The language of social business

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The latest question from Michael Cook (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk) continues from our last one:

Wow, your response to my last question was a deep and wide one indeed. I think I may need to put some more definite boundaries around where my concerns lie. First, the line from your last response that captured my interest was this: “To stay engaged with interconnected markets, business must get more social.”  I am thinking about some of my clients and approaching them with the thought that they need to have their businesses become more social. Just to test my own understanding it seems to me that by using the term social, especially in view of the IBM quote you referenced, that you mean to say highly connective, many options for connectivity are now a must for the value proposition of any organization. I imagine you mean more than that but am I in the right ballpark?

What I think I need is some language that creates a new context for the term social because I am afraid my clients will consider the remark naive. ‘Business is business and social is social.’ This would be their natural response, thinking that “social” means not results focused. I know you are using the term in a context that may be transparent to you but I can assure you that my clients do not share the same transparency.

What I need to do is be able to connect your conversation to the critical relationship between companies and customers and show how social media plays an important part in sustaining these relationships into the future. Can you give me a couple of concrete examples where this connection was made using social media that I might be able to share?

Secondly, when I read through your response to my last question I notice that you did not directly address the last part of my question where I asked about the right time to bring a technical expert into a conversation with a client. I suspect it is at the level of strategic value because I know most of my clients would not have an extensive interest in the technology itself but more the outcomes it might leverage. Again, am I on the right track here?

Does social mean highly connective? It’s much more than that. Social means human. It is an understanding that relationships and networks are complex. Our industrial management models are based on a belief that our structures are merely complicated. Here’s an explanation from Noop.nl

The main difference between predictable systems and complex systems is our approach to understanding them. We can understand simple and complicated systems by taking them apart and analyzing the details. However, we cannot understand complex systems by applying the same strategy of reductionism. But we can achieve some understanding by watching and studying how the whole system operates.

What’s important for managers is that this also works the other way around. We create complicated systems by first designing the parts, and then putting them together. This works well for mechanical things, like buildings, watches and Quattro Stagioni pizzas. But it doesn’t work for complex systems, like brains, software development teams, and the local pizzeria. We cannot build a system from scratch and expect it to become complex in the way that we intended. Complex systems defy attempts to be created in an engineering effort.

Social means the bonds that keep us together. Much of it is about trust. If I trust you, I might ask you for advice, so trust is essential for collaboration. We lose it if we try to micro-manage knowledge work. A framework like wirearchy is much better for complex environments than our traditional models of command & control, functional management and enforced adoption of work practices. Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

The argument that ‘business is business and social is social’ makes little sense today. Business is social because it involves people. Business must be more social the more complex the work and the greater the need for collaboration. We foster innovation through social interactions. The idea that a lone person working in a lab can come up with a brilliant idea is largely unfounded. Connections between people drive innovation, says Tim Kastelle; “Connecting ideas is the core of innovation, but without connecting ideas to people, there is no innovation at all.”

How does social media connect companies and customers? There are many case studies on social media for marketing and customer service available online . However, as my colleague Jane Hart writes:

There are many examples of how enterprises/organisations (profits and non-profits) are using social media for EXTERNAL marketing, customer support, etc, but few real-life case studies of strategic approaches to its use INTERNALLY for social and collaborative learning and/or performance and productivity improvement.

Making organizations more effective is what really interests me.

When working with clients, I would bring in technical expertise as late as possible. Technology is more often a business constraint than an enabler, especially internal IT departments. They will tell you what you can’t do. Determine the business requirements first and make sure they’re clear. Then figure out how to enable them with technology. Don’t let the IT tail wag the business dog. As Steve Woodruff writes, social media is not a business strategy. That also means that a self-proclaimed “social media strategist” should not be developing your business strategy.

Mass, decentralized and social

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How did the word get out for Tunisians to initiate large-scale protests? Social networks; though not necessarily all technology-mediated. The same happened in Egypt. If social media were not a threat, it is unlikely the government would have shut down almost all web access. Jeremy Littau says the Egyptian uprising “movement is mass, decentralized, and social. Sound like anything we know?” It’s also very human.

