Leave the cookie-cutters at the bakery

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It seems that everybody wants an easy solution. They want best practices and case studies they can copy. They don’t want to do the hard work of learning for themselves. They want a cookie-cutter solution.

Well there aren’t any.

Case studies abound in business and many sell for a significant amount. Other than for general education, they’re rather useless. Each organization’s situation is not only different, it’s changing. Case studies and best practices in business are like the arbitrary subjects in our schools. They’re easy to package but don’t transfer well into real life.

Few managers ask the tough questions, like what are the underlying assumptions of how we do business and do they make sense? Are any of our practices self-defeating?

Complex problems require require different thinking. Once again, I’d like to refer to the book,  Getting to Maybe. The authors say that in complex environments:

  • Rigid protocols are counter-productive
  • There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
  • We cannot separate parts from the whole
  • Success is not a fixed address [what I call perpetual Beta]

Rigid protocols are prescriptive and tell you what to do. For dealing with complex systems, we need to make sense of the data and THEN figure out what to do, as Dave Snowden explains in this video.

“We conduct safe-fail experiments. We don’t do fail-safe design. If an experiment succeeds, we amplify it. If an experiment fails, we dampen it.”

The problem with best practices is they presume simplicity and this can cause the organization to fall off the cliff into chaos. Beware the cookie-cutter salesman!

The next time you pick up a report on best practices, ask yourself:

  • Has anything changed since this report was written?
  • How is my organization different from these?
  • Who stands to gain from the report?

Many best practices are self-evident. They’ve worked for years and address relatively simple systems. But the business issues that consume us are most likely complex. Instead of looking for best practices, take that time and money and invest in an experiment (a probe).

Perpetual Beta is an attitude toward learning and working. It is accepting that we’ll never get to the final release and our learning will never stabilize. Perpetual Beta is affirming to principles and actually committing to do something, while remaining open to change. But most of all, it’s actually doing something.

Life in Perpetual Beta – Director's Cut

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You read this blog, why not see the movie by the same name? [I have no affiliation with the film, though I like the title and enjoyed it]

Life in perpetual Beta – Director’s Cut is now available for purchase. Produced by Melissa Pierce @melissapierce and released this month, the documentary covers the effects of social media and the always-on Web on many facets of our lives. It includes interviews with Seth Godin, Biz Stone, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jason Fried, Liz Strauss and many others.

Life in Perpetual Beta is a documentary film about the ways in which technology has/is/will change the ways in which we think about ourselves as individuals and a society. It is exploring the cultural shift that technology creates as it enables people to live more passionate, less planned lives. Life in Perpetual Beta was made by the same principles it explores, all aspects of the film were crowdsourced on social networks, from who to interview, what to ask, camera crews and how to pay for production. Life in Perpetual Beta will inspire you to believe that with a little faith in humanity and help from the internet, anything is possible.

Check out the movie’s website.

There are a lot of interesting stories and perspectives in this video. No answers, but many lenses to see our mixed-up world and how perpetual Beta is becoming the norm.

“There’s no map” – “You have to be open” – “Authenticity is obvious” – “Everybody is in the design business” – “You can change your mind” – “You have to know where you are now and plan forward from that”

Note: The video is only available for purchase in the USA, though you can watch it in the screening room.

Managing information and knowledge

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

“Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb – via @KareAnderson

@adriarichards: “You do a disservice to entire STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] community when you don’t think about bridging the gap between your knowledge and a layperson’s experience.”

—

Can there really be Too Much Information? via @jrobes

Information rules all of our lives. In fact, DNA, the building block of our bodies, is “the quintessential information molecule,” writes journalist James Gleick in his new book, The Information: A Theory, a History, a Flood. Yet all this information can be overwhelming and difficult to use effectively. In advance of Gleick’s appearance at Zócalo on March 15, we asked [five] experts whether more information is always a good thing.

Information overload and innovation by @rhillard

Business and government innovation is best measured by the new connections it adds to society and the organisations that support it rather than by the quantity of transient data that becomes persistent or even the amount of truly new data. Adding something new adds the greatest value to the people that it serves when it increases the number of connections.

A little more on not doing KM – via @DavidGurteen

The potential of KM [knowledge management] is enormous but many KM projects have failed to live up to expectations. Why?

