Work

business & working

Emergent Value

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A certain amount of hierarchy is necessary to get work done. Networks route around hierarchy. Networks enable work to be done collaboratively, especially when that work is complex and there are no simple answers, best practices or case studies to fall back on. This is where real business value lies – complex work.

The above image, by Verna Allee, shows the relationship between hierarchies and networks in various domains. While most organizations need to deal with all of these domains, each takes different control methods and communications platforms. Complex work requires looser hierarchies and stronger networks, something many organizations need to improve.

As simple work gets automated, it still needs to be controlled. Complicated work is outsourced but needs to be coordinated. The high value work, as I’ve contended before on this blog, is complex (and creative) and requires collaboration to get things done. This has to be enabled by communications platforms that do more than the traditional Intranet. Enterprise collaboration tools – Socialcast; Jive; Brainpark – are the platforms for complex, collaborative work. In addition, knowledge workers need to regularly poke their heads out of these private networks and get involved in public, social networks – Twitter; LinkedIn; Facebook – which are rather chaotic. This is where they may find new ideas and create emergent value for their organizations.

All levels are needed in any large organization, and they shouldn’t be confused. Enabling the outer rings is critical for long-term success and that’s what business leaders, IT departments, HR and Legal have to enable; very soon.

Follow-up post: Embrace Chaos

Glass Houses

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My conversation with Michael Cook continues (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk), this time with no specific question, but some very good insight and commentary:

Harold: I just read your response to my latest couple of questions. In my view your response is profound. I especially like the reference to the address delivered to people in the HR field.  I am a former HR professional so what I’ll say next is grounded in direct experience.

In my opinion, the HR profession is badly in need of a new identity, one that demonstrates clearly to all members of senior management that HR has a strategic imperative which is to be accountable for shaping the management models and practices for the future of any organization.

As you have pointed out, and no doubt what was recognized by your HR audience, much of what is currently contributed by HR staffs falls in the category of “complicated work” which is increasingly a candidate for outsourcing. Where the largest opportunity lies, in my opinion, is to transform the current conversation around “employee engagement” from being held as a complicated matter to one that is viewed as complex. We have arrived at a point where increasingly an employee’s time in the workplace is merely an intersection in their lives, not necessarily a destination, one where their personal vision, talents and skills come together with a “place” or occasion to meet some but certainly not all of their personal needs.

To the degree that employee engagement, supported by HR practices, continues to be thought of as a “thing” to be tweaked, like the temperature of a room, companies will continue to either lose their best people or fail to attract the talent they truly need. The likelihood in these scenarios is that those same companies and their HR department staffs will be left scratching their heads and speaking in low tones about work ethic and attitudes of entitlement as the root of their problems.

Two of the slides from your presentation struck me as particularly poignant, numbers 20 and 29. The first points out that the “cheese” for many people currently working as employees has actually moved. Waaay back in the early 2000’s Ken Thomas provided very grounded insight that could serve as a guiding light for the necessary transformation with the publication of ‘Intrinsic Motivation at Work: What Really Drives Employee Engagement’. Thomas uses a somewhat different vocabulary than yours yet to my ears and eyes it conveys much the same meaning. You say Autonomy, Mastery and Sense of Purpose. He says Meaningfulness, Choice, Competence and Progress. Samo/Samo to me. Then you point out (slide 29) that 90% of the learning that matters today in the workplace is the outcome of an experiential process, either personal or with the assistance of others. Yikes, suddenly it is no longer a question of if social media but which and how soon. Clearly the technology and the times have collided much like the chicken and the egg.

I realize there is not a question here but I have been wrestling with one for some time and it is; how can we break up the mythology around engagement, starting with the recognition that engagement cannot be controlled, it can be offered. Leadership appropriate to the reality now is supportive/offering and inquisitive/asking. HR Leadership can lead this transformation and as Peter Block might say, it is not a matter of how as much as are they willing to say YES!

“We have arrived at a point where increasingly an employee’s time in the workplace is merely an intersection in their lives, not necessarily a destination, one where their personal vision, talents and skills come together with a “place” or occasion to meet some but certainly not all of their personal needs.”

