Patrik Bergman – Page 4 – A corn of wheat

Why “Experts” Keep Getting It Wrong

Management theorists lack depth, I realized, because they have been doing for only a century what philosophers and creative thinkers have been doing for millennia. This explains why future business leaders are better off reading histories, philosophical essays, or just a good novel than pursuing degrees in business.

I just read “The Management Myth: Why the “Experts” Keep Getting It Wrong”, a book written by Matthew Stewart. It challenges the traditional ideas and practices of management in modern businesses. In his book, Stewart argues that the current system of management is based on flawed assumptions and that it is in need of a major overhaul. Basically, it needs more Schopenhauer, Kant, and Jung, than it needs Taylor.

One of the main ideas that Stewart explores in the book is the concept of expertise. He argues that the current system of management relies heavily on the idea of expertise, with managers being viewed as the experts who have all the answers. However, Stewart asserts that this notion of expertise is often misguided and that it can actually hinder progress and innovation.

“The idea of expertise is a trap. It seduces us into thinking that we know more than we do and that we can predict the future with greater accuracy than is possible. It lulls us into complacency and dulls our senses to the possibility of surprise.”

Stewart also critiques the way that modern businesses are structured, arguing that they often prioritize short-term profits over long-term sustainability. He argues that this focus on short-term gains leads to a lack of innovation and a failure to adapt to changing circumstances. It also leads to an all too positive view of what new shiny technilogy can do, dating all the way back to the beginning of the industrialisation:

This confusion of facts and values—or, more generally, the attempt to find pseudotechnical solutions to moral and political problems—is the most consequential error in Taylor’s work and is the cardinal sin of management theory to the present.

The book also brings up a thing I have noted when swithcing from privately owned companies to working for the City of Malmö:

“The main problem with the modern business enterprise is not that it is inefficient, but that it is a machine for the production of the wrong things. It is designed to produce profits for the benefit of a small group of shareholders and executives, rather than for the benefit of society as a whole.”

It is very liberating to not have a board of directors I never meet but who decide if I am needed or not, and to always work for the next quarter. Instead, we are in it for the long run and work for the great of the public instead of shareholders. A nice change.

Finally, the book brilliantly presents the steps anyone who worked with a management consulting firm has seen:

Marketing (The Luring). Fly in “experts” from around the world, never to be seen again. Hold “conferences.”
Diagnostic (Halloween). It’s trick and treat time. First, scare the pants off them. Crater their self-esteem. This requires what is known in the trade as a “trick.” A trick is a quick and easy analysis that will produce predictably horrifying results—predictable for you, horrifying for them. Consultants spend years honing these tricks. Second, offer to give them their self-esteem back in exchange for your treat!
Implementation (Eating the Brain). The key to establishing an enduring presence is to colonize key functions in the client’s central nervous system. A good place to start is the planning function.
Follow-ons (Metastasis). You’re already expanding deep inside the client organization, so think like a cancer.
The Breakup.

It all ends in sending a hefty bill and the planning for a new round.

Of course, there are management consultants that can bring value. But after having read this book, written by a management consultant, I will be very cautious regarding whom to hire.

Image by maximiliano estevez from Pixaba, portraying a healthily sceptical manager.

Using mental models to evolve your digital workplace

Mental models are what they say: The models in our head that help us understand the world, connect ideas and sort out what is relevant to us. They are representations of the complex world around us and can help us both personally and professionally.

Let’s say you are asked to take your intranet or digital workplace to the next level. You can do this in many ways of course, but several mental models can help you take these steps. There are hundreds of mental models, and here I only list a few but list more models at the end.

Start with the vision, not the technology

Far too many intranets and the discussions we have about them, are based on the technology and not why we do what we do. This way you can use any award-winning platform and still fail miserably since there is no strong reason for the intranet to exist. It just simply exists. If you do the opposite by using models like Impact Mapping, and start with the vision and end-user needs, the intranet you build will be much better no matter the technology you use. Therefore, you should be cautious when a platform vendor sells features to you before asking what you want. My advice is to set a vision for the intranet, talk to the users and follow their daily work, and ser a few strong reasons for the intranet. Not until this is done are you allowed to look at how the technology should be handled.

