Month: September 2011

Thoughts on slackers, conversations, data and networks

by

Here are some of the observations and insights shared via Twitter this past week.

“The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.” ~ Gloria Steinem via @sebpaquet

Slack is a good thing – by @jackvinson

It can’t hurt to repeat this over and over again. Effective operations requires open spaces to handle variation and uncertainty. Even fairly “uniform” operations, such as assembly lines and factories need white space. Projects and knowledge work need even more.

It is a complete myth to believe that keeping everyone busy will result in success.

Netflix: maybe lessons here for your business? 

  • Netflix hire and promote people who demonstrate: Judgement, Communication, Impact, Curiosity, Innovation, Courage, Passion, Honesty & Selflessness.
  • At Netflix “adequate performance is rewarded with a generous severance package“.  They see themselves as a professional sports team not a kids games team so Netflix leaders hire, develop and cut smartly so they have stars in every position.

Data Is A Social Object by Ton Zijlstra

In my presentations over the past 8 months I’ve positioned data as an object of sociality: it becomes the trigger for interaction, a trigger for the forming of connections between people. Much like photos are the social object of a site like Flickr.com, and videos are the social object of YouTube, or your daily activities are for Twitter.

Factories: the original social business – by @drmcewan

Linking back to Esko’s contention that leadership “should be about providing a platform for discussing the meaning of work and the collective identity”, I think that one of the big learnings in making the transition from traditional manufacturing to the ” learning factory” is the emergence of relationships as a key lever in making the transition to new ways of working.

I think we learned that the meaning of work was and continues to be in the relationships we have with each other, the relationship we have with the organisation we work for, and in the service we give to others. Creating the initial conditions for relationships to develop that enhance out desire for recognition, self-determination, social status and learning will continue to be associated with high- performance and engaging work.

2 Questions Everyone Asks When They Meet You – all social judgments boiled down to 2 dimensions? by @drves

Professor Susan Fiske of Princeton University has shown that all social judgements can be boiled down to these two dimensions:

  1. How warm is this person? The idea of warmth includes things like trustworthiness, friendliness, helpfulness, sociability and so on. Initial warmth judgements are made within a few seconds of meeting you.
  2. How competent is this person? Competency judgements take longer to form and include things like intelligence, creativity, perceived ability and so on.
June Holley and network weaving via @PAnklam & @nancyrubin
Connector
  • Reach out to be more inclusive
  • Helping people find resources
  • Connecting people with common interests
Network facilitator
  • Coordinate working groups
  • Facilitate meetings
  • Help set up the structure of the network
Project Leader/Coordinator
  • Help people find others interested in the same things
  • Help people work together on projects
  • Help people keep organized
Network Guardian
  • Help set up good communication systems and resources
  • Set up training & support for network weavers
  • Make sure time is set aside for reflection

Organizing for diversity and complexity

by

I’ve been looking at ways to explain why social learning is so important for business today. It comes down to the fact that what we know and do inside our organizations is insufficient to address external complexity or to be innovative. In Leadership 2030, the Hay Group identifies six fairly obvious, but worth repeating, megatrends, all of which will require more innovative approaches to work:

  • The balance of power is shifting to the East
  • Climate change and scarcity of resources is a mounting problem
  • The war for talent rages on
  • Accommodating growing individualization, requiring more social workplaces
  • Embracing people who are digitally adept
  • Harnessing Nano-Info-Bio-Cogno technologies

Connecting the diversity of markets and society to the organization, instead of creating firewalls, is a major challenge for leadership today. How do you maintain the integrity of the organization while embracing the chaos beyond? Part of the answer is in supporting communities of practice as a bridge between external networks and those doing the work.

Project Teams do complex work (if it’s not complex, it will be outsourced & automated) which requires strong interpersonal ties. Nick Milton has a similar explanatory framework [I’ve used some of his terms in my revised graphic above], and notes the increase in virtual teams as well:

The fourth level [project teams] is where the business needs actively to work with people from elsewhere as part of a short lived co-located team, or a longer lived virtual team.  It needs the skills and input and judgment and effort from the others, and the outcome is co-created with the others.

At the far end are external networks, where we get ideas and opinions, in a more chaotic, unstructured and random way. This is where serendipity often beckons.

