Latest / Humanity Working / Making the Intangible Tangible

Transcript

Making the Intangible Tangible · Humanity Working

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, Paul, you just did an interview with Dr.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Keith Keating about hidden value inside organizations.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's up in our feed.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: There was a bunch in there, but I wanted to go deeper on this concept of intangibles.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: What do you mean by it in the context of work?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Matt.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that uh that pod that's in the feed, by the way, that's one of our longer form interviews that we mentioned will be throwing up every so often.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Really would uh uh urge people to go listen to it.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's an awful lot in there, as you say.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um but specifically when it comes to intangibles, yeah, we think of intangibles as all of the stuff that people do inside organizations that are not easily captured in other ways, but really make the difference in terms of people getting hired, getting consistently retained, getting promoted on a regular basis.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um difficult to put your finger in many cases on what they are, but they're very, very important.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, pretty much everybody, from uh middle managers inside organizations all the way up to CEOs inside organizations, look for those intangibles, but they often find it quite hard to articulate exactly what they are.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's uh I I do a quite a bit of hiring, and and it's it's very hard to put in a job description.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's very hard to screen for, it's very hard to ask your interview panels to figure out.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's just like a feeling, this ethereal feeling that that you get about people.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: It reminds me of kind of that Malcolm Gladwell blink concept a little bit.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you just you can't really put your finger on it.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's really, really interesting.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: So, well, maybe to get around that, you know, some leaders uh love the line, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: So how how could you measure these intangibles?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, gosh.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know it's funny.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was speaking at a at a conference recently, I think I even alluded to this on the on the pod with Keith.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I said that at this conference, I said, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, is probably the nine, is it nine words?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's nine words, the nine worst words in the in the English language.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um the reason I think is because it's uh it leads to a bunch of behaviors that you do that you don't actually want.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um what it typically leads to is this idea that um we're going to focus on the things that are easily measured and we're gonna manage those things.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that is completely divorced from the concept of of underlying value.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um are you seriously telling me that something that is inherently measurable is inherently more valuable than something that is more difficult to measure?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's that's clearly not the case.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's clearly not the case in every aspect of our lives, right?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you've if you've got a partner that you've been with for the last 20 years, did you did you determine uh did you pick that partner based on a series of metrics?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Probably not.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: But clearly the uh the success in that case speaks for itself, yet you probably pick them based on intangibles.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So um it is um it is difficult, as you kind of alluded to, it's difficult to f fully, fully quantify the intangibles that you're talking about.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't mean that you shouldn't try, and it doesn't mean that you shouldn't um at least get some measure of uh of value.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now the measure can be partly quantitative and partly qualitative, um, but if you're not measuring it at all, and particularly if you're basing value on the things that you are measuring, then you're gonna be in a situation where you're by definition devaluing things that you can't measure.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that ultimately can be damaging for teams, it can be damaging for organizations, and it can lead to very, very valuable individuals in an organization being left out.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think it manifests and they're trying to do it in like culture?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, like bury the intangibles in culture a little bit, and then yeah, it's it's it's fascinating, right?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-uh.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, kind of.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like when we speak to organizations about their culture, it's amazing the number of people, once you get into it where you ask them what their culture is, and they'll reach around for a bit, and then ultimately they go, I don't know what it is.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: It you're right, culture almost becomes this sort of bucket for uh for all of the intangibles in inside an organization.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that could be tricky, right?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because if it's too uh undefined, then you can wind up with some with the flip side of this, whereby there are people that can provide true value for your organization, but they challenge you in some way, and so you don't want it because, in quotes, they're not a fit, right?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's why we need to get better at um at looking these intangibles head on and as best we can making the intangible tangible.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's you know, if I would if I were to pick one phrase in in the work that my company does, that's the phrase we often use, right?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: We make the intangible tangible.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting too on culture and measurement.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes by trying to measure the KPIs, you kill the culture.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: So if you ask people, I need to know how many hours you do this thing and track it for me every week and tell me about it every month, the culture is going to be very different.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Then yeah, I don't know how many physics fans we have on the uh have on the pod, but I think of it as um our version of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um so for folks that are not familiar with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, um, the I the idea is that um very, very lay version of this is that by measuring something you change it.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um and this is a sort of instantiation of that.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um in fact, um really good example of this, I include it in one of our recent newsletters.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine you've got a uh team of content developers, and there's three people in this uh in this uh content uh development team.