ConnectedEnterprise – Page 11

Industrial disease

2022-02-222014-03-02 by Harold Jarche

some blame the management, some the employees;
and everybody knows it’s the Industrial Disease —Dire Straits

Complexity is the new normal

We are so interconnected today that many cannot imagine otherwise. Almost every person is connected to worldwide communication networks. News travels at the speed of a Tweet. Meanwhile, inside the enterprise, reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster to deal with markets that can create multi-billion dollar valuations seemingly overnight. But are they getting faster?

In a wired world, companies have to re-wire

2020-10-262014-02-26 by Harold Jarche

Wirearchies are smarter than the sum of their parts. But what are the parts? One way to look at wirearchy is as four interrelated levels:

Coordination of routine & standardized work
The daily practice of getting work done
The continuous development of expertise
Connecting to others with complementary interests

All levels are necessary and knowledge has to flow between them, or companies will get disconnected from their markets and their people. This is why trust is so important, and the sharing of power and authority is the visible evidence of trust.

Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations. —The Cluetrain Manifesto

In a wired world, companies have to re-wire. The gap between markets and companies can only be addressed by two-way conversations between real people. Companies need to foster not only internal communities of practice but external communities of expertise. Only people can enable knowledge, trust and credibility to flow within and between markets and companies. Business in a wired world is first interconnected people, and then technology. Wirearchy puts people first.

Download PDF: wirearchy in 4 parts

Wirearchies are smarter than the sum of their parts

2018-08-022014-02-24 by Harold Jarche

Many parts of knowledge work have been routinized and standardized with the ongoing marriages of business processes and integrated enterprise information systems. What has not changed much yet is the adaptation of structures and culture to permit easily building flows of information into pertinent, useful and just-in-time knowledge, or fanning out problem-solving and accountability into networks of connected workers. —Jon Husband

Chee Chin Liew’s 2010 slide presentation on moving from hierarchies to teams at BASF shows how IT Services used their technology platforms to enhance networking, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration. The slide on the character of communities (#14) shows one approach to “building flows of information into pertinent, useful and just-in-time knowledge”.

Adapting these ideas to a model that promotes a “dynamic two-way flow of power of authority enabled by interconnected people and technology” shows how knowledge can flow in order to foster trust and credibility. Creating this two-way flow of dialogue, practice, expertise, and interest, can be the foundation of a wirearchy.

[Note: I might rename Dialogue to Coordination in a future version.]

Work in the network era needs to be cooperative and collaborative, and organizations have to support both. This may not be an easy transition for companies based solely on unified leadership. Collaboration is not the same as cooperation. Collaboration means working together, with an objective, and usually for a boss. This can work well when the objective is clear and the conditions do not change. Cooperation means sharing and helping others without expectations of direct reciprocation. Cooperation helps to strengthen networks, without central managerial interference. In times of rapid change, and decreasing lifespans of companies, cooperation trumps collaboration.

In complex environments, weak hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle. While many companies today have strong networks, they are too often coupled with strong central control. Becoming a wirearchy requires new organizational structures that incorporate communities, networks, and cooperative behaviours. It means giving up control. The job of those in leaderships roles is to help the network make better decisions.

As markets get more complex in the network era, most business value is created through innovation, not process improvement. Innovative ideas come through loose social ties and diverse opinions. Companies therefore need to push work beyond the practice layer and out to communities and networks. Openness improves task coordination, so that all problems can be seen. Transparency can improve collaboration to get tasks done better. In such a work environment, trust emerges. With openness and transparency in place, cooperation with more diverse knowledge networks can then lead to real business value. Hierarchies are merely simple control networks, while wirearchies are complex human networks.

Let me once again put forth my Principles of Management for the Network Era: 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, as well as management.

We need to undo our dominant business models which are the legacy of military hierarchies because they are inefficient, ineffective, and stifle innovation. Hierarchies are only as good as the smartest gatekeeper. Wirearchies are smarter than the sum of their parts.

Changing the world of work

2017-07-102014-02-19 by Harold Jarche

Change Agents Worldwide has just released its first ebook featuring 21 views on the future of work. I have captured some of the highlights and set them in a flow to tell a part of the story, but you will want to read them all. Most formats are free of charge, and don’t forget to check out the last page.

