New Zealand is struggling to keep up with its peers in wealth generation and its leaders are struggling to understand the root causes and how to change them.

The easy measure of business activity is productivity - and business owners are often criticised for the lack of it. Does this mean we don't work hard enough? Are we complacent; settling for the "bach, boat and BMW" rather than striving for the national good?

My view is that, aside from our small local markets not offering the aspirations and hardening fire of strong competition, our productivity problem is a capital problem.  New Zealand's venture capital is broken, such that passionate entrepreneurs often have to seek offshore funding to grow.

Capital enables investment in machines, and machines work. Automation is what accelerates processing and output speed far more than flogging people - particularly in a country where skills are scarce.  The paradox, in fact, for people is that they will output more if given the chance and not treated like computers. Better to recognise the importance of thinking time and the process of creative focus - especially for people charged with making new things or solving problems.

The solution to our productivity problem is to invest in automation, to release our intelligence to focus on human touch-points and high return fixes by enabling machines to run the repetitive tasks. The challenge is our approach to investment; maybe there are big answers in our capital market system (med report - pdf), but at an individual business level, the answers lie in recognising the different time value of machines vs people:

Machines should work, people should think (IBM Pollyanna principle).  

the psychology of challenge vs skill

Often maligned and usually misunderstood, people tend to think consultants are motivated by money. I believe instead they are motivated by fully utilising their skills to help clients. Knowledge workers like to think - to be challenged for their creativity and opinion - not to follow administrative rules. 

That is why consultants love productivity tools. Tools that speed up the repetitive elements of their work and free them to do what they are really good at. To better get them in the state of flow, a state when your skills are fully employed and your attention fully focussed. The buzz of flow is a consultants happy place. See the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for more on this theory. Don't be surprised then if your consultants are the first to embrace your process automation.

Today the team at BSR has reworked the original with the voice of modern blues artist, Shelley Hirini. It is a beautiful rendition, preserving the spirit of the music but bringing in a modern and high def polish. It is deserving of anthem status, I applaud the initiative and thank them for breathing new life to it to keep the memories alive and relevant to a new audience.

Web application development is one activity where both sides come together. It is rare to find a software developer who can create a visually appealing and intuitively good design. It is also rare to find a creative designer who can build robust and elegant functional code. How well the two marry is what makes or breaks a good application.

However, applications are like icebergs - most of the work is under the surface, hidden beneath the user interface. Changes to the interface can be relatively simple compared to functional changes to the underlying code. This is useful to bear in mind when selecting skill-sets for a build. After all, form does follow function.

1. grand plans suffer from changing context, flagging confidence, shifting sponsor support, or increasing project risks and fail to deliver on expectations, while immediate issues have gone unaddressed; 
2. quick wins "do it fast but don't do it right" - applying band-aid solutions to symptomatic problems while causal factors continue and ultimately lead to strategic failures.

These extremes, however, suggest oversimplification in the way scope meets strategy - a cause of tension in development projects. 

The trick is to assess potential deliverables on a roadmap against the benefits they offer and to tailor and prioritise the work programme accordingly. In principle, even "strategic solutions" should show reviewable deliverables in 6 -12 weeks and a working iterations in 18-24 weeks. Appropriately prioritised, these small steps should have big impacts while also progressing the strategic plan.

A well thought-out plan will consider time-to benefit, front-loading, and crawl-walk-run-lead aspects but also note that, in some cases (e.g. softening markets) even a delay may be the most economic option.

Maybe its about reaching for the low-hanging fruit, while ensuring you're at the right tree.

We need to acknowledge that business is made of people and, not only is it the talents of passionate individuals that fuel change, but it is emotional appeal that binds the rational elements of our brands into customer winning formulas. Sure, uncontrolled emotions can drain and misdirect a business, but emotions channelled toward business ends as passion can be the secret to success and achievement of purpose.

To help move their change along then, you can try validating people's lack of readiness and decision ownership and encourage re-evaluation of the status quo, its inherent risks, and the pros and cons of change. As people get their heads around it, promote the positive outcomes of the change and then break it down to small initial steps. Note also, that change requires its resistance (R) (or cost) be overcome by the degree of dissatisfaction (D) with how things are, the strength of vision (V) of what is possible and clear first steps (F).  This is Gleicher's Formula: D.V.F>R. Add pragmatism to your passion and you may just accelerate the tipping point for improvement.

I believe what enterprises really intend and need is to ensure their collective endeavors preserve institutional knowledge for future use. This is actually more difficult than defining property rights over intangible and elusive intellectual assets. Conservation of institutional knowledge requires the establishment of a memory represented in rules, procedures, systems, beliefs and culture, that survives individuals. Whether it is a practice of post-implementation reviews, documenting business rules, or deploying formal content or digital asset management technologies, investment in the enterprise memory will enable lessons learned (at great expense) through the development or projects of companies to be built upon and not re-learned by a new team at new time or location. A wise company knows the the true cost of losing people can be far higher than the obvious expenses.