Originally posted March 23, 2009

The end of “business as usual”

Please, let us be coming to the end of “business as usual”. Conversations about whether MBA programs caused the financial crisis and what the future of capitalism should be suggest that ways of doing business that have long been seen as acceptable and even admirable are now being revealed as economically, socially and ecologically destructive. Hasn’t this economic crisis lead you to doubt whether “business as usual” is something we really want to recover? I, for one, don’t think that business as usual is worth saving.

Welcome “progressive organizational movements”

In spite of all the bad news, I’m becoming more optimistic that positive change may will occur, because I’m seeing all around us a range of (what I call) progressive organizational movements. Progressive organizational movements are initiatives that aim to create social and economic change simultaneously, through for-purpose business, through nonprofit initiatives and/or through political initiatives.

When I think about the macro-dynamics of organizations that are subtly and radically different working to improve our economic, social, political, and natural world, there really is change afoot. Yet, the organization scholar in me wonders about the relationship between the ends: social transformation, and the means: the organizational systems and tools that will create the organizations that will lead these changes.

Audre Lorde’s Change Leadership Advice

As Audre Lord memorably reminds anyone who ever takes a women’s studies class,

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

The master’s tools won’t help us build authentic organizations, either. So now we need to ask:

1. What tools will progressive organizations use to create the changes we need to see in our world?
2. What tools can organizations use so that they simultaneously move towards their goals and act now on their principles?
3. Where can progressive organizations find tools that express their values?

Progressive organizations, organizations with a change-oriented purpose, need to put their values into practice as they go about creating change. Otherwise, they will not act authentically and they will reduce their own power.

Every organization devoted to change needs to be built with new “tools” and I’m not just talking about Web 2.0 tools. I’m thinking about decision making tools, information sharing tools, coordination tools, feedback systems, tracking tools, and tools for celebration. Cellar to roof.

Finding alternative tools

Thus motivated, I’ve begun a quiet quest for new, alternative tools. When I say new , I don’t mean taking popular tools like GTD and scaling them up to the organizational level. When I say alternative , I’m not looking for tools that are built on conventional assumptions about relationships between people or conventional assumptions about what good “control and coordination” look like.

I’m thinking alternative in that these tools start from a different premise about who we are and why we are together. I’m looking for tools that will support businesses and organizations that exist for something beyond profit, and that want to model right now the changes they seek. Still with me?

Dotmocracy, a little example of a big change

So, last week, when blogging friend Easton Ellsworth was looking for ideas about how to get tons of people involved in a cause, I sent him to this site: Dotmocracy.

Dotmocracy is a deceptively simple , easy way for a group of people to generate ideas and evaluate options. On the website is quick explaination of the process as well as manuals and forms for putting the process to work in your organization.

As described by Jason Diceman, an activist who has codified the advanced form of Dotmocracy:

The Advanced Dotmocracy process has been proven to:

• Recognize priorities and direction from all participants.
• Engage and empower diverse groups.
• Give a voice to even the quietest of participants.
• Recognize and celebrate shared values.
• Focus on solutions while avoiding traditional power dynamics.
• Provide fully documented results that can be easily translated into action plans.
• Garner friendly discussions while efficiently leading to practical conclusions.

(I especially like the way that this process helps us circumvent obstacles created by power dynamics and imbalances within groups of diverse participants.) As a bonus, the Dotmocracy process is fun and takes only minutes to learn and apply. The process has some similarities with crowdsourcing.

Tools that create change as they create change

It’s important to recognize that Dotmocracy is more than just an alternative to brainstorming. Look more closely at the values that Dotmocracy is built upon. And, look closely at what Dotmocracy can create.

Dotmocracy is a process that :

• generates constructive feedback,
• develops the elements of trust
• reinforces relationships between individuals as peers,
• draws on the diversity of perspectives within in a group, and
• invokes contributions of uniqueness from individuals.

Dotmocracy is not a “perfect” tool- – it does not (and does not claim to) solve every problem with group idea generation and choice.

There are lots of organizing and organizational tools out there that seem mundane at the surface but aren’t designed to sustain “business as usual.”  Instead, underneath their simple instructions, these tools are actually subversive . Yes, I said subversive , in a good way, right here on this blog for business people. These tools put into practice the changes that the progressive groups want to create in organizations, in our economy and in society.

Finding tools for change

Jason Diceman, the activist and stakeholder engagement consultant who maintains the Advanced Dotmocracy site also maintains a list-in-progress called The Co-op Tools List. The Co-op Tools List is a collection of simple techniques that help make co-operation a whole lot easier. The Co-Op Tools website has lists of even more resources (like Collections of Engagement Techniques ) that look like they would be useful for progressive organizations.

I’ll be on the lookout myself, partly to help add to Jason’s list if I can, and also to get up to speed on the opportunities out there. In the meantime, if you know of tools for change, please recommend them to Jason.

We need more tools that create change as they create change, so that organizations can put into action the changes that they want to bring to our world.

We may not need to reinvent the wheel, but we do need more tools to reinvent just about everything else.

