Complexity

Complexity

Principles of creative management

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F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, written in 1911, is still the basis of many of our management practices today. Taylor’s ghost is everywhere.

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

One hundred years later, we need to get away from these ideas and adopt methods that enable creative work in an interconnected economy. I would suggest something like the following:

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.

It’s the network …

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I presented on Managing in a Networked World at DevLearn 2011 today in Las Vegas.

How do you manage a workforce that is both nomadic and collaborative? In a 24/7 always-on- and-interconnected world, do we need to rethink the industrial-workplace social contract that’s based on hours worked and being on-the-job ? Join Harold Jarche to discuss how these and other trends mean a shift to perpetual Beta, where learning is the work.

A total of four people attended, as compared to about 50 for a session this morning on some new learning technology tool. Many of my conversations with training/learning professionals have shown a general lack of interest in management, leadership or business issues. Too many learning folks are interested in the tools of THEIR trade and not the businesses they are supposed to serve.

Thinking like a node in a network and not as a position in a hierarchy is the first mental shift that’s required to move to a collaborative enterprise. Nurturing Creativity is now a management responsibility. The old traits of the industrial/information worker were Intellect, Diligence, and Obedience. The new traits of the collaborative worker are Passion, Creativity, and Initiative. These cannot be commoditized. People cannot be creative on demand. The collaborative enterprise requires looser hierarchies and stronger networks. What does that mean for learning & development?

The learning delivery model is being obsolesced by ubiquitous connectivity and diverse social networks. If learning professionals do not participate in the emergent leadership of the networked enterprise, they will be outsourced and sooner than later, automated. There is no room for those who just do their job within their job description (these were industrial-age constructs). The automation of physicians and lawyers was discussed during this morning’s keynote. What makes instructional designers et al, think they are any different? The 21st century workplace is all about understanding networks, modelling networked learning, supporting and strengthening networks.

Why do we need social business?

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The Dachis Group’s latest XPLANATiON of the attributes of a socially optimized business is a pretty good answer to the question, “What is social business?”

Looking just at the key differences in the info-graphic, I’d like to dig into “Why” these differences are necessary:

Greater acceptance of risks & failures: This is how complex problems are addressed, and all businesses are dealing with more complexity. As I mentioned in leadership emerges from network culture, a Probe-Sense-Respond approach is necessary. Dave Snowden underlines the fact that over half of your probes will fail and hence the need to have a culture where failure is an option. It’s what Dave calls “safe-fail”: “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.” Failure is not just an option, it’s a common occurrence.

Clear guidelines allow everyone to speak openly on behalf of the company. That’s because hyperlinks have subverted hierarchy. Everyone is connected. In hierarchical organizations, workers are more connected when they go home than when they’re at work. This is a sure sign of the obsolescence of many management control systems.  The Internet has changed everything.

Democratization of information: User-generated content is ubiquitous and much of it is very useful. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity will change traditional power structures, though the full effects of this are not yet visible.

Leaders and experts can easily emerge: It takes different leadership, or leadership for networks, to do the important work in complex work environments, which is to increase collaboration and support social learning in the workplace. If the main point of the internet is to remove “barriers to socializing”, then shouldn’t leadership in a networked, social business strive for a similar objective?

Team-oriented, much flatter, exists beyond the org chart: This is another result of a networked society but I’m not sure if team is the best term for social business and I would use collaboration instead. This is the objective of Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

Greater business visibility, info flows vertically and horizontally: There are emerging patterns and dynamics related to interconnected people and interlinked information flows, which are bypassing established traditional structures and services. It’s part of wired work.

Comfortable with outward facing communication: Most of the action in business is moving to the edge and a greater percentage of the workforce will be customer-facing.

Organizing for diversity and complexity

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I’ve been looking at ways to explain why social learning is so important for business today. It comes down to the fact that what we know and do inside our organizations is insufficient to address external complexity or to be innovative. In Leadership 2030, the Hay Group identifies six fairly obvious, but worth repeating, megatrends, all of which will require more innovative approaches to work:

  • The balance of power is shifting to the East
  • Climate change and scarcity of resources is a mounting problem
  • The war for talent rages on
  • Accommodating growing individualization, requiring more social workplaces
  • Embracing people who are digitally adept
  • Harnessing Nano-Info-Bio-Cogno technologies

Connecting the diversity of markets and society to the organization, instead of creating firewalls, is a major challenge for leadership today. How do you maintain the integrity of the organization while embracing the chaos beyond? Part of the answer is in supporting communities of practice as a bridge between external networks and those doing the work.

Project Teams do complex work (if it’s not complex, it will be outsourced & automated) which requires strong interpersonal ties. Nick Milton has a similar explanatory framework [I’ve used some of his terms in my revised graphic above], and notes the increase in virtual teams as well:

The fourth level [project teams] is where the business needs actively to work with people from elsewhere as part of a short lived co-located team, or a longer lived virtual team.  It needs the skills and input and judgment and effort from the others, and the outcome is co-created with the others.

At the far end are external networks, where we get ideas and opinions, in a more chaotic, unstructured and random way. This is where serendipity often beckons.

