Wirearchy

Wirearchy

Social business on the edge of the chasm

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Last year I was asked what I thought about Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0). While it’s a popular subject amongst some management theorists, there aren’t many examples of E2.0 in practice.  Peter Evans-Greenwood has a good analysis of why E2.0 is not ready for mainstream business implementation due to regulatory constraints:

So, I agree with naysayers that the business case for E2.0 etc “transforming business into a more social business” is not there today. I disagree in that I think it will happen, but we need to up-end regulation first.

As I write this, it seems the term “social business” is already replacing E2.0. Social business should be understood by organizational leaders because they will need to be ready for a significant change in their operating models in the near future. Social business is almost ready to cross the chasm.

Social business is about a shift in how we do work, moving from hierarchies to networks. 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. They flow in all directions. As John Seely Brown said, you can only understand complex systems by marinating in them. This requires social learning. Complex work is not linear. Social business is giving up centralized control and harnessing the power of networks. It is as radical as was Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management in 1911.

The potential of social business is organizational survival. Enterprises must be able to share knowledge quicker than before.  This requires a shift toward something like a starfish framework that not only allows for independent action but also distributes knowledge through all the parts. Social learning is how organizational knowledge gets distributed. Social businesses can learn quicker.

The main barriers to social business are cultural. People in charge of most organizations today got there by doing things the traditional way of the MBA mindset. They feel they do not need to change and few are willing to give up power and authority, even if it is for the good of the organization.

Shortly after posting this, I came across an article in CIO: How Social is Taking Over Business [dead link]

Social media for senior managers

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This is the second of my conversations with Michael Cook on Organizational Development.

Michael:

I was thinking about the metaphor you used in responding to my question, that “social media are like new languages”, then after reflecting on that idea for a while I re-read your response and realized that you had actually said “social media are new languages” not like new languages, they are actually new languages. I was jolted into realizing where much of my current challenge is coming from. I keep attempting to learn about social media by comparing them to something I already know about rather than recognizing that while they have aspects that are familiar they are truly new phenomena.

So now I am wondering, email is email and it is ubiquitous. Anyone who has used email for any amount of time has had instances of recognizing its limitations. For one, it does a terrible job of conveying context and tone. Yet, there is no doubt that many of my clients (most of whom are senior managers, 45+ years of age) will do as I have done and think of an ESSP (Emerging Social Software Platform) as a glorified email system, and when I make a suggestion that they consider writing a blog they will give me the “devil eye” and shrink back like I have suggested maybe we hug. Since these are very likely the people in an organization that stand to gain the most by endorsing an investment in some form of social media, where would you suggest I begin a conversation with them about the topic and when is the right time to bring in someone with a technical background to support any signs of interest? It seems to me that starting with a product discussion is probably not where I would want to begin.

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Harold: Once again, let me rephrase the question – “How do you start the discussion about social media with senior managers who think of technology as just more IT products and platforms?”

I like to start any conversation with a client from a business perspective. IBM describes the current situation as such:

The rapid growth of social networking and mobility has enabled people to tap into the experience of others to accomplish anything – ranging from their work to the way they purchase goods and services.

This pretty well sums up what is driving business change. People can connect to anyone, anywhere and at any time. This changes all the control systems that organizations have developed over the past century: pricing, pay, hours of work, product development, jobs, customer service – you name it.

The challenge for business leaders is to manage work with porous organizational boundaries. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. We need to change our mental models and even invert the management pyramid.The typical branching organization chart does not reflect the way that work gets done in networks. Work is really done in the white space within and now outside the organization.

Work today has few time or geographical boundaries. As our water coolers become virtual, social relations online will be the glue that connects us in our increasingly distributed work. Every little tweet, blog post, comment or “like” online shares our individuality and humanity. These actions help us be known to others in the digital surround. They help us build trust to get things done, be productive and innovate. However, we cannot benefit from professional social networks unless we engage in them. This requires more than merely mastering the technology. It means being social in our work. Not using social media to connect, contribute and collaborate is like sitting in a closed office all day.

According to McKinsey, the main reason that businesses today use social media is to increase the speed of access to knowledge. It’s not a question of why we should understand social business but what can we do to survive and thrive in what has become a social business ecosystem. Social media are necessary to keep up.

Here is an indicator of the changing nature of business in a highly networked and social marketplace; the “app” market:

This rapid adaption to what customers want requires a very different organizational structure than at many companies. It must be able to adapt rapidly to new information and it must move that information around rapidly … Staying engaged and being adaptive – the successful companies will have both of these attributes.

To stay engaged with interconnected markets, business must get more social. Social learning, which can involve many of these web social media, is how we get things done in networks.  Most organizational value is created by teams and networks, not individuals working alone. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Organizational learning really spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance.

Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization. Senior managers need to understand social media in order to support learning in social networks which will enable practitioners to produce results.

Organizational Development and social media

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This post is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing conversation (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk) between Michael Cook and myself. Mike contacted me after having read my posts through the Human Capital League, which cross-posts many of my articles.

Michael:

“Thanks again for both the time and the conversation we’ve started on social media and uses in the workplace. As a starting point for our dialogue I’d like to begin with a broad question…I am an OD consultant by profession with a passion for improving the overall return on investment that a company makes in human capital and a co-equal commitment to improve the overall experience of being at work in any environment for each individual. Honestly, I want to see less suffering in the working experience.