Photos from Dotmocracy Flickr page and Shawn at Anecdote, the collaborative workplace consultancy. Old wheels from Indslf72 on Flickr.

Originally posted 4/14/2009

I just got done commenting on the blog of my colleague and blogging buddy Michael Roberto, a strategy professor at Bryant University. Michael blogged today about his concern that Americans (and by extension, students in the Business Schools where many of us teach) have lost faith in Capitalism.

Michael’s answer to this problem, in so many words, is that

“As educators, we should never flinch from teaching that capitalism is far superior to socialism, while acknowledging that people of different political affiliations may have different views on the form of capitalism that should be employed.”

Should I have been surprised to find myself writing 300+ words in reply?

Probably not. I know my views on Capitalism (and by extension, democratic socialism) are not as common in the business schools where I have learned and taught as they are in the political science and philosophy departments where my views were first formed.

Moreover, I recognize that I was probably the only Darden faculty member ever to receive anonymous feedback from a student that “People who don’t believe in Capitalism shouldn’t be allowed to teach in a business school.”

Apparently being married to a Harvard MBA, getting a 4.0 in my MBA Finance course, having a PhD from a Business School, owning stocks and amassing property wasn’t enough to establish my street cred as a believer in Capitalism. Which is, in the end, fine with me. Why? Because —

It’s less important to be a believer than it is to be someone who understands.

And, it is less important to accept what Capitalism as practice has to offer us, than it is to consider how to adjust, reform, and apply Capitalism to make the world a better place.

I’m pasting most of Michael’s post, as well as my reply, below, for your enjoyment. Please do check out Michael’s blog directly… not because I agree with him most of the time (I generally do) but also because he has useful insights on a wide range of business & strategy issues.

I’d love your thoughts on these issues… if you share them in the Comments, below, I’ll incorporate them in my upcoming discussions of Progressive Organizational Movements…

Capitalism vs. Socialism

Rasmussen released a shocking poll last week about Americans’ views regarding capitalism and socialism. Here’s an excerpt from their report:

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

These numbers clearly reflect some disenchantment associated with the poor economy. Still, these data startle and worry me. Do young people truly understand what socialism means? Do they recognize that, throughout our history, well-meaning Americans of all political stripes have worked very hard to build and defend our system of democratic capitalism. This economic and political system has brought freedom and posterity to many parts of the world. Socialism has brought nothing but ruin, and with it has often come dictatorship and oppression. As an educator, I worry that perhaps we are not teaching our young people the critical lessons of history. As educators, we should never flinch from teaching that capitalism is far superior to socialism, while acknowledging that people of different political affiliations may have different views on the form of capitalism that should be employed.

Posted by Michael Roberto at 4/14/2009

Here’s my comment:

Michael,

I have a few problems with this research/poll, only one of which you mention. Very few Americans actually know
(1) what Socialism is,
(2) how Socialism works,
(3) how Socialism works in a democracy,
(4) how Socialism differs from Communism, and
(5) how Capitalism actually works.

Given these 5 points of ignorance, it’s hard to imagine that a poll of average Americans tells us anything about whether they prefer Socialism to Capitalism, or which is inherently better. It’s like those surveys about the number of Americans who don’t believe in evolution. Those surveys indicate not a failure of evolution, but a failure of *education*.

It’s hard to “know” that Capitalism is “better” than Socialism, when both are practiced in a democracy. Where democratic socialism is practiced, there is more gender equality, less social stratification, lower infant mortality, longer life spans, higher literacy, better healthcare and so on. Are these indicators of failure? I don’t think so; ymmv.

When I teach international students– you know, students from countries with democratic socialist governments & parties — I am always careful not to denigrate the values on which democratic socialism is based. The execution may be flawed (as so often is the execution of capitalism), but the values are to be respected (whether or not one disagrees).

We have in business schools right now a very serious parochialism about how capitalism should be executed (e.g., the ‘which variety’ question) and we also have a severe/obstinate resistance to analyzing how and where captialism as practiced in the US is flawed/letting us down.

I don’t think that the answer is to step up to the challenge of teaching students that captialism is far superior to socialism. I think that the better strategy is to teach students how to get in touch with their values, how to analyze systems, how to separate ideology from data, and how to make the world a better place.

Remember, I share will you a faith in the metaproject… even if we disagree on tactics.

Your thoughts? Please join in. …

Thank you SO much for being a longtime reader of AuthenticOrganizations!

It’s meant a lot to me to know that there have been people on the other end of these ideas.

Not just the visitors who click on over from Twitter, LinkedIn, or a guest post … but also the nearly 500 of you dedicated readers who’ve been receiving an email every time I post a blog.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed the ideas I’ve shared so far — and I hope you’ll be interested in joining me in my new digs.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be moving my writing over to the mvp of my new site, cvharquail.com.

I’d like you to come along with me!    

To help make the move easier for you, I’ll be sending you an invitation to subscribe to “posts by email” from cvharquail.com. (These will come ‘automagically’ via MailChimp.)

If you want to join me the next leg of the journey — and I hope you do — please use these invitations to renew and transfer your connection with me.

I’ll continue to publish posts here on AuthenticOrganizations for a while, and I’ll keep the site up as an archive for all these great older posts.

