Perpetual Beta

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It hadn’t really occurred to me before that pilots are an almost inextricable aspect of Enterprise 2.0. Of course the ‘iterate and refine’ concept can be implemented in other ways, but I think it’s fair to say that organizations absolutely need to get good at running pilots, if they’re not already there. It is a key facet of the path that leads to improved organizational performance.

So says Ross Dawson in pilots as a key instrument for improving organizational performance in a complex world. If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practice. There are no good or best practices that will work for  your context in a changing complex environment, so probing (AKA: piloting or Beta releases) is necessary to see what works. However, changing from a highly designed approach to an agile method is difficult. I previously recommended that instructional design adopt agile methods but even in the programming world, letting go of old ways is difficult as Sara Ford at Microsoft explains in how I learned to program manage an agile team after six years of waterfall.

There is no silver bullet solution to running the human performance side of an organization in the complexity of a highly networked economy with ubiquitous access to information and people. New tools keep being developed that can change the way we work and learn. Today it’s Twitter and tomorrow it will be something else. Approaching enterprise performance from the perspective of perpetual Beta is a way to maintain your sanity in all of this change. The values and culture can remain stable while the tools and practices keep evolving to take advantage of the situation.

Pilots are key to improving organizational performance but the culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta is my attitude toward learning – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilize. I’ve also realized that organizations with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those that believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilizes and we don’t need to learn or do anything new. I think that point is called death.

Protesting infringement on privacy and free speech in Canada

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Ontario Court Orders Website To Disclose Identity of Anonymous Posters

Protection for anonymous postings is certainly not an absolute, but a high threshold that requires prima facie evidence supporting the plaintiff’s claim is critical to ensuring that a proper balance is struck between the rights of a plaintiff (whether in a defamation or copyright case) and the privacy and free speech rights of the poster. I [Michael Geist] cannot comment on the postings themselves (and I recognize that Warman has been a frequent target online) but I fear that the high threshold seems to have been abandoned here, with the court all-too-eager to dismiss the privacy considerations associated with mandated disclosure by not engaging in an analysis as to whether the evidentiary standard was met.

We need very high thresholds before our rights can be trampled.

It’s time to black-out in protest.

Starting an Online Community

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There are several factors that should be looked at when creating a collaborative working/learning space. I’ve previously referred to Column Two’s three tiers of collaboration – Capacity, Capability & Strategy and it’s a good model to start with. Part of capacity are the existing processes and culture of collaboration while capability includes the best tools for the job. It’s not easy for a group of individuals, who do not know each other, to work collaboratively from the onset. It is even more difficult to ask that this collaboration occur online when the participants are not in the habit of working on the Internet. The practice of sharing needs to be joined with the tools that work for the culture. Finally, strategy includes the leadership, direction and project management of getting things going to work collaboratively online.

It’s important to get participants/members first used to processing their information flow online. A framework such as Personal Knowledge Mastery can be used, but each person must be given time to practice, connect and get feedback. The community also needs to be nurtured, one relationship at a time, as the creators of Flickr realized:

A lot of our success came from George, the lead designer, and Caterina. Both of them spent a lot of time in the early days greeting individual users as they came in, encouraging them and leaving comments on their photos. There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too.

Because culture is slow to change I would recommend starting with the simplest tool-set possible. Turn off most functions and only enable new ones when people start asking for more. As with tools, the same minimization principle goes for content. It is more important to build relationships and to draft the right people than it is to build the best content. Community trumps content online. Therefore, the focus should be on building connections.

A model we used for a CoP prototype (the first of several to be implemented on a variety of ‘topics’) was based on these roles in the core team:

Process Lead (Communities) – Stays current on online communities, evaluates progress, helps members with knowledge-sharing, develops processes and records progress.

Recruiter (Early Adopter) – Identifies and connects with other potential Early Adopters.

Recruiter (Maven) – Identifies subject areas of interest to the community and finds knowledge or human resources.

Technical Lead – Identifies technologies and ensures that the community has the right tools.

Topic Lead – The ‘go-to’ person on all questions relating to implementation. This person is supported by the other core team members.

