Distributed research needs collaborative researchers

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“What Sanofi is doing is reducing its own internal research capacity,” he said. “The days when we locked all of our scientists up in a building and put them on a nice tree-lined campus are done. We will do less of our own research. We’re not going to get out of research. We believe we do certain things well in research but we want to work with more outside companies, startup biotechs, with universities.”

Chris Viehbacher, CEO of pharmaceutical company Sanofi recently stated that ” …  big companies, and not just Big Pharma, big companies I believe, are not any good at doing innovation.” It seems Sanofi is moving to a more networked way of doing business. But to be more innovative, companies must first become open and transparent.

That’s the challenge of the networked organization. Trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. People who have been working in silos for decades may not immediately embrace a more diverse and complex networked way of doing business.

Part of working smarter is connecting the work being done with the identification of opportunities for future work. Innovative ideas often come from loosely knit external learning networks. These can later get developed in slightly tighter communities of communities of practice. But in order to capitalize on novel ideas, professionals have to be continuously sharing knowledge in their communities and testing new opinions in more dynamic external networks.

As research becomes more networked, researchers will need to be more collaborative. Social learning, or learning from and with their (distributed) peers, will become more important. New practices will emerge from these new relationships and more innovative tools & processes will have to support this complex work. The role of connecting and communicating what is happening in various widespread groups will become critical. This is the job of a CCO, or some similar role: to manage workforce collaboration.

The three principles of net work remain, in my opinion:

  1. Transparency
  2. Narration of Work
  3. Distribution of Power
Getting a workforce, and many organizations, to embrace and internalize these principles will take time and managed effort. It will require normalizing the act of working across boundaries and switching the default mode to sharing information. In addition, the organization will have to tolerate mistakes and encourage reflection. This could be a major culture shift. Any company that is going to open its work processes to a networked model must make a significant effort to support its people in integrating their learning and work because you simply cannot train people to be social.

A mixed bag

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

@Richard_Florida – ‘In a knowledge & innovation driven economy, why do we fixate on housing & auto sales as “drivers” of “recovery?”‘

@RickWarren – “The moment people stop bringing their problems to you is the moment you stop being the leader.”

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. ~ Churchill” – via @cyetain

“The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes” – via @BenaiahLLC

@dweinberger – “Linking is a public service that reminds us how deeply we are social and public creatures.” JOHO The Blog

@robpatrob – “Is school essential? Can only the church save your soul? Same question – same answer!” Trusted Space

Children taught at home significantly outperform their contemporaries who go to school, the first comparative study has found.  It discovered that home-educated children of working-class parents achieved considerably higher marks in tests than the children of professional, middle-class parents and that gender differences in exam results disappear among home-taught children.

How new Internet Spying Laws will actually enable criminals: What’s worse than building a target? Telling everyone you’re building a target. – via @eprenen

Politicians who propose such measures appear to be thinking that they’re building a weapon — a weapon that law enforcement agencies can use to pursue people who’ve committed, or are suspected of committing, crimes. But they’re not. They’re building a target. They’re building the mother lode for stalkers, pedophiles, spammers, identity thieves, child pornographers, blackmailers, extortionists, and yes — terrorists. A Techdirt story just a few days ago gave some rather creepy examples of what Target’s data mining can do…and they’re just trying to sell you stuff. Imagine what very bad people are capable of, given far richer data and the rather obvious inclination to break the law at will.

Telegraph: Twitter sells tweet archive to marketers – via @sebfiedler [Note: you can access my weekly Friday’s Finds for free, going back to May 2009]

From today onwards, businesses around the world can pay a fee to access all of the tweets written on Twitter going back to January 2010.

It is the first time that anyone will be able to access tweets going back more than 30 days. Until now, other companies which Twitter has allowed access to their tweet archive, have only been able to surface tweets going back 30 days.

Organizations Don’t Tweet – Review

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Managers’ authority is being replaced by the need to influence, so how will they manage in the future? How do you manage online environments and encourage them to be a productive use of people’s time? Being obsessively interested in what people are doing and asking great questions is the way to help steer their collective energy towards successful outcomes.

The title, Organizations Don’t tweet, People Do – A manager’s guide to the social web by Euan Semple pretty well describes this book. If I could recommend just one manager’s guide to dealing with the network era, this would be it.