Other big news:

To focus on writing related to my book on Generosity At Work, and to find the audience who’s most excited by these ideas, I’ll also be launching a newsletter.

(The newsletter will be  separate from “posts by email” and will contain different writing, links, and questions.)

I’ll be sending you a separate invitation to “sign up as a Beta Tester” of the newsletter. Think of this as an invitation to check out the ideas before you make a commitment. You can test out the newsletter (as I figure it out!), offer some feedback if you’re so inclined, and decide if the ideas are useful to you.

As always, I only want to send you things that feel like a little gift in your mailbox.

My feelings won’t be hurt if these new ideas aren’t a good fit with your interests right now and you decide not to sign up for the newsletter.

But, I hope you’ll be excited enough by the ideas unfolding around Generosity At Work to stay with me and help me figure them out.

To each of you, my heartfelt thanks.

cvh

via GIPHY

For so many reasons, Etsy has been one of my leading examples of companies practicing Generosity At Work. 

I rely on Etsy’s Code As Craft initiative to illustrate the strategy of Opening Your Learning, but that’s only one way that Etsy demonstrates an expanded culture of generosity. Etsy uses each of the five higher-level generosity strategies, as well as over two dozen specific generosity practices. And, sometimes with one move, Etsy demonstrates several generosity practices at the same time.

That’s the case with Etsy’s new Parental Leave Policy, announced last week in a blog post by Juliet Gorman, the Director of Culture and Engagement at Etsy: “Strong Families, Strong Business: A Step Forward in Parental Leave at Etsy”.

In addition to demonstrating the strategy of Promoting Your Unique Culture, the policy and its announcement demonstrate the generosity practices of Networked Citizenship and Industry & Marketplace Advocacy.  

Here’s how:

Generosity Strategy:  Promoting Your Unique Culture

Etsy’s revised Parental Leave policy is a generously conceived and well-designed effort that strengthens Etsy itself, sets a standard that other similar companies should follow, and aims to influence the conversation about family leave in our society. 

The details of the policy are all wonderful. 26 weeks at full pay is generous, period. The policy is open to biological, adoptive and surrogate parents, of any gender expression or family status, regardless of the country in which they reside. It’s about as inclusive as you could imagine.  Some of the 6 months of paid leave must be taken as a chunk of 8 consecutive weeks so that parents get the maximum psychological benefit of the leave, while other time can be taken in a flexible distribution.   

Etsy promotes its unique culture through the original announcement and a companion piece, 5 Facts That Support Gender-Blind Parental Leave.   Etsy offers the details of its new policy as all as the data supporting its decision to advocate that other companies follow Etsy’s lead. (Recall that I’ve talked about Promoting Your Culture before, using the example of Buffer and its efforts to promote radical transparency and the distributed (aka remote) workforce.)

While it’s certainly true that this new policy will help to keep Etsy competitive in a marketplace where it’s hard to find software engineering talent, its also true that it fits with Etsy’s core values and with Etsy’s vision of the company it wants to be. This generosity towards employees reinforces Etsy’s unique identity.

Generosity Practice: Networked Citizenship

Promoting its Parental Leave policy also helps Etsy remain a leading citizen of its business network.  By proactively taking responsibility for steering the growth and development of behavior in its network, Etsy’s policy reinforces the efforts of other pioneering digital businesses who already announced generous parental leave policies (such as Spotify). 

Especially because Etsy has a public profile that’s much bigger than its actual size (still less than 820 employees), throwing its energy behind Parental Leave — 

• Draws attention to parental leave policies at digital companies,
• Pulls in a broader business audience (e.g., this Time article), and
• Strengthens the perceived legitimacy of these policies.

Etsy’s efforts are helping its network shift perceptions of its parental leave policies (and “great place to work” reputations) so that these are not ‘exceptional’ within its industry, but normal to the network.

Generosity Practice: Industry & Marketplace Advocacy

But the part I like best, and where Etsy is demonstrating a rare form of generosity at work, is revealed in the final paragraph of the formal announcement:

We (at Etsy) believe parental leave policies like ours are just one step towards a more fulfilling, lasting world. Our policy is premised on the traditional employer-employee relationship in the U.S. We applaud the efforts of leaders like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has proposed a paid family leave program for all workers in the state, similar to programs in California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington, and Washington, DC. We’re also mindful that many Etsy sellers are independently employed, like more and more workers today, which is why we advocate for portable benefits. Our hope is that policy makers and future business leaders find a way to provide a stable and flexible safety net for all people.  You can read more about the research that informed our decision in our companion post: 5 Facts That Support Gender-Blind Parental Leave.

With this final paragraph, Etsy is proactively advocating for an approach to parental leave that it believes is good for the economy as a whole.

That’s giving big.

Etsy is expressing its values AND practicing generosity by taking a stand that paid parental leave helps everyone, and thus should be universal.