How can you kill your intranet?

When the famous investor Charlie Munger was young, his work included helping his fellow men land their planes safely. So, the question he asked was “How can I kill these pilots?”. That’s not the question most of us pick perhaps, but under it lies a very strong mental model called inversion. By knowing how to kill these pilots via ice and lack of fuel, he inversely also knew how to save them by avoiding these hazards. For an intranet, inversion is listing ways you could kill your intranet, and then reverse them one by one. If we use inversion on an intranet and list how it could be awful, the list might include:

The intranet has an uptime of 10%.
There is no way to search.
You cannot use it outside the work building.
The UX/UI is ugly and confusing.
The intranet is not based on user needs.

If we turn these around and have an intranet that has an uptime of 99%, has a good search, can be used all over the place, has a good UX/UI, and is based on user needs, we have a decent intranet already there. This means, that if you first list the ways you could kill your intranet and do something about them, you end up with an intranet many would use.

Find the 20% of efforts that represent 80% of the results

A mental model that is related to inversion is the 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle. Originally about 20% owning 80% of the resources, it can now be applied to many business areas. Most probably, 20% of your intranet content has 80% of the traffic, and this should be easy to find. And the reverse is true as well: 80% of your time should be spent on 20% of all the things you can do as an intranet owner. And these can be linked to the ways you could kill your intranet. 80% of your time should be spent on understanding user needs, ensuring the UX/UI is great (including the navigation), optimizing the search, and training people on how to search, and use the intranet.

Understand the complexity level of your priorities

Dave Snowden and his friends have an excellent model called Cynefin for analyzing the complexity of a situation. Without going into all the richness of Cynefin, we can use its four parts as a map for understanding the complexity of what you have prioritized for your intranet. Let’s see some examples using the Cynefin domains:

Easy: You can teach people how to search on your intranet. There are clear rules and best practices for this, and a straightforward connection between cause and effect: Search the wrong way and the results are bad, search the right way and the results are good.
Complicated: There are no longer any best practices but only good practices since the problem can be approached in several ways. This means you should not trust vendors that talk about ‘best practices where in reality they are ‘good practices. An example of the complicated domain that depends on the context and culture of the organization, is designing a champions program for an intranet. It can be done in several different ways.
Complex: The cause and effect are very blurry here and you need to explore the environment as you go. For example, increasing the digital literacy for 400 different professions among 30 000 users can be done but needs a lot of work to land right.
Chaotic: No clear cause and effect, and a time to navigate the chaos. Here lie the typical technology-heavy areas of today, with virtual worlds very few have tested (or can see the reasons for), costly and vague ways to use AI to improve the end-user situation and all the things based on engineering dreams rather than the vision of the intranet.

As the novelty wears off and the market matures, today’s chaotic, complex, and complicated situations can jump one or several steps in the model. What used to be complicated can then have a best practice.

Let many small things create a big momentum

Many of us live in a culture that has goal setting at the center, and that uses goal shaming to point out why people aren’t “succeeding”: If only you set some grand goals, acted on them, and tracked them every day, you would be happier. But what many of us have experienced is that the grand goals, inspired by gurus and teachers, fall flat since we seldom know how to go from where we are today, to this grand goal.

A good way to overcome this is by using what has been called atomic habits or using the compounding effect where many small changes lead to big changes over time. So, instead of saying that one year from now we will the best intranet in the world (whatever that means), you can improve the intranet by 1% every day. This is hardly noticeable for you or the end users, but it is the consistency that will get you there. If you improve something by 1% per day, it is theoretically 37 times better after one year. And the opposite: If you make the intranet 1% worse every day, you will have a useless intranet after one year. 1% improvements for a day can include:

Talking to an intranet user to understand their needs.
Improving the search by adding a best bet.
Doing a tree test on a small part of the menu.
Suggesting how to improve the readability of a text.

