Work

business & working

Social business for organizational survival

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The potential of social business is organizational survival, because enterprises must be able to share knowledge quicker than before.  Why? As everyone and everything gets connected to the Net, feedback loops, both positive and negative, accelerate. A video can go viral and generate fame and revenue almost overnight. A racist act can be recorded and distributed around the world in minutes, even years after the event, forcing the perpetrators to leave politics. Customers can quickly force companies to change their policies, taking advantage of social media’s capability for “ridiculously easy group-forming” [Seb Paquet].  Self-publishing makes everyone a broadcaster.

Social business requires a major shift in how we do work, moving from hierarchies to networks. What does this really mean? It is understanding that business is not something separate from being human, and that humans are social creatures. Business is personal and has always been. We just thought we could mechanize everything by applying the principles of scientific management and other industrial age crap that have only got us into a bigger mess than when we started a century ago. As Jay Cross explains:

“People are emotional beings. We take everything personally.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, business has tried to cover this up. Management by spreadsheet is easier if workers are interchangeable parts. No messy emotions to get in the way.”

We are beginning to realize that the highest value work today is the more complex stuff, or the type of work that cannot be automated or outsourced. It’s work that requires creativity and passion. Doing complex work in networks means that information, knowledge and power no longer flow up and down but in all directions. Social business is giving up centralized control and harnessing the power of networks.

Knowledge networks are based on openness, transparency and diversity, from which trust emerges. Effective enterprise networks ensure that when knowledge is gained, some of it can be captured and then easily shared. Trust is essential for sharing implicit knowledge. This is the core of social learning – sharing implicit knowledge through conversations, observations and modelled behaviour.  Social learning is how organizational knowledge gets distributed. A social business learns quicker through social learning. Social media are merely enablers, if used adeptly.

A business that is more connected to its people, its customers, and its partners will be more resilient than one that is reliant on rules, regulations, and mechanistic frameworks. Many people talk about the need for resilience in facing climate change, population growth and environmental degradation.

Resilience is also an “… ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever …” Social businesses are more resilient because they rely on people, not processes. The latter are developed only to handle the work that is not complex or creative, freeing workers to deal more with exception handling. Social business is how an organization can survive by using a more resilient, organic framework. Isn’t it time to exorcise Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ghost from our organizations?

Enterprise social network dimensions

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Many organizations are using social media and social networks, but how do they know if they are using them appropriately or adequately? Do they have all the aspects of collaboration and cooperation supported in order to succeed as a social business? I started looking at how we can begin to make sense of enterprise social networks from an organizational performance perspective and found a few good sources and have woven these together for what I hope is a useful performance support tool, or at least a conversation starter.

Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb of social media was an initial inspiration, showing how one could quickly and graphically portray differences between social media platforms. The Altimeter Group’s recent report on making the business case for enterprise social networks provided more detail on what happens inside organizations. Finally, Oscar Berg’s digital workplace concretized gave a good picture of what people-centric, service-oriented businesses should look like.

I put these concepts together within the framework of a coherent enterprise that supports both collaborative and cooperative behaviours. I hope it provides some clarity and would appreciate any feedback or further building upon these ideas. Thanks to all those who have shared so that I could play with these ideas, and hopefully create something useful.

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It’s about value creation

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There’s always something thought-provoking on Sigurd Rinde’s blog. His latest post, the information age fallacy, looks at the amount of time wasted in managing information flows, instead of creating anything new. The problem with information technology, as Sig describes it, is that IT, “has mostly produced faster ways to do exactly the same we did two thousand years ago.”

“The figures are rather simple – knowledge work stands for about 60% of the world’s value creation while knowledge workers spend on average about 2/3rd of their time on managing the flows. If we could automate that management and spend that time on value creation instead – i.e. change “what” we do – we would look at approximately 120% GNI growth world wide.”

The amount of time at work wasted doing certain non-productive tasks can be up to 50%, according to some studies, and this does not even include time wasted in meetings.

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Adapting to a networked economy and workplace takes time. This time has been overlooked in our race to get the next shiny piece of technology. Oscar Berg summed it up on Twitter recently and said that the main reason for our technology-centric approach to work is that we are hoping “for a silver bullet that will kill all our problems in one shot.” Obviously, the evidence shows that the next piece of technology will not solve our problems and may actually compound them.