Here’s more, from the companion post mentioned on the Etsy blog (below), where Gorman notes:

At Etsy, we’re working to be a diverse and inclusive company. In sharing our thinking, we hope to advance the conversation among our community?—?including our employees, business peers, other corporate leaders and policymakers?—?to build a business culture that’s more enriching and sustainable for everyone. (emphasis mine)

Etsy ties its Parental Leave policy to a much larger mission and purpose.  By promoting its own unique culture, Etsy is generously advocating for something that will benefit every company and every worker in the USA.

Well done, Etsy.

On a Related Note:

(here’s the extra newsletter section

I believe that parental leave, like health insurance, should not be attached to a person’s job or place of employment. We should encourage companies to provide leave while we advocate for universal paid parental leave, as well as universal child care. And, we need to encourage companies of any size and any industry to offer parental leave in whatever capacity they can.

That’s why I was surprised to see this statement, by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (USV), an early investor in Etsy and now a board member. 

I fully support Etsy’s parental leave policy and am proud that Etsy is at the forefront of a movement in the tech industry for more family friendly employee policies.

However, I am not suggesting that all startups or all USV backed startups should do the same.

There’s a vast gap between “a workforce in the thousands or tens of thousands” and the “team of four people working from a co-working space” that Wilson uses to anchor the size of companies that can and can’t offer parental leave. Companies don’t have to have thousands — or even hundreds- of employees to find ways to offer paid parental leave.

Remember how, just a year ago,  Mary Ellen Slater shared how her small startup managed to give employees parental leave, and Sara Holoubek of Luminary Labs wrote about planning for her own parental leave?  Rethink those excuses, people.

Two perspectives on Family Leave Policy worth checking out:

Bravo for Etsy, but Its Paid Parental Leave Policy Really Shouldn’t Be Exceptional, Inc.com, by Jessica Stillman, @EntryLevelRebel, March 16, 2016.

— I always appreciate Stillman’s perspective, and here she shows us the big picture of parental leave in the USA and globally.

These Are the Companies With the Best Parental Leave Policies, Time.com, by Alicia Adamczyk, Nov. 4, 2015.   

—  Do you wonder what it would be like to work at Netflix and actually TAKE your unlimited parental leave? I do.

Sign up to be a Beta Tester of my new newsletter, Generosity At Work.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to Generosity At Work that defines a concept that’s critical for assessing the impact of your business. Let me know what you think!

Defining Net Positive Value

Self-centered business care whether their own bottom line is growing.  Generous businesses care about their own growth at the same time as they care about the growth of their business network itself.

Generous businesses want to grow by creating “net positive value”.

Net positive value is created when a group of businesses works together to create new sources of value and additional kinds of value while using or claiming for themselves less than they contribute. Any individual business can influence the network’s net value by adding more value and/or taking less itself.

Generous businesses think about what they’re taking, what they are contributing as they assess whether or not they are really, truly, growing.

In a network with net positive value, businesses are being generous themselves and helpful to each other. Business are growing, and so is the network.

What Net Positive Value means

The word ‘net’ does double duty in the concept of ‘net positive value’. It stands for the balance of inputs to outputs while also emphasizing the system’s health instead of just the health of the individual business.

In accounting, the term ‘net’ means an entity’s income minus cost of goods sold, expenses and taxes. It tells accountants whether profits are growing, or not. An entity has net positive, net neutral or net negative outcomes. The idea of “net” gain or loss can be used outside of financial accounting, to consider any kind of resource or value. It’s a way to understand, when it’s all said and done, whether the entity is growing, maintaining status quo, or declining in value.

When self-centered companies focus on their own growth, they think about net value the way accountants do.

They want to end up with more value than they had when they started, and more value than they burned through to get here. Indeed, that’s what competitive businesses are supposed to do— they are supposed to maximize the value they claim for themselves by efficiently using the least amount of resources necessary to create that value. They try to be efficient with their resources and aggressive with their pricing, so that the net effect of their efforts is a positive number on the bottom line.

But what’s good for the bottom line of the self-centered company can be bad for the net positive value of the group.

Consider what happened in 20o2, when Walmart introduced an inventory management system powered by RFID tags. Walmart wanted to save money by shifting away from the labor-intensive process of taking inventory by hand. They also wanted to increase sales by eliminating out-of-stocks. Both goals could be addressed by the RFID system, and the savings generated for Walmart by this system would show up as increased profits. For Walmart.

Walmart mandated that every one of its product suppliers put these RFID tags onto their products — at the suppliers’ expense — before Walmart would accept shipments from them. Walmart wasn’t concerned with the impact of its mandate on the bottom line of anyone but itself.

Walmart could have put these tags on pallets of inventory once products arrived in its own warehouses, using Walmart’s own workers, equipment and time. Instead, Walmart used its power to push the costs of these RFID tags onto its suppliers. By aiming to reap the benefits of an RFID-managed system all for itself, Walmart decreased the net value (bottom line) of each and every supplier whose products Walmart sold in its stores. Worse still was that few if any suppliers were able to use this RFID technology to make their own internal systems more efficient.

The added expense of the RFID technology for the suppliers became the cost of doing business with Walmart.

If the costs to suppliers were about the same as the additional value Walmart received, then the overall impact on the network was neutral. More than a decade later, however, the jury’s still out on how much and even whether this move to RFID actually helped Walmart’s bottom line. We know that for many of Walmart’s suppliers, the shift to RFID damaged their bottom line for years.

