ConnectedEnterprise – Page 5

“We made up these rules, and we can change them”

2016-05-242016-05-23 by Harold Jarche

Now is the time for a serious rethinking of how we organize in our society: from businesses, to schools, and as communities. We need to base all of our organizations on the principle of temporary, negotiated hierarchies. In this way, citizens can freely cooperate and from time to time, as required, collaborate to get things done. This requires a new approach to organizing work, abolishing the separation of employer & employee, as well as the artificial and unequal division between labour and financial capital. Simultaneously, our educational systems need to phase out teachers and curriculum and focus on everyone becoming a better learner.

Top down leadership, including teaching, is no longer necessary in the network era. As Donald Clark notes, “We have fetishised ‘Leadership’, we’re all leaders now, rendering the word meaningless”. I have noted before that smart cities need smart citizens. The smart citizen is connected: to communities of practice, extended social networks, the community, and society. In the network era rigid hierarchies are counter-productive, as they shut off opportunities for serendipity and innovation, which is why self-organization must be the basis of new organizational models. The market era is ending. The emerging network era needs new operating principles. Now is the time to create these.

enabling enterprise social networks

2016-04-202016-04-20 by Harold Jarche

Mark Britz says that, “your organization already has an enterprise social network (hint, it’s people not technology). A platform just exposes it.” But it’s not not about the tools either, as in many cases the medium changes the message. When the AgileBits team found they were using Slack for everything, it became overwhelming, much as email and its inevitable inbox overload, is common in too many organizations.

“Slack was simply too good for us to resist and as a result we preferred using it over all the other tools at our disposal … All of these interactions would happen in Slack, despite there being many other tools that are better suited. Tools like bug trackers and wikis would allow answers to be preserved so future questions wouldn’t even have to be asked but they weren’t as fun.

We all knew how great it would be to have a repository of knowledge for people to find their answers, but Slack was simply too good at providing the quick fix we all needed. Copying these answers from Slack to a permanent location didn’t release the same endorphins provided by Slack, so it seldom happened.” – Curing Our Slack Addiction

complexity in the workplace

2016-08-292016-04-19 by Harold Jarche

In my post on complexity and learning, I said that work in networks requires different skills than in hierarchies. Coordination is making sure things get done effectively and efficiently. Most organizations do this well. Collaboration is working together for a common objective, usually directed through someone in authority. This is still the focus of most management training. But cooperation should be the default behaviour for connected organizations working in the network era.

Cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. People in a network cannot be told what to do, only influenced by their peers. If they don’t like you, they won’t connect. In a hierarchy you only have to please your boss. In a network you have to be seen as having some value, though not the same value, by many others. Organizations need to be open, transparent, and diverse to thrive in networks. Enabling people to cooperate gives organizations the flexibility they will need to engage with complexity.

connecting cooperation and collaboration

2021-05-182016-01-18 by Harold Jarche

According to The Collaboration Paradox: Why Working Together Often Yields Weaker Results, some of the reasons that workplace collaboration fails is due to:

overconfidence in our collective thinking;
peer pressure to conform; and
reliance on others to do the work.

The article goes on to show that collaboration works when:

we work with people with different skills;
we do what each person does best; and
we all contribute our own work.

the self-governance maturity model

2019-04-192015-11-22 by Harold Jarche

“If we emphasize Autonomy, the Node Artifact, Autonomy as the core organizing principle, this will result in individuals, small groups and tribes, forming complex responsive flows e.g. through conversations and flexible ad hoc structures.” —John Kellden

In the triple operating system (Awareness>Alternatives>Action) work gets done by self-governing work teams with a degree of autonomy operating in temporary, negotiated hierarchies. Self-organizing teams are more flexible than hierarchical ones, but they require active and engaged members. One cannot cede power to the boss, because everyone is responsible for the boss they choose. Like democracy, self-organized teams require constant effort to work. Hierarchies work well when information flows mostly in one direction: down. They are good for command and control. Hierarchies can get things done efficiently. But hierarchies are useless to create, innovate, or change. Hierarchies in perpetual beta are optimal for creativity and to deal with complexity.

a triple operating system

2016-08-112015-11-21 by Harold Jarche

Governance, business, and learning models are moving from centralized control to network-centric foundations. For instance, coalition governments are increasing in frequency, businesses are organizing in value networks, and collaborative and connected learning is becoming widespread. In these cases, collaboration (working for a common objective) and cooperation (sharing freely without direct reciprocity) flow both ways.

