Top managers fail to understand complexity?

Nokia along other big companies has tried a bunch of different strategies on it's way including touch, services, Maemo, Meego and QT. Seems that big organizations can only handle one -ism or vision at the time. The need to renew strategies completely can lead in ditching all parallel scenarios while striving for optimal beauty of a chart or simplicity of communication.

So why do these visions and strategies change so fast? It might have something to do with what I discussed in my last post about how leaders create a vision and keep up their reputation.
Creating a vision is a crucial competence for a leader. When things go wrong (stress rises narrowing the line of sight and lowering the willingness to discuss) the urge to form a strong vision can become the last straw to keep up the reputation, although the vision might be personally driven or not just good. When the vision is set, leaders competence is measured in how well the strategy is implemented - no matter what it is.

Adapting to new situations is crucial, but evaluating when a strategy is based on actual situation and when on personal drivers can be difficult. Stupidity should be easy to detect, but we want to believe in people and their decisions - to trust that there is a good reason behind every decision.
 

Employee centric leadership?

In my projects I could usually guess what the user thinks and wants, but in several cases, I wouldn't be accurate enough. That's why I practice user centered design against my natural way of thinking.
When I say natural, we come to the theory how I believe big leaders think:


Every profession is a combination of competence, reputation and vision.
As a designer, my job is to bring up the vision of the user need. In doing this, I might feel myself as a bad designer for the fact that I'm not competent to create the vision without asking the common people and I could believe that the fact lowers my reputation as a designer.
-In this respect being a designer is easy. Nowadays there is a managerial need for user centric design and you don't need to make excuses for their expert investment needing external support.

Being a big leader on the other hand, might not be as easy. I claim that employees are the information source for leaders, like users are for me. Unfortunately, there is no model for employee centric leadership - just the normal specialist model, managers on areas of engineering, markets and accounting try to keep up their good work and reputation by delivering insight, no matter how unsure that might be. And what would happen to the reputation of the leader, if someone heard the the grand vision is formed on regular workers opinions?


What would happen if we live based on the assumption that I cannot know - I'd better ask?
The natural bottle neck becomes the capacity of listening and finding out. The very same problem I face every day - just like different levels of management.

What hit Nokia - Elop or mediocre Middle Managers?

I have been repeatedly asked that what killed Nokia. I thought I'd better do the analysis now, when I still remember something about it. Tomi Ahonen writes exhaustively how incompetent formal Microsoft executive ruined it all, but I have to disagree with Ahonen that much, that there were also other reasons than just Elop.

Accusations on the burning platform memo are valid, but Symbian had already been burning for years. It was like a fireplace that keeps the house warm, but must be watched. More or less the memo peaked the crisis both externally and internally. Despite the crisis, the issue of what was the pothole that caused the decline of the competitiveness and consumed majority of the R&D resources, has not been discussed. Here I name a factor that hasn't been accused before: middle management.


I have several posts where you can find me reflecting this very topic, but in very general level. Now to be more concrete, I'll list few major reasons why Nokia among other big organizations failed:

Culture of finding problems, risks and saying no.
Engineers are taught to find problems. Under pressure, stress can create impossible obstacles out of ordinary challenges. If company culture does not support positive approach of accepting both the challenges And the cruel facts which might follow, the Culture of No get's into speed and managers prefer to make anticipated setbacks easy for their teams and themselves.

Culture to support innovation.
Despite Elop accused his employees of failing to deliver innovation, good proposals never stopped flowing despite repeated setbacks. What explains these contradicting views could be explained by having a highly innovative employees and a middle management cutting the wings of the proposals. According to Johtopätkii, creativity consists of competence, motivation and commitment which were in order thanks to the good reputation of the company among earlier recruits.

Making good work.
Everybody wants to make a good work. It's a matter of what you measure. If project has multiple stakeholders, everyone of them wants to optimize their part of the project. Abstract example; if sourcing, project manager and finance do magnificent work, the result can be poor hardware, hasty design and lousy experience. The need to make good work is also connected to fear of mistakes and to the pressure of getting good results to keep your job.

Pressure and fear.
Before starting in Nokia I had experienced two lay offs and been part of terminating two contracts, but I still thought that it was a unusual situation. Lay off waves in Nokia came more often than once a year. Even a single wave has a huge effect to the motivation, self esteem and effectivity - and repeated more so. Also reorganizing, replanning and the mistakes along with the corrective actions consume a huge amount of time and resources. Further if management anticipates new waves, they try to do extra good work and to say often no, which leads paralyzing the other half of the company.

Lack of vision.
Before Nokia seemed to know what was it and where it was going. But during the great rush Nokia had around the time first iPhone launched, they had focused on money and productivity. When readjusting the organization and portfolio to face the new challenge, mission and vision was replaced by an internal disputes about whether to rely on it's true competences. (Competencies that had already producticed the first touch screen smartphone four years before Apple, but was cancelled due the lack of managerial trust.) Or to make fast correction move and glue the touch onto the existing platform and rely on the ridiculous services agenda.
After that the vision has been jumping from side to side, which enabled the next point.