A self-centered business might think that it is generating net positive value of the accounting kind, because it is taking and claiming more value than it spent. But from the big picture, there isn’t any net positive value created overall. Business that take a network point of view (NetPOV), however, understand that looking at their individual balance of contributions and claims is not quite enough to evaluate their success. They need to consider the the network as a whole. When companies with a netPOV think about their growth, they pay attention to the outcome for the system. These businesses look beyond their own balance sheets to include in their calculations their effects on the businesses around them and on the network itself.

From the perspective of the individual business, the goal is to ‘claim’ as much as you can of the value you help to create.

Does your business introduce other businesses to your customers? Then charge these businesses when you offer them your mailing list.

Does your business help customers understand an entire category of products? Then, to every business in the industry, send a bill for p.r. ‘services rendered’.

Do other businesses adopt a software tool that your designers made? Then charge them a subscription fee for every month that tool is in their service.

That’s how business is done. That’s how a self-centered company can ‘capture’ more of the value that it helps to create within a network.

But in these examples, as in so much of “business as usual”, the value has been moved to the bottom line of one company right from the balance sheet of some other business. The impact is net neutral at best.

Generous business, because their are network-focused and concerned about all kinds of value, recognize that they need to assess the health of the whole network before they can tell whether or not the value they are claiming on their balance sheets is fundamentally new value.

New value, that didn’t exist before and that the generous business has helped to create, leads the network’s value towards net positive.

That’s why the assessment of value at the level of the network is so important:

We can only tell if our business is growing in a sustainable way if it is contributing to the network’s net value as well as our own. 

Image: Balance, by Brenda Gottsabend on Flickr

I’m “working out loud in public” with a rangy, rambling first draft. What I’m working to understand, with this draft, is how to explain ‘generous products’, and how to link ideas about generous products to current conversations about product design. This is a small piece of the puzzle, focused on how products themselves might be generous.
Helpful comments and provocative or clarifying questions welcomed.

Every product or service is functional.

That is to say, every product fills some kind of user need. It does something.

As it functions, a product can also be generous or stingy.

Stingy, ungenerous products are difficult to use, costly of time and energy, wasteful because they create by-products, or/ and unpleasant because they lack beauty. Stinginess or generosity of a product is put there — deliberately or unintentionally — by the people designing the product.

In businesses that aim to practice generosity, product designers and producers can design generosity into their products and into how the products gets their jobs done.

Products can be designed to offer the “function plus X”, or the “function minus Y” .

Generous Products Creating Something (else) to Share

Generosity can be creating something while the product functions that is potentially useful/helpful to someone else.

A digital example is Facebook’s end-of-year feature, Your Year In Review (YYIR). Your Year In Review is a little product embedded in your Facebook stream that invites you to create a short slideshow of the highlights of the past year.  Facebook build YYIR to use the photos each of us had already uploaded to make something new. YYIR is a co-product of your regular Facebook activity. 

Even better and more generous, YYIR was built to offer you a first draft of the slideshow, with your 10 most popular photos already suggested for your slideshow. Facebook used data they already had (i.e., information about which photos had the most ‘likes’) to create something new for its users.

The idea that a generous product creates something else that can be shared or offered to another business — above and beyond the actual function — is both the obvious definition of a generous product and the less common one.  It’s less common because we’re so used to dismissing the extra of ‘what’s created when using the product’ as waste or as a by-product, instead of thinking of it as a “co-product”.  Clever reframing and reuse of what a product already does can help make it more generous.

Generous Products Create Positive Additional  Thick Value

Products can be generous when, as they are used, they create non-functional ‘thick’ value for the user and /or the users’ network.  (Thick value, you’ll remember, is all the non-financial, non-functional value — such as meaning, emotion, experience, expression, or assistance — that can be part of an exchange between businesses, people and products.)

Thick value is created through a generous product’s ‘user interface’. The user interface includes the actions, commands, movements, handles, buttons, menus, instruction manual, and anything else that a user needs to engage with to get the product to work the way it’s supposed to work. User interface is a term that’s used most often in conversations about computers and electronic devices, but it’s relevant to any kind of product or service.

Products are designed to create a particular quality of interface, both when designers consciously consider how a product and user will interact as well as when designers overlook things.   Ideally, the user interface is ‘user friendly’, easy to comprehend, efficient, and enjoyable with minimal or no undesired, unpleasant experiences for the user.

Generous Products that have good user interface are created by empathetic, generous designers in businesses that value generosity.

Three Conversations That Anchor “Generous Products”

Currently, there are three different places where businesses think about issues relevant to generous products: Design Thinking, Considerate Software, and Positive Design.

1. Design Thinking is a process for developing business strategy that puts the users’ needs and experiences at the center. (See @designatdarden’s work here.)  [not elaborating on design thinking here]

2. Considerate Software is code that’s written to get a digital job done while putting the goals and needs of users first.

3. Positive Design is an approach to design that — wait for it — puts the goals and needs of users first, so that products enhance users experience and support the users’ growth.