In the middle are communities of practice, which comprise a mix of strong and weak social ties and are the ideal liquid space for mixing learning and work while sharing advice and knowledge. Social networks are the enabling technologies that can connect external networks, communities of practice and project teams. Social learning is what flows on these networks.

Ross Dawson has a very good description of the power of social networks from the perspective of Giam Swiegers, CEO of Deloitte Australia. However, social media change the hierarchical power dynamic and not all leaders may be ready for it:

He said as a senior executive if you can’t handle having a peer conversation with young, junior staff, you shouldn’t get involved. He gave an example of a young staff member who disagreed on a key issue with the CEO who said so publicly. Swiegers far preferred to have the debate with him in public rather than the views being aired in the pub without him knowing about it.

An unpopular policy decision was made internally that Swiegers was not told about. The response on Yammer was strong, quickly leading to changes in the policy, guided by the most sensible alternatives proposed on the social network.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter starts by organizing to embrace diversity and manage complexity.

Cooperation and networks at Innotribe

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Stowe Boyd & I are opening the presentation on corporate culture this morning, here in Toronto at Sibos. We will be looking at how organizational frameworks and models have changed. Stowe will talk about the architecture of cooperation:

The new architecture of work is now emerging, after decades of transition. White collar work became knowledge work which has now become creative work. The transition from process to networks is not just a recasting, not just a different style of communication. The work is styled as information sharing through social relationships, and where ‘following’ takes the place of ‘invitation’. People coordinate efforts, but work on a wide variety of activities, which are not necessarily co-aligned with others’ work, and which are not necessarily even known in a general way. A new degree of privacy and autonomy animates cooperative work, in comparison to collaborative work. Individuals cooperating hand off information or take on tasks in a fashion that is like businesses cooperating: they see the benefit in cooperating, and don’t have to share a common core set of strategic goals to do so: they don’t need the alignment of goals that defines old style business employment.

I will discuss the TIMN model, which I learned about via John Robb. I will overlay it with a look at dominant communications media and talk about some of the organizational changes we are seeing and may see in the near future.

We may see more of the following.

Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

Heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same “horizontal” position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role [wikipedia].

Chaordic refers to a system of governance that blends characteristics of chaos and order. The term was coined by Dee Hock the founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association [wikipedia].

And I’ll ask these and some some other questions:

Do networks obsolesce hierarchies? Can they co-exist?

What happens when your customers are more connected than your organization?

How does the transparency that networks enable change your organizational model?

Informal learning is a business imperative

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In Part 2 of Social Learning doesn’t mean what you think it does, my colleague Jane Hart  uses a very helpful diagram created by a previous colleague of mine, Tom Gram:

Tom Gram’s diagram [reproduced below] shows that “most work requires a combination of knowledge work and routine work. These characteristics of jobs and work environments call for different approaches to training and development.” [see  Mapping informal and formal learning strategies to real work], so the work of the L&D department will be very different in different organisations, depending on the type of workers and work done.

I connected this to the whole notion of simpler work getting automated and outsourced usingTom’s framework.

I then created my own graphic and looked at what happens to work if this is true.

Supporting informal learning and helping connect tacit knowledge in the enterprise are now business imperatives, not just something extra. The valued work in the enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. It is moving to the edge. Organizations that do not optimize informal learning may themselves get automated and outsourced.

Social networks drive Innovation

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I’m always looking for simple ways to explain how networks change business and how social media help to increase openness, driving transparency and increasing innovation.

Does this graphic stand on its own, or is there more explanation required?

Updated:

With significant feedback via Google+, here is the next, but not last, version.

Version 3 (thanks to Dan Pontefract & Simon Fowler and many others on Google Plus)

Metacognition, our secret weapon

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Why are organizations victim to “negative, culturally-driven patterns” while cities are not, asks Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon. In a most interesting paper, Patrick examines why organizations seem to sabotage  themselves; why cities grow, corporations die and life gets faster; how the food price index is linked to political instability; and a long discussion on the role of witchcraft in most societies.

How Collectives Inhibit Insight (PDF) synthesizes much of my own recent thinking, on bureaucracy and the emergent nature of corporate culture.

These patterns of behaviour are emergent and unintended. Collectives do not sit down and decide by consensus to act in these ways. They just happen. But there does seem to be a “grammar” of collective behaviours, where specific kinds of circumstance will produce specific kinds of social response, and which therefore makes them predictable.

There are two ideas here:

(1) social collectives produce unintended (ie never deliberately planned by individuals or groups of individuals) habits of thinking and behaving, and provide those habits to their members – and these habits have predictable, discoverable “grammars” rooted in the circumstances of the social collective and its needs; and

(2) the natural “grammar” of social collectives in response to insight and innovation is to impose friction on the absorption of new ideas.

If we understand the grammar of how social collectives naturally respond to insight, perhaps we can understand how to work with the insight-activation mechanisms of that grammar, and avoid or mitigate the effects of the insight suppression mechanisms.