We believe change is coming fast to the enterprise. We believe in the principles that drive the evolving Web: chief among these are transparency, sharing/collaboration, authenticity, and trust. —@chagww

The World of Work

The typical situation in which many businesses are stuck – taming emergent bottom-up behaviors external to organizations, while trying to give rise internally to similar emergence through top-down programs. —Thierry de Baillon

As I walk the halls of too many businesses, I see zombies. They were once new employees, alive, full of excitement and vitality; they were one part optimism, one part tenacity with at least a sprinkle of ingeniousness. Now those characteristics have all but vanished. Reluctantly, they have become cogs in the machine. —Kevin Jones

The last decade has been all about the social business buzz with organizations introducing new technologies with old-world thinking. —Ayelet Baron

How to Ensure the Failure of Your Change Initiative: Engage with your legal team and allow them to make the policies for use of the new capability as restrictive as possible. —Bruce Galinsky

Generation Y: So when I make the realization that I am a shiny new cog in an old, rusty machine, you, my manager, must act quickly to help keep me engaged, productive, and happy. —Carrie Basham Young

Re-thinking Work

The possibilities for what your organization can become when you no longer think of employees as cogs in a wheel are extraordinary. —Rob Caldera

In a knowledge economy, it’s the talent and knowledge of people, and the results of their productive interactions that create value — solving complex problems, inventing new solutions, engaging with customers. —Catherine Shinners

The collapse of workplace certainty requires us to – forge new partnerships; subvert hierarchies; connect & reconnect; add our special value. —Jonathan Anthony.

Rethinking how we pay people for an era defined by networked collaboration represents an important element in the quest for ongoing improvements in performance. —Jon Husband

Sharing complex knowledge in trusted networks requires a combination of actively engaged knowledge workers, using optimal communications tools, all within a supportive organizational structure. —Harold Jarche

The best outcomes come from creating an environment where individuals can think and learn together. —Clark Quinn

In your job, whenever you have to design a project or achieve a task that supports the classical Top-Down frame, think about doing it a different way. —Céline Schillinger

An important consideration is not always focusing on “What’s in it for me right now?” but on shifting our thinking to “What will best balance satisfying immediate needs, yet still nourish future opportunity in the process?” —Bryce Williams

Setting out to “change the world of work” is an ambitious goal. It takes a raw courage to challenge the status quo, to tear down the psychological walls that have built our understanding of “work” as we know it in the 21st century. —Susan Scrupski

Changing the World of Work

The world needs each of us to hear the call in the distance and move. The people making a difference are leaping one step at a time. —Marcia Conner

Deciding to trust your own choices of talented people is the first step to the future of work. —Simon Terry

If you believe change is needed but don’t know where to start, consider a very simple approach: revisit the annual objectives. Make 50 percent of the bonus count for engagement and exploration of better ways of working. —Danny DeGrave

A good Change Agent will use his network to reach out way beyond his company — and even his industry — to find the most forward- thinking people, study their way of working, and then apply that new knowledge to his own enterprise. —Jim Worth

Forget about job titles and job descriptions. They are constraints. Tear your eyes away from the rear-view mirror and have a good long look through the windshield. —Richard Martin

Storytelling is more powerful than official, crafted messages. “Look what they did” means more than “Our strategy is to do this.” —Jane McConnell

Be ready to start a journey. Nobody will guarantee you that this journey will be successful. But to quote philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: “I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.” —Rainer Gimbel

Postscript

We don’t know exactly how it happened. Our chroniclers believe it started around 2020, when networks became an invisible fabric of society. Everyone and everything was connected to everyone and everything else. —Joachim Stroh

7 guidelines for managing open networks

2017-03-142014-02-14 by Harold Jarche

Ed Morrison, Advisor for the Purdue Center for Regional Development, says that many of the familiar approaches to management no longer apply, and goes on to provide 7 keys to guiding an open network. I have added my images that support this excellent set of rules.

Click on each image for a link to the supporting article.

Rule 1: Form a core team with distributed leadership roles

Rule 2: To accelerate, go slowly at first [AKA: Probe-Sense-Respond]

Rule 3: Find opportunities by linking and leveraging assets

Rule 4: Create coherence with visualizations and outcomes with success metrics

Rule 5: Adopt simple rules to design and implement strategy

Rule 6: Promote transparency, mutual accountability and success metrics

Rule 7: Embrace action and experimentation

Social Learning Handbook

2014-01-27 by Harold Jarche

This post is an excerpt from Jane Hart’s recently published Social Learning Handbook 2014.

It’s all about people.

Today’s digitally connected workplace demands a completely new set of skills. Our increasing interconnectedness is illuminating the complexity of our work environments. More connections create more possibilities, as well as more potential problems.

On the negative side, we are seeing that simple work keeps getting automated, like automatic bank machines. Complicated work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labor.

On the positive side, complex work can provide unique business advantages and creative work can help to identify new business opportunities. However, complex work is difficult to copy and creative work constantly changes.

But both complex and creative work require greater implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge, unlike explicit knowledge, is difficult to codify and standardize. It is also difficult to transfer.

Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their pay cheque. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done.

Becoming a successful social organization will require more than just the implementation of enterprise social technologies. Developing, supporting, and encouraging people to use a range of new social workplace skills will be just as important. Individual skills, in addition to new organizational support structures, are both required.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization. Keeping track of digital information flows and separating the signal from the noise is difficult. There is little time to make sense of it all. We may feel like we are just not able to stay current and make informed decisions. PKM gives a framework to develop a network of people and sources of information that one can draw from on a daily basis. PKM is a process of filtering, creating, and discerning, and it also helps manage individual professional development through continuous learning.

Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks. In order to support collaborative working and learning in the organization, it is important to experience what it means to work and learn collaboratively, and understand the new community and collaboration skills that are involved. “You can’t train someone to be social, only show them how to be social.” Practice is necessary.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every existing business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust. The 21st century connected enterprise is a new world of work and learning.

For example, traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are changing. Probably the biggest change we are seeing is that the content delivery model is being replaced by more social and collaborative frameworks. This is due to almost universal Internet connectivity, especially with mobile devices, as well as a growing familiarity with online social networks.

Work is changing and so organizational learning must change. There is an urgent need for organizational support functions (HR, OD, KM, Training) to move beyond offering training services and toward supporting learning as it is happening in the digitally connected workplace. The connected enterprise will not wait for the training department to catch up.

Moving to the edges

2014-01-21 by Harold Jarche

Innovation comes from the edge, almost never from the centre. Sometimes it’s cool to live on the edge but for the most part it’s hard work. Things keep breaking. The business models are not proven. The procedures aren’t fixed. The models and metaphors are not understood by everyone. It’s difficult to connect with the mainstream. This is life on the edges.

I have been living on the edges for over a decade and it has given me a unique perspective. Twenty years ago I saw the power of the internet and that it could have as great an impact on society and business as the printing press did. My graduate thesis discussed this and I have since examined in depth the world as it has changed into the global village that Marshall McLuhan saw. I chose to move to the edges of business and technology to explore the emerging network era, giving up mainstream employment in order to do so. I figured that to be a good teacher I would first need to be a good learner.

In the near future, the edges will be where almost all high-value work will be done in organizations. Change and complexity will be the norm in this work. Most people will work the edges, or not at all. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced. This core will be managed by very few internal staff.

This is a sea change in organizational design. Some companies are already playing with new designs, tweaking their existing models. A few, mostly start-ups, are trying completely new models. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value. Freelancers and contractors, already increasing in number, will be needed to address continuously evolving markets. The future of work will be in understanding complexity and dealing with chaos.

A core organizational design challenge in this shift will be addressing our inherent tribal nature. People have a strong need to belong to something identifiable. But this need for a sense of belonging can detract from critical thinking and questioning the inherent assumptions of our existing structures. However, this questioning will be essential as organizations test out new work models. Unfortunately, anthropology does not scale as easily as technology does. While some organizations may have the software networks in place, most lack pervasive network thinking and social skills.

As organizations become more technologically networked, they also face skilled, motivated and intelligent workers who can now see systemic dysfunctions. But those who talk about these problems are often branded as rebels. Pitting tribes of rebels against tribes of incumbent power-holders only detracts from the serious organizational redesign that needs to be done. In addition, traditional external consultants will be of little help because trying to solve this challenge from the outside will only result in the problems being changed from the inside. Organizations will have to solve their own problems, and this takes time.

From my perspective on the edge, a new type of business relationship is needed. Change management has to be seen as a way of working, not a separate process, and not an event. It needs to involve all tribes. On the edges the answers may not be clear, but they are less obscured than in the centre. A new business partnership is needed, between current management on the inside, workers moving to the edges, and others living beyond the organizational edges. Organizational development and change management need to move to the edges, and quickly.

This post is a follow-up to Rebels on the Edges.

Image: @gapingvoid

Six roles of network management

2017-06-052014-01-19 by Harold Jarche

If helping the network make better decisions is a primary role of management in the emerging economy, how does one get there? I highlighted the six roles of management in the network era in my last post and I would like to build on these and show how this is being practiced at Change Agents Worldwide.

First of all, the founders set a good example of transparency and working out loud. Subsequent members have joined and continue to narrate their work. Also, the network does not have a marketing department, as everyone is responsible for connecting with our markets. Everyone must set an example because there is no one to defer work to. In this environment everyone is learning and everyone is teaching by example. As a result, work gets done very quickly, such as our first ebook, that would have taken months to complete by a central marketing department.

We are all knowledge managers at CAWW, sharing as we work transparently. Some, like myself, share blog posts at appropriate moments. Others share tools, techniques, and experiences. The organizational knowledge base, much of it captured in a large wiki, constantly grows. There is no central management for our knowledge.