The Example of Considerate Software

Considerate software, as defined by Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann in their book “About Face 2.0: The essentials of interaction design”, follows about a dozen different principles to ultimately create digital tools that deliver thick value as they are used.  Considerate software anticipates user needs, uses common sense, respects users’ intelligence and time, and more. Considerate software deliberately does not do certain things, such as ask users for the same information twice.

Considerate software creates digital tools that go beyond gathering information that the tool needs, to incorporate support for human needs. 

We see examples of considerate software every day, though you might overlook it because it’s so sensible that it’s easy to take for granted. My favorite example is online forms that, when asking us to enter our ten-digit American phone numbers, not only presents us with three differently sized entry spaces that reflect the 3-3-4 structure of a phone number but that also automatically tab from the one space to the next once we’ve entered three digits into the area code space.  Everybody knows that there’s a space – and a hyphen! – between the area code and prefix and between the prefix and the line number. Only considerate software adds the box sizes, the automatic tabs and the character limits to quietly guide the typist’s accuracy. All of these features make it easier and faster for users (especially those like me, who are poor typists) to add their phone numbers to a form. 

You know inconsiderate software when you’re using it. 

With inconsiderate software, if you were filling out an online form and you typed the wrong username, hitting < enter > might return a message like “Incorrect” or “Rejected”. A small thing, but not an encouraging response.  In contrast, considerate software would return a message like “Looks like a typo. Try again.” Or “Your username is probably your email.”

It takes effort to design products that are considerate. That effort is part of what makes these products generous — they do something more than their basic function so that they create additional value for the user. 

Products can be neutral, adding no additional value and causing no particular pain. Products can also be stingy, when they are annoying, frustrating, demanding, or inconsistent. These get the job done (sort of) but they take value from the user.

Some stingy design gives you only what you explicitly asked for, and only if you’ve asked for it precisely and accurately. It shifts to the user all the pain and effort of getting the data entered perfectly.  When I ordered groceries online and typed in “multi-colored quoina” (sic), I got back “no products were found”. Despite having ordered multi-colored quinoa many times before. I had to google how to spell “quinoa” and then return to the website to complete my order with perfect spelling.

ShopRite Online has no mercy.  

In contrast, generous design has ways to respond effectively to incomplete requests with a set of possible (or close) examples. When I mistyped “Bow Obama” into Google Search, the considerate response was both “Did you mean: bo obama?” and a display of images of President Obama bowing to the Emperor of Japan. I never had to google “How do you spell Malia Obama’s dog’s name?” to get the photos I was looking for.

Inconsiderate software and inconsiderate design leads us to feel annoyed, overworked, tapped out, and dumbed-down.

Considerate design removes annoyances and streamline the users’ experience — while providing the function that the user (and the business) need. Annoyances are gone, efficiency and leverage have been achieved.

What would it take to move past neural and into an objectively positive place, where positive value is added to the user (and perhaps to the company)?

Positive Design

That’s the mission of Positive Design, an initiative lead by Pamela Pavliscak and her team at Change Sciences. Positive designers don’t stop once they eliminate or reduce friction and pain for the user. They move past neutral, to find ways to extend, reinforce, and amplify specifically positive feelings.  Positive design evokes positive feelings by helping users experience the sense of autonomy, trust, creativity, connection and meaning that meet our deepest human needs.

Many products are designed with more than functional qualities in mind. Like snack food, some products are designed to never fully satisfy the user, so that people continued to consume them in vain hope of being fulfilled. Like games on a smart phone, some products are designed to persuade users to chase the next badge or reach the next level, paying each time for the privilege. These products evoke feelings, but in ways that mainly serve the needs of the product and the business.  What sets positive design is that it aims to balance the purpose of the product and the company with the genuine pleasure of the product’s users. Positive products help users feel validated, engaged, creative, smart, or simply happy.

ModCloth is one of those companies that has designed its products to create positive emotions in customers.  Their clothes are trendy, fun to wear, and affordable. Even better, the clothes are available in a wide range of sizes, so that customers can find something that fits well and is flattering no matter what their size, shape or age. Or gender self-expression.

This orientation towards fun, expressiveness, and authenticity in the clothes themselves extends past the clothes themselves and is reflected (and evoked) in ModCloth’s online presence. [[Discussed earlier.]]  ModCloth was able to evoke strong positive feelings in me because ModCloth designed its Style Gallery to be open to every customer, without concern for the conventionality of customers’ self-presentations. As long as the outfit includes something from ModCloth, anything goes.

ModCloth customers sharing their ModCloth outfits included Rye Silverman, a standup comedian, writer and gender rebel, whose photos shared her gender-nonconventional stylings. All the way back in early 2014 — long before American culture had recognized Caitlyn Jenner — Rye was submitting photos of herself in ModCloth outfits, and ModCloth community moderators were posting them on ModCloth’s site.

Of course, and so predictably, it was Rye’s cat t-shirt that first caught my attention.  As I clicked through the Style Gallery it seemed to me that Rye’s presence on the site was both normal and notable, and so I tweeted with her and confirmed that, yes, ModCloth welcomed her contributions without any reference to her gender-nonconventional styling. 