In the middle are communities of practice, which comprise a mix of strong and weak social ties and are the ideal liquid space for mixing learning and work while sharing advice and knowledge. Social networks are the enabling technologies that can connect external networks, communities of practice and project teams. Social learning is what flows on these networks.

Ross Dawson has a very good description of the power of social networks from the perspective of Giam Swiegers, CEO of Deloitte Australia. However, social media change the hierarchical power dynamic and not all leaders may be ready for it:

He said as a senior executive if you can’t handle having a peer conversation with young, junior staff, you shouldn’t get involved. He gave an example of a young staff member who disagreed on a key issue with the CEO who said so publicly. Swiegers far preferred to have the debate with him in public rather than the views being aired in the pub without him knowing about it.

An unpopular policy decision was made internally that Swiegers was not told about. The response on Yammer was strong, quickly leading to changes in the policy, guided by the most sensible alternatives proposed on the social network.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter starts by organizing to embrace diversity and manage complexity.

Keep your social media in perpetual Beta

by

When I started blogging, it was one of the few options to share ideas on the Net. There were some utilities like Quicktopic that let you easily make posts and of course we had listservs, bulletin boards and discussions forums that had been around for much longer. After blogs, the next big phenomena were social networks. Ning started by giving out spaces for free and there were many other variations on that theme. Today, Facebook is the general public forum of choice for individuals, businesses, charities, brands and almost everyone else. Facebook beat MySpace and many other contenders to the critical point when network effects drive exponential growth.

I’m still blogging, as are many others, but the conversation is constantly moving:

Blogs are for longer thoughts (at least for me).

Twitter is where you can feel the pulse of the action and are able to follow the most conversations.

LinkedIn is just a place where I hang my hat.

Google+ is becoming the place for deeper conversations as I recently discovered.

This is the current state of social networking, from my particular perspective, but I’m sure it’s different for others and I know it will change. The constant flux makes it difficult to advise others where to start. It depends, says the consultant in me. It really does, when you consider how quickly some of these platforms change and how some go from good to evil overnight. Hedge your bets, I’d say. Own your data when you must. Be flexible. Keep your social media in perpetual Beta.

New Hire Emergent Practices

by

In May I asked what interesting new hire practices have emerged in the workplace and later re-posted the question to Google+. I also collected a number of bookmarks on onboarding, as some companies call it. There are many good practices, such as:

  • Dedicated coaches
  • Formal introductions to people in the work network, especially those at a distance.
  • Encouraging informal conversations.
  • Giving enough time to settle into the work.
  • Using collaboration platforms to enable better communication.

Good practices can be summed up with three key lessons:

  1. Connect People
  2. Connect with Social Media (less hierarchical than other forms of communication).
  3. Start the process as early as possible

Here are some of the more interesting emergent practices, in my opinion.

Offering to pay people to leave after onboarding, so that only motivated workers stay.

Have new employees work one level down for a week to see how their work affects others in the hierarchy. (Executive Yak)

Integrating staff into the workflow, culture, and team from day one (in a supportive environment). This reflects the emerging freelance economy that I work in, much more than the traditional corporate environment. As Will Kryski noted:

 I jump into companies as a contractor with no hand holding, mentoring, etc and am expected to perform from day one. Huge learning curves, little info or help, even on how to use the timesheet system. I just ask as required or figure it out on my own.

And to which I responded that one advantage we free-agents have is in adapting to new contexts. We change clients more frequently than salaried employees change jobs. We’ve had to learn how to adapt. I remember one client where I got to spend a week in a broom closet.

What I found most interesting is that I did not find a lot of unique or emergent practices. Perhaps these are being kept as company secrets or maybe HR departments in general lack creativity and innovation.

"

"Anyone can be a cynic"

by

Here are some insights and observations that were shared via Twitter (and Google+) this past week.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Hugh Macleod – @GapingVoid @GapingVoidArt – and watching him in action this week at Sibos-Innotribe in Toronto. Here is one of my favourite cartoons:

Quotes of the Week:

“The Internet is the largest and most expensive human artifact ever created.” ~ Stowe Boyd via @GapingVoid

“10 year old daughter: ‘Are you going in for work or for meetings?’ Even she knows there is a difference! ;-)” – by @KevinDJones

“What it means to be skillful is going to change when information is universally accessible.” ~ Lawrence Summers via @willrich45

—

Evidence-based HR: How many Deloitte HR consultants does it take to jelly a stapler?