It is important to know why we are creating this not-for-profit “collaborative sharing economy model for consulting services”. We constantly discuss the Why of our work, and ensure we stay focused and do not chase every new opportunity. Our Why is to change how work gets done in large organizations. As a result, we have a very diverse group of change agents, from various disciplines, countries, and industries.

It is interesting to see how our discussions focus on improving insights and we are not overly focused on merely improving internal processes and procedures. We leave that to people doing the work, as change agents are independent and can choose their own tools and techniques, like true knowledge artisans.

With hundreds of years of experience, an open discussion environment, and people who have worked as internal and external consultants, there is no shortage of learning opportunities. Change agents can freely join project teams and try something new. CAWW is one big learning experience for everyone, and the speed of learning is amazing.

These ‘management’ roles apply to all members, for in a network, everyone is a manager, and everyone can play a leadership role. The principles of openness, transparency, and diversity provide a solid foundation for these roles to be practiced. I think this model will help to create a new way of approaching workplace change. Large, hierarchical consultancies are no longer sufficient to help organizations adapt to the network era. As Donald Clark says, “Dinosaurs don’t give birth to gazelles.”

Helping the network make better decisions is the primary job of every change agent. It should be the job of every person in every organization. Perhaps some day it will be.

Management in Networks

2018-03-112014-01-14 by Harold Jarche

In networks, cooperation is more important than collaboration. Collaboration is working together toward a common objective. This is what most workplaces are focused on. It is also what most managers focus on. Implicit in many workplaces is that if you are not focused on the objective at hand, you are not doing any real work. This emphasis on collaboration blinds managers. They cannot see the potential of social networks for enabling sense-making and knowledge-sharing. Many managers do not understand the value of cooperation, or sharing freely without direct reciprocity. Cooperation sounds too much like wasting time on Facebook or Twitter. Most management practices today still focus on 20th century models, such as Henri Fayol’s six functions of management [look familiar?].

forecasting
planning
organizing
commanding
coordinating
controlling

I heard these same functions discussed by a workplace issues consultant on the radio as recently as yesterday morning. Notice that there is no function for enhancing serendipity, or increasing innovation, or inspiring people. The core of management practice today has not changed since the days of Fayol, who died ninety years ago.

But the new reality is that networks are the new companies. The company no longer offers the stability it once did as innovative disruption comes from all corners. Economic value is getting redistributed to creative workers and then diffused through networks. Knowledge networks differ from company hierarchies. One major difference is that cooperation, not collaboration, is the optimal behaviour in a knowledge network. In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration.

So what are the functions of management in the network era?

managing network era

Improve insights – Too often, management only focuses on reducing errors, but it is insight that drives innovation. Managers must loosen the filters through which information and knowledge pass in the organization and increase the organizational willpower to act on these insights.

Provide Learning Experiences – As Charles Jennings notes, managers are vital for workers’ performance improvement, but only if they provide opportunities for experiential learning with constructive feedback, new projects, and new skills.

Focus on the “Why” of Work – Current compensation systems ignore the data on human motivation. Extrinsic rewards only work for simple physical tasks and increased monetary rewards can actually be detrimental to performance, especially with knowledge work. The keys to motivation at work are for each person to have a sense of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. This is a network management responsibility.

Help the Network Make Better Decisions – Managers should see themselves as servant leaders. Managers must actively listen, continuously question the changing work context, help to see patterns and make sense of them, and then suggest new practices and build consensus with networked workers.

Be Knowledge Managers – Managers need to practice and encourage personal knowledge management throughout the network.

Be an Example – Social networks shine a spotlight on dysfunctional managers. Cooperative behaviours require an example and that example must come from those in management positions. While there may be a role for good managers in networks, there likely will not be much of a future for bosses.

Connected leadership is helping the network make better decisions

2016-11-022014-01-06 by Harold Jarche

Organizations face more complexity in the type of work they do, the problems they face, and the markets they interact with. This is due to increasing connections between everyone and everything. To deal with this complexity, organizations must structure around loose hierarchies and strong networks. This challenges command and control management as well as the concept that those in leadership positions are special. It makes the concept of High Potential [HiPo] employees seem rather old-fashioned. Leadership in networks is an emergent property.

In networks, everyone is a contributor within a transparent environment. Effective networks are also diverse and open. Anyone can lead in a network, if there are willing followers. Those who have consensus to lead have to actively listen and make sense of what is happening. They are in service to the network, to help keep it resilient through transparency, diversity of ideas, and openness. Servant leaders help to set the context around them and build consensus around emergent practices.