Value flows from the hard conversations

There was the repeat session for the cocked-up one I delivered last week and while it went far better and they were even happy with the outcome, the amount of effort it took was insane. Under normal circumstances, there is a 1:1 ratio between the hours spent planning and after math, and the hours spent delivering. This however was an hour-long delivery and the planning work that I put into it was around 25 hours and for some of those hours, I needed support from two other colleagues. That would put it at around 30 work-hours, for 2 hours billable. The customer is mammoth and we have a very long relationship and more work in the future, so I am guessing that we will wear it.

The reason it took so long to plan is that it wasn't training work, it was dedicated consultancy work and I am a trainer, not a consultant. The difference is that I train general level usage and logic, while a consultant has technical background in specific solution and usecase. Normally, this isn't too much of issue at the lower levels where I work, but this particular solution is complex and there are a lot of barriers to smooth communication flow, something which ironically the solution will end up improving.

One of the challenges with this level of communication is that there are a massive amount of flows globally and finding a line of best fit where an individual will be happy with the information they access is difficult. What I recommend in this kind of situation is to build the environment structure to cater at the higher levels of information, and provide support for individual customization. This is an effective solution, but companies that have a very strong hierarchical business structure, tend to want to control a lot, meaning they want to provide assets for their people to leverage, but not have control over.

This is possible, but has less flexibility and requires far more micromanagement and constant monitoring and adjusting, rather than leveraging the power of individuals to build their own informational views, so to speak. Essentially, even a centralized organization like a company can benefit from the decentralization of information and communication management, if the system also provides some level of structure beneath and incorporates some unbreakable rules.

As I have said before, the product I train is very similar to a blockchain in many ways and this includes a "code is law" approach, where the client is able to customize the code that will interact with their employees and the data they create. It is a very effective and efficient solution, as it allows for dynamic entry from throughout the organization, automatically building the required structure defined by the code. This means that effectively, information is always following Stand Operating Procedures and still giving endusers freedom, without having to read an operating documentation.

In many ways, it is like all of the different apps that write transactions to the Hive blockchain, collecting all communication together that can be cross-referenced and leveraged, without the applications have to talk to each other directly. It is a collection of independents, all working together and has brought a lot of value to the organizations who have implemented a decent solution.

It is the functionality and processes used that caused me to accept the job in the first place, as the logic was familiar from the moment I started using it, which is also why I was able to pick it up pretty fast also. The learning curve wasn't very steep. Specific customer environments however, can be quite complex, especially for the size of customer I have been dealing with today, spread across the globe with tens of thousands of workers, hundreds of thousands of external resources and hundreds of millions of bits of information, all having to meat localization standards and fit into the global standard of the organization simultaneously.

The challenge isn't in the infrastructure solution being able to do this, it is in the organization being able to firstly discover all that they do and then, create global standards that everyone can agree on, but still meet local needs. It is a massive amount of internal negotiation and decision-making, so that "one rule" is able to be rolled-out to everyone.

As you can likely imagine, there is a fair bit of conflict that goes on in some organizations, as no single rule is going to meet the needs of everyone, so it takes time and a great deal of work-hours. For example today, the hour session did take 30 hours to setup, but as there were about 25 people in the session from the customer side, that is another set of hours spent - and this was one, albeit key, feature training. A lot of people do not understand the costs involved at this kind of scale, but it is immense.

The other thing that a lot of people might not understand in this, is that on Hive, all of this communication exists too, though it takes on various forms. A lot of people complain about the amount of "Hive content" on the platform and don't realize that this communication is a core component of the future of the blockchain and while a lot of the development decisions will be made off-chain, a lot of the ideas are introduced and discussed from the community level. Again, while not everyone will agree to or be helped by every rule change that gets applied to the blockchain at each hardfork, the discussions that lead to changes are highly valuable and very important to have.

In a decentralized environment, it is impossible to make everyone happy in the same way it is impossible to control absolutely, as through the organic nature of participation, things will always be changing in multiple ways simultaneously, without visibility on each other in the moment. Of course, that which touches the blockchain gets remembered, but even then it is hard to collect all the information together and analyze it a a whole.

This makes for a lot of possibility and potential, because unlike an organization who has to find that line of best fit, generally dictated by the authority at the top, all users can instead have authority over their actions and behavior and do as they please, as the code allows, at any given point in time. Of course, "code allowing" doesn't mean it is the right thing to do, because there are also unwritten social codes in play too, and these vary greatly across the community also.

The important thing to understand about information and communication is that it is all about relationship building. The types of relationships between information can be very diverse, as can the reactions and behaviors made after information is delivered, but it all goes into building that matric of connections between people. Many might not see data from this perspective, but data itself is useless until it can connect one dot to another, creating a new course for action. When information is used well, it can lead to improvement, when it is used badly, degradation - when there is no flow at all - death.

The thing that I like to be part of in my work is helping organizations improve their communication flow so that their interactions with each other are not only more effective, but can center more on finding solution than developing conflict. It is easier at some times than others, but once even small inroads are made, the chance for the next step is that much closer.

Eventually, things keep progressing and advancing at an increasing velocity and the changes that were once hard to make, seem like they were always there, giving space to improve and change them again. Continual improvement, requires continual conversation that leads to continual development and application. Communication has immense value, but it also comes burdened with costs in time, money and a lot of mental energy.

While only an hour and a bit long, today's session wore me down - but not out.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]