Work

business & working

Building an alliance

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A study of international alliances found that two-thirds  of the alliances between equally matched partners were successful but where there was a significant  imbalance of power almost 60% of alliances failed. Consequently in the case of a formal joint venture equal ownership is the most successful structure, 50-50 ownership being twice as likely to succeed as other ownership structures. ~ Managing Collaboration

When we created the Internet Time Alliance we were five independent consultants, all with many years working alone. We wanted to do something together but did not want to become a typical professional services company, with principals, junior staff and administrative support, all driven by sales & marketing.

Now the six of us continue to work as individuals but we are increasingly realizing the power of our alliance, which is driven by our almost daily narration of our professional work. Internally, we are completely transparent and it’s often quite amazing how quickly we can put something together, as we draw on our specific strengths and connections. More and more we are working together, sometimes in pairs, or even as a group.

People often ask, what does Internet Time Alliance really mean? Well first of all, we are all free-agents, with our individual professional practices, but we are also co-owners of our UK-based company. That means we have business presences in four countries. Jay calls internet time, the accelerated timeframe of the new economy brought on by eBusiness and the Internet. A year of Internet time may equal 7 years of calendar time. We think wikipedia’s definition of alliance aligns with our practice, “An agreement or friendship between two or more parties, made in order to advance common goals and to secure common interests“.

One of our common goals is the democratization of work and learning, as Jay discussed recently during his trip to India and I talked about in relation to social business.

Our interlaced networks are dominated by innovators and early adopters. Most of us are early adopters in that we put into practice much of what we recommend. For example, we were early to blogging and Twitter. When our clients are ready to cross the technology adoption chasm, we can be the pathfinders. We learn from our mistakes by talking about them. We’ve learned that solving problems together is becoming the real business imperative. Sharing and using knowledge is where emerging business value lies.

Image via Wikipedia

Because our work is often on the complex and chaotic edge, our business will not grow like a traditional company. There is no formula to bottle and sell. An alliance is a business model suited for a networked world and we think it’s a good one to try out. While there is no template to follow, a good starting point is to develop a network culture.

Build trust over time by doing things together. Nurture the good things that emerge and bypass the negative things. There is no need to dwell on your weaknesses. Focus on your strengths. No contract, mission statement or charter is going to create a working alliance. We had the advantage that many of us had worked together or had known each other for a long time prior to creating the alliance.

Our own business model stays in perpetual Beta and we are often trying new “probes” to see what happens. Everything is filtered through our online conversations, often in our private activity stream, but sometimes in public, like this post. If you want to create an alliance, start with openness, transparency and diversity; but trust is what will keep you together.

Net Work Skills

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Imagine if we limited our conversations to only those in the same office.  We would miss out on so many learning opportunities. Well it seems some people are still missing out.  Today, people with larger and more diverse networks have an advantage as professionals and in dealing with change. They are engaged in a constant flow of sense-making through multiple conversations.

Every professional needs to be open to continuous learning and to make much of it transparent in order to cooperate with others. Nothing remains the same, and the only way to remain relevant in the network era is to stay connected. This is life in perpetual Beta.

An open attitude is increasingly important. The people who blog or connect on social media can get things done quicker, find answers faster, get advice and just be more effective. All of this requires professional networks and these take time to build the necessary trust before one can even ask for help. For instance, strangers usually have to know something about someone before they will help out. Without some persistent point of presence (blog, Twitter, LinkedIn), one is invisible online unless he or she is already famous. Most of us are not.

It is not just an advantage to belong to diverse professional networks but in recent years the situation has tipped so that it is now a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

With social media, anyone can easily create digital content and collaborate with others without any special programming skills. And the kinds of skills needed for all professionals today are not so much specific social media platforms, but rather changes in attitudes and perspective.

It is getting difficult for anyone to be an expert other than in a very narrow field for a short period of time. Bloggers can quickly get the scoop on professional journalists. As knowledge workers, we are like actors — only as good as our last performance. For a fleeting time, we may be viewed as experts. This erosion in perceived and conferred expertise means that professionals have to become learners themselves and follow the flow of the ever-expanding bodies of knowledge related to their fields. It is a shift away from subject matter experts and toward subject matter networks.

“Creativity is a conversation—a tension—between individuals working on individual problems, and the professional communities they belong to.”~ David Williamson Shaffer

Conversation is an essential part of being a networked professional today. One person cannot know everything, but can add to, as well as benefit from, the knowledge of others by engaging in various online conversations. Social media let anyone join in professional conversations, and conversely, may isolate those who do not.