Break down the walls

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If we don’t bust down the industrial-age silos in our organizations, their walls will inevitably crash down on us. Just ask the News department that had walls between print and the Web.

Three years ago Jon Husband called for an amalgamation of support functions in the networked workplace or eOD (e-OrganizationalDevelopment). Luis Suarez has suggested the merging of knowledge management and learning. Most recently Euan Semple calls for combining HR, Communications and IT. Euan says that HR are “maintainers of order, rather than enablers of staff”; that Communications manages rather than enables communication; while IT controls risk instead of enabling the business. These are generalizations, but expose the weaknesses of our current management system.

I’ve recommended before that a wide range of silos (HR, Training, Personnel, KM, OD, Communications, PR, Marketing, etc.) should be incorporated into one support function. Individuals could have a variety of roles, depending on organizational needs but all have to be focused on the organization. Separate departments create tribes and internal cultures that may be at cross-purposes with other departments or the overall organization. With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are internal departments of less value, they could subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately.

I know that there’s more than one way to achieve better functioning organizations but tearing down the walls is a good place to start.

Twitter: more than what I’m having for breakfast

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Twitter is a great source of information. Here are some “tweets” that caught my attention and I’ve added as “favorites”. An eclectic mix of tools, tips, information and ideas:

sleslie how did I never know about the <acronym> tag? http://snurl.com/adf6y

shantarohse When you want the whole discussion not just a monologue. TwitterScope by @designmeme shows posts with @ replies. Clever. http://bit.ly/rYEQ

skap5 RT @aptuscollab: @skap5 Future work unit is federated teams. Recession has broken valence bonds of old corporate molecule.

soluzioni #davos “… education is the engine nexus … technology is the flywheel …” – Linda Lorimer

valdiskrebs In this century, global power will increasingly be defined by connections — who is connected to whom & for what purposes. http://is.gd/iNyF

MichelleBlanc Retweeting @Cleo_Qc: @MichelleBlanc http://www.back-to-iraq.com/ Un journaliste supporté financièrement directement par ses lecteurs.

Dave_Ferguson RT @levyj413: “From 30,000 Feet to 3 Feet: Running a Federal Blog” http://twurl.nl/550nep <slideshare>

kate__k Great patching-together of twitter, delicious and RSS: become a ‘twitterteacher’, too! – http://tinyurl.com/bjtcdo – thanks @thecleversheep

thecleversheep PDF to Word is now available to everyone! http://www.pdftoword.com/

robpatrob Fast Forward guide to Twitter – all you need to know to convince a friend/boss/colleague is up now http://tinyurl.com/ayzub2

Disruptive business models already here

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The Great Disruption is on. Globalized, kleptocratic powers are trying to control the change by grabbing the monetary system while at the same time the Web has enabled empowering, grassroots initiatives like Kiva.org to spring up. As stock prices plummet and currency fluctuates, even the unwashed masses, who never understood derivatives, are realizing that money has no real value. That’s good because two types of organizations don’t need a lot of money.

First, a lot of Web services start with sweat equity and their service fees fuel organic growth with little need for investment until they are are already proven businesses. Second, natural enterprises, based on community, continue to spring up all over. Starting your own small business is one way to deal with down-sizing. In our town we have witnessed the launch of an organic bakery, a community supported agriculture association and a green builders cooperative in the past few years. All three are growing. At the same time, I’ve seen local web-based businesses going global with niche products and services.

A presentation from CFIB this week showed that 1) Farmers and 2) Small Business Owners are the most trusted professions in Canada. Investment bankers did not even make the list. So who is going to suffer from any future lack of talent, the big guys or the little guys? The big firms can only offer money, while smaller businesses usually offer lifestyle and a sense of doing something worthwhile. If we enter into a period of currency devaluation, then money will be of even less value. The barter system actually works at the local level.

In the networked, always-on workplace, community is king, as it has always been at the local level. Today, organizations, public, private & non-profit, need to connect with their communities. People are already doing this on the Web and it’s becoming unnatural to go to work and not be connected to our communities. Workers only surf the Web or play solitaire when they’re disconnected from their work. Keeping people connected and engaged is the great challenge, especially for larger organizations. This can be a role for the training department, but I’m not sure if most are up to it.