I recently had the misfortune of finding myself diverted by this report and my immediate reaction was to ridicule its pretensions and verbosity but words fail me – it is beyond ridicule.  As someone who is well-used to the rhetoric of large consultancies I still find it difficult to conceive how an organisation like Deloitte can employ so many supposedly intelligent people, who take themselves so seriously, and yet are happy to discharge such large volumes of untreated sewage into the HR ‘sea’.  Or perhaps I under-estimate Deloitte – maybe they know exactly what their HR clients like to wallow in?

If you don’t have social interactions at work, how can you be productive in a creative economy? How playing Games at Work Can Help Boost Your Creativity by @elsua

[We should] do another piece of research or study on the impact of NOT having social software tools, or games, to build trust, connect, collaborate and share your knowledge with your peers, customers and business partners.

How internet time is changing business – by @Om

—

Finally, I reiterated on Twitter that My blog is my “outboard brain” where I put many thoughts and ideas. If people read them, that’s fine; but it’s mainly for me.

Cooperation and networks at Innotribe

by

Stowe Boyd & I are opening the presentation on corporate culture this morning, here in Toronto at Sibos. We will be looking at how organizational frameworks and models have changed. Stowe will talk about the architecture of cooperation:

The new architecture of work is now emerging, after decades of transition. White collar work became knowledge work which has now become creative work. The transition from process to networks is not just a recasting, not just a different style of communication. The work is styled as information sharing through social relationships, and where ‘following’ takes the place of ‘invitation’. People coordinate efforts, but work on a wide variety of activities, which are not necessarily co-aligned with others’ work, and which are not necessarily even known in a general way. A new degree of privacy and autonomy animates cooperative work, in comparison to collaborative work. Individuals cooperating hand off information or take on tasks in a fashion that is like businesses cooperating: they see the benefit in cooperating, and don’t have to share a common core set of strategic goals to do so: they don’t need the alignment of goals that defines old style business employment.

I will discuss the TIMN model, which I learned about via John Robb. I will overlay it with a look at dominant communications media and talk about some of the organizational changes we are seeing and may see in the near future.

We may see more of the following.

Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

Heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same “horizontal” position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role [wikipedia].

Chaordic refers to a system of governance that blends characteristics of chaos and order. The term was coined by Dee Hock the founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association [wikipedia].

And I’ll ask these and some some other questions:

Do networks obsolesce hierarchies? Can they co-exist?

What happens when your customers are more connected than your organization?

How does the transparency that networks enable change your organizational model?

Innotribe at Sibos Toronto

by

This morning I’m heading to Toronto to participate in the Innotribe stream for the Sibos conference. Peter Vander Auwera invited me and I’m really looking forward to what is already a most interesting conference, as I read the tweets and posts. I’m presenting on organizational models over time with Stowe Boyd and the session is moderated by the always-interesting Mark Dowds.

Peter’s blog has been covering many of the themes that will be discussed – Digital Identity; the new physics of big data; and new economies for example.

Some comments via Twitter so far:

@petervan – Decrease the bank’s AND the customer’s risk should be one of the principles

@dsearls – Has anybody ever drowned in a Deep Dive? Just wondering. :-) Corollary to last tweet: I have been rained out in a brainstorm.

@marovdan – # innotribe  has grown and matured into something very important. The future course of finance is being debated and decided. Here.

There should be lots to learn and much to write about, which of course I’ll share here. Hugh Macleod is the official cartoonist for the event, so that should be a real treat!

We are (still) the solution to the problem

by

In 2008 (just before the financial crisis), Jay Cross noted many dysfunctional workplace practices in a survey of 237 respondents worldwide. Is this still the state of the workplace?

  • a lack of cooperation;
  • no time for reflection;
  • no ability to create DIY [do it yourself] tools for work;
  • no communities of practice for support;
  • lack of professional development;
  • poor training; and
  • working in organizations that are slow to change.

Does this resemble an organization you work for, or work with?