China is blocking searches on Twitter related to Egypt, as it too fears the power of social networks. Social networks, and the learning that happens as a result, are a threat to all hierarchical structures. Social networks accelerate the spread of new ideas and lay bare systemic injustices. This is powerful stuff and it scares people. Anyone in a position of power and authority is losing some of that due to the growing power of social networks – doctors, teachers, managers, politicians, etc. Seb Paquet calls it “ridiculously easy group-forming”. Hugh Macleod says that the network is more powerful than the node.

Social networks speed access to knowledge and accelerate learning. An Egyptian blogger, Ma3t, learned via social media this week:

They hit us bad. They shot tear gas at us, I saw ppl running and screaming, and all i can remember is the tweeted instructions ” Do not rub ur eyes” I tried, I really tried, but my eyes were on fire, I didn’t rub them though but ended up walking blindly into a wall.

It’s all social as we become more connected and observe the emerging network effects. The year 2011 will be interesting and 2012 will be even more interesting. Hang on.

No best practices, but some strong indicators

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It’s been a busy week, mostly on-site with a new and exciting client project. I’m still trying to get a flight home (hopefully this evening) but at least I’m able to get out my weekly Friday’s Finds. Here’s what I learned via Twitter this week.

QUOTES

@jackvinson “I did blogging in my KM class a few years ago. “forced blogging” = flogging :-)”

@zenmoments “Freedom is not worth having if it does not involve the freedom to make mistakes. ~ Gandhi”

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Performance Measurement “a Complete Waste of Time” – via @julienllanas

So, why do companies spend so much time and money on trying to come up with new rating systems and fancy pay for performance plans? Actually, I have no idea. I’m hoping someone out there can help me on that one. But, this week is a milestone week in my career – I’ve officially decided to do something about it – I’ve propsed to my executive team that we eliminate our performance rating system and ditch this whole pay for performance idea.

@stevedenning: Coordination: From hierarchical bureaucracy to dynamic linking via @RessHum

2. The team reports to the client, not the manager: The shift in the organization’s goal from producing goods and services to delighting clients means that the team effectively reports to the client, rather than the manager. The manager’s role is to give the team a clear line of sight to the client. Work is presented to the client or customer proxy at the end of the process of iterations, so that the team doing the work can experience the reaction. Progress is measured not by whether the boss is satisfied but rather whether value is delivered to clients. Instead of reliance on progress reports, progress is measured by only in terms of finished work—work that actually delivers value to clients at the end of a work cycle.

Un-Manage Your Employees by @DHH  Getting rid of distractions and co-managing so workers can get things done. – via @dhinchcliffe

When you hire people who do nothing but manage, you implicitly say to the rest of your employees, “Don’t worry about the coordination or structure of your work—all these concerns now belong to the manager.” When people don’t have to think about the totality of their work environment, because that’s now the manager’s job, they’re less engaged, less motivated and less efficient.

The Net Work of Leadership: Create the Space by @panklam

What he [Rangaswami] says is (and I agree) is that it makes no sense to give smart people tasks, but to “expose them to problem domains and then giving them the resources and tools to solve these problems.”  When a problem domain is large, it takes a network, more than just a team, and the vision of a leader who can create the spaces within which people will make the right choices about what tasks they must select to work toward the solution of the problem.

Going Social – Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity via @fdomon

You may be saying to yourself: “Echols, this tale of hats and cattle is all well and good, but what’s the bottom line? I need best practices to convince my management.” Well, right now there are no best practices to emulate, but there are lots of experiments going on to define solutions. I repeat, these are experiments, and to succeed, your organization needs to have a culture of experimentation. Experiments produce failures most of the time. Acceptance of failure and disciplined learning from those failures is key because the winners in this arena will be the organizations that learn the fastest, and you can’t learn if you don’t try.

A case for social learning in business

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This is a first draft of putting together the case for social learning and social business. Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. This was not rehearsed, so I know that the narration can be tightened up. I’m interested in seeing what other points could or should be added and especially if the central theme makes sense.

Happy Monday

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I’m on the road this week. We’re working with an interesting client and I’m doing what I love: designing new ways to work and learn more effectively. Life is good :)

When you work for yourself, it doesn’t feel like work, just an opportunity to do better.

Saving tigers, social business and science

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Here are some of things I learned via Twitter this past week [Friday’s Finds].