I wasn’t the only ModCloth customer who’d been excited to see Rye’s photos on the site. (Rye discusses responses to her photos on her blog, chicklikeme.)   Rye became such a regular and popular contributor to the Style Gallery that ModCloth featured her in its #fashiontruth monthly style column. ModCloth even named a dress after Rye.

Not underestimating the positive emotions evoked for Rye in being included and featured by ModCloth, the open design of its Style Gallery evoked positive feelings in me. I was happy, to see diversity positively affirmed this way, and my heart was warmed.

Turns out I’m not the only one that’s noticed the positive emotions design into ModCloth’s Style Gallery community. When I was researching positive design, I discovered an interview with Pamela Pavliscek, by Drew Lepp, where she, too, discusses the example of ModCloth: 

Says Pavliscak:

  ModCloth is another good example. … For me, a positive design shows the presence of other people in an authentic way. ModCloth, in its product reviews, lets me see real people wearing the clothes and putting them together in new ways. It brings that element of humanity, and also acceptance, and that’s a very positive thing.

Positive design fosters opportunities for individuals, customers, and communities to experience a greater sense of well-being. When this happens, folks often respond in ways that serve the companies’ larger goals — not simply product purchases, but also word of mouth recommendations, brand loyalty, positive corporate reputation, and community participation.

Once I saw Rye’s photos, I shifted from a sometime customer to a die-hard ModCloth fan. I’ve bought items for myself, gifts for friends, recommended ModCloth on my parenting blog, and even recommended that students apply for jobs at ModCloth— all because ModCloth’s design evoked positive feelings through its inclusiveness.

See also:
5 Ways to Expand How We Think About Value in a Boost Economy
Defining Thick Value in a Boost Economy

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A little story I’m using to illustrate Generosity At Work —

Three cowhands are setting up camp on a chilly night. While one builds the campfire and the second gets water for the horses, the third takes command of the saddles. He drags each one to the far side of the fire pit, lines them up in a curve, and builds a wall that closes off half of the circle.

“What are you doing?”, the first cowhand asks him.

“I’m making sure no one else gets the benefit of our camp fire.”

As absurd as this scenario seems out on the range, it illustrates the standard operating procedure in the world of business.

Businesses build resources, tools, events, ideas and more that are so big and powerful that they can’t use all these resources by themselves. Yet, businesses go to great lengths to wall off these resources from anyone else.  They don’t want any other business to benefit from what they’ve made for themselves, even if it means that valuable heat, light, insight, expertise and more go to waste.

Would it hurt the cowhands to leave their fire circle open, in case a few others show up? Would it be so wrong to leave a space for a raccoon, some meerkats, or even a stray dog to crawl up nearby and enjoy the warmth? Would offering some of their campfire to cowhands from another ranch make these cowhands any less able to do their jobs, to care for their cattle, and to make a profit for their ranch at the end of the season?

There is no cost, no harm done, in sharing the campfire. Yet, what could be rays of light and heat to warm someone else’s journey gets blocked by businesses that are unable even to think of sharing. They are too convinced they have to protect what’s “theirs”, even when they can’t profit from hoarding it. Even when it takes real energy to drag the saddles round to set up a wall.

When I bring up the idea of businesses being generous by sharing with each other, usually the first question is — why would a business want to give their secrets away?  But that’s not what we’re talking about with generosity at work.

Generosity At Work isn’t dumb sharing, where a business gives in ways that could ultimately come to hurt it.

And, it’s not dumb hoarding, where a business holds on to or blocks off other’s access to resources that business can’t use up by itself.

Generosity At Work is smart and thoughtful — it offers what’s easy to share, easy to replenish, and helpful to others.

When your business is generous in its work, you’re not walking away from the fire you built for yourself, or even giving away your firewood to someone else.

You’re simply letting others sit in the open spaces of your campfire, or letting the light and heat go out through the open space to reach whomever might benefit from it.

Image: Campfire Generosity by Holstee.com.  (…I’m looking for a link so you can purchase a copy from Holstee’s site…)

@Brian_Ashcraft of Kotaku  shared this gif of two commuters who, somewhat accidentally, illustrate how one business can be generous with another while becoming stronger itself.

The tall fellow ends up with a hand on each strap, making his own stance more sturdy.

The shorter guy gets something to hold that he can actually reach, making his stance more secure — and taking nothing away from the tall guy.

If only I could crop off the facial expression of the tall fellow, at the very end, it would be perfect.

I wrote this explanation of Feminism at Work back in Feb of 2013.  In advance of our panel at In Good Company on June 1, I’m reposting it as pre-reading for folks who’ll be attending. Want to join us? Sign up here: Everyday Leadership for Women Entrepreneurs

It’s time to use the f-word at work.

Sheryl Sandberg’s forthcoming book, “Lean In”, may finally get us all to talk about what it will really take for women and men to achieve equality at work.

As we talk, we’re going to use words like ‘ambition’ and ‘power’. We’re going to explain how to ‘lean in’ and why not to ‘leave before we leave’. We’re going to tell the truth about the kinds of support we need from our partners at home and our mentors at work. We’re going to do a lot of talking about what to do.