Social collectives seem to have a life of their own, no matter what any individual does. This can appear hopeless, but Patrick shows that we a powerful weapon, “we have something that social collectives do not have – and that is metacognition, the ability to reflect on our own thinking processes and to question them.” This is a powerful tool in all that we do within organizations and societies. The ability to see outside of our selves. With much discussion in various venues about 21st century competencies, I would put metacognition at the top of the list, as it’s the core of critical thinking.

Corporate culture

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Next month I’ll be discussing corporate culture at Sibos in Toronto. My view (not original) is that corporate culture is an emergent property. It is a result of the myriad properties of the organization and its environment. Culture happens, and like a child, once born, the parents are not really in control.

We used to think of organizations like machines, inspired by Newtonian physics 300 years ago. The scientific revolution followed the last communication revolution, the age of print.  Now we face a new revolution as we sit in the middle of the electric age, its disembodied words first spread by the telegraph and now the Internet. With increasing connections and speeds of transmission, our work environments have become much more complex.

In complex environments, emergent practices have to be developed by probing, sensing and responding. This is what I call perpetual Beta; constantly probing the environment, sensing what happens and then responding by creating Beta practices; but always ready to discard them should the situation change. Both culture and practice emerge from the organization and its environment. As John Seely Brown noted, in order to understand complex systems you have to marinate in them.

The one complex system that I know best is my body. I remember as a competitive athlete how in tune I was with my body, feeling the smallest changes. People would ask me what I thought about during races. Most of the time I was monitoring my systems, seeing if I could push a bit harder, change my stride or take advantage of some aspect of the environment. I was marinating in it.

For several decades the idea of the organization as organism has spread, popularized by the work of Peter Senge on the learning organization in 1990.  If you think of organizations like organisms and culture as emergent then it becomes obvious that understanding and monitoring systems is critical.  If you also understand the need to develop emergent practices in order to adapt and thrive, then you know you have to engage the entire organism. As a complex adaptive system, it cannot be directed and there is no obvious link between cause and and effect. You don’t push a button at head office and voilà you get a specific result at the field office. Instead, you keep the body healthy, engaged and constantly learning. The body, and all its constituent parts,  then adapts to its environment.

This is how you develop a healthy corporate culture. Nurture the body, which is composed of people and their relationships, using tools, within a framework of processes and procedures. But designing an effective work system is only part of the solution; it merely sets the stage. Marinating in the resulting complex adaptive system is essential. Monitoring all systems by engaging with them is how we can understand the organization as organism. It cannot be done by managers disconnected from the work being done. It cannot be done from behind a desk. To know the culture, be the culture.

Lead, follow or get out of the way

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A while back, it was only those nasty dictatorships that shut down communications, but now “enlightened” democracies like the USA and the UK are doing the same. However, it’s not really about social media, as they’re just the current manifestation of the Internet. The Cluetrain made it clear in 1999, “Hyperlinks subvert Hierarchy”. We are living in a complex, hyperlinked society and this interconnectivity is changing how we work and live.

Nine Shift likens it to 100 years ago when we left the agrarian age and moved into the industrial age: we are at a turning point in society (2008-2012) and the old way gives way to the new way (2010-2020). Mark Federman sees this point in time as just past mid-way in a 300-year transition of our dominant communication medium, from the print age to the electric age, starting with the telegraph and currently manifested with Web 2.0 [see Why Johnnie & Janey Can’t Read and Why Mr & Mrs Smith Can’t Teach PDF].

Social media for marketing was the tip of the iceberg. This didn’t shake much up, as there was no significant power shift. Corporations stayed in charge. But the real power of social media is for getting things done. Social media facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at the hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones. They give communication power to each person. Social media enable ridiculously easy group-forming, for both furthering democracy and enabling hooligans.

Institutions are just beginning to realize how profound these changes are and they are fighting back. The role of bureaucracy is to maintain the status quo. For the last one hundred years, our positions in the hierarchy have given us our purpose. In North America, people still ask, “What do you do for a living?”. It places us in the pecking order. This was very noticeable when I worked for the federal government in Ottawa 20 years ago. Each job title had a number of digits. The more digits you had, the lower you were, and therefore of less importance. Traditional, stable hierarchies will be blown apart by the interconnected, always-on electric age.

My observations show these are some of the required qualities for what is currently called the social enterprise, a better way of working together:

Work is open & transparent
There is a constant need to share and work is narrated
Continuous learning is a must
Conversation is valued
There is time for reflection
A culture of Perpetual Beta
Metrics are understood and measured by the workers

These are at cross-purposes with most of our existing organizational structures, whether it be the non-democratic enterprise with the CEO as anointed ruler or the bureaucracies where process trumps purpose. There is little doubt that the powers-that-be will continue to fight against the new medium because it is already destroying many of the old forms of power. This has happened with each communication revolution.

Therefore it’s no surprise that we will continue to hear about the Web being censored or government controlling our communications. If we want open and transparent work, education and governance then we will have to fight for it. The good thing is that the next generation is already onboard. We only have to look to them for inspiration. It’s up to us to step up and provide some leadership.

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“Lead, follow or get out of the way”

~ Thomas Paine