ConnectedEnterprise

Connected enterprise

designing the emergent organization

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In The Rise of Emergent Organizations, Beth Comstock, Vice Chair at GE, provides some rules of thumb to guide organizational design for the emerging network era. It is wonderful to see a large corporation putting into practice the recommendations I, and many others, have been making on organizational design for more than a decade. I have taken five of these rules of thumb and annotated them with images from my last book in the perpetual beta series: Working in Perpetual Beta. With such an example set by GE, more organizations should be able to convince their executives that a serious redesign of how they work is essential. The alternative does not look good.

“The Elephant in the Room: Our current approach to business and employment (two crucial drivers of the economy) are designed to screw and take advantage of far too many people in the workforce. Extensive changes are required to fix this, much faster than most leaders are willing to admit, talk about, or address.

The elephant in the room is the future of work and every person’s place in that future.”

—Bill Jensen

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perpetual beta working model

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The perpetual beta working model is just that: a working model about working. I have developed several models that inform my professional practice, such as the network learning model that shows how work and learning have to be connected. The triple operating system describes how organizations can connect three types of networks. All of these models are founded on individuals taking control of their learning and professional development while actively engaging in social networks and communities of practice. This is the personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework and the Seek > Sense > Share model.

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working out loud in perpetual beta

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So it’s international working out loud week [AKA Narrating Our Work] and this year people are encouraged to follow a seven-day structure.

  1. Share a purpose
  2. Make a connection
  3. Make a contribution
  4. Share your progress
  5. Share a need
  6. Celebrate, Help
  7. Plan next steps

These seven components can help make work teams more effective as they collaborate to achieve some purpose. Narrating Our Work requires purpose, or it’s not work. Collaboration means taking action. In order to learn, people need to share. They need to make connections, between ideas as well as people.

But Narrating Our Work needs people who are actively engaged in learning. If not, the work space can become an echo chamber. Experimentation with alternatives is how we learn to do new things. This is what #wolweek encourages. Doing this outside the work team means it can be more playful and creative. This is why we all need to find communities of practice beyond our work teams.

We also need to be aware of what is happening outside our spheres of influence. We need to be curious and find others who are not like us. This means we have to give without expectation of direct benefit. This is cooperation. Our social networks can provide this diversity and increase the potential for serendipitous discoveries. “Chance favors the connected mind”, says Stephen B. Johnson.

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it’s not a skills gap

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The lack of skills is not the main problem facing most organizations today, in spite of what many managers and executives might say.

Researchers Dave Swenson and Liesl Eathington identified several factors contributing to hiring challenges, but a widespread lack of skilled workers was not one them … The Iowa researchers’ conclusion? “When employers say there’s a skills gap, what they’re often really saying is they can’t find workers willing to work for the pay they’re willing to pay,” —GE Reports

Neither is a lack of tools the core issue in organizational performance. Many organizations have more tools than they need. I worked with a company that had several hundred software platforms and programs at its disposal. It still had issues around sharing knowledge, managing institutional memory, and collaborating across departments.

Tools and skills are easy-to-fill buckets, but meta-competencies of learning to learn and working in digital networks take significant time, effort, and support to fill. A long-term strategy to support these meta-competencies is lacking in most organizations today. Everyone wants a quick fix. Projects are designed around clear short-term deliverables. Few measure competencies for the long term.

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a new business ideology

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“Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.” – Charles Green

The following table shows how ideas, technology, organizations, and institutions are changing as we enter a network economy. There is now a need for a new business ideology.

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enabling self-governing teams

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“All forms of governance are failing their citizens — dictatorships and communism failed in the last part of the 20th century, and in this century democracies are not meeting citizen expectations. No matter which leaders are chosen, the systems themselves are failing.” – Yaneer Bar-Yam

Our communities were not developed for a global economy, our institutions were not designed for a networked citizenry, and our markets were created for physical goods, not networked intangibles. We need to create new institutions and markets for the network era. Perhaps monitory democracy is an answer. Perhaps it requires an applied blueprint for the restoration of democracy.

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implementing a triple operating system

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A triple operating system aligns work and learning and has a network perspective. It is based on three interrelated processes, first proposed by Valdis Krebs: Awareness, Alternatives, Action. My perspective is that people in organizations cannot take appropriate action unless they have systems in place to consider alternatives, and are aware of the complex environments in which they operate. While my network learning model [previous post] looks at knowledge flow from the individual’s point of view, the triple operating system is an organizational perspective.

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implementing network learning

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In the network era, developing the skills of a master artisan in every field of work will be critical for success. While getting work done collaboratively will continue to be of importance in all organizations, it will not be enough. New ideas will have to come from our professional networks in order to keep pace with innovation and change in our fields. More importantly, a safe place is needed to connect these new ideas to the work to be done. Communities of practice will continue to grow as knowledge artisans need to integrate their work and learning in a trusted space. As the gig economy dominates, communities of practice can bring some stability to our professional development. These are owned by the practitioners themselves, not an association and not an organization. You know you are in a real community of practice when it changes your practice.

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principles and models for the network era

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The End of the Market Era

Capitalism today is the ultimate expression of a market dominated society, where money is made from nothing, as financial traders manipulate stocks, currencies, and whatever else they can. Its final growth spurt was enabled by ubiquitous fossil fuels so that supply chains could take advantage of either cheap goods or cheap labour due to the human inequalities on our planet. But the age of oil is ending, and markets are being replaced by networks as the dominant organizing model. Nafeez Ahmed recently stated that the end of capitalism is inevitable.

“At the core of this radical re-wiring is a transformation of the human relationship with nature: moving away from top-down modes of political and economic organization, to participatory models of grassroots self-governance, localized sustainable agriculture, and equity in access to economic production.” – Medium.com

One theory that has informed my own work is David Ronfeldt’s TIMN (Tribes-Institutions-Markets-Networks) Theory showing that all four of these forms will co-exist as we enter the next evolution of society, but networks will dominate. This explanatory theory shows what has happened as we have previously transitioned from one dominant organizing form to the next and is a good starting point to discuss what we can do about it.

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human networks connect through empathy

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We are only as good as our networks. Our decisions reflect the diversity of our networks. Complex problems usually do not have simple solutions but require a deep understanding of the context. How do we understand the complexity of social networks? Empathy puts us in other people’s shoes. We try to understand their perspective. Empathy is a requisite perspective for the network era. Empathy means engaging with others. The ability to connect with a diversity of people is the human potential of the Internet.

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