NEW YORK–If there is an opportunity to be found in the pandemic, it’s in shedding “organizational debt,” according to Scott Belsky, who also offered a “litmus test” for whether a credit union’s strategic plan is going to be effective.
Belsky, who is Adobe’s chief creative officer and who leads product management and engineering for Creative Cloud, Adobe Spark, Behance, and the Adobe community of 10-million users, told a CO-OP THINK 20 Virtual Forum the silver lining in the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting shutdown is in really utilizing technologies organizations have available but have never fully utilized, and in rethinking (and often discarding) every process.
As examples of the types of “organizational debt” to which he was referring, Belsky cited regularly scheduled meetings that still occur even though they are no longer needed, processes that don’t fit the new reality, and consultants whose contracts expired years ago but who are still around.
“In the daily course of business there is no impetus to change these things,” said Belsky, the author of the book “The Messy Middle.” But now there is. One change to consider, he said: eliminating management-level approvals when lower-level workers should simply be empowered to make decisions.
He cautioned there will always “be the holdouts,” but they are no reason to not move forward.
Mind the Gap
All of it leads to what Belsky calls the “Productivity Realization Gap,” a gap that prevents organizations from fully taking advantage of technologies.
“With the COVID crisis and suddenly so many people working from home, managers have had to revisit resource allocation and priorities,” he said. “We started to realize a lot of this productivity we already had around us. This is the opportunity here--to make sure your teams are not wasting this silver lining.”
How to Begin
Where should an organization begin in tackling Organizational Debt? Belsky offered these ideas:
Never Waste a Crisis
“Every great experience leader I’ve ever interviewed talks about something going wrong that made their organization a learning organization,” said Belsky. “Now, we’re finally talking about the difficult things, how to create a culture that surfaces the difficult things. These are the elephants in the room. One best practice here is to have people send you what they think the elephants are before a meeting begins.”
Lead with Empathy
“As we architect our future of work, such as being remote friendly, using new technology and new practices, let’s start with the first principles. One mistake we are making is looking to what other companies are doing. It’s important to understand what will work for your organization, and that starts with asking what is it that makes you uniquely you in the way you run meetings, hire people, etc.”
Meetings
“What is the purpose of every type of meeting? What should the default be? I think we will look back to the days when we used to commute or travel from across the country to a meeting where we contributed a sentence and be amazed that we went through that.”
Culture
“Is your culture designed or circumstantial or story or activity driven? What makes your culture unique? It’s about defining what the elements are and then designing them in instead of relying on circumstance to make them happen,” Belsky told the CO-OP Forum.
Innovation
“What is the role of serendipity? Where does it happen? How do you preserve cognitive transitions between meetings and everything else we do?” Belsky asked. “They played a very important role that we never really recognized before. We have to build in the time for serendipity purposefully. Many companies now have quarterly off-sites where everyone is required to be there.”
Talent
“How and where do you find the best talent? How do you optimize for diversity? How do you advantage next gen talent development over established talent?” asked Belsky, pointing out that at many organizations new talent hired in the last eight months has never met physically with their managers, never had a spontaneous discussion over lunch. “In addition, the remote friendly workforce is an incredible hack toward diversity. You can now hire talent wherever they are.”
Space
Belsky said every CU leader needs to be asking what is the role of space for collaboration, members, face time, ambient knowledge exchange? “Do we need to continue to have offices? Do you have to see each other to stay engaged, or you do a lot of brainstorming. Maybe you redesign for a WeWork-like design, or teaching rooms. There are an incredible number of opportunities here.”
Seek Competition
“Seeing how others are making progress is often the impetus for us to act,” said Belsky. “I encourage all of you with the plans you have, the ambitions you have, to find peers to pace yourself with. Embrace competition to act upon some of this stuff.”
Be The Bureaucracy Breaker
“When you think about implementing a change, it’s easy for someone in a meeting to say ‘Legal said we can’t make a change,’ or ‘We have to wait for so and so…’” observed Belsky. “The folks who say ‘Who is the lawyer who can sign off on this?,’ and ‘Where is the regulation that says that and can we reinterpret it?’ are the bureaucracy breakers. We have to be the ones who make our bosses make decisions.”
A Litmus Test
Belsky offered this “litmus test” for any CU’s or organization’s plan.
“Can you tell it is your team/company by reading the plan?
Could this be any company that is trying to navigate this unique era? Make sure it feels like it’s you.”