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: The first person is like a content machine, they're just throwing out uh a whole bunch of uh posts every day, et cetera.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Second person, maybe they're producing half the content that the first person is, but they're in the same space, and they're always the person you bounce ideas off because they've got like super original ideas.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so that first person often bounces his ideas off the second and creates a better article.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then you've got the third person, maybe they create the least amount of content of anybody, but they've got this encyclopedic knowledge of all of the uh of all of the other stuff that is out there and how you can draw on it, and they've got like this sort of like internal library and always know where to go to find information.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: All three of those people in that organization are incredibly useful.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: They've just brought their own set of talents to uh to that work.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now you now go into that team and you go, you know what, we're gonna the ultimate goal of this team is to produce a bunch of content.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna measure people based on that.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: What you've now done is that first person's sitting happy because they're doing everything they're supposed to do.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Second person and third person, they bring incredible value to the to the team.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: They help ensure that all the content is better, but they stop doing that and they start trying to try and do what the first person is doing and increase the amount of content that they're producing.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: You've made the team worse by measuring.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Man.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I mean that that's a great, you know, what goes like perfectly.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: What goes wrong if you pick more direct KPIs?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: This is an example of that.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um scary.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to hard to navigate, I think.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um Yeah, yeah, I think it is.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I think really if you want to, if you if you want to get practical on this stuff, the real thing that you need to do is you need to stop thinking more about indirect KPIs.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So rather than thinking about the activity that is happening and trying to measure the activity that is happening, make the connection between that activity and the ultimate business outcome you want to drive.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, let's say we talk about this, uh, we talk about this with Keith, but let's say that you're running training on uh conflict resolution.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can measure the attendance of people on training on that conflict resolution.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's easy to measure.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Great, right?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Does it tell you anything?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: But what you can do is you can measure what the expected outcome associated with people being better at conflict resolution is, measure that, and now you're measuring something that is actually valuable, even though it is not and it's it's not immediately obvious that all of the activities that you're doing are the only thing that is contributing towards that.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if the classic ROI spreadsheet won't capture these softer assets, uh, what signals or leading indicators uh should executives be watching?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, other than like you said, actually thinking about it in deeper detail.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um what other what are what other ways can they do it?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think it really is what I just mentioned.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think it I think it I think it basically we need to do do what I just said and one other thing.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what I so uh start with the idea of the business outcome you want to drive and capture that and then look to make the connective tissue between the activity that you're performing and that ultimate uh and that ultimate activity.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: But also you need to get really comfortable with combining that qualitative and quantitative stuff.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes to human impact in particular, by definition, humans are the creatures of intangibles, right?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're the creature we're we're good in organizations because we can thrive and it's ambiguity and we can do unusual things and so on.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so look to capture that ambiguity with the qualitative stuff.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Combine it with relevant quantitative metrics that are potentially a degree of separation away from the activities you're performing, and have that combined with the qualitative stuff.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: All right, this will be worth the extra minute.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Across a typical organization, what functions or teams really struggle the most to make intangible contributions visible?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: And what practical moves can they take to surface that value to the organization?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: A lot, actually, of functions.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is one of the biggest misnomas that um people that are in teams that are struggling to prove their value have.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: They think they're alone.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so again, this is something Keith and I spoke about a little bit.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: We had uh we were talking about learning and development teams.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And sure, learning and development teams struggle to prove their value.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, enterprise architecture teams often struggle to prove their value.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Even some marketing functions, social media marketing in particular, they can struggle to prove their value.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um in an average organization that is of a thousand people or more, generally somewhere between um forty and sixty-five percent of the employees are not directly connected to driving revenue or lowering costs.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, they're sort of supporting functions.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so all of those people are um going in some way to struggle to present their value very clearly.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: So all of those, it's it's incumbent upon those teams to demonstrate that value, to make the invisible value that they provide visible, or in other words, to make the intangible tangible.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we did it even without the chess timer, Paul.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, great episode.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: But we did it.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: See you on the next one.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Meal.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, like, and recommend us to others.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: It helps us reach more people.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.