We need to save our tigers [follow link for ways to help] by @Sumeet_Moghe

“Do not cut down the  forest with its tigers and do not banish the tigers from the forest; the tiger perishes without the forest and the forest perishes without its tigers”  – Mahabharata, 400 BCE

“C’est avec la logique que nous prouvons mais c’est avec l’intuition que nous trouvons. [Henri Poincaré]” via @MichelleBlanc

@jmcgee “‘diligent laziness’ = DRY – don’t repeat yourself, = take advantage of what others know and share, = take/make time for reflection”

@snowded “Never try to excite a conservative with something novel or interesting (note to self)”

From information to conversation by @EskoKilpi

People often need to act and make decisions in situations in which causality is poorly understood, where there is considerable uncertainty and people hold different beliefs and have personal biases. However, people very reluctantly acknowledge that they face ambiguity at work. Problems in organizations tend to get labeled as lack of information. It feels more professional to try to solve a knowledge management problem that is called lack of information than a problem that is called confusion.

[SEED Magazine] “Critical slowing” as a threshold approaches could be a signal for collapses in complex systems. via @ViRAms

The practice of science has always been grounded in predicting outcomes. The hypothetico-deductive method—the due process of scientific inquiry—can be summed up by four basic steps: review data, make prediction, test, repeat. Now the ways in which we as a society are extracting information from large-scale events and systems, identifying patterns, and making predictions are clear examples of the analytical logic of science—what might be referred to as scientific thinking—transferring to the organizational principles of the public at large. In this way, scientific thinking is a nascent tool for policymaking, governance, and problem solving in general.

Foreign Policy: the “nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow”. via @ValdisKrebs

The first generations of Indian startups focused on selling IT services, and the Chinese developed copycat web technologies such as Baidu, China’s Google rival, and Sina, its Twitter clone. But they are going beyond that now. They are gaining the knowledge — and developing the confidence — to create innovative products, not only for domestic markets, but also for global ones.

Social Business planning: set up a process of discovery by @robpatrob

When I worked with NPR back in 2005 the question was “How will social media affect us and what should we do?”

The great thing then was that No One could know the answer to that question. And if by chance one of us did, no one else would just accept that answer.

So what we did was to set up a process of discovery where it was agreed at the outset that no one knew.

We then set off, nearly 1,000 people, on a number of test journeys where groups “Played” with creating stories about what the future might be.

Social learning for business

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Here’s an elevator pitch, in 10 sentences, for social learning, which is what really makes social business work.

  1. The increasing complexity of our work is a result of our global interconnectedness.
  2. Today, simple work is being automated (e.g. bank tellers).
  3. Complicated work (e.g. accounting) is getting outsourced.
  4. Complex and creative work is what gives companies unique business advantages.
  5. Complex and creative work is difficult to replicate, constantly changes and requires greater tacit knowledge.
  6. Tacit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships.
  7. Training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few; that time has passed.
  8. Social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops.
  9. Hierarchies constrain social interactions so traditional management models must change.
  10. Learning amongst ourselves is the real work in social businesses and management’s role is to support social learning.

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Social business on the edge of the chasm

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Last year I was asked what I thought about Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0). While it’s a popular subject amongst some management theorists, there aren’t many examples of E2.0 in practice.  Peter Evans-Greenwood has a good analysis of why E2.0 is not ready for mainstream business implementation due to regulatory constraints:

So, I agree with naysayers that the business case for E2.0 etc “transforming business into a more social business” is not there today. I disagree in that I think it will happen, but we need to up-end regulation first.

As I write this, it seems the term “social business” is already replacing E2.0. Social business should be understood by organizational leaders because they will need to be ready for a significant change in their operating models in the near future. Social business is almost ready to cross the chasm.

Social business is about a shift in how we do work, moving from hierarchies to networks. The highest value work today is the more complex stuff, or the type of work that cannot be automated or outsourced. It’s work that requires creativity and passion. Doing complex work in networks means that information, knowledge and power no longer flow up and down. They flow in all directions. As John Seely Brown said, you can only understand complex systems by marinating in them. This requires social learning. Complex work is not linear. Social business is giving up centralized control and harnessing the power of networks. It is as radical as was Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management in 1911.

The potential of social business is organizational survival. Enterprises must be able to share knowledge quicker than before.  This requires a shift toward something like a starfish framework that not only allows for independent action but also distributes knowledge through all the parts. Social learning is how organizational knowledge gets distributed. Social businesses can learn quicker.