Rise of the career opportunists.
The questionable character in humans is that when things seem hopeless, they face up and hope that some extraordinary force turns everything good again. In Nokia this meant getting new talent to lead things. Positions started to slide outside of Finland due to the appeal of London and Silicon Valley. What happened was that new people started repeating old stupid mistakes, but now their accent was sexy and their designs rocked - at least on paper. Unfortunately when the faith is strong and you made the hire, seeing the truth takes usually way too long.

A job too well done?

In the morning I made our regular oat porridge and while rinsing the pot I started to think that how far the qualities of oat flakes are tuned to enable easy washing of the pot.

Sometimes doing a really good work can end up ruining the rest of the process. Lately I been pondering how to open up this paradox with an example. This might not be the best of examples, but I promise to discuss this issue further in the next post about What hit Nokia.


If I ever got an assignment to develop a better porridge, I would probably consider rinse-ability as one of the most important issues to solve. Likely I would find it as a pain point in user research and likely that would be something what I could develop and the management would like it because it could be easily measured..

Totally other story might be that is it wise.
People might appreciate actually more organic, unprocessed flakes.
But that wouldn't be my business - so most probably I'd end up overdoing and ruining the whole point of eating oat porridge.

If you don't make mistakes, you don't succeed

While ago I wrote about the negative impact a fear of mistakes can create in services. Another major issue with fear of mistakes is it's impact on creativity.

Creative work is usually done in the crossroad of freedom of creative thinking and limiting factors like time and budget. There is clearly a need for both, but like in the post about the facit and explicit communication, the weaker one needs to be supported.

Schedules and budgets as resources are easy to measure and are monitored by managers that usually have a strong background on economy or engineering. Creativity and new ways of thinking can present themselves even as a threat. Typical manager role avoids uncertainty and wants to keep track of the process. Already letting other disciplines follow their process that inherently includes phases of uncertainty requires trust and tolerance for uncertainty.

When all risks are removed and processes optimized it can lead to reverting to old solutions and way of thinking which means that creative process has failed before it even started.
Another risk is that if an organization develops a culture with strong sense of "right" and "wrong",  important and revolutionary opinions may never be said aloud.


Creating something new includes always risks. If there is no room for risks, creating something new might be the wrong way. If organization has a strategy to develop something new, the strategy should surely enable new explorations by not limiting thinking of talented individuals.

How to benefit of a cross functional organization

If organization wants to learn from other domains, it first requires accepting that the other disciplines are not doing it Wrong - just differently.

Hannu Leimun veistos Auringon lapsi (2010)

What's your true profession?

A persons profession might actually be what the person Want's to be good at.

During my time in Nokia I witnessed how experience and competence were repeatedly ignored when organizations were reshaped according to new strategies. Further, when this was understood, there was a strict guidance to ensure that recruits had proper education, which led to overlook the experience.


People really can make up their experience or credibility and talk themselves into almost any job and learn while doing, like the fake doctors also have shown. Fact is that a person might turn out to be incompetent despite the long list of experiences, but on the other hand person can be extremely skilled, but totally lack the motivation for the job.

Despite the idea of crafting ones career might sound awkward for Finnish ears it should be considered. It is proven to be a clear weakness in the competition between Finnish and foreign applicants e.g. in Nokia and has lead to less competent people doing the work with better accent.


Developing a new career without years of training sounds unorthodox for some, but it can be seen also as a huge possibility. This thinking does not corner people into their slots, but opens new possibilities, keeps the motivation up and creates cross discipline innovations.

What really matters, is whether a person wants to learn and grow to a new profession and from employer point of view, is the person interested in the right aspects of the role with potential to learn.

How to train people incompetent

"Uusavuton" is a finnish term for younger generations who don't know how to make food or clean the house. Newly incompetent might be the direct translation. (According to natives, english does not have the term, since all UK and US kids are anyway like this. ;)

I happened to read two articles below and those made me do a following conclusion:
Finnish society and individuals are over achieving in fulfilling all regulations and creating a bunch of new details to follow. At the same time there is urgent need to support new entrepreneurship. We excel in byrocracy - when we should excel in enabling creativity and business.


Unfortunately articles are only in finnish :/
Taloussanomat: Keittiö, jossa ei saa leipoa – ja muut hullut kiellot
Gradutakuu: Opittu avuttomuus

Enhancing creativity and innovatio by doing mistakes

Have you ever felt that the success is must and you cannot fail? Did you feel stressed?


Most (if not all) people do feel stressed if failure is not an option. What we know about stress is that it limits the our creativity and our capability to see possibilities instead of threats. If your resources are low and solution is needed instantly - isn't it quite obvious that you try something that has been tried before and works for sure?

In organizations where jobs are in danger, showing that projects run smoothly and mistakes do not happen can feel important. Unfortunately this kind of thinking leads into several problems.
Organization stops learning from each other, ability to create new innovations drops and information of ongoing crisis or failures of larger scale can be buried. -And we need to remember that this happens in ALL levels of organization. -We all have somebody to report ;)

Sam Swaminathan tells a story in www.managementexchange.com how one organization was changed by celebrating the Mistake of the Month.