There are advocates for a dual operating system to deal with the complexity of the networked era: one that is hierarchical and another that is networked. This may make more sense than an elaborate 8-step model but the duality misses an important connection between structured work and cooperative networks. That space is the community of practice, which is neither project team nor professional network. Networks provide new ideas and perspectives from their diverse weak social ties. Work teams often have to share complex knowledge, and this requires strong social ties. Communities of practice are the bridge between these two, where we can test new ideas in a trusted space. This trinity is not three separate operating systems. It is one, that without the others is ineffective.

the trinity model

2016-12-122015-11-05 by Harold Jarche

Update: see implementing a triple operating system for a more current view

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Following up on my last post, the network era trinity, I have put together two images to synthesize the multiple concepts behind them. These images are my attempt to create a simple model that explains how networked organizations need to operate differently.

Individuals must be supported in interacting with diverse social networks, as part of their work, to enhance the possibility of serendipitous connections. This is the practice of PKM.
Communities of practice must be supported as safe places to test out new ideas. This is where HR and L&D departments can play a significant role.
Working on complex or creative projects is the realm of human activity in the network era. These teams are effective as temporary negotiated hierarchies that can be reformed as the situation changes.
Every worker is involved in all three of these spaces continuously, therefore working and learning are not separate activities.
Knowledge flows from implicit personal knowledge and is socialized while learning with communities or working in groups. The organization can curate knowledge from the flows of discussions among its workers and codify it in systems of record.

the network era trinity

2015-11-092015-11-01 by Harold Jarche

There are advocates for a dual operating system to deal with the complexity of the networked era: one that is hierarchical and another that is networked. This makes more sense than an elaborate 8-step model but the duality misses an important connection between structured work and cooperative networks. That space is the community of practice, which is neither project team nor professional network. Networks provide new ideas and perspectives from their diverse weak social ties. Work teams often have to share complex knowledge, and this requires strong social ties. Communities of practice are the bridge between these two, where we can test new ideas in a trusted space. This trinity is not three separate operating systems. It is one, that without the others is ineffective.

you are only as good as your network

2018-11-132015-10-29 by Harold Jarche

I’ve worked as an organizational learning & performance consultant since 1994. Every year I get new challenges but usually I have something in my toolbox that fits the requirement. Then one day in 2012 I was asked to solve a problem for a client that I did not have a clue how to even begin looking at. This involved complex knowledge about information technology, organizational behaviour, knowledge management, and social media. The client required a model to determine how their suite of IT platforms aligned with a newly developed learning & performance model that was being implemented across the enterprise. In short, they asked me to “simplify the complexity”.

I was a bit nervous, not knowing where to begin. But I put my faith in my knowledge networks and communities of practice where I had been involved for the past 14 years. I went out to my networks, looking for as wide and diverse opinions as possible. I also checked my collections of social bookmarks and blog posts to see if I had come across anything useful in the past few years. As I found a few models and ideas, I tested them out with some trusted colleagues, including the client team who were keen on solving the problem. Over several weeks, many conversations, and a lot of searching and probing, I developed a working model that the client accepted. It was only through the transparent sharing of knowledge and engaging the networks and communities that I had already developed, that I was able to accomplish the objective. In the end, I realized I was only as good as my network. This is the new world of work today. It requires us to not solely focus on our jobs doing regular work and projects. The network era rewards people who can bring their communities of practice and professional networks to bear on complex problems. Nobody’s individual toolbox is big enough.

leadership archetypes

2025-12-132015-10-21 by Harold Jarche

Ubiquitous digital networks are extending our capacity to listen and speak with others. In a hyperlinked world, we can tap multiple global perspectives and easily push our own views through various free and inexpensive media options. This is making many traditional centres of expertise, like news sites, obsolete. At the same time, access to important contextual knowledge is limited to the few, such as attendees at the yearly World Economic Forum in Davos.

With all of this access to information and knowledge, we are seeing a retrieval of storytelling. The TED talks are one example of finely crafted stories, though their impact and the agenda of sponsors may over time reverse into a single or even false narrative, controlled by a few powerful interests. This is how McLuhan’s laws of media can be useful in seeing what kinds of changes digital networks will bring about in how we communicate as a society in the network era. Every new technology enhances some aspect of humanity, obsolesces some previous technology, retrieves something from our past, and can reverse into the opposite of its initial intention.