Value is created by workers with creativity, curiosity, and empathy. Value creation in the 21st century is having ideas, connecting people and ideas, and trying new things out based on these ideas. Not only do these activities take time, they are highly social, as success often depends on who we work with. Spending time on merely managing data flows saps our energy and drive for doing creative work.

Maybe we need to look at productivity differently. Instead of asking, what have you done for the company this week, we should be asking what ideas you have had and what have you done to test them out? It might get us away from measuring and doing things that should be automated in the first place. Automation is not a bad thing if you know what to do with the extra time it provides, so let the droids do the boring stuff, and let’s focus on value creation.

A coherent path to social business

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Thierry de Baillon and Ralph Ohr, in their post on Business Model Innovation as Wicked Problem, conclude the following:

An ever increasing pace of change leads to a decrease in life time of operating business models. Companies are therefore forced to reinvent themselves more frequently by creating new business models. Entering new businesses through open business model innovation exhibits a wicked problem structure. In order to properly address those problems, companies have to follow emergent strategies and need to put decentralized, self-organizing structures in place. Social business brings an answer to the urgent necessity to successfully tackle corporate reinvention and to enhance strategic adaptability by connecting individual human stakeholders.

What kinds of “emergent strategies and decentralized, self-organizing structures” can be put in place? I think it boils down to three things: Openness, Knowledge-sharing, and Diversity.

1. Openness can be encouraged through the use of social networks and enterprise social platforms. People need to know what others are doing and the default mode has to be sharing. If workers cannot connect with anyone they need to, then the knowledge needed to address a problem may never be revealed to those who need it. Opening communications to everyone is the antithesis of bureaucracy, where lines of control are ever-important.  Bureaucracies are the enemy of innovation, as they favour self-preservation over change. They are self-serving. They are also reinforced by the notion of jobs. Openness means getting rid of jobs, which subvert openness, innovation and emergent practices. Social networks, powered by social media, help to remove bureaucracy and antiquated ways of working.

2. Just because a system is open does not mean that a learning organization will emerge. People need to practice knowledge-sharing through the narration of work and personal knowledge mastery. Both are simple concepts to understand but take time to become daily practices throughout an organization.

3. Finally, any organization needs to have a diversity of opinions in order to remain innovative and deal with the wicked problems described by Thierry and Ralph. “Connections drive innovation“, according to Tim Kastelle. “We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas.” This means giving access to social networks, eliminating tribes such as departmental silos, and actively looking for people with different backgrounds and experience.

Putting all of this together, is what we at the Internet Time Alliance call a coherent organization.

The Coherent Organization:
Cooperation & Collaboration flowing between work teams & social networks
via communities of practice

It takes time to be social

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According to research by the Dachis Group, only 10 – 20% of employees in large organizations are actively engaged with their enterprise social collaboration platforms, as reported in this MIT Sloan article:

It may be that for many employees, even in these early adopter firms working to integrate internal social business applications, using these applications do not offer enough value or reason to shift behavior. Employees may be unaware of the potential of their social platform; or perhaps they have not been properly trained and educated. Or of course, it is also possible that while they are aware and have been trained, the value still isn’t there or isn’t high enough.

I think that one of the underlying reason is that these platforms, like KM and elearning platforms before them, are not integrated with the workflow. For example, email, frustrating as it may be, is part of most business workflows. If a collaboration platform requires that you go out of your normal workflow, then it will not be used by anyone except the curious and the early adopters. The problem is too often a case of putting the technology before the people using it.

However, once social technologies have been installed, modelling new work behaviours becomes the next organizational challenge. This part is often overlooked in the hubris of a successful technology implementation project, when really it is just the beginning. Too many companies do not do the time-consuming work of modelling, coaching, mentoring and facilitating social learning (and I do not mean in the classroom). Low adoption rates are not a worker issue, they are a management issue.

Looking back on a project we did last year with a large organization, I note that we spent several months coaching the learning & performance innovation team on working socially. Initially, we had daily conference calls. We cajoled people to narrate their work, and required at least one micro-post per day. We did a lot of explaining and modelled narrating our work. Later we had weekly conference calls, or “virtual coffee” to discuss issues. These were essential, as even a few months into the new work/learning routine there was some confusion, so things were not obvious to everyone. It takes time and a lot of practice to change behaviours. After several months, we were no longer needed; but I doubt that progress would have been made if we had not provided the initial scaffolding.