For too long we’ve had simplistic models of what motivates people. This is where the whole “incentivise” BS comes from [no, it’s not a word]. People are complex beings. They have multiple, overlapping valences. Good leaders have always understood that.

I agree with Mike. It’s a question of which social media and how soon. This conversation about social media will be dead in a few years. Nobody discusses email any more, other than how many unread messages they have in their inbox. Social media will be there in less than five years. I give it 24 months. But that’s not the important point.

Control is the killer. It’s the basis of our industrial-rooted work systems. Many HR policies imply that people cannot be trusted. Almost all IT policies say that. But it’s a new world. Everything is transparent, whether you want it to be or not. Just ask Julian or Anonymous.

Image by Dave Makes

Once you realize you live in a glass house, you start thinking differently.

 

 

NetWorkShop Sackville

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“I’ve become convinced that understanding how networks work is an essential 21st century literacy.” ~ Howard Rheingold

Patti Anklam, author of Net Work, will be conducting a workshop at Mount Allison University on Saturday, 19 March (9 AM to 4PM). Sponsored by the university’s Office of Research Services, this workshop is focused on bringing together faculty, researchers and businesses in understanding how networks influence us.

Sign up for the workshop online. Similar workshops cost $399, so take advantage of this free offer .

A NetWorkShop is a customized workshop that combines:

A clear and useful presentation of basic network concepts that demystify the hype;

Practical exercises in basic methods that will help participants learn how to use network concepts to make sense of and manage organizational, project, and personal networks;

In short, the NetWorkShop offers a new perspective – a network lens – that sheds light on how human networks are structured and how technologies can enhance our ability to collaborate and co-create.

Leaders Net Work

Collaboration across boundaries is one of the most significant challenges for leaders in the 21st century. Collaboration is about working to make networks effective. Net Work – being intentional about creating and sustaining networks – is a core capability of successful leaders.

Your personal network is key to your performance. Work performance and success is highly correlated with an individual’s ability to maintain a diverse network of contacts and to understand how to maintain and manage relationships. A simple exercise will reveal the diversity and reach of the participants’ personal networks and provide insight into how personal networks affect performance.

You can’t manage a network. Many traditional “soft” management skills can refocus the role of management toward a model of stewardship. Stewardship results in creation of conditions in which vibrant and focused networks can make a difference for an organization. Using case examples from participants, we’ll work out some ways that the network perspective can leverage the power of emerging networks.

Managing in Complexity. A complex system is one in which the relationships are always changing and in which there is absolutely no way to predict the future. We’ll tie together the network concepts, exercises, and cases by taking a practical view of how to lead effectively in an environment of continuous change.

The NetWorkShop (PDF)

 

Changing the mechanistic mindset

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The latest question from Michael Cook (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk) continues from our last conversations:

Harold: I am still not certain about my future as a member of the blogging community but I have revisited our last exchange and rekindled my spirit for that dialogue…

Among the many things you said in your post of February 1st a couple have stuck with me as they pertain particularly to where I put my energies. Here is the first of these:

“Our industrial management models are based on a belief that our structures are merely complicated.”

To me this statement gets right to the heart of where I am stumped about how to support clients. Without fail, in the past five years every new client I have been engaged by has specified one of two things they really wanted to see change in their organizations culture. They said either 1) they wanted more leadership from their mid-level managers or 2) they wanted more ownership from their employees for the outcomes the business required. The phrase they often use is wanting people to “step up.”

In my dialogues with them I do my best to point out that to the best of my knowledge both of these changes are within reach, however, not without them, the client, making the first move. Among the moves that they need to make is to stop imposing a management structure designed to serve the interests of the ownership of the business on employees who are doing their best to fulfill the requirements of customers or clients.

The challenge of having this conversation make a difference lies in speaking this way into a system that believes that their company is really mechanistic in its operation and that they, the owner or senior manager, are really in control. This perspective is supported entirely by the belief that not only is the organization mechanistic, it is merely, as you have said, complicated.

How would you recommend breaking through this mythology? My guess is that a conceptual approach won’t cut it. Without releasing the grip of this perspective the outcomes they desire are virtually impossible to attain.