These are some examples and I look forward to testing these models and more. For those of you who want to explore more mental models, please see these:

Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash

A new life in Malmö begins

During the first two years of the pandemic, I was fortunate to work 100% remotely at Play’n GO and the Digital Workplace Group (DWG). Two world-leading organizations in their respective fields, with many challenges and opportunities. But with no offices (DWG) or offices hours away (Play’n GO), I started to feel isolated. So, after two years of digital team meetings, the time came to do something else. By then, a job I really felt sounded right for me appeared, and since May I am the product owner of the intranet at Malmö Stad with access to three offices although the job is done from home as well.

Since then, I have become a key player in the team, plus met a lot of skilled and awfully nice people who work at Malmö Stad since you can do a difference for a lot of people. I am also a member of the steering group for acquiring a new learning management system (LMS) and a member of a team focusing on Working Smarter. This means I not only feel less isolated. I can also take on a broader approach to intranets and digital workplaces. With 27 000 employees, Malmö City is a big employer, and the better we collaborate and innovate in our teams, the better the service we can provide to the citizens of Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city.

A very rewarding thing that also happened is that I was selected to be one of the judges in the Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards, held by the legendary Step Two people. Humbling and awfully fascinating to see so many skilled and devoted entries, which of course also gave me insights on which kinds of intranets and digital workplaces are awarded and why. I also managed to record the 27th episode of “Att vakna ur meningkrisen” (in Swedish) – my interpretation of the work of professor John Vervaeke. Plus a recording in English on how I use the application Obsidian to structure my knowledge work around the Brothers Karamazov.

I am in a good place now, which you can tell also by me posting more often on LinkedIn. The time has come to work closely with the world-leading experts to see how far we all can take our work.

Photo by Pontus Ohlsson on Unsplash

How I learned to play Fortnite

Even since my Ph.D. studies in adult learning geared towards games, both games and learning have fascinated me. Meanwhile, I work with learning in the workplace and the difference between those two worlds can have any grown-up cry. The first world can be utterly removed from the real world of work, individual, very boring, and with a constant panic around upskilling and reskilling. The second world is highly immersive, gradually harder, social, and lots of fun. This is the story of how I learned to play Fortnite – a game of ‘last man standing’ for individuals and teams with a storm that kills, lots of weapons and ammo, and berries, and purple birds and dinosaurs. And swearing and laughing as 100 people on the island get fewer and fewer in a smaller place.

I started playing Fortnite a couple of months ago, to see what the fuzz is about. My oldest (now 12) has played it a few years and I first associated it with a lot of screaming and cursing. Then the playing and the players matured and now they mostly engage vividly with just the occasional cursing. I decided to learn to play Fortnite, after soon 20 years with World of Warcraft (WoW) and these are the main ways I used to get into the game:

Just get in there and play and be a big loser. You will suck hard at this, and people will laugh at you. But there you are playing among the best 80 of 100 players, and it’s ok. Soon enough you see what works better just by trying things out and using the epic spectating function in Fortnite: After someone kills you, you can spectate what they do. And if you are lucky, this was not just a fluke shot from a noob, but a skilled moved from a good player. Just sit back and relax to see how they play.
Play with people who are much better than you and who can tolerate that you kind of suck. This player for me has been my son. When we play as a duo, we win in 90% of the cases. He tolerates that I am not at all as skilled as him, but he guides me towards success. One thing I never get is how he knows what I do, which gear I have, which enemies to attack, if they are one-shots or not (have low health so another shot is enough), and where the enemy is. This without sitting in the same room as me, meaning he just knows after playing so many hours (and no, it’s not a cheat).
Checking YouTube for occasional tips and tricks on how to perform certain moves. I have found that the films on the funnier side, like this one noobs, pros, and hacker skills, are easier to watch since they just show the flow of the game. I watch the step-by-step tips-and-trick movies more seldom since they feel more like instruction. Could be helpful but are less fun.
Taking formal 2-hour e-learning courses on the history of Fortnite with quizzes demanding that I score 80% correct and where the correct answer is always the longest. Ha, ha, ha.