Just being aware of the potential of a social platform is not enough. Everyone needs their own “aha” moment, and until that happens, adoption is not certain. It will not happen at all if the work being done on a daily basis and the social collaboration platform are not integrated; and if they are, it will still take time.

Understanding behaviour

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In his book Drive, Dan Pink looked at rewards, consequences and motivation at work and showed that much of what we have taken for granted is just not supported by the research. 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, as shown in this video. With this in mind, there are times when rewards and consequences are not linked to a desired performance, and this can lead to confusion or even worse. Rewards are still an important aspect to consider in workplace performance. Consider the case of medical researchers sharing their professional knowledge and findings amongst peers.

In a research-oriented work environment, it makes sense to share one’s knowledge so the whole team can be more productive. Insights from one person can save another a lot of wasted time. But what happens when this sharing is not recorded, or people are not given credit for their input? Compound this with a system that only rewards final discoveries, so that researchers have their bonus and career directly tied to their published work. Would you help out a colleague knowing that he alone would get credit for the final discovery? Would you be willing to share if the two of you were in competition for a promotion? Would you share if the company was letting go of staff based on merit, as measured in the annual performance reviews?

Klaus Wittkuhn wrote about human performance system imbalances several years ago in the Performance Improvement Journal.

It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design the system properly to make sure that the performers can leverage all their capabilities.

Even if we trained researchers how to share their knowledge using social media tools combined with good network weaving behaviours, we likely would not get the knowledge-sharing behaviours the enterprise leadership say they want. This of course puts the knowledge management and learning support staff in a very difficult position. They know that the leadership says that collaboration is critical, but they see that the internal system has long-established barriers to real knowledge-sharing.

While a performance analysis can be helpful in determining the barriers to performance, sometimes these are controlled at such a high level that they are beyond the scope of those implementing new systems and initiatives. Perhaps the only thing that can be done is to highlight the issue by making it as clear as possible that all the technology and skills will not overcome systemic barriers. In the case of the researchers described above, not performing is rewarded.

Looking at Dan Pink’s three motivational factors, one can also say that even with a good degree of autonomy, mastery of a complex field of research, and a sense of purpose to create products for the benefit of society; there are still obstacles in creating an effective collaborative workplace. This is why anyone responsible for a collaboration project, such as promoting communities of practice, needs to look at all the factors influencing behaviour at work. There are no easy answers when it comes to changing behaviours in large organizations.

Performance Analysis process based on Mager & Pipe’s book
Analyzing Performance Problems

Taking Charge of your own Development

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I was interviewed by Rob Paterson (podcast at link) this week and we talked about work, jobs and taking charge of your own professional development. Rob summarized our half-hour together with these points. It is a real pleasure to have someone else encapsulate what you think.

  • The Change in Work – It’s not just factory workers but even Doctors that are going to be automated or outsourced. So how will you make a living? Only truly creative work will pay.
  • So what is Creative Work? – It is not just design etc but will include making valuable things and even growing food – and new sites such as Etsy enable you to find a market
  • The Industrial World Deskilled work – It all became assembly – Anything like this can be automated and will be
  • The jobs cannot come back
  • Training works well when you want to learn how to drive a car – you can train to be a carpenter but making the shift to be creative or to stand for themseleves – you cannot train for that

What is the new?

  • So what helps you be this new person?
  • Apprenticing – complex things cannot be learned except by shared experience
  • The crafts communities have never lost this – learn the rules and then learn how to break them – look at studios – very little teaching – mainly doing
  • Then you have to get connected to your community
  • All sorts of studios will emerge that will help you where clusters of people who know aggregate
  • The Knowledge Artisans have to take charge of themselves

What about advice for you?

