Continuous Productivity: New tools and a new way of working for a new era!
– paper by Steven Sinofsky
excerpt from Learning by Shipping
Note by CAPix: This paper describes very well how we are moving into Enterprise Incisive Converged Knowledge. Technologies are developing, organizations are adapting and new generations of people coming on board of the workforce are defining how collaboration is evolving between people, data and technology.
It also makes for an amazing opportunity to transform how organizations make products, serve customers, and do the work of corporations. We’re on the verge of seeing an entire rewrite of the management canon of the 20th century. New ways of organizing, managing, working, collaborating are being enabled by the tools of the continuous productivity paradigm shift.
click the picture for the full article by Steven Sinofsky
What happens when the tools and technologies we use every day become mainstream parts of the business world? What happens when we stop leading separate “consumer” and “professional” lives when it comes to technology stacks? The result is a dramatic change in the products we use at work and as a result an upending of the canon of management practices that define how work is done.
This paper says business must embrace the consumer world and see it not as different, less functional, or less enterprise-worthy, but as the new path forward for how people will use technology platforms, how businesses will organize and execute work, and how the roles of software and hardware will evolve in business.
Paradigm shift
Continuous productivity is an era that fosters a seamless integration between consumer and business platforms. Today, tools and platforms used broadly for our non-work activities are often used for work, but under the radar.
Continuous productivity manifests itself as an environment where the evolving tools and culture make it possible to innovate more and faster than ever, with significantly improved execution. Continuous productivity shifts our efforts from the start/stop world of episodic work and work products to one that builds on the technologies that start to answer what happens when:
- A generation of new employees has access to the collective knowledge of an entire profession and experts are easy to find and connect with.
- Collaboration takes place across organization and company boundaries with everyone connected by a social fiber that rises above the boundaries of institutions.
- Data, knowledge, analysis, and opinion are equally available to every member of a team in formats that are digital, sharable, and structured.
- People have the ability to time slice, context switch, and proactively deal with situations as they arise, shifting from a world of start/stop productivity and decision-making to one that is continuous.
Knowledge productivity
The problems created by the success of mechanized production were met with a solution—the introduction of the computer and the start of the information revolution. The mid-20th century would kick off a revolution in business, business marked by global and connected organizations. Knowledge created a new culture of business derived from the information gathering and analysis capabilities of first the mainframe and then the PC.
The essence of knowledge was the people-centric office which focused on ever-improving analysis and decision-making to allocate capital, develop products and services, and coordinate the work across the globe. The modern organization model of a board of directors, executives, middle management, and employees grew out of these new capabilities. Management of these knowledge-centric organizations happened through an ever-increasing network of middle-managers. The definition of work changed and most employees were not directly involved in making things, but in analyzing, coordinating, or servicing the products and services a company delivered.
The information available to management grew exponentially. Middle-management grew to spend their time researching, tabulating, reporting, and reconciling the information sources available. Information spanned from quantitative to qualitative and the successful leaders were expert or well versed in not just navigating or validating information, but in using it to effectively influence the organization as a whole. Knowledge is power in this environment. Management took over the role of resource allocation from owners and focused on decision-making as the primary effort, using knowledge and the skills of middle management to inform those choices.
Today’s workplace: Continuous Productivity
Today’s workplace is as different as the office was from the factory.
Today’s organizations are either themselves mobile or serving customers that are mobile, or likely both. Mobility is everywhere we look—from apps for consumers to sales people in stores and the cash registers to plane tickets. With mobility comes an unprecedented degree of freedom and flexibility—freedom from locality, limited information, and the desktop computer.
The knowledge-based organization spent much energy on connecting the dots between qualitative sampling and data sourced on what could be measured.
The following table contrasts the way we work between the historic norms and continuous productivity.
Transition versus disruption
The biggest risks organizations face is in thinking the transition to a new way of working will be just that, a transition, rather than a disruption. While individuals within an organization, particularly those that might be in senior management, will seek to smoothly transition from one style of work to another, the bulk of employees will switch quickly. Interns, new hires, or employees looking for an edge see these changes as the new normal or the only normal they’ve ever experienced. Our own experience with PCs is proof of how quickly change can take place.