The second thought that you shared of particular interest was the notion of Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology. The truly stunning aspect of this idea is that it may in fact be possible to implement on some level without the use of technology. In my own experience some version of Wirearchies have been around for a long time, especially on complex development projects. What would you recommend as an approach to have a client see that the notion is less something new than something not yet formally recognized or empowered? Then, having accomplished that objective, how best to introduce the possibility of leverage deriving from some sort of investment in technology?

To me both your remarks and the questions they generated for me are interrelated and from an OD standpoint truly stand as the gateway to establishing new management models.

I think this may be a long response, Mike.

I recently gave a presentation to senior HR executives, discussing the need for new work and learning approaches premised specifically on the need to focus on complex (and creative) work.

Rob Paterson sums up complexity and why we need to understand how if differs from the merely complicated:

“It’s a simple message, really. But if you don’t get it, you’re headed for chaos.

Simple = easily knowable.

Complicated = not simple, but still knowable.

Complex = not fully knowable, but reasonably predictable.

Chaotic = neither knowable nor predictable.”

In that presentation to HR Execs I show that simple routine work is constantly being automated (e.g. automated tellers) and complicated work is being outsourced to the cheapest labour market (e.g. call centres). If companies want to be competitive in the global market, they need to focus on non-standardized, complex & creative work.

automation

Work is changing as we get more connected. The old ways of organizing work are becoming obsolete, as 84% of workers in the US plan to change their jobs in 2011. They want out, in spite of a lacklustre economy. We are seeing mass, decentralized and social movements that confront existing hierarchies, politically and in the workplace. The recent examples of uprisings in North Africa are good attention-getters. There is no normal. All our institutions are facing the challenges of always-on connectedness and the need to adapt to Internet Time. Social media are just the current tip of the Internet iceberg, making work relationships much more complex. Workers do have to step up, but they also need the tools and authority. Encouraging workplace practices like personal knowledge mastery is a start.

When I show that our existing professional disciplines are like blind monks examining an elephant, I get some attention. The need for collaborative work and social learning increases as higher-value complex work requires passion, creativity and initiative. These skills are not taught in some training program, but shared socially through modelled behaviour and over many conversations. We need to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us  focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. The role of leadership becomes supportive rather than directive in this new knowledge-intensive and creative workplace. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag companies down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

The last slide of that presentation shows a type of servant leadership, supporting the real work being done.

connected leadership


I have learned that I need to start a conversation on complexity but it has to be simple enough not to lose my clients’ attention and not to seem like an academic lecture. This latest presentation is one more iteration of that. If you can can reframe the conversation, then you can talk about new ways of working and integrating learning. For example, most managers would agree that more work and effort is required for exception-handling. Social networks are an excellent framework to deal with these. This can start a new business conversation.

Analytical tools like organizational or value network analysis are also good ways to show what is really happening in an organization and its environment. Visualization is a powerful change agent. The most effective technology to start with to see the value of more collaborative, less controlled, work practices is micro-blogging. This could be an open platform like Twitter or a cloud service like Yammer or Chatter or an in-house tool like Status.net.

I agree that it’s not necessarily about the technology, even though technology is everywhere.

Sometimes it’s just giving up control, as the wirearchy framework suggests. Adam Kahane wrote in Solving Tough Problems:

“If we want to help resolve complex situations, we have to get out of the way of situations that are resolving themselves.”

According to the authors of Getting to Maybe, in complex environments:

  • Rigid protocols are counter-productive
  • There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
  • We cannot separate parts from the whole
  • Success is not a fixed address [perpetual Beta]

None of these require technology, but they all require a new mindset. I have worked with clients who accepted the need to deal with complexity and change their work structures. Patience is a virtue.

 

Seven years and 95 theses

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Do hyperlinks really subvert hierarchy? I recently asked on Twitter. They can when people outside the organization take advantage of ridiculously easy group-forming. Examples such as United Breaks Guitars and the various mass, decentralized and social revolutions show what is possible when hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

However, are there any workplace examples, where existing management practices were forced to change? I don’t know of any, though I think we will see many in the near future.