Euan is one of those on my short-list of must read blogs, and I was most pleased when Wiley sent me a copy of his book. It covers the full gamut of what is becoming known as social business, from work literacy to collaboration and innovation. Each chapter is short and focused and usually includes anecdotes from Euan’s many years of experience. In spite of the title, this book is not about Twitter, but it is a manager’s guide to the social web, and would be a valuable to asset to every organization I have ever dealt with.

If you only read each chapter summary, this book will still be an excellent performance support tool for managers. Euan and I share similar perspectives, such as democracy in the enterprise or workplace transparency, so it’s not surprising that I liked it so much. However, I think this book has great value for anyone dealing with enterprise social media or becoming more collaborative as an organization.

Chapters like Dealing with a Boss who Doesn’t “Get It” or Heading Into the Great Unknown offer practical advice that can be applied right away. This is not management theory, it’s hands-on. Since the topic of return on investment often comes up from some detractors of social business, here are excerpts from Back to Front ROI.

Quantifying the return on investment on anything to do with increasing intangible assets has always been difficult and social media is no different. But what if we are asking the question back to front?

… In fact I was once offered a Scotsman’s tip on ROI – keep the “I” really small and no one will give you hassle about the “R”.

… As a final resort, consider turning the ROI question on its head. Given that it appears inevitable that the web and social tools are going to become an even more significant part of how we do things, instead of asking me to justify the ROI of encouraging this process – justify to me the ROI of stopping it.

With 45 chapters and 266 pages, there is a lot of good information and shared knowledge in this book. I know I will refer back to it for my client-related work. This book can be read in order or haphazardly by individual chapters, obviously informed by Euan’s hyperlinked writing for the past decade. The book closes with Chapter 45, A word or two on love,  a reprint of the blog post Euan wrote in 2006 as he left his job at the BBC:

Maybe love does have a place in business after all. Maybe more and more of us will start to have the courage to begin to talk about what really matters to us about work and our relationships with each other and to push back the sterile language of business that we have been trained to accept. Maybe we will realise that accepting love into the workplace reminds us of the original purpose of work – not to maximise shareholder value but to come together to do good things, to help each other and hopefully to make the world a better place.

Scientific management yields Scientific schooling

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Work is learning, and learning is the work – that’s what’s currently on this site’s masthead.

You could add the tagline – life is learning, and learning is life – to Seth Godin’s comprehensive piece on the state of public schooling, Stop Stealing Dreams.

This 30,000 word article echoes many of the sentiments of Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, John Taylor Gatto and Ken Robinson in calling for systemic educational reform.

As is becoming obvious, the network era is here, and Godin reinforces many of the ideas found in Connectivism:

22. The connection revolution is upon us

It sells the moment short to call this the Internet revolution. In fact, the era that marks the end of the industrial age and the beginning of something new is ultimately about connection.

The industrial revolution wasn’t about inventing manufacturing, it was about amplifying it to the point where it changed everything. And the connection revolution doesn’t invent connection, of course, but it amplifies it to become the dominant force in our economy.

Connecting people to one another.

Connecting seekers to data.

Connecting businesses to each other.

Connecting tribes of similarly minded individuals into larger, more effective organizations.

Connecting machines to each other and creating value as a result.

In the connection revolution, value is not created by increasing the productivity of those manufacturing a good or a service. Value is created by connecting buyers to sellers, producers to consumers, and the passionate to each other.

This meta-level of value creation is hard to embrace if you’re used to measuring sales per square foot or units produced per hour. In fact, though, connection leads to an extraordinary boost in productivity, efficiency, and impact.

In the connected world, reputation is worth more than test scores. Access to data means that data isn’t the valuable part; the processing is what matters. Most of all, the connected world rewards those with an uncontrollable itch to make and lead and matter.

In the pre-connected world, information was scarce, and hoarding it was smart. Information needed to be processed in isolation, by individuals. After school, you were on your own.

In the connected world, all of that scarcity is replaced by abundance—an abundance of information, networks, and interactions.

An article this long may not be read by most people, especially those who need to read it. However, there is a lot here to foster further discussion and it is presented in clear language. This article, or manifesto, can and should be used to call for a new approach to public education, because making the current ineffective system merely more efficient would be a waste and a shame.