  • KM projects are NOT focused on the business
  • KM projects are tough
  • KM project leaders are often inexperienced
  • KM projects poorly conceived
  • Lack of senior management support

“every single organization has an informal network where 70% of the work takes place” by @dustinmattison

Work usually doesn’t get accomplished the way management sees it formally. The problem with formality is the fact that you really cannot foresee every circumstance that takes place in an organization, especially unanticipated circumstances. For example, a mid-level manager is called into his boss and she says that “we need to do a project and my idea is to do it in such as way, now go ahead and put it together and let me know if you have any questions.”

You will typically see that mid-level managers going back to his or her section and calling people together where he needs participation on a project. The first thing they will do is try to figure out exactly what the instructions entail. The thing to keep in mind is that every person has to interpret something in their own way. There is no way that two or more people see something in exactly the same way. The management needs to interpret those instructions and have an interaction with his/her people and try to determine what needs to get done.

The Power of Conversations by @charlesjennings

We rarely, if ever, work and learn alone. We reach our goals and contribute to our organisations’ objectives in a social context. In the maelstrom of our digital communications age the need to think ‘socially’ is more important than ever.

 

Crossing the social media threshold

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My ongoing conversation with Michael Cook continues (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk), with these thoughts:

Harold: With the delays that seem to be following each of your recent responses to me you may be thinking I have fallen through the web someplace and cannot find my way back. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth, although I have been on a journey thanks to everything you have provided me to think about. From when we started by talking on the phone to where we are now has for me been a very long journey. I am reminded of one of those scenes from the Lord of the Rings films where one or the other of the wizards was looking into either a crystal ball or a boiling pot and could see something going on very far, far away. Maybe that time difference between where you are in New Brunswick and where I am in Washington is actually much greater than the four hours that show on the clock!

Perhaps you saw me after that last exchange wandering lost among the hyperlinks you provided. I wasn’t lost, that’s just the look on my face most of the time, especially when I am considering connectivity. Maybe its just my natural tendency to go inward to address a big question.

After spending a good deal of time with the various references you provided I found my mind wandering back to current client relationships. I have one in particular that years ago began by addressing a problem and providing a service that handles a complicated issue for clients. Over the years they added in a couple more twists to further reduce the complicated issue. Then, maybe 10 years ago they ventured outside the simply complicated and began to address areas of complexity, I say without recognition of the looking glass they had passed through. Since that time they have continued along the path of complexity and had increasing problems with their margins.

How might I begin a conversation with this client’s leadership to have them begin to consider that they have evolved into an entirely different type of animal than they were at the beginning? In the context of our conversation thus far around the use of social media inside business this would seem like a fairly fundamental threshold to cross before a management group might begin to consider the use of these technologies.

How do you tell people that the world is different? This is especially difficult for those in postions of authority who owe their position to the past. Why change what still works?

You could start with a list of events to describe how the world is significantly different, like when a singer from Halifax, Nova Scotia can publish a music video seen by millions of viewers and it affects the stock price of a major corporation: United Breaks Guitars or a group of distributed computer hackers shatter the diplomatic world as they join forces with traditional media outlets: Wikileaks. There are many other examples, such as regional protests coordinated through Facebook or some other social medium.

But you also have to show that the organization itself has changed.

If you have someone coming over for the first time, do you Google them? You can be pretty sure that if they’re under 30, they’ve already checked you out online. If you don’t have a profile on the Web they may even have decided not to show. For many people, if you’re not the Web, you don’t exist. Now that’s a change from a decade ago. Find out if the HR department uses LinkedIn to recruit. Maybe they don’t even know what it is.

Social media for marketing is the tip of the iceberg. The real power of social media is for getting things done. They facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones and always-on.

If the organization doesn’t embrace the values of the external network, it will move at a snail’s pace while the rest of the world spins around it. Does this reflect the inside?

Open & transparent
Need to share
Continuous learning
Conversation is valued
Time for reflection
Perpetual Beta
Business metrics are understood

It’s what’s happening outside.

Finally, you can throw some return on investment figures at them. Simply put, social media give you more time to get things done. There are many other reasons, some of which the folks at Socialcast have neatly put out as an infographic:

Not sure if this addresses your questions, Mike, but we have much more time and all the digital space we need.

Don’t worry, we’re counting the apples

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The other day I was at the university dining hall, waiting at the cashier’s counter. Several students came through and swiped their cards. One student was carrying her hand bag and was told that she couldn’t come in with it. [I later found out that hand bags and back packs must be left in a non-secure area at the entrance. This seems to be the norm at many institutions of higher learnin’. ]

The young lady explained that she was carrying the necessary equipment to deal with her diabetes, such as insulin and juice packs . The cashier did not know what to do and the supervisor was called. The young lady was grilled again on the need for the offending bag in the dining hall and after a minute or two the supervisor allowed her to enter with it, with a clear warning not to take any food from the dining hall.