  • Learn REAL skills – not just how to make it in an organization
  • Learn how to have a network – in the job world we don’t have them – many of us don’t know anything about this if we have had a job – so start now
  • This must be diverse and be about your interests
  • Put yourself OUT THERE
  • You are as good as your network
  • Think of yourself as a Freelancer for Life – and so always nuture your network  no matter what – avoid getting lulled into a sense of false security

His [my] advice to his [our] kids

  • Find the sweet spot (Dave Pollard) Find out your passion, what you are good at and what people will pay you for
  • You have to have all three

Rob just wrote a book, the first in a series, called You Don’t Need a Job. If you could spend an evening with Rob, I am sure he would share much of what he has written here. But for less than the price of buying him a glass of red wine [his preference I would guess] you can purchase this e-book for only $2.99. Rob provides an interesting way to look at the changing nature of work, and how people are reacting to the fact that the economy and society have fundamentally shifted.

We can see the world now dividing into three camps. There is a camp in Phase I [childhood]. They want simple answers. They want the good old days where women know their place and God rules the natural world. All who are not with them are against them. There is a camp in phase II [teenager]. They want to belong. Status is granted to them by belonging to the system. They want structures that can be predicted. The natural world is only a resource. They want control. And finally there is phase III [adulthood]. Here people need to express themselves. They need to be part of what is going on. They feel connected to all people and to all things.

There is lots of good advice in this first manual for the network era. You may not need a job, but we all need to work together in creating better structures for exchanging value. This book can help. Rob’s next book, You don’t need a Banker, will be out soon. Rob is also an ex investment banker, and has seen the inside of the beast, so I am sure we will learn much from him on this subject.

"I am what I create, share and others build on”

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The Entrepreneurial Learner:

Takeaways. (1) in a world of constantly changing contexts, best practices don’t travel very well. (2) As contexts change, we need to move past stories (which explain a specific event) to narratives (which create a framework for moving us to action, perhaps in a new direction). (3) there are important shifts occurring: knowing what has moved to knowing what and where; making things moves to making things and contexts (e.g., remix); (4) in sense-making, we move from playing to reframing; in media, we move from storytelling to transmedia (e.g., how a story jumps from one medium to another — this has huge implications for corporate branding). (5) Identity Shift is the biggest shift of all. We’re moving from a sense of “I am what I wear/own/control” to “I am what I create, share and others build on.” How do I put something into play so others build on it? When you figure this out, you understand agency and impact. —John Seely Brown

fractal
A “built-upon” image by Joachim Stroh

We are moving to the edge, not just in our work but for a greater part of our interconnected lives.

Chance favours the Connected Company

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About 18 months ago I wrote in Embrace Chaos, that I think the outer edge will be where almost all high value work gets done in organizations. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced and these will be managed by very few internal staff. Change and complexity will be the norm in our work and any work where complexity is not the norm will be of of diminishing value.

Riitta Raesmaa picked up on this in Embracing chaos with a little help from my friends: “Changes in the organizational culture, more open attitudes and behavior, together with social media tools and services, are altering the landscape of human connectedness and the ways of value creation.” Recently, Oscar Berg started experimenting with new ways of looking at value creation and openness. Oscar says that:

Without openness, the door is closed for anyone who wants to participate.
With openness but no or limited transparency, the number and quality of potential participants will be delimited.
With openness and (high) transparency, anyone anywhere can become aware of opportunities to participate and choose whether or not to actually participate.

Viewing this first from the perspective of what makes an effective knowledge-sharing network, I would say that in trusted networks, openness enables transparency, which in turn fosters a diversity of ideas. Supporting the creation of social networks can increase knowledge-sharing which can lead to more innovation, especially in networks built on trust.

From a value creation perspective, this can inform us how and where we should best get work done in the network era. Openness can help with internal task coordination, and transparency can improve collaboration amongst teams, while cooperation in diverse external networks can lead to improved innovation. In complex and changing markets, innovation has much higher business value than merely coordinating internal tasks. To paraphrase Steven B. Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From who said “Chance favors the connected mind”, and inspired by Dave Gray’s The Connected Company, let me propose that Chance favours the Connected Company.

 

Principles of Networked Unmanagement

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Cooperation

Collaboration is working together for a common objective, while cooperation is openly sharing, without any quid pro quo. Cooperation is a necessary behaviour to be open to serendipity and to encourage experimentation. In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity.

As we shift to a networked economy, our organizational frameworks have to change. While collaboration inside the company and with partners may have worked in a market economy, cooperation amongst a greater variety of network actors is now necessary. We are seeing this with customers getting involved in product design and marketing becoming more “social”. Shifting our emphasis from collaboration, which still is required to get some work done, to cooperation, in order to thrive in a networked ecosystem, means reassessing some of our assumptions about work.