A new economy needs a new approach to education.

96. Big companies no longer create jobs

Apple just built a massive data center in Malden, North Carolina. That sort of plant development would have brought a thousand or five thousand jobs to a town just thirty years ago. The total employment at the data center? Fifty.

Big companies are no longer the engines of job creation. Not the good jobs, anyway.

What the data center does, though, is create the opportunity for a thousand or ten thousand individuals to invent new jobs, new movements, and new technologies as a result of the tools and technology that can be built on top of it.

There is a race to build a plug-and-play infrastructure. Companies like Amazon and Apple and others are laying the groundwork for a generation of job creation—but not exclusively by big companies. They create an environment where people like you can create jobs instead.

Pick yourself.

Every section in this article can be the subject of its own debate and discussion. Each one made sense to me, and while I may not be an education expert, I have spent a good part of the last two decades studying and practising at the edges of the field. Godin concludes with a very simple piece of advice to anyone who wants to change the way things are.

132. What we teach

When we teach a child to make good decisions, we benefit from a lifetime of good decisions.

When we teach a child to love to learn, the amount of learning will become limitless.

When we teach a child to deal with a changing world, she will never become obsolete.

When we are brave enough to teach a child to question authority, even ours, we insulate ourselves from those who would use their authority to work against each of us.

And when we give students the desire to make things, even choices, we create a world filled with makers.

“The best way to complain is to make things”

artisans.jpg

Online community ethics

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Are you on Facebook? Who isn’t these days? Here’s a question about using Facebook as an extension of work or classroom learning. Is it ethical to force people (over whom you have some power & authority) to use Facebook, a proprietary platform that tracks users & sells their data to third parties?

I ask this question to organizational community managers, teachers, professors and even companies. For example, if I want to interact with our national public broadcaster, it seems the preferred venue is “The Facebook”. Last December I put my Facebook account into hibernation (you cannot actually delete your Facebook profile). Since then, I have had many offers to join groups or engage in communities on the platform, all assuming that, of course, I use Facebook.

For those of us who understand these technologies, are we doing a disservice by not promoting a free & open web? People learn most from modelling the behaviour of their peers. For those of us who have been online for some time now, what kind of tacit examples are we providing?

Educators and facilitators of organizational learning need to have a conversation about the open web and understand the implications of their actions. It is more than just owning our data, it’s having some control over our collective digital future.

Update: A good article on what online walled gardens are doing to us: I killed the Internet

Related:

Jaron Lanier: The False Ideals of the Web – via @jhagel

The obvious strategy in the fight for a piece of the advertising pie is to close off substantial parts of the Internet so Google doesn’t see it all anymore. That’s how Facebook hopes to make money, by sealing off a huge amount of user-generated information into a separate, non-Google world. Networks lock in their users, whether it is Facebook’s members or Google’s advertisers.

Wired – Dirty Little Secrets: The Trouble With Social Search

Still, this potentially marks a real transformation to the way we have looked for information on the web, one with real winners and losers. It also signals a real danger to the balance of power between users and megacompanies. We are increasingly moving from a bottom-up web, where users vote with their links, keyboards and their clicks to show what’s relevant to them, to a top-down web where that’s doubly or triply mediated by browsers, search engines and social networks.

Oopsie! The Audacious iBooks Author EULA – via @nwinton

Apple, in this EULA [end user license agreement], is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented. I’m sure it’s commonplace with enterprise software, but the difference is that those contracts are negotiated by corporate legal departments and signed the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink and penalties and termination clauses. A by-using-you-agree-to license that oh by the way asserts rights over a file format? Unheard of, in my experience.

Commuters

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I have only had to commute by vehicle for four years in my life. The rest of the time I have been able to walk or cycle to work. It’s been nine years since I last had to commute. Every Monday morning I am very thankful.

Photo via US Library of Congress

Is management on the table?

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As you soon as you try to address a problem, it gets more complicated, because that’s what conventional management does; I wrote last week in Managing collaboration, and Paul Chepolis commented:

I couldn’t agree more. How many times has this occurred with leadership teams and organizational leaders. Take a simple problem, lose total perspective, and give it a life that is absolutely unnecessary. We kill ourselves!