Professionals immersed in communities of practice, or those continuously pushing their informal learning opportunities, may have a larger zone of proximal development (the gap between a person’s current development level and the potential level of development). They are more open to learning and to expanding their knowledge. Active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in any field.

Being a professional in the network era is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.

Fields of knowledge are expanding, new tools are constantly being introduced, and over a billion people are connected via the Internet. However, blogging still stands out as nearly ubiquitous, especially for professional development. Varieties of blogs include text, video, and audio, but blogs are relatively simple, give individuals voice, and enable conversation to flow. One can think of a blog as a professional journal to record thoughts and ask questions of peers.

Each blog post has a unique identifier (permalink) which can be referenced by others, without permission. This is where blogs still remain superior to many walled information gardens, like Facebook. Blogs enhance serendipity. Blog posts do not need to be perfect essays but can help make sense of the learning process. The comments between blogs help create networks of conversations around issues or topics.

Even once connected with social media, the critical aspect that remains is attitude. Accepting that we will never know everything, but that others may be able to help, is the first step in becoming a networked professional. This is an acceptance of a world in flux, and that knowledge is neither constant nor fixed.

Instead of trying to know everything in the field, we can concentrate on knowing with whom to connect. The network becomes all-important. That means embracing an attitude of openness and collaboration—joining others on a journey of understanding. Giving up control is a first step on this journey.

Having a blog, a permanent presence on the web, becomes the jumping off point for deeper professional discussions. I call it my home base. Producing a blog also opens a person up to criticism, so once again, an open attitude to learning is essential.

Networked professionals can no longer rest on their past accomplishments while their fields of knowledge change and grow. 

Through sharing and exposing their work on the web, networked professionals can connect to communities of practice and get informal peer review. There is no way to stay current all by ourselves. With blogs and other collaboration methods, each of us can become a participatory node in various communities of practice.

The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and knowing who to call becomes more important than having the right answer. But we are all humans and we relate on a human level, which means that we first have to get to know others and develop a level of trust before real sharing can happen. Collaboration is a two-way street.

Finally, critical thinking – the questioning of underlying assumptions, including our own – is becoming all-important as we have to make our own way in the network era. Critical thinking can be looked at as four main activities, which social media can help us achieve:

  • Observing and studying our fields
  • Participating in professional communities
  • Building tentative opinions
  • Challenging and evaluating ideas

In the early 21st century, it’s time for all professionals to develop net work skills.

Making collaborative work work

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Everyone talks about collaboration in the workplace today but what does it really mean? How do you get from here to there? Every snake oil salesman is selling social something: enterprise social; social learning; social CRM; etc. For me it boils down to three principles.

Narration of Work: This means actually talking about what you are doing. It’s making your tacit knowledge (what you feel) more explicit (what you are doing with that knowledge). Narrating your work is a powerful behaviour changer, as anyone who blogs regularly can attest. Of course, I mean personal or professional blogs, not writing articles just to attract eyeballs and increase advertising revenue.

In an organization, narration can take many forms. It could be a regular blog; sharing day-to-day happenings in activity streams; taking pictures and videos; or just having regular discussions. Developing good narration skills, like adding value to information, takes time and practice, so don’t expect overnight miracles.

Narration of work is the first step in becoming a social enterprise.

Transparency: This is an easy concept to understand but much more difficult to implement in the enterprise. It’s switching the default mode to sharing. This can be enabled by social media but note that social media also make the company culture transparent. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. Here’s an observation from Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, in 2007:

But I’ll also make one argument, about how the change in tools may be deterministic for changing culture and about cultural spillover.  Blogs and Wikis are inherently more transparent than email, where 90% of collaboration occurs.  Users are first gaining exposure to these tools as consumers, within consumer culture.  The default in that culture with these tools is transparency and sharing.  Corporate cultures vary. I can say that we see earlier adoption by corporations with healthy cultures and management practices such as 360 degree reviews, and adoption practices matter.  But it should be noted that consumer culture spills over to corporate culture.  And because this culture shift aids practice building, I’d assert that these tools will trend us towards transparency.

Use social media to promote transparency but be ready to deal with the culture that is exposed. Transparency means real knowledge-sharing. The prime benefit cited for social media in the enterprise is increasing the speed of access to knowledge. This is what transparency enables and it’s necessary to implement the third principle.