After playing for some time, playing with others (step 2 above) totally dominates my learning. The 10–14-year-olds know all the tactics, weapons, ways in and out, enemy movement and skills, and build craft, so I just need to be in it and soak it up and practice it.

One of the best books on learning and games is James Paul Gees’ “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” and at the end, he lists 36 learning principles (here with my comments). We can easily see that many of these still apply, such as:

Active, Critical Learning Principle: All aspects of the learning environment are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive learning.
–> You learn to play Fortnite by being active (see point 1 above). Just get in there. If you are passive, you will be an easy target and die. And by being active, you learn.

Semiotic Principle: Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts) as a complex system is a core to the learning experience.
–> This is true for any game where, in the beginning, you don’t know what for example epic, one-shot, or double movement are. You learn as you go. Such as in WoW: Try being in a party and pick up something that is BOP and that another player needs more than you, and the social setting will teach you a thing or two.

Multiple Routes Principle: There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and problem solving, while also exploring alternative styles.
–> There are many ways to be the best of 100 people in Fortnite. I thought I had come up with something great when I landed on the outskirts and slowly moved towards the center. I could collect weapons, not meet as many, and be in more control. Until I heard from the 10–14-year-olds that this is how the noobs play, of course. Experienced players land in the most crowded city since the fighting is fierce (and resembles end fights more), the weapons are plenty, and you do less running from the storm. Two very different ways that work but based on different mindsets.

Transfer Principle: Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning.
–> This happens all the time between matches in Fortnite, or after respawns in WoW. In one game you learn that attacking a heavily armed guard just for the hell of it is fun for a very short time if you have a pickaxe. In the next game, you find a way around him (so-called ‘reskilling’).

Achievement principle: For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner’s level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner’s ongoing achievements.
–> You are always challenged at the right level in Fortnite and when you are rewarded it looks just awesome (see top image). A.k.a. ‘upskilling’.

It can be easy to say that gaming is one thing and corporate learning another. But remember that this is how our kids grow up now and how the gaming world has worked the last 20 years. Meanwhile, what has happened to corporate learning? We still talk about gamification, learning management systems, mandatory training, testing via multiple-choice, social learning as if this is something new, and pushing heavy content as if it should land in people’s brains, instead of challenging them.

Trust me, mastering Fortnite and WoW is really hard. So, let’s wait for the kids to show the way. They never took a course in Fortnite but are masters of it. And have fun doing so.

What are the steps for building a sound learning culture?

I asked this question on LinkedIn the other week since the learning culture can decide if any learning initiatives succeed or fail. Of course, there is no set recipe to follow, but this is what I and others discussed:

1. Ground everything in the company strategy and its goals, and make sure continuous learning, curiosity, trust, and empathy are central aspects of doing business. If you have, as Clark Quinn stated, a Miranda culture, you will not succeed. In such a culture, everything you say can and will be held against you and people will hold back from sharing since they might be punished for it later.

2. Leaders, all the way to the CEO, must set an example and be role models for learning. People do what these leaders do, not what they say. Top management also needs to co-create and backup all choices regarding the learning platform, intended skills in relation to the strategy, providing time for people to learn and experiment, change management, and more.

3. Ensure all employees understand what learning at work is today and how to practice it openly every day. Working out loud, Personal Knowledge Mastery, Modern Workplace Learning, 70/20/10, and more will guide them to the best possible learning based on their needs. People should be talking about learning, sharing interesting things, and encourage others to do the same. Marcia Conner’s Learning Culture Audit can create a picture of where you are now and provides a roadmap for what to aim for.