Culture of continuous productivity
The culture of continuous productivity enabled by new tools is literally a rewrite of the past 30 years of management doctrine. Hierarchy, top-down decision making, strategic plans, static competitors, single-sided markets, and more are almost quaint views in a world literally flattened by the presence of connectivity, mobility, and data. The impact of continuous productivity can be viewed through the organization, individuals and teams, and the role of data.
The cultural changes encouraged or enabled by continuous productivity include:
- Innovate more and faster
- Flatten hierarchy
- Improve execution
- Respond to changes using telemetry / data
- Strengthen organization and partnerships
- Focus on the destination, not the journey
Organization culture change
Continuously productive organizations look and feel different from traditional organizations. As a comparison, consider how different a reunion (college, family, etc.) is in the era of Facebook usage. When everyone gets together there is so much more that is known—the reunion starts from shared context and “intimacy”. Organizations should be just as effective, no matter how big or how geographically dispersed.
Effective organizations were previously defined by rhythms of weekly, monthly and quarterly updates. These “episodic” connection points had high production values (and costs) and ironically relatively low retention and usage. Management liked this approach as it placed a high value on and required active management as distinct from the work. Tools were designed to run these meetings or email blasts, but over time these were far too often over-produced and tended to be used more for backward looking pseudo-accountability.
Looking ahead, continuously productive organizations will be characterized by the following:
- Execution-centric focus
- Management framing context with teams deciding
- Outside is your friend
- Employees see management participate and learn, everyone has the tools of management
- Individuals own devices, organizations develop and manage IP
Individuals and teams work differently
The new tools and techniques come together to improve upon the way individuals and teams interact. Just as the first communication tools transformed business, the tools of mobile and continuous productivity change the way interactions happen between individuals and teams.
- Sense and respond
- Bottom up and network centric
- Team and crowd spanning the internal and external
- Unstructured work rhythm
Data becomes pervasive (and big)
With software capabilities come ever-increasing data and information. While the 20th century enabled the collection of data and to a large degree the analysis of data to yield ever improving decisions in business, the prevalence of continuous data again transforms business.
- Sharing data continuously
- Always up to date
- Yielding best statistical approach informed by telemetry (induction)
- Valuing more usage
New generation of productivity tools, examples and checklist
Bringing together new technologies and new methods for management has implications that go beyond the obvious and immediate. We will all certainly be bringing our own devices to work, accessing and contributing to work from a variety of platforms, and seeing our work take place across organization boundaries with greater ease. We can look very specifically at how things will change across the tools we use, the way we communicate, how success is measured, and the structure of teams.
Tools will be quite different from those that grew up through the desktop PC era. At the highest level the implications about how tools are used are profound. New tools are being developed today—these are not “ports” of existing tools for mobile platforms, but ideas for new interpretations of tools or new combinations of technologies.
The user experience of this new generation of productivity tools takes on a number of attributes that contrast with existing tools, including:
- Continuous v. episodic
- Online and shared information
- Low startup costs
- Sharing inside and outside
- Measured enterprise integration
- Mobile first
- Devices in many sizes
Building on the sealed case platform, a new generation of applications will exhibit a significant number of the following attributes at the architecture and implementation level. As with all transitions, debates will rage over the relative strength or priority of one or more attributes for an app or scenario (“is something truly cloud” or historically “is this a native GUI”). Over time, if history is any guide, the preferred tools will exhibit these and other attributes as a first or native priority, and de-prioritize the checklists that characterized the “best of” apps for the previous era.
The following is a checklist of attributes of tools for continuous productivity:
- Mobile first
- Cloud first
- User experience is platform native or browser exploitive
- Tools are discrete, loosely coupled, limited surface area
- Data contributed is data extractable
- Metadata is as important as data
- Files move from something you manage to something you use when needed
- Identity is a choice
- User experience has a memory and is aware and predictive
- Telemetry is essential / privacy redefined
- Participation is a feature
- Business communication becomes indistinguishable from social
- Enterprise usage and control does not make things worse
What comes next?
Over the coming months and years, debates will continue over whether or not the new platforms and newly created tools will replace, augment, or see occasional use relative to the tools with which we are all familiar. Changes as significant as those we are experiencing right now happen two ways, at first gradually and then quickly, to paraphrase Hemingway. Some might find little need or incentive to change. Others have already embraced the changes. Perhaps those right now on the cusp, realize that the benefits of their new device and new apps are gradually taking over their most important work and information needs. All of these will happen. This makes for a healthy dialog.
KnowledgEvolution 
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