Shared Power: Jon Husband describes wirearchy as; “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” This is the desired state, but getting there is difficult. Companies that start with this objective have an advantage over existing hierarchical cultures. Examples of shared-power organizations are growing, but not so much that they are the majority.

Start with narration and move toward transparency, with a longer-term objective of shared power. This third principle is essential for social businesses that derive their value from complex and creative work. In these organizations, the higher value work is at the edges and power has to be pushed out to enable exception-handling, the real work in the connected enterprise.

These three simple principles should be enough guidance. The rest depends on the specific context of each organization and the ability to keep things in perpetual Beta.

“You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”  ~ Pablo Picasso

 Thanks to Chris Mackay for the title of this post.

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Commuters

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I have only had to commute by vehicle for four years in my life. The rest of the time I have been able to walk or cycle to work. It’s been nine years since I last had to commute. Every Monday morning I am very thankful.

Photo via US Library of Congress

Is management on the table?

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As you soon as you try to address a problem, it gets more complicated, because that’s what conventional management does; I wrote last week in Managing collaboration, and Paul Chepolis commented:

I couldn’t agree more. How many times has this occurred with leadership teams and organizational leaders. Take a simple problem, lose total perspective, and give it a life that is absolutely unnecessary. We kill ourselves!

As Umair Haque posted on Twitter back in November; “Name a “working” institution. Just one. Better yet, define a “working” institution. See the problem? Management is the problem:

  • Learning Management
  • Information Management
  • Human Resource Management
  • Financial Management; etc.

We falsely believe we can manage the future, based on the past. Researchers have shown  experts do worse than laypeople in predicting the stock market and that these experts do even worse than just flipping a coin.  Managing for the future is a conceit of those in power and our institutions are based on the notion of being able to manage complex systems using mechanistic models.

For any change initiative, there is often an assumption of going from the current state to a desired state, as if there is some kind of linear progression. This can be the false presumption of many a performance analysis. Thinking in terms of networks moves us beyond linear thinking. Dave Gray says we even need to change the way we think about change:

If change is a constant, then the only real sustainable competitive advantage is to be able to grow and evolve continually, to stay ahead of the competitive pack.

You can’t do this with the traditional business structure that we’ve inherited from the industrial revolution. This isn’t like redecorating a room in your house or moving the furniture around. This is a major rehab project that might affect the foundations, the plumbing and everything else. It requires some pretty fundamental rethinking of the way your company is structured, how you execute your strategy, and how you’re going to evolve.

What the world requires today is organizations that are capable of continuous creativity and innovation, that can adapt and evolve on a continual basis; organizations that can generate new businesses, that can sprout and branch into new categories and new industries; that can recover quickly from failures and move on.

I have not seen organizations move toward a more social business model without changing management. That may mean reducing the number of managers; empowering people who are customer-facing; or significantly opening up the workflow and making it more transparent. Management is the problem but management is also the solution, if you change it.

A world without bosses may seem like science fiction but then so did a world without secretaries, typing pools, or switchboard operators not that long ago. To be successful in changing to a networked enterprise, the management  structure must be up for negotiation. This may be the critical question to ask at the beginning of any change (social business, enterprise 2.0, social learning) initiative. Is management on the table? If not, why even start?

Image: William Jay Gaynor: NYC under new management (1913)

the new electric media

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“Of course we can live without a bodily identity, but the body confers a particular kind of identity. Aquinas pointed out that the principle of individuation consists in the intersection of matter and spirit. Without the body, then, individual identity is not possible. Discarnate man is mass man; individuality is simply not possible because there is nothing on which to base it, to give it substance. Individualism and private identity are artefacts, side-effects of the phonetic alphabet and its symphony of abstraction. (Laws of Media chapter one.) One of the three themes on which Take Today: The Executive as Dropout is based is that jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles. Roles mean audiences and participation. Private identity depends first and foremost on detachment. Social media like Facebook provide identity from the in-crowd of friends that one can amass: that attention is the identity dynamic. Take it away and the user is nobody—a nobody with no body.