4. Use the best platforms and content services available to give life to the educational guidelines and company goals above. There are many platforms out there but select the ones that are right for you. Make the training, coaching, and stretch goals relevant, timely, and, targeted (thanks Nigel Paine). Ensure that, before you launch any courses as the solution for anything, analyze how the learning transfer over to real problems will occur using Will Thalheimer’s Learning Transfer Evaluation Model (LTEM).

5. Build for the future using a champions program with the people who are inspired by the above and want it to work for their team. They will, together with the leaders in step 2 help make learning a natural part of work. As Harold Jarche says “Learning is work, and work is learning”. Make sure to hire people that have this approach to learning.

Finally, as the learning culture is maturing and people talk more and more about learning, it can be easy for them to slip back to the old way of thinking where courses were meant to solve it all. An excellent source of knowledge to avoid this is Cathy Moore’s Will Training Help, where you clearly see that training is not always the answer. It might be the culture or something else that hinders people’s performance.

The post on LinkedIn is here, for anyone who is interested.

Existentialism in times of deep distress

I hear quite a lot about positive psychology and its focus on the good things that make life not just tolerable, but worth living. Meanwhile, we live in a dystopic pandemic and I have read too much Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Dante, Huxley, Camus, and Nietzsche to accept the basis of this psychological movement as the only truth. Then I bumped into Jordan Peterson’s series where chapter 12 talks about some of these authors, and about existentialism. And Jordan is not happy about the positive psychology:

“Happiness is basically extraversion minus neuroticism, and we knew that 15 years ago.”

This means that, if this is true, we need to increase our chances of spontaneous joy and talking about things that interest us, while decreasing withdrawal in the face of uncertainty and being less irritable and upset when things go wrong.

Jordan carries on:

“People are not like the utopians think. We don’t want it easy. We don’t want it comfortable. We don’t want it good. And the reason for that is we’d be bored stiff. “

This, in turn, echoes, Dostoyevsky:

“Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.”

So maybe, during these immense hardships, it might be the existentialists that can guide us. For the existentialists it is a fact that we are mortal, and vulnerable, and prone to suffering. Inescapably. And that we are willing to pay that price to have a life worth living. And if this is true, then we can turn the suffering of this miserable pandemic into something that makes life worth living. Life is not easy at all. But this is also how we grow. Meanwhile, #fuckcorona! It is a horrible, parallel universe that have changed nearly everything we know and feel. People are dying everywhere and we have never been this lonely and sad. But this is what it is to be human, too.

Let’s end this with Pascal and the existential ‘thrownness’:

“When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid, and wonder to see myself here rather than there; for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there, now, rather than then.”

So please remember: We are here now, and we are here together. And as long as we are here, we can help each other. We are still alive.

Photo by Loren Gu on Unsplash

A new road opens, thanks to my network

The summer began with me being asked by my former employer to leave the company alongside many others. The pandemic hit the automotive industry very hard, and apparently, not even the company expert on Office 365 could be saved. At the same time, I prepared and went through the biggest house move ever, where I and the kids and the dog moved to a new place. So what to do to find a new professional future?

I reached out on LinkedIn saying what happened and then asking for help to find something interesting again. That post has not been viewed by more than 24 000 people globally, and it directly led to my two new work arrangements. This is the true power of building a rich network of experts, which I have built over a decade. I learned from Harold Jarche, Valdis Krebs, Michelle Ockers, and many others by then, and continued this year after year.

Starting on September 1, I will work 80% as the Digital Workplace Architect at Play n’ GO and 20% as the Community Manager Nordics for the Digital Workplace Group (DWG) to expand the collaboration between companies in these crucial times. This means I both take care of a digital workplace and advice others on how to do this. The best of two worlds.

So, my advice today is for you to keep building a rich network of people that you learn from. One day you might need them more than ever like I did this summer, and until that day you have grown every day thanks to them.