The main barriers to social business are cultural. People in charge of most organizations today got there by doing things the traditional way of the MBA mindset. They feel they do not need to change and few are willing to give up power and authority, even if it is for the good of the organization.

Shortly after posting this, I came across an article in CIO: How Social is Taking Over Business [dead link]

Social media for senior managers

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This is the second of my conversations with Michael Cook on Organizational Development.

Michael:

I was thinking about the metaphor you used in responding to my question, that “social media are like new languages”, then after reflecting on that idea for a while I re-read your response and realized that you had actually said “social media are new languages” not like new languages, they are actually new languages. I was jolted into realizing where much of my current challenge is coming from. I keep attempting to learn about social media by comparing them to something I already know about rather than recognizing that while they have aspects that are familiar they are truly new phenomena.

So now I am wondering, email is email and it is ubiquitous. Anyone who has used email for any amount of time has had instances of recognizing its limitations. For one, it does a terrible job of conveying context and tone. Yet, there is no doubt that many of my clients (most of whom are senior managers, 45+ years of age) will do as I have done and think of an ESSP (Emerging Social Software Platform) as a glorified email system, and when I make a suggestion that they consider writing a blog they will give me the “devil eye” and shrink back like I have suggested maybe we hug. Since these are very likely the people in an organization that stand to gain the most by endorsing an investment in some form of social media, where would you suggest I begin a conversation with them about the topic and when is the right time to bring in someone with a technical background to support any signs of interest? It seems to me that starting with a product discussion is probably not where I would want to begin.

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Harold: Once again, let me rephrase the question – “How do you start the discussion about social media with senior managers who think of technology as just more IT products and platforms?”

I like to start any conversation with a client from a business perspective. IBM describes the current situation as such:

The rapid growth of social networking and mobility has enabled people to tap into the experience of others to accomplish anything – ranging from their work to the way they purchase goods and services.

This pretty well sums up what is driving business change. People can connect to anyone, anywhere and at any time. This changes all the control systems that organizations have developed over the past century: pricing, pay, hours of work, product development, jobs, customer service – you name it.

The challenge for business leaders is to manage work with porous organizational boundaries. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. We need to change our mental models and even invert the management pyramid.The typical branching organization chart does not reflect the way that work gets done in networks. Work is really done in the white space within and now outside the organization.

Work today has few time or geographical boundaries. As our water coolers become virtual, social relations online will be the glue that connects us in our increasingly distributed work. Every little tweet, blog post, comment or “like” online shares our individuality and humanity. These actions help us be known to others in the digital surround. They help us build trust to get things done, be productive and innovate. However, we cannot benefit from professional social networks unless we engage in them. This requires more than merely mastering the technology. It means being social in our work. Not using social media to connect, contribute and collaborate is like sitting in a closed office all day.

According to McKinsey, the main reason that businesses today use social media is to increase the speed of access to knowledge. It’s not a question of why we should understand social business but what can we do to survive and thrive in what has become a social business ecosystem. Social media are necessary to keep up.

Here is an indicator of the changing nature of business in a highly networked and social marketplace; the “app” market:

This rapid adaption to what customers want requires a very different organizational structure than at many companies. It must be able to adapt rapidly to new information and it must move that information around rapidly … Staying engaged and being adaptive – the successful companies will have both of these attributes.

To stay engaged with interconnected markets, business must get more social. Social learning, which can involve many of these web social media, is how we get things done in networks.  Most organizational value is created by teams and networks, not individuals working alone. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Organizational learning really spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance.

Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization. Senior managers need to understand social media in order to support learning in social networks which will enable practitioners to produce results.

The wisdom of lists

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Finding out how others perceive you can be an interesting professional exercise. Marketing and branding may have their place but understanding how the rest of world sees you reverses that lens.

One function of Twitter that I haven’t used much is the ability to create Lists. I only have two lists, but many people seem to find them useful. For example, I have one that includes my Internet Time Alliance colleagues, so I can stay up to date with their tweets, across 8 time zones, without any additional searching. Lists are just groupings of profiles and can be created by any user. All lists are named and some have a detailed description.

I’m on about 400 lists so I decided to take a look at them and I noticed that I’m categorized in many ways. I then went through all of the titles and descriptions, standardized the language & spelling, and put these words into a text document which I used to create a Wordle cloud.

Here’s what my social mirror reflected back to me.