And so the student went for her mid-day meal. A student who pays about $7,000 in tuition, plus the cost of text books and other fees and then an additional $3,700 for the privilege of dining in an establishment where you are treated like a criminal. If I was a student with a $2,000 computer in my pack, I would not leave it unattended. But it seems they have little choice. Take it or leave it. The thing is, some day they may leave it, especially in an age of instant communications and ubiquitous online university rankings.

This highlights the small-mindedness of institutional culture. We become obsessed with the possibility that a student may sneak an apple out of the dining hall while oblivious to the enormous demographic and economic changes that universities are only beginning to face. No students, no dining hall, no apples to sneak out in hand bags. But don’t worry, the apples are safe.

 

 

 

Embrace chaos

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When I discussed Emergent Value, some very good comments ensued, from Jon Husband, Gordon Ross, Peg Boyles, Ollie Gardener and Monika Hardy. This image was my first attempt to show how real value creation happens at the edge of organizations and requires different management and communications practices. Social networks, collaboration and cooperation must be the norm when dealing with complex or chaotic situations.

Jon Husband commented on my post with a suggested wirearchy framework for implementation:

– Identify a purpose (this is what may or will be emerging in chaotic activities)
– Identify and enroll the skills, motivations and personalities necessary to address the purpose in a constructive and/or creation-of-value way (typically, within one or more social networks).
– Identify and create the infrastructure for effective and constructive communication and collaboration (the web services and social tools that are increasingly commonplace and free or inexpensive)
– Open the infrastructure to the “crowd of interest” on the web (unless it is a commercial endeavour on the part of a now-grouping of people, as in a consulting group that emerges from peoples’ interactions) .. it can be participative social media marketing on the part of companies, or advocacy and activist dynamics on the part of not-for-profits
– Create practical metrics that a group or network actually understand and believe in, and refine as the networked wirearchy grows, sustains or wanes.
– Refine, adjust, adapt (it’s critical to ensure social ‘hygiene’ and seek, then instill ways of building and sustaining trust)

Start with Purpose > People > Platform then open it up to Network > Metrics > Community.

Ollie Gardener noted that, “The wirearchy of connections need to form not just to meet the collective needs/goals, but to support people’s independent work both within and across company boundaries (the work that we do in parallel).” This is high-value work/learning on the edge, where life is complex and chaotic. It’s from the periphery of a network, where it is less homogenous, that we get diversity and innovation. This is where individuals and organizations have to go to continue learning and developing.

As Seely Brown, Hagel and Davison noted two years ago in How to Bring the Core to the Edge:

In today’s fast-moving, chaotic world, edges are beginning to take on greater meaning. Not only in their ability to help us recognize new ideas but, perhaps more importantly, in the power they give us to escape the old ones.

I think the edge will be where almost all high value work gets done in organizations. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced. Most of the people in an organization will be on the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. This is a sea change, in my opinion. It means that change and complexity will be the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.

We need to embrace complexity and chaos, it’s where the future of work lies.

Mapping quality with VNA

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Our NetWorkShop on Saturday was a great success and I think everyone left with a better understanding of networks, as well as some ideas for future pursuit. One main message that came through early in the workshop is that you cannot manage a network. That’s probably the biggest barrier to Net Work in most organizations. We also went through a few exercises to describe some of our networks and created value network maps that looked much messier than this one, by Patti Anklam.

Our value network analyses (VNA) looked like this:

One key insight for me is that when analyzing networks we need to describe the connections in detail. It’s not just mapping the nodes, but understanding how they are connected. With Value Network Analysis, one looks at tangible and intangible asset transfers. Process maps often ignore the type of connection and show it as an arrow without describing all the fuzzy relationships. This is a limitation of performance analysis as it often misses the social aspect of organizations.

Incorporating a process map like performance analysis into a value network analysis might give us deeper insights into how an organization and its people actually work. Given that more of our work collaboration happens in networks and uses social media platforms, this is the direction our analysis should go. As Jay Deragon notes, it’s not the outputs that really matter but the quality of the connected processes. I’ve added comments on the need for descriptions of relationships and quality of connections to the performance analysis process map above. It’s just a start.

More photos of our NetWorkShop are on Flickr.

Patti Anklam’s book on Net Work is now available on the Kindle.