How the Waking Up app and the Before launcher have helped me

As you might know by now, I am on a quest to bring more calmness and mindfulness into my life. For example, I have written about awakening from the meaning crisis and my Swedish shorter versions of these themes.

Today, I will continue on this path but tell you about an app and a launcher that really have helped me: Waking Up by Sam Harris and the minimalist Before launcher by Before Labs. These are no affiliate links, meaning I mention these apps since I genuinely like them and not because they pay me.

Waking Up is by far the best mindfulness app I have tested, and I think I have tested at least 10. Tim Ferriss was right when he said:

“I’ve been incredibly impressed with this app. Whether you want to sharpen your mind or experience more peace, this can help in dramatic fashion. The power of its progression is hard to overstate.”

For example, Sam Harris has a 50-day long introduction where you learn mindfulness, and then a lot of other very useful material such as daily meditations. You can test the app for free and see what you think.

The other phone-related idea is the Before Launcher for Android. I have used the Nova launcher for years with all its built-in tools, but now I got what I needed: You can only select 8 apps on the front page, and there are nearly no notifications! It is like they say about their app:

✶Open your phone 40% less.✶
✶Reduce distractions with our notification filter. 80% of all notifications don’t warrant interruption.✶
✶Focus on what matters.✶

Already the first day of using the launcher I started to bother less about my phone. Since there are no notifications and distractions, there is no point, and I can go on my the rest of my life instead. Our phones are hauntingly seductive but this removes much of the temptation. Yes, in this case, less is more.

Awakening from the meaning crisis, in Swedish

In my last post, I wrote about a life crisis and my way of dealing with it. One of the many ways I chose to take the next step is by engaging in John Vervaeke’s video series “Awakening from the meaning crisis”. Every Monday, I discuss an episode with members of the Future Thinkers network. But to really understand it, I also record short versions of each episode in Swedish. I gain two things from this: I teach the material and need to know it, and the Swedish audience gets a quicker way of learning this rather complex material.

For example, here is my Swedish version of episode 8 where John task about Siddharta Gautama (Buddha) and mindfulness:

I don’t have an explicit plan with these Swedish versions but they help me. And if anyone else can benefit from them, that just makes me happier. To access the rest of my recordings, please visit my YouTube page.

You will find the links to both John’s full course and to Future Thinkers in the description of the video if you open it in YouTube. For anyone deeply interested in these questions, I highly recommend the full series from John and the watch parties and discussions with Future Thinkers.

A personal awakening from the meaning crisis

Sometimes, life doesn’t go as you have thought, and 2019 has delivered personal circumstances I had a hard time seeing coming. It has been really challenging, but in the midst of this, I noticed ways to get out of the mist.

The upside of such life-changing events has been that I have reached out to my network of people, that I both know and don’t know. Having a couple of beers with a wise fellow from the mentor program is one example and reaching out to the Farnam Street Learning Community is another example. The latter is a formidable network of people who are willing to pay to be members and engage in learning as much as possible about themselves and the world. I asked what others have done to move through the turbulence to see the sun again. The amount of wisdom I received is fantastic.

Via the Farnam Street Learning Community, I also saw the post where people were asked to list their most valuable YouTube channels, and why. One of them recommended Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by professor John Vervaeke. This is a truly remarkable series of videos, about an hour each, where he guides us in both cognitive science and everything from Plato, Jung, and many others. I wanted to binge-watch it to receive all the wisdom quickly but noticed I needed to pause after one or two episodes. The ideas are so fundamentally interesting and potentially life-changing that I will watch all of the chapters and see how it can change my life. John is right when he says we engage too much in bullshit, confirmation porn, and self-deception instead of building trusted networks and focusing on the things that are both true and meaningful.

I will continue to work with myself, but beneath all the noise caused by the above, I noticed that I am still me. It will take time to recreate myself, but with all the help I can receive from my friends and network, the ride will be smoother. Thank you for listening.

Photo by Christiaan Huynen on Unsplash.