I read the Cluetrain Manifesto when it was developed and published online in 1999. I even bought a dead-tree version a few years years later. I’m still amazed how many senior executives have never even heard of the Cluetrain. While it may be a bit of a rant, it’s available online for free and makes some very important statements that still resonate a decade later. The Internet has changed the way we work.

Many of my posts over the past 7 years have been inspired by one of the Cluetrain’s 95 theses.

2004 – Lee LeFever hits the nail on the head with this Esse Quam Videre (to be rather than seem) post about weblogging in business. It’s just too easy to see through the smoke when you post every day. You have to be yourself, or you’ll get caught. Lee talks about this idea stemming from the Cluetrain Manifesto (worth the read in spite of its rant style). From Rick Levine’s section of Cluetrain, “Talk is Cheap”, is this excellent sidebar – “A knowledge worker is someone who’s job is having really interesting conversations at work.” That would be most bloggers, I would say.

2005 – Regular readers know that I often refer to The Cluetrain Manifesto. If you haven’t read it yet, take a look at the 95 theses, but I’d suggest that you read the whole book – online or in print. Scott Adams has taken the theses and re-mixed them for education. I’ve re-mixed a bit more, but don’t have the energy (yet) to address all 95:

  • Learning is conversation.
  • Learners are human beings, not demographic sectors.
  • What’s happening to education is also happening among learners. A metaphysical construct called “The School” is the only thing standing between the two.
  • To traditional educational institutions, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we, the learners, are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

2006 – Markets are conversations and conversations [relationships] create markets … Let’s go back to the Cluetrain Manifesto, from which we get the initial thesis that markets are conversations. In this case, I think that theses 11 and 12 are much more pertinent:

#11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

#12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

2007 – One of the main forces of change that will affect how we learn is the weakening of the industrial command & control organisation. We don’t need a third party to mediate our learning because we can find interesting stuff and interesting people (interesting to us, at least) on the Web. I see those workers, who one could call the “Cluetrained’, as already dropping out of the bottom of the industrial organisation’s pyramid and doing it on their own. “It” meaning working, learning, creating and collaborating.

2008 – Here is an important note to corporations; Cluetrain Thesis #20:

Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Gee, what’s next, people making fun of education?

2009 – Cluetrain #10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

Jeff Jarvis:

To make the money I don’t make teaching, I consult and speak for various media companies and brands. The only reason I get those gigs is because companies read the ideas I discuss at Buzzmachine and ask me to come and repeat them in PowerPoint form and explore them with their staff. I’ve also been asked to teach executives how to blog (a class that should, by rights, take about two minutes). That work and the teaching get me to a nice income in six figures. So I’m not looking quite as idiotic now, I hope.

Rob Paterson:

NPR, all my work in New Media, Blackwater, Education – all my paying gigs have come through this medium [blogging].

2010 – It is only by working (and learning) interdependently, retaining our autonomy, co-developing our mastery and feeling a shared sense of purpose that we will be truly motivated. The opportunity the Internet has given individuals is the chance to work cooperatively toward a shared purpose (Seb Paquet calls this “ridiculously easy group-forming”). The Internet also affords organizations the opportunity to loosen the dependence of workers through participative engagement (as The Cluetrain Manifesto explained a decade ago). The new organization must be some mix of free-agent autonomy, support mechanisms for mastery, and a wide enough span for each person to develop a personal sense of purpose.

Wasted Effort at Work

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The Dare to Share: A New Culture of Collaboration in the Enterprise infographic, by Socialcast provides an excellent snapshot of the need  for collaborative work and learning practices.

The web and ever-transforming digital technology have revolutionized the concept of communication and collaboration at work. Fundamental to employee collaboration is how individuals join together to achieve a mutual goal. Collaboration is based on the idea that sharing knowledge through cooperation helps solve problems more efficiently.

One part of the graphic shows three areas of opportunity for most organizations: sources of wasted effort. These are activities where you should be able to get measurable results fairly quickly.

Make meetings optional.

Promote video and web – conferencing & go mobile.

Reduce email to inbox zero.

Thanks to Jane Hart for highlighting this.