Where we are and where we've been

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Here is some of what I learned via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

The Internet: “The private interests of all have to be subsumed to the public good.” – by @robpatrob

@Euan “We depersonalise business so it doesn’t get messy. Instead it gets dysfunctional.”

Leadership Freak: “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less” ~ General Shinseki – via @KoreenOlbrish

@AronSolomon – “Insiders who claim a desire to change the status quo are sheep in wolf’s clothing.”

—

The advantages of social learning propelled incipient human groups along a different evolutionary path from chimpanzees – via @c4lpt

The new data on early human social structure furnishes the context in which two distinctive human behaviors emerged, those of cooperation and social learning, Dr. Hill said. A male chimp may know in his lifetime just 12 other males, all from his own group. But a hunter-gatherer, because of cooperation between bands, may interact with a thousand individuals in his tribe. Because humans are unusually adept at social learning, including copying useful activities from others, a large social network is particularly effective at spreading and accumulating knowledge.

The Return of the Barbarian –  “Civilization is the process of taking intelligence out of human minds and putting it into institutions.” – via @sebpaquet

In the short term this works brilliantly. The ideas of the smartest people (usually embedded higher barbarians) are externalized and encoded into the design of institutions, which can then make far stupider people vastly more effective than their raw capabilities would allow (this is the reason why the modern economic notion of “productivity” is so misleading).

But in the long term this fails. The smart people die, and their ideas become obsolete and ritualized. Initially, more intelligence is being externalized into institutions than is being taken away through ritualization, but at some point, you get a peak, and the decline begins. As entropy accumulates, it becomes a simple matter for another wave of lower barbarians on the periphery to take down the civilization.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: A Time of Institutional Recomposition – via @raesmaa

When companies are no longer competitive, they go out of business and their clients take their business elsewhere.  But, the invisible hand, creative destruction and other powerful free market forces that impose rigorous disciplines on business have not applied to government.  There is a huge difference between failed companies and failed communities, cities or countries.  Clients can easily find other companies to do business with in place of the ones no longer around.  This is not the case with citizens.

Systemic vs. Silo Thinking & Social Media – by @JDeragon

Social media are an influence on markets. The market of conversations can be used to improve an organizations system and its ability to serve a market. That is of course if we understand the “system and all the interrelated parts”.

Most organizations are failing at social media because:

It is being used in silos
The current measures are not relevant to systemic improvements
It is disconnected from the organizations people, processes and systemic improvements
Use is isolated in marketing and advertising processes
It is not designed around people’s intents or relational objectives

The advancement and improvement of any organization starts and ends with alignment of people, processes and communications. Not leveraging social technology systemically means the organization will be out of alignment.

 

Networked Knowledge: out of the ivory tower

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Many of the important issues that face our society are complex and require a good knowledge of science. Yesterday, I explained some of what I’ve been trying to learn about nuclear fission and power generation. Understanding how people learn and how we can integrate learning into work is a prime professional interest of mine.

More and more political and personal decisions have to made on some understanding of science. Of interest to me are: nuclear power; hydro-fracking; climate change and uranium mining. Each requires significant knowledge to understand the issues.

Obviously, the public media are not designed to deal with these kinds of issues. They are in the business of selling advertising and getting readership. Some journalists inform but most, including the good ones, can only shine a lens and let us make up our minds. My post yesterday was intended to show that mainstream media were not very good at informing us on complex subjects. I wanted to explain how I was able to get information and put some things together. The self-correcting nature of a blog would ensure that somebody might set me straight or point me to better sources of information. Comments on Twitter indicated that I might be seriously misinformed. I am still learning and will continue to do so. Learning is work and work is learning; that’s life in perpetual Beta.

Image: Ivory Towers by Colin Smith

I’d like to highlight one aspect of how we treat knowledge in our society. Complex scientific fields are the realm of research institutions, like universities.  It takes a long time to get expertise and competence is conferred through peer review. But peer review has its problems and much of the research is published in the language of specialists that only the select few can decipher. There is also little incentive in the highly competitive (for research funding) fields of scientific research to publish widely or to synthesize research so that it is understandable by the average adult. These same adults who vote for politicians who set research funding policies.

The media aren’t informing and the informed aren’t using media.

Part of my responsibility in using networked knowledge is to give back to the community. I believe it’s our part of the social learning contract. The scientific community has the same responsibility. I was asked, “Please, don’t spread this wrong thinking around.” So in return, I ask the scientific community to step up and spread their knowledge. The whole world is trying to understand these issues.