Cooperation in our work is needed so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by increased complexity. What worked yesterday won’t work today. No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. Cooperation is a foundational behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where most of us, and our children, will be working.  Cooperation is the future, which is already here, albeit unevenly distributed.

Since cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate, people in the network cannot be told what to do, only influenced. If they don’t like you, they won’t connect. That’s like being on Twitter with no followers and never getting “retweeted”. You will be a lone node and of little value to the network. In a hierarchy you only have to please your boss. In a network you have to be perceived as having some value by many others.

Teamwork

Most of us have seen those fancy teamwork motivational posters on workplace walls, and almost every job description includes teamwork as a critical competency. Teamwork is over-rated, as it can be a smoke screen for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. A big economic stick often hangs over the team; “be a team player or lose your job”.

Teams promote unity of purpose, not openness, transparency and diversity of ideas, essential for building trust in networks. Think of a football team, a common business metaphor in North America. There is only one coach and everybody has a specific job to do while “keeping their eye on the ball”. In today’s workplace, there’s more than one ball and the coach cannot see the entire field. The team, as a work vehicle, is outdated.

As much as organizations advertise for “team players”, what would be better are workers who can collaborate and cooperate by connecting to each other in a balanced manner. There are other ways of organizing work. Orchestras are not teams; neither are jazz ensembles. There may be teamwork on a theatre production but the cast is not a team. It is more like a social network. Teams are what we get when we use the blunt stick of economic consequences as the prime motivator. In a complex world, unity can be counter-productive.

Jobs

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. Most workers are paid to do only one thing – solve problems. When dealing with work problems we can categorize them as either known or new. Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management help us to map it. We can also create tools, especially electronic performance support systems (EPSS) to do work and not have to learn all the background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how simple and complicated knowledge gets automated.

Complex, new problems need tacit (implicit) knowledge to solve them. Furthermore, as more work becomes automated & outsourced, exception-handling becomes more important in the networked workplace. The system handles the routine stuff and people, usually working together, deal with the exceptions. As new exceptions get addressed, some or all of the solution gets automated, and so the process evolves. The 21st century workplace, with its growing complexity due to our interconnectivity, requires that we focus work on new problems and exception-handing. This increases the need for collaboration, working together on a problem; as well as cooperation, sharing without any specific objective.

One challenge for organizations will be getting people to realize that what they actually know, as detailed in a job description, has decreasing value. How to solve problems together is becoming the real business imperative. Sharing and using knowledge in new ways is where business value lies. With computer systems that can handle more and more of our known knowledge, the 21st century worker has to move to the complex and chaotic edge to get the valued and paid work done. There are many people who will need help with this challenge.

Networks

Workplace leaders everywhere need to help the current and upcoming workforce enter the 21st century network economy. Another change to manage will be getting people to work more transparently. Transparency is necessity for effective networks. For instance, a major benefit of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. However, if the information is not shared by people, it will not be found. With greater transparency, information can flow horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics can then emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services. Working transparently and cooperatively is much less controllable than many managers will be comfortable with. But in this network era that we are entering, the increase in complex work, and rise of networks as the primary organizing framework, will create an even greater need for cooperation.

“In the long term, +N [network] dynamics should enable government, business, and civil-society leaders to create new mechanisms for mutual consultation, coordination, and cooperation spanning all levels of governance. Aging contentions that “the government” or “the market” is the solution to particular public-policy issues will eventually give way to new ideas that “the network” is the optimal solution.” — Ronfeldt

We, collectively, are the solution to our problems. We just have not figured out how to get optimally organized. Network theory can provide many of the answers. The first step is seeing that we have a problem and that our current work models are inadequate. Doing the same things better will not help. Looking outward, beyond our organizations, can enable cooperative behaviour. Casting off old management models, like jobs and organization charts, is another step. Shifting to a networked economy is going to take cooperation, and that only happens when we let go of control, just the opposite of Taylor’s principles of scientific management* which have informed us for the past century. Here are my introductory Principles of Networked Unmanagement:

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, including management.

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* Here are F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911)

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.