But if any of this talking is going to make a difference for ourselves, for our colleagues, for our businesses and for our economy, we’re going to have to use some words.  Words you don’t hear often in the cube farms and conference rooms of corporate America.

We’ll need to use words like ‘fairness’, ‘privilege’, ‘inclusion’, ‘class’, ‘racism’, and ‘living wage’.

I can see your reaction already.

Feminism? What has feminism got to do with business? With work?

Just about everything.

Consider for a minute all the different kinds of women who work. How can we talk about transforming the world of work unless we use words like ‘race’, ‘class’, and ‘justice’?

Compare the situation for women at work to the situation of men. How can we talk about work unless we also talk about ‘family’ and ‘life’ and ‘community’?

We have to broaden our vocabulary and talk about more.

We have to find words that include all women of all races, that include men, that include work, family and life, that help individuals empower themselves at work, and that help leaders change the systems at work.

The only word, and the only perspective, that includes all of these concerns at once is feminism.

Yes, I know that a lot of people don’t really know what “feminism” is. They may reject feminism outright, misunderstand it as being ‘against men’, and criticize it appropriately for historically emphasizing the concerns of white women. People may even criticize the women and men who are in the early stages of learning how to use feminism and are a little didactic or simplistic as they use it.

Yet even with all the ways people misunderstand feminism,

Feminism is still the most powerful way to transform organizations to make them better for everyone.

By taking a feminist perspective and putting feminism to work, we can change not only how we act as women and men, but also change the ways we lead and the goals we are leading towards.

Putting feminism to work helps women and men together push for changes in their organization’s systems, in employees’ behaviors, and ultimately in each other’s beliefs and values, so that women and men — regardless of their position in the organization, or their race, ethnicity, class, family status, physical ability, gendered self expression and sexual orientation — can achieve the same rewards for the same amount of contribution at work.

It isn’t enough to for each of us to “lean in”, and use the energy of feminism to advance our own individual careers.

We also need to use feminism at work, through our own personal, individual behavior, so that we challenge:

• Unequal treatment of women and men, especially in terms of wages, promotions and authority
• Gendered expectations of who leaders are and how leaders should behave
• Gendered expectations about what is good work and who are good workers
• Interpersonal behaviors that devalue women and men and that dehumanize us all
• Behaviors that exclude and fail to include certain kinds of people simply for what we presume about them

Using feminism at work means that we lean in to our leadership positions and our influence within our businesses, so that we challenge:

• Hierarchy and bureaucracy that create status without wisdom and authority without responsibility
• Jobs and products that we can’t take pride in
• Work systems that advantage of employees instead of respectfully engaging us
• The devaluing and overvaluing of certain kinds of work, where employees’ compensation doesn’t match the value that their work creates
• The ways that organizations take advantage of employees through overwork, intensified work, 24/7 demands, and the expectation that work comes before anything or anyone else.

Using feminism at work also means we lean in to our roles in specific departments and functions so that we make a difference.  

Whether we’re in line management, human resources, marketing, production, customer service or strategy, using feminism at work means that:

• We challenge and change who is hired, who is recruited, and who is seen as capable for a job
• We challenge and change the ways we market our products to make ads less sexist and to promote inclusiveness
• We challenge and change the products we create to address real customer needs, and we use inclusive design to make products usable by anyone who wants them
• We challenge and change our manufacturing and production systems to reduce waste in the supply chain, promote energy conservation, and more towards sustainability
• We challenge and change our corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives so that they are genuine contributions to improving the world, not just pinkwash or pr.
• We treat our customers and suppliers with respect, looking for relationships that create more value for everyone rather than more value for just us
• We challenge and change how we interact with our communities to embrace them as partners in each others’ success

Putting feminism to work means that we combine feminist values and goals with basic business practices. It means that we think about what it really means to advocate for feminism, and what it really means to pursue business “success”.

Some might say that we don’t really need feminism at work.

After all, we’ve got the EEOC, affirmative action laws, and laws against sexual harassment. We’ve got HR departments sponsoring diversity and inclusion programs, we’ve got work-life flexibility programs, and women’s leadership development programs.

In spite of these efforts, we still have gender-related differences in interpersonal treatment, know as ‘benevolent sexism’.  We have gendered norms in corporate culture that create ‘ambient sexism’ and we have unchallenged, unspoken scripts about how men and women ought to behave that’s known as ‘aversive sexism’.

What we don’t have at work is a big picture understanding that there is no single solution — not mentoring, not training, not promotion, not ‘leaning in’ — that will create workplaces where women employees at every level, and male employees at every level, are paid well for their contributions, are working on jobs with meaning and dignity, and are treated with respect.

We can’t change work systems, businesses, or organizations without a point of view and a plan of action that includes everyone — women and men, managers and workers, typically and differently-abled employees, people with families and personal lives, and more.

Feminism offers an inclusive point of view. Feminism offers an inclusive plan of action.

If we want to make work better, more just and more fair, we need to claim the power of the F word.

We need to start using feminism at work.