With private identity and detachment also comes another artefact: privacy, now a major concern. As private identity evaporates, privacy becomes a matter of great concern-and so do private ownership and copyright. All of these things are interrelated and make no sense in isolation from each other. It is no secret that private identity is unknown in non-literate societies and equally that they have no use for privacy.” – Eric McLuhan

Managing Collaboration

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My colleague Jane Hart asks who should be your Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO)? It’s a good question, given the growing importance of working collaboratively in the 21st century workplace. Collaboration is a key part of creative work. Hugh Macleod pretty well sums up the core of the networked enterprise with this image:

We live in a most interesting time in history.  With the Internet, never before has it been so easy to collaborate, yet within many organizations it’s often more difficult. A CCO could be a role that helps with the transition to a more collaborative workplace, but do we really need more managers? Two comments on Jane’s post raise this question as well:

Jay Cross: “Companies have to make a profit but they don’t have Chief Profit Officers. Workers must be motivated but there aren’t any Chief Motivation Officers.”

Tim Hickernell: “Chief Collaboration Officer? The hierarchy is the problem, not the solution. Collaboration Strategy, yes; CCO; no.“

It’s that darn hierarchy thing. As you soon as you try to address a problem, it gets more complicated, because that’s what conventional management does. It adds an extra layer of taxation. But information technology has made management [not leadership] redundant, as Sigurd Rinde explains in Let the Managers Go:

Outside the corporate world, in places with fewer habits and assumed truths, IT has shown way more promise: we can communicate and collaborate with people all over the world in a gazillion ways, we have the “cloud”, we have tablets and smartphones, we have all kinds of technological power. But in the corporate world we still run workflows using doughnuts and stern looks. That’s silly. And amazingly ineffective.

Do you need a Chief Collaboration Officer? Yes, if the CCO is focused on putting the position out of business and is seen as a temporary and transitionary role. The CCO can be the person who has a high profile and can model the new collaborative behaviours. This can take some time but, like raising children, should not take forever. So get a CCO, set up a dance hall, throw some parties, mix things up, and see what happens. Keep your CCO in perpetual Beta.

What you should not do is get a CCO with the primary task of implementing some costly  enterprise collaboration software system. That is definitely putting the cart before the horse – but there are many who will counsel this approach. Caveat emptor!

Betterness: Review

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Umair Haque’s Betterness: Economics for Humans is a quick read and a very cheap book at $2.69 for a Kindle version. It’s worth much more than that. Haque starts with an invitation:

If you’re delighted with the status quo, splendidly contented with the present, firmly convinced that the way live, work, and play is the best and last way we can, put this volume back on the digital shelf.

He defines the problem …

Today, business is held fast to this paradox: the more “business” we do and the more we think solely in terms of “business,” the more we structure human exchange according to the precepts of yesterday’s paradigm; the less wealth we create, and often, the more wealth we destroy.

… and shows the signs:

Our institutions are failing. They’re failing us, failing the challenge of igniting real, lasting human prosperity. If institutions are just instruments to fulfill social contracts, then ours are shattering because the social contracts at their heart have fractured.

Haque takes on existing organizational structures and especially skewers vision and mission statements, proposing that businesses should be asking “Why are we here?”, much as Simon Sinek does.

Betterness is a wake-up call to our business leadership and perhaps the best thing you can do is buy a copy for your managers, their bosses, and all the way up the industrial ladder.

I believe we are on the cusp of such a turning point – here and now. Consider what Kuhn famously argues: that a paradigm shift happens when we encounter anomalies that can’t be explained by the paradigm responsible for progress thereto. So here’s our anomaly: that industrial-age wealth hasn’t neatly powered lives lived meaningfully well; that near-term profit, gross product, and hyperconsumption haven’t produced a fuller human prosperity; that the frenzied pursuit of opulence hasn’t been sufficient for the attainment of a good life – of eudaimonia.

Understanding what you do

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I came across this most thought-proving post by Seb Paquet on Google Plus, that looks at how new ideas and especially new business models can be understood. Seb notes that:

  • There is a small group of people who understand why you are doing it;
  • A larger group of people who get how you are doing it;
  • An even larger group of people who get what you are doing; and finally
  • The largest group of people who don’t get it at all.

Phil Jones adds this insight in the comments:

  • Inner circle : comrades (or arch enemies)
  • 2nd circle : potential collaborators (dependent on deals you can make) (or potential competitors)
  • 3rd circle : supporters (or opponents)
  • outer rim: passive obstacles

What could this mean for a startup or new business?

Accept that most people do not understand why you are doing this in the first place and some of those who do will be working at cross purposes to subvert you. Try to turn potential competitors into collaborators. Be active in professional networks with your supporters and be co-operative in spirit, for these people may help to convert your opponents. Finally, ignore the passive obstacles and find ways to route around them.

Seb is already working on version .2 of this, so stay tuned on G+.