As Umair Haque posted on Twitter back in November; “Name a “working” institution. Just one. Better yet, define a “working” institution. See the problem? Management is the problem:

  • Learning Management
  • Information Management
  • Human Resource Management
  • Financial Management; etc.

We falsely believe we can manage the future, based on the past. Researchers have shown  experts do worse than laypeople in predicting the stock market and that these experts do even worse than just flipping a coin.  Managing for the future is a conceit of those in power and our institutions are based on the notion of being able to manage complex systems using mechanistic models.

For any change initiative, there is often an assumption of going from the current state to a desired state, as if there is some kind of linear progression. This can be the false presumption of many a performance analysis. Thinking in terms of networks moves us beyond linear thinking. Dave Gray says we even need to change the way we think about change:

If change is a constant, then the only real sustainable competitive advantage is to be able to grow and evolve continually, to stay ahead of the competitive pack.

You can’t do this with the traditional business structure that we’ve inherited from the industrial revolution. This isn’t like redecorating a room in your house or moving the furniture around. This is a major rehab project that might affect the foundations, the plumbing and everything else. It requires some pretty fundamental rethinking of the way your company is structured, how you execute your strategy, and how you’re going to evolve.

What the world requires today is organizations that are capable of continuous creativity and innovation, that can adapt and evolve on a continual basis; organizations that can generate new businesses, that can sprout and branch into new categories and new industries; that can recover quickly from failures and move on.

I have not seen organizations move toward a more social business model without changing management. That may mean reducing the number of managers; empowering people who are customer-facing; or significantly opening up the workflow and making it more transparent. Management is the problem but management is also the solution, if you change it.

A world without bosses may seem like science fiction but then so did a world without secretaries, typing pools, or switchboard operators not that long ago. To be successful in changing to a networked enterprise, the management  structure must be up for negotiation. This may be the critical question to ask at the beginning of any change (social business, enterprise 2.0, social learning) initiative. Is management on the table? If not, why even start?

Image: William Jay Gaynor: NYC under new management (1913)

“Problems tend to be interdisciplinary”

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“If problems are one focal point for collaboration, tools can be another. An example: systems needed to deal with the gigantic data sets generated in finance, astronomy and oceanography. Such tools naturally bring together computer scientists and the statisticians, economists and scientists who might use the data. Goldin points to “crowdsourcing” as a second example of a cross-disciplinary tool, complexity science as a third and (optimistically, I feel) practical ethics as a fourth.” ~ Tim Harford

[emphasis added]

Humans are 'naturally nice'

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

@milouness – “As technology & knowledge allow people to handle more complexity, old categories of simplification become less useful.” – via @sandymaxey

“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards. ~ Mark Twain” via Roger Schank

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. ~ Clay Shirky” – via @surreallyno @flowchainsensei

Aljazeera – “Please remember: Humans are ‘naturally nice’ ~ @Ohra_aho”

Biological research is increasingly debunking the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish.

“Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies,” Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday.

@EskoKilpi – knowledge is socially constructed. Knowledge is not stuff accumulated and stored by individuals:

Whether the social process is called leadership, management, networking, or communication, knowing is an ongoing process of relating. Social media best produce connectedness and interdependence as processes that construct collective authority and responsibility. Social media are most meaningful when giving voice to multiple perspectives, making it possible to seek out, recognize and respect differences as different but equal. Accordingly, reality in science is no longer viewed as a singular fact of nature but as multiple and socially constructed as David Weinberger writes in his newest book: “Too Big to Know”.

Innovator inside: there is little remaining competitive advantage in trying to control intellectual property:

… if the point of IT security is to preserve the privacy and security of individual customers and their relationships with a supplier (and each other of course), then, in a Sidestep and Twist world, security becomes one of the most important disciplines there is. You’re hardly going to have the most customers (the basis of a Twist competitive strategy) if you’re not trusted in the first place.

Recent semi-scandals, such as the one Path and others are presently embroiled in (they were uploading people’s address books without permission) would probably not have happened if those organisations had been advised properly by their information security people.

On the other hand, if the intent of IT security is to preserve corporate intellectual property and trade secrets, then investing significantly to keep competitors out is something of a losing strategy.