Update: I’m noticing The Guardian and the CS Monitor are providing good in-depth analysis of the nuclear situation in Japan now. Very good to see. Now we just need this on a regular basis for many other complex scientific issues, especially when there’s no urgent crisis.

Fuelled by Informal learning

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Caveat: It seems I have to put a warning sign on this post. I am not a nuclear physicist and the opinions on this post are personal and are not professional, scientific advice on radiation or its effects.

I’ve had a crash course in nuclear physics this week. I took basic Physics in university, but my major was History, so I never really got into it. This interconnected world sure makes it easy to learn informally though.

From Twitter, I was led to an excellent overview of how the Fukushima Daiichi reactor works at Why I am not worried … which is now being hosted by MIT’s Nuclear Information Hub:

The solid fuel pellet (a ceramic oxide matrix) is the first barrier that retains many of the radioactive fission products produced by the fission process.  The Zircaloy casing is the second barrier to release that separates the radioactive fuel from the rest of the reactor.

The core is then placed in the pressure vessel. The pressure vessel is a thick steel vessel that operates at a pressure of about 7 MPa (~1000 psi), and is designed to withstand the high pressures that may occur during an accident. The pressure vessel is the third barrier to radioactive material release.

The entire primary loop of the nuclear reactor – the pressure vessel, pipes, and pumps that contain the coolant (water) – are housed in the containment structure.  This structure is the fourth barrier to radioactive material release. The containment structure is a hermetically (air tight) sealed, very thick structure made of steel and concrete. This structure is designed, built and tested for one single purpose: To contain, indefinitely, a complete core meltdown. To aid in this purpose, a large, thick concrete structure is poured around the containment structure and is referred to as the secondary containment.

Both the main containment structure and the secondary containment structure are housed in the reactor building. The reactor building is an outer shell that is supposed to keep the weather out, but nothing in. (this is the part that was damaged in the explosions, but more to that later).

Then I read today on the MIT site that, “Radiation levels on the edge of the plant compound briefly spiked at 8217 microsieverts per hour but later fell to about a third that.” What’s a microsievert, I asked myself, and how dangerous are 8217 of them? I was able to find out via Wikipedia that:

1 Sv = 1000 mSv (millisieverts) = 1,000,000 µSv (microsieverts) = 100 rem = 100,000 mrem (millirem)

And I further read that at 250,000 µSv “Some people feel nausea” and at 1,000,000 µSv there is “Mild to severe nausea”. Makes 8,217 µSv look pretty small to me.

The mainstream media reports tell a different story. Here’s one from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

Most of the attention in the past three days has been focused on Daiichi units 1 and 3. A complete meltdown — the melting of the radioactive core — could release radioactive contaminants into the environment and pose major, widespread health risks.

There is no mention of radiation levels, or what would happen in the event of a core meltdown [containment], in this story and in many others by the CBC and other mainstream media/entertainment sources.

Update: A more detailed explanation of the factors at play, via Twitter:

There are some characteristics of a nuclear fission reactor that will be common to every nuclear fission reactor. They will always have to contend with decay heat. They will always have to produce heat at high temperatures to generate electricity. But they do not have to use coolant fluids like water that must operate at high pressures in order to achieve high temperatures. Other fluids like fluoride salts can operate at high temperatures yet at the same pressures as the outside. Fluoride salts are impervious to radiation damage, unlike water, and don’t evolve hydrogen gas which can lead to an explosion. Solid nuclear fuel like that used at Fukushima-Daiichi can melt and release radioactive materials if not cooled consistently during shutdown. Fluoride salts can carry fuel in chemically-stable forms that can be passively cooled without pumps driven by emergency power generation. There are solutions to the extreme situation that was encountered at Fukushima-Daiichi, and it may be in our best interest to pursue them.

This is why it’s so important to be a self-directed learner. Who stands to benefit by the stuff that’s being Pushed to you? Advertisers? Whether it’s news or education, we have the networks that can help us figure things out. It just takes a little effort.

It’s not just the media, either. This weekend I came across an article in The Atlantic, Lies, Damn Lies and Medical Science that showed that “as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed”. We need to think for ourselves.

Update 16 March: The CSMonitor (almost mainstream media!) is providing some good in-depth reporting:

Meltdown 101: What are spent fuels and why are they a threat?

Opinion: Japan’s Nuclear Crisis: 6 reasons why we should – and shouldn’t – worry

Good coverage by The Guardian – Japan Nuclear Crisis Live Updates

I must say that the mainstream press are stepping up on this.

18 March: From a science journalist: Nuclear power won’t kill you