Michele Martin commented in 2008 that:

What strikes me is the fundamental sense of disempowerment in the workplace that suggests that people are essentially at the mercy of the companies they work for. While obviously there’s some truth to this, especially in an economic downturn, I still believe that people have far more control over these issues than they believe. One of my main goals in working with people on integrating social media and professional development is to point out how empowering it is to take control of your own learning by starting a blog and pursuing DIY professional development. If the will is there, the means certainly exist …

Unlike people in poverty, our power to move into another less dysfunctional system of work is still within our grasp, especially if we take a DIY approach to professional development. Systems, after all, are created by people, so we also need to be working on changing ourselves so that we’re in a better position to change the system. It’s not an either/or as much as an AND situation – change people AND change systems.

If these are still issues (and I see them in many organizations) then we need to remember that we are the solution to the problem. However, that situation may not last forever. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.

Not your average consultancy

by

When we got together as the Internet Time Alliance it was rather obvious that we were not going to be your usual consulting company. We are five principals and one associate, spread across nine time zones, who share a passion for our work. Status quo and cookie cutter solutions are not our business. Jay likens us to a group of artists who share the same gallery. That’s not a bad metaphor. We communicate pretty much every day, using all types of what are now called social media, but we remember the days of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) and many other terms that have been cast aside. There are a couple hundred years of experience at the Internet Time Alliance.

One thing that differentiates us is our approach to wired work. Our interlaced networks are dominated by innovators and early adopters. Most of us are early adopters in that we put into practice much of what we recommend. We tried out that new blogging thing a long time ago. We’ve been on Twitter for several years. When we suggest ways to work smarter, we’ve done them. When clients are ready to cross the technology adoption chasm, we’re the pathfinders. That means we’ve failed several times already. We’ve learned from those mistakes. We don’t wait until the early majority is ready and then launch packaged services for that market. We’re already on to the next challenge, staying ahead and testing the waters.

Our networks are an essential part of our business.

“What the Internet Time Alliance brought to the table in our engagement was not only their extensive experience but their networks as well. While we in our organization have networks of our own, the quality and extensiveness of the ITA network added a value that we would not have been able to tap alone, and led us to a superior solution that will better serve our customers.” (Corporate University Manager within Fortune 500 Health Insurance company)

 

Idiots, Networks and Patterns

by

Here are some interesting things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@SebPaquet ~ “Make something idiot-proof and somebody will make a better idiot.”

@CharlesJennings ~ “we deliver milk. we facilitate learning. we transfer funds. we help build knowledge.” [on ‘learning transfer’]

@StevenBJohnson ~”you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons” – Where Good Ideas Come From [innovation is about networks]

Marc Benioff [CEO Salesforce.com]: We learned that the key to success with social collaboration is integrating social into workflow. Collaboration is not an island. – via @JayCross

The Physics of Finance: The more chaotic our environment & less control we have, the more we see non-existent simple patterns, or as Valdis Krebs pointed out, seeing fictitious patterns in random data is called “apophenia”

This is interesting in this limited context of discrimination and how the orderliness of physical environments might influence it, but the effect described seems in fact to be far more general — it reflects a human longing for order and simplicity whenever faced with too much uncertainty.

People Are Close to Revolt (James Fallows, The Atlantic) via @SteveBrant

All of the people I know who are capable of rational thought also understand that the combination of (we’re rural so pretty much everyone gets climate change) climate change and energy issues, lack of jobs, and the refusal of government to provide us with basic services means that a new revolutionary social movement is needed. Food prices are soaring, gas prices are making it hard for people to get to low paying jobs, and the amount of suffering because of lack of access to medical care is dire. [US Midwest University Librarian]

Situated Technologies: interesting future-oriented reads HT @JonHusband

The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World [available as free PDF]
Spring 2011 – Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg

The authors articulate the foundations of a future manifesto for an Internet of Things in the public interest. Nold and Kranenburg propose tangible design interventions that challenge an internet dominated by commercial tools and systems, emphasizing that people from all walks of life have to be at the table when we talk about alternate possibilities for ubiquitous computing. Through horizontally scaling grass roots efforts along with establishing social standards for governments and companies to allow cooperation, Nold and Kranenberg argue for transforming the Internet of Things into an Internet of People.

Will you soon be able to make Amazon’s Kindle at Home? by @SteveDenning [reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s book, Makers]

Igoe and Mota point out that digital manufacturing is beginning to do to manufacturing what the Internet has done to information-based goods and services. Just as video went from a handful of broadcast networks to millions of producers on YouTube within a decade, a massive transition from centralized production to a “maker culture” of dispersed manufacturing innovation is under way today.