2020 Workplace

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In The 2020 Workplace, Jeanne Meister & Karie Willyerd make 20 predictions at the end of the book. William Gibson said, “the future is already here –  it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Here are my thoughts on where we are with some of these predictions:

Your mobile device will become your office, your classroom, and your concierge. We’re already seeing this with young people. They’d rather go without a car. Mobile computing is the future that is already here.

Web commuters will force corporate offices to reinvent themselves. Yes, working online IS different.

Job requirements for CEOs will include blogging. How else can you communicate with everyone effectively and efficiently? It’s sure not by email and face-to-face is difficult in distributed organizations. I would include podcasts & video in this statement.

Social media literacy will be required for all employees. I give this perhaps 24 months. We no longer offer training on email. Connecting to online social networks for working and learning will be a fact of life much sooner than later.

The lines between marketing, communications and learning will blur. I’ve called this the integration of organizational support. What we at the Internet Time Alliance call working smarter is a culture supported by social learning; collaborative work and a leadership framework. Technology enables this but the three pillars are more important than any technology platform.


Training Evaluation: a mug’s game

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“Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” —Peter Drucker

Dan Pontefract is quite clear in Dear Kirkpatrick’s: You still don’t get it:

Let me be clear – training is not an event; learning is a connected, collaborative and continuous process. It can and does occur in formal, informal and social ways every day in and out of your job. In your email, with the statement “what happens after the training event”, you have cemented (again) the root cause of the Kirkpatrick model. The ‘event’ is not solely how learning occurs. Whether in the original model, or the weakly updated model, the single largest flaw with the Kirkpatrick Four Levels model is the fact its basic premise is that learning starts with an event. Once you ultimately get past this stumbling block, the Kirkpatrick Four Levels model will potentially become relevant again, should it be suitably updated again.

Dan is not the first person to show the limitations of the Kirkpatrick model. Eric Davidove and Craig Mindrun wrote in Verifying Virtual Value:

The key to determining the business value of networked learning, however, is a more expansive view of the kinds of outcomes delivered. Traditional training analyses, such as Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation, were designed to assess solutions that are delivered in a linear manner. Since networked or collaborative learning solutions are informal, integrated with the workflow and driven by the learners, these traditional assessments will not work.

Event-based instructional interventions, or the course as learning vehicle, is an outdated and useless way to look at workplace learning. Courses are an artifact of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. The internet is an environment optimized for ABC learning [Anything But Courses].

In “Not Your Father’s ROI”, Jay Cross suggests:

Make a hypothesis of cause and effect. Interview a statistically significant sample of the workforce to see if the hypothesis holds up. Often, results obtained from social science research methods will produce more meaningful feedback than solid counts of the wrong thing.

Changing our training evaluation models shouldn’t be a management focus anyway. That’s looking at the wrong thing. Even if we get 100% efficiency, and some level of effectiveness, we’re missing 90% of the  picture, as shown in this graphic by Charles Jennings.

Training more efficiently is a mug’s game. Managers and workplace performance professionals should focus on Working Smarter, by helping people learn and develop socially.

Digital hierarchies

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IBM is holding a social business jam this week and lots of high profile people are attending. Check the special guest list. If you want to be part of the action you can sign up for free. To contribute you have to set up your profile and put yourself in one of the pre-selected categories like “Social Network Junkie” or “Baby Boomer”. That’s where I stopped. There was no “none of the above” to select and I didn’t like any of the choices. I am not a label.

Image: Jam by Sally

My first foray as a lurker to the jam showed that most of the conversations were around marketing. My idea of social business is working smarter through social learning. Marketing is merely the tip of the iceberg.

The more I thought about this jam, the more I felt that Jaron Lanier was right:

The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation.  The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system.

Are we all a bunch of TED wannabe’s looking for some exclusive opportunity to be special? The good news is: you are special. The bad news is: so is everyone else.

The open Web, without special sign-ons or walled gardens or exclusive clubs is where we can co-create the knowledge needed for the 21st century. It has to be open, transparent and easily reproduceable & linkable. If not, we’re just building digital versions of the hierarchies and silos of the 20th century.

Update:

Here’s the label where I stopped: