“Of course we can live without a bodily identity, but the body confers a particular kind of identity. Aquinas pointed out that the principle of individuation consists in the intersection of matter and spirit. Without the body, then, individual identity is not possible. Discarnate man is mass man; individuality is simply not possible because there is nothing on which to base it, to give it substance. Individualism and private identity are artefacts, side-effects of the phonetic alphabet and its symphony of abstraction. (Laws of Media chapter one.) One of the three themes on which Take Today: The Executive as Dropout is based is that jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles. Roles mean audiences and participation. Private identity depends first and foremost on detachment. Social media like Facebook provide identity from the in-crowd of friends that one can amass: that attention is the identity dynamic. Take it away and the user is nobody—a nobody with no body.
With private identity and detachment also comes another artefact: privacy, now a major concern. As private identity evaporates, privacy becomes a matter of great concern-and so do private ownership and copyright. All of these things are interrelated and make no sense in isolation from each other. It is no secret that private identity is unknown in non-literate societies and equally that they have no use for privacy.” – Eric McLuhan
Managing Collaboration
My colleague Jane Hart asks who should be your Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO)? It’s a good question, given the growing importance of working collaboratively in the 21st century workplace. Collaboration is a key part of creative work. Hugh Macleod pretty well sums up the core of the networked enterprise with this image:
We live in a most interesting time in history. With the Internet, never before has it been so easy to collaborate, yet within many organizations it’s often more difficult. A CCO could be a role that helps with the transition to a more collaborative workplace, but do we really need more managers? Two comments on Jane’s post raise this question as well:
Jay Cross: “Companies have to make a profit but they don’t have Chief Profit Officers. Workers must be motivated but there aren’t any Chief Motivation Officers.”
Tim Hickernell: “Chief Collaborat
It’s that darn hierarchy thing. As you soon as you try to address a problem, it gets more complicated, because that’s what conventional management does. It adds an extra layer of taxation. But information technology has made management [not leadership] redundant, as Sigurd Rinde explains in Let the Managers Go:
Outside the corporate world, in places with fewer habits and assumed truths, IT has shown way more promise: we can communicate and collaborate with people all over the world in a gazillion ways, we have the “cloud”, we have tablets and smartphones, we have all kinds of technological power. But in the corporate world we still run workflows using doughnuts and stern looks. That’s silly. And amazingly ineffective.
Do you need a Chief Collaboration Officer? Yes, if the CCO is focused on putting the position out of business and is seen as a temporary and transitionary role. The CCO can be the person who has a high profile and can model the new collaborative behaviours. This can take some time but, like raising children, should not take forever. So get a CCO, set up a dance hall, throw some parties, mix things up, and see what happens. Keep your CCO in perpetual Beta.
What you should not do is get a CCO with the primary task of implementing some costly enterprise collaboration software system. That is definitely putting the cart before the horse – but there are many who will counsel this approach. Caveat emptor!
Betterness: Review
Umair Haque’s Betterness: Economics for Humans is a quick read and a very cheap book at $2.69 for a Kindle version. It’s worth much more than that. Haque starts with an invitation:
If you’re delighted with the status quo, splendidly contented with the present, firmly convinced that the way live, work, and play is the best and last way we can, put this volume back on the digital shelf.
He defines the problem …
Today, business is held fast to this paradox: the more “business” we do and the more we think solely in terms of “business,” the more we structure human exchange according to the precepts of yesterday’s paradigm; the less wealth we create, and often, the more wealth we destroy.
… and shows the signs:
Our institutions are failing. They’re failing us, failing the challenge of igniting real, lasting human prosperity. If institutions are just instruments to fulfill social contracts, then ours are shattering because the social contracts at their heart have fractured.
Haque takes on existing organizational structures and especially skewers vision and mission statements, proposing that businesses should be asking “Why are we here?”, much as Simon Sinek does.
Betterness is a wake-up call to our business leadership and perhaps the best thing you can do is buy a copy for your managers, their bosses, and all the way up the industrial ladder.
I believe we are on the cusp of such a turning point – here and now. Consider what Kuhn famously argues: that a paradigm shift happens when we encounter anomalies that can’t be explained by the paradigm responsible for progress thereto. So here’s our anomaly: that industrial-age wealth hasn’t neatly powered lives lived meaningfully well; that near-term profit, gross product, and hyperconsumption haven’t produced a fuller human prosperity; that the frenzied pursuit of opulence hasn’t been sufficient for the attainment of a good life – of eudaimonia.
Strategic Doing is designed for open, loosely coupled networks
“In Strategic Doing, metrics play a different role. We use metrics to facilitate learning. Whereas strategic planning is a deductive process of thought and action, Strategic Doing using inductive reasoning. We learn as we do. Metrics provide a convenient tool to accelerate our learning. With them, we figure out what works. Without them, we would be lost. Accountability in Strategic Doing comes through transparency and the mutual interdependence embedded in the relationships of the network. Forget command and control. It does not work in open networks. Mutual trust becomes the fuel for economic transformation. ” —Ed Morrison
Why is learning and the sharing of information so important?
The Globe & Mail: The diplomacy of knowledge
“Learning together is an important part of living together. While many of our greatest challenges arise through the interplay of complex problems, so, too, do our greatest advances often occur at the intersections between disciplines. Who knows what a greater understanding of quantum physics will be able to tell us about genetics, or what a better grasp of ecology can teach us about global networks?” ~ David Johnston, Governor-General of Canada.
Rats, coffee & software
Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.
“If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.” – via Nick Milton
Horses for Sources: Why Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo shifts the innovation onus onto the service providers:
Companies buy software because they want standard process that can be automated with as little human intervention as possible. For process flows such as recruitment, if Taleo can provide you with the steps you need to automate an end-to-end recruitment process effectively, then the only way to find more value (or dare I say “innovation”) from recruitment is in those areas that cannot be automated – such as assessing the cultural fit of a candidate, or making a judgement call that the candidate has potential which his or her former employers had previously failed to unleash.
Sarah Lacy – Why Oracle May Really Be Doomed This Time – via @rstephens
But to win, Oracle will have to change its strategy as dramatically as it did in 2006 when Ellison famously announced that software innovation was dead and just started to buy everything. Buying once-hot companies like Taleo and RightNow isn’t going to cut it this time when there are better products in the market like Workday and Salesforce.
The Speculist – In the Future, Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop – via @jhagel
Universities Will Become Coffee Shops
Book Stores Will Shrink to Coffee Shops
The Coffee Shop Will Displace Most Retail Shops
Offices Become Coffee Shops … Again
@MartijnLinssen – Why it pays to keep rats on starvation diets
I merely showed them the stats. And they’d go on, and stay at the company for many years to come. And I’d think of my wife’s quote “The company’s goal is to keep their employees just not dissatisfied enough”.
@euan – “social business is just the web becoming part of our work life”
Understanding what you do
I came across this most thought-proving post by Seb Paquet on Google Plus, that looks at how new ideas and especially new business models can be understood. Seb notes that:
- There is a small group of people who understand why you are doing it;
- A larger group of people who get how you are doing it;
- An even larger group of people who get what you are doing; and finally
- The largest group of people who don’t get it at all.
Phil Jones adds this insight in the comments:
- Inner circle : comrades (or arch enemies)
- 2nd circle : potential collaborators (dependent on deals you can make) (or potential competitors)
- 3rd circle : supporters (or opponents)
- outer rim: passive obstacles
What could this mean for a startup or new business?
Accept that most people do not understand why you are doing this in the first place and some of those who do will be working at cross purposes to subvert you. Try to turn potential competitors into collaborators. Be active in professional networks with your supporters and be co-operative in spirit, for these people may help to convert your opponents. Finally, ignore the passive obstacles and find ways to route around them.
Seb is already working on version .2 of this, so stay tuned on G+.
"you simply can’t train people to be social!"
Over the past year I have been working on change initiatives to improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing with two large companies, one of them a multinational. In each case, implementation has boiled down to two components: individual skills & organizational support. Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making. I have also learned that changing work routines can be a messy process that requires significant time, much of it dedicated to modelling behaviours.
My Internet Time Alliance colleague, Jane Hart, notes, ” … as for the new social and collaboration skills that workers require, well you simply can’t train people to be social! What was required was getting down and dirty and helping people understand what it actually meant to work collaboratively in the new social workplace, and the value that this would bring to them.”
Jane refers to the collaboration pyramid by Oscar Berg, an excellent model to show what needs to be addressed to become a social business.
The low visibility activities link directly to personal knowledge mastery (PKM) skills, based on the process of Seeking information & knowledge; making Sense of it; and Sharing higher value information with others. These individual activities are not a single skill-set that can be trained in a classroom. They have to be internalized and perceived as valuable to each person in order to achieve the discipline to use them regularly. Every person’s PKM processes will differ. As Jane notes, one size doesn’t fit all.
It is a difficult path to get acceptance that each worker is responsible for his or her own learning and additionally must be a contributing member of a network. PKM is individuals retaking control of learning, and making it transparent. It takes time, but it also requires a receptive environment.
Creating a supportive social environment is management’s responsibility. These activities are shown on the upper part of the pyramid, above the water line. Some specific examples of activities I have been involved in over the past year include:
- Support for small innovation teams to initiate and practice the new collaboration and knowledge-sharing skills.
- Daily routines of posting observations and sharing with team members.
- Weekly “virtual coffee” to catch up and help build social bonds.
- Adding activity-stream technologies to productivity tool suites.
- Constant analysis of activity data.
- Providing dedicated time for reflection [this is a tough one to get management buy-in].
- Regular mediated events like “Yam-Jams” on a select theme.
- Creation of internal communications material to make social learning and social business more understandable.
- Professional development activities using the same social media as will be used to work.
- Face to face social activities.
- Many conversations [usually Skype or telephone] and much one-on-one support as people work at becoming more social.
- Social & Value network analyses to visualize network thinking.
My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort.
Note: Oscar Berg has made a higher resolution image available on Flickr with a CC-BY license: The Collaboration Pyramid
Social media in 1940
Image via US Library of Congress
Getting to Social
You are engaging with social media for marketing and customer support. You have also put in place a social intranet, with activity streams for sharing information, collaboration tools for work teams and document management systems that include social tags and easy sharing. Now the hard work begins. However, this usually occurs just after the software vendors have provided the initial training and you are now on your own as an organization. You’re ready to be a social business; everyone is connected but few know what to do.
Social Media are New Languages
Social media can have a strong influence on the individual, very much in a McLuhanesque tetrad of media effects way. Those who come to social media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. They cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors they may have in a primary language. Furthermore, once they get to an advanced level in this new language, its idioms, metaphors and culture may have changed how they think in that language. This is the real change process enabled by social business; people will start thinking differently.
Social media change the way we communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing will change. Use Twitter for some time and get a sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Patterns emerge over time. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how we react to being apart from friends. Social media change the way we think.
Each time we adopt a new social medium we start at the bottom, or at the single node level. We have to make connections with what will become our network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like creating content for sharing. Starting over, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.
But we need to actually use social media to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is little in the industrial workplace or public school system to prepare us for this. Therefore we won’t even know what we’re talking about until we learn the new language of social media and online networks, and the only way to learn a new language is through practice.
The Transparent Workplace
While people may say it’s not about the technology, that’s where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage is getting people to work transparently. Transparency is a necessity for cooperation and collaboration in networks. A major benefit of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. However, if the information is not shared by people, it will not be found.
In this newly transparent workplace, there is no place to hide, or as Mark Britz wrote, “Social Media spreads your culture quickly … for better or worse.” This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. It must be addressed by modelling good network era behaviours. Working smarter is not just about using technologies but changing our routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services.
With the democratization of information, user-generated content is ubiquitous. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to be visible. From this transparent environment new leaders and experts will emerge. It will take different leadership, or leadership for networks, to support collaboration and social learning in the workplace.
Agile organizations need people who can work in concert on solving problems. People need to change how they work and all the knowledge and courses won’t help. Management must ask – “How can we help you work in this new transparent environment?” – and take action, not once, but continuously.
Setting the Example
In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories, and sharing what we know. While not highly efficient, this can be very effective learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. There is also a need to share power, for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with this new knowledge? Modelling the new behaviours will take time and trust.
Since all these social technologies cannot model the new work behaviours themselves, who will? The organization will, by fostering communities of practice. These can be bridges between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.
Organizations adopting social business need to find people who can model the behaviours, not just talk about them. They should identify people who already narrate their work, share transparently and create user-generated content. Organizations should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks. If there is nobody to model network era behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From Facebook?