To weather the great disruption a successful organization will have to be more like 1) a web-based service company and 2) a small, community-based business. It will have to be nimble and remain small, or small-thinking. That means breaking down silos and giving autonomy to sub-organizations. It also means sharing and enabling people to connect on a human level, not with some document or policy. The future belongs to an organization that can think like a small business, where your word is your bond, and at the same time act as an inter-connected global citizen.

Catching the Zeitgeist

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From SocialCollider.net (via @gsiemens):

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter.

And here is what I found when looking at @hjarche on Twitter for the last week:

This visual shows that what we post (tweet) can take on a life of its own in the network and that we may not always consider this. We are not in control of our information once it’s on the Net.

Social media without the BPR

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Last night at ThirdTuesdayNB the conversation came around to how to implement social media in large, bureaucratic organizations without creating a white elephant type of project that takes years to implement. Michele Martin just posted some social media baby steps that have worked for her, particularly:

Static website => blog

Wikis for committee work to replace/reduce e-mail

Other small steps that I think can work without major business process re-engineering (BPR):

  • Use e-mail only for contractual/legal/official communications that need to be tracked, and add an internal Jaiku or Yammer instance of Twitter for business conversations inside the firewall.
  • Use social bookmarks and tags (Delicious or open source variants) to highlight external information, once again to replace e-mail and to open everyone’s browser “favorites” to the rest of the organization.
  • Replace multi-recipient e-mails with internal blog posts and send the link via e-mail or IM. All comments get added to the blog post and if the position holder leaves, the replacement takes over the blog. Great for non-sensitive discussions like training schedules.

New roles for the networked workplace

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The best definition of a professional I’ve seen comes from David Williamson Shaffer, author of How computer games help children learn [not really about children] as:

anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise

Let’s face it, no professional can know everything and is dependent on others for knowledge and expertise, hence the growing need for effective networks in our work and learning. Our networks are becoming all-important in our work and this requires an attitude of openness and collaboration, not the norm in industrial corporations nor command and control organizations.

If you agree that networks are more powerful and flexible than closed hierarchies, especially in complex environments, what should the support departments (HR, OD, KM, L&D) do to make their organizations more networked?

Jay Cross suggests some new roles for the networked workplace: “When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes, we don’t suggest firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors, and performance consultants.“

In looking at our current organizational roles that support the enterprise we should ask, how do these help to strengthen our networks? If they don’t, then it may be time to change, abolish or create new roles.

Communities of Practice

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I’m reviewing my resources on communities of practice and synthesizing some of the articles I’ve come across and added to my social bookmarks or blogged about on my Communities Thread.

One of the best sources of practical knowledge on online community building is Anecdote from Australia. In Building a Collaborative Workplace, they discuss three types of collaboration – Team, Community and Network. As they say, “Our purpose is to provide an understanding of the type of culture required to support collaboration.”

Anecdote’s collaborative framework:

Another Australian resource I found via Jack Vinson is three tiers of collaboration from Column Two, a good model to examine organizational readiness regarding – Strategy, Capability & Capacity.

Peter Bond’s article, which I referred to in 2005, on Communities of Practice and Complexity is still worth reading to see how communities can be viewed from a biological perspective and that communities don’t have to continue forever:

This suggests that the process of CoP development be approached as if they were transitory organisational phenomena that may act, but only for a finite period, as the source of the motivation for change and as the vehicles for change.

My 2006 post on the failure of online communities has some good comments and is worth a read if you’re thinking of setting up an online community. I also posted on an unsuccessful community of practice case study. Even with these failures, some think that we may be hard-wired for collaboration (good comments on this one).

Last year I used the Company Command model for a community of practice prototype. The advice on who to get involved in building it was useful:

  1. Initial Core Team of two or three people who desire to share knowledge.
  2. Early Adopters who are members of the community that you are serving, especially those who are already well-connected.
  3. Mavens with deep knowledge in an area that is valued by the members.

For anyone interested in the technology, I discussed how to select social network platforms as we were conducting our Work Literacy workshops. A wider variety of tools are listed on Robin Good’s Mind Map of best online collaboration tools.