just looking at things that are happening within the company through the eyes of a child and explaining it or rephrasing it in a very simple wording that is true telling to give you an example the company I work for now since a few months already in the first week I worked there it was big corporate it's Proximus here in Belgium I found myself in a meeting and the meeting had five people in this and each of them had a laptop with him a laptop in a meeting and on that laptop was a PowerPoint presentation and each of them had studied a tool and we were the meet the purpose of the meeting was to select a tool to do innovation thermal management a certain type of process so everyone pulled open their PowerPoint and explained all of the bullets they checked and all of the features they checked etc and the idea was that by comparing the features of these different tools towards the requirements set that was agreed upon beforehand they would select the ideal tool at the given moment in that meeting I said well I'm just getting the impression here that none of you have ever done any innovation funnel management the process by itself so did anyone use any of these tools were discussing here so an all-hands that they all know we really haven't you you just make the PowerPoint because that's what their job is they need to compare these features I said well I think then is it true in my assumption this is the truth-telling part am I correct in saying that none of you know what you're talking about when you're discussing these tools because none of you use them they said well yeah actually you're right I suppose we could break up the meeting go to the website of the tool vendors register for a demo account use that for a couple days and come back and so we did and after a couple of days we selected the tool not based upon all of these requirements and these comparisons but upon real-life experience of what you actually want to do with these kind of things so that's just a very simple example of how by doing truth-telling you can change things and how you can gain some sort of reputation for oh yeah there is another way of doing things so that's the first thing you need to be a true talent within your company and do that in every meeting you go to I assure you you will have well I don't show you that you will have success but you will have some result of that so that's the first thing truth-telling never in a personal way never in an aggressive way always telling the truth observing what you see through the eyes of a child that's the first step the second step is that you need to find soldiers you need to build yourself a little army of people who say well what you're doing actually that's nice I want to do things that way as well I don't dare to but I would like to I would love to join you I've created the Proximus innovators club approximate so if you work at Proximus you can join it and so we can't have our little club and we have the soldiers there and we just meet them every month so just to interact about what we think about the company what are the evolutions that are happening but we don't do anything yet that's very important don't start this coming as a project where you say everything we do here in finance or in I don't know what department is wrong we want to do it differently never do that because you are challenging people on what they do every day you will create resistance that's not what you should do what you should do is you should wait you should wait for the right moments because in every big company every few years there comes a moment that top management sees oh this is the plan this is where we're heading mm-hmm there's a big difference there we're not bridging that we're not getting there so we need to do something radical we need to change everything so then comes a big reorganization something disruptive and usually then they create a burning platform and I will not explain holder the change management theory behind it but what it boils down to is that management will create some flag and saying well we need to achieve this goal if we get there we'll all be saved everything will be fine and this is the moment that you put your soldiers in action because then and this is something that top management will never refuse if you have 40 people working down below on an execution level saying yes we understand where you want to go to we understand where this flag is planted and we want to be the task force that is getting us through that flag we can do this this normally never happens if you do it and I did it now true my consultancy practice with a number of companies and now in Proximus I assure you that top management say yes you can do this start your task force and execute the project the result of this is that your task force will succeed because your task force is not fighting change the rest of the organization will fight the change no matter how they can they will try to resist it so will they will be much slower in reaching the goal than you are and by doing this you will introduce a culture that will change the company forever to give an example from within Proximus my first 20 days within the organization I interviewed someone every noon so I went to have lunch with people and I interviewed them and I wrote it on my blog if you want to read it it's a 20k K dot B E so to 0 K K dot B e it stands in Dutch for twin taking up a copper 20 smart people and I chose them based upon recommendations of their colleagues and one of the guys who was a field engineer it was working in the field and he explained to me well when about 15 years ago there were some bunch of people who started this task force to start with digital TV we all set those guys are met those guys are going to destroy our company this will never work come on what are they thinking but now we say when we talk amongst collies field engineers we say those guys weren't mad those guys we're really smart they saved our company thanks to them we reached that point and even now we realize that there is a way we can do things in the company which is different than the way we used to do things before so we have this new culture as well and this is very important you're introducing a can-do culture in such a big organization and this is what I think you can do with your task force in these three steps so for me this is what it boils down to you need to make sure that you can defy gravity because gravity is often misunderstood and I have I'm very sure about this because this noon I talked to a physicist who assured me that my theory is correct because what I understood when I was in school about physics is that gravity is the fact that two bodies with a certain mass will always attract each other so the earth has a very big mouth and I have a well with a relatively small mouth so I'm standing on the earth I can't escape it because it's much bigger than I am but when within an organization you feel that the whole organization is waiting on you as a mouse the only thing you need to do is you need to gather enough people together to go into another direction and when you gather enough people you have enough mass to move the whole organization and that is what I want you to do to defy gravity thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 8,002

Rating: 4.8571429 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Belgium, Business, Decision making, Work

Id: bGvBhzcsoR0

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2015