Given these two commitments why, in your view, it is consistent with what I am already working on to give myself over to gaining a better understanding of some of the newest developments in the social technologies. I mean to say here that I am first and foremost a people guy. Won’t getting involved with these technologies simply be a distraction, a boost more for my ego than necessarily moving my commitments forward?”

Hi Mike:

Let me restate the question. Why should I, as an OD professional, concerned with the human aspects of organizations, have to understand web technologies? As Andrew McAfee says, “it’s not not about the technology”. McAfee addresses much of this question in his post, so I won’t repeat what he says.

All organizations use information and communication technologies to some extent, whether it be email, data management systems or more recently, social media. The one technology that is changing how we work, learn and relate is the Internet, especially the web. Many information technologies are just exploiting Internet connectivity in some way. Saying we don’t need to understand the Internet is like saying we didn’t need to understand speaking, reading or writing to do our jobs before. In my experience, most organizational issues boil down to one factor: communication. The Internet is where we communicate; from voice to data to social networking.

With this ubiquitous connectivity, more of our work is at a distance, either in space or time. Telework and distributed teams are becoming the norm. If we are going to support people doing this kind of work, we need to understand it. However, working online takes practice to be proficient. It is difficult to understand theoretically. For example, even though I have worked online for over a decade, I did not really understand Twitter until I used it.

But can’t we understand these communications media theoretically, or get advice from our IT department? For example, a doctor does not have to have suffered a disease before discussing how to treat it. Many academics in business school have never started a company, yet they can talk about the fundamentals of business.

Why is the Web, and especially social media, so different?

I think that one fundamental difference about social media is they have a strong influence on the user, very much in a McLuhanesque medium/message/massage way. Those who come to web media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. You cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors that you have in your primary language. Furthermore, if you do get to an advanced level in your new language, its idioms, metaphors and culture may have had a strong influence on how you think in that language.

Social media change the way we communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing (and thinking) will change. Use Twitter for some time and you will get a sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Patterns emerge over time. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how you react to being apart from friends. Social media can change the way you think.

When you adopt a new web social medium you are also starting on the bottom, or at the single node level. You have to make connections with what will become your network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like writing a blog post. Starting over, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.

Yes, you need to use the tools in order to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare you for this. Therefore you won’t know what you’re talking about until you learn the new language of online networks. The only way to learn a new language is through practice.

Social media are new languages.

Literacy and numeracy for complexity

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The need for competency in developing emergent practices is not a new theme here. Neither is the democratization of the workplace. It’s all about dealing with increasing complexity.

In addition to new work practices, it seems there might also be a need for different types of literacy and numeracy, as described by Daniel Lemire. Increasing complexity blurs traditional fields of understanding:

We teach kids arithmetic and calculus, but systematically fail to teach them about probabilities. We are training them to distinguish truth from falsehoods, when most things are neither true nor false.

Most of our organizations and institutions seem to be stuck in a medium-complexity mindset. That’s not good enough in a highly complex world but there are forces that want to drag us back to a low-complexity world; one that does not exist. Standardized testing and “back to basics” movements are manifestations of this simplistic mindset. Unfortunately, it’s going to be difficult to upgrade skills for higher complexity work when we lack the necessary basic numeracy (understanding of probabilities) or literacy (seeking truth on our own).

Perhaps this is the underlying challenge in getting people to think about and be comfortable in developing emergent practices. Maybe they lack the required literacy and numeracy.

* More from Daniel on Demarchy and probabilistic algorithms

Transparency: embrace it

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How do you make work more effective? Make it transparent, as Sigurd Rinde did with his client. He redesigned an advertising agency’s workflow, identifying the main choke points, four “big meetings” where one of the “owners” had to be present, and then made the workflow visible so anybody could see what was happening.

With an average seven weeks from start to end for their projects, where I assumed half a week average delay from instant for each meeting due to “sorry, I’m busy on Thursday”s (that I would argue was very optimistic), we could cut the time from seven to five weeks per project, on average, without losing anything but thumb twiddling. With a 20% profit margin today it would translate to a tripling of their profits.

Of course the clients would think this was a great idea.

Did they go for this no-brainer? Nope, the two owners would not hear of it, their controlling habits and methods where not to be touched, and bah humbug to tripling of profits. Ah well, their prerogative, they did not have outside investors. Maybe I should have had a chat with their spouses over lunch at Harrods?

Oh, I guess they didn’t.

Transparent work is the one of biggest opportunities we have in creating more effective organizations but it seems to be a major barrier in any hierarchy. The owners didn’t want a transparent workflow to show they were the cause of the problem. Too often, the leadership IS the problem. Whether they like it or not, these types of owners/managers had better adapt. More and more, workers know where the problems are because they have access to the data. They  can see alternatives and find solutions blindingly fast on the web. The hard reality for business leaders is that in an inter-connected world, we need less management, not more.

In a transparent workplace, the role of management is to give workers a job worth doing, the tools to do it, recognition of a job well done and then let them manage themselves. Working smarter means using social media tools, which are inherently designed for transparency, and doing something worthwhile.  Social media are the equivalent of an industrial factory for each worker. Today, every worker has the ability to get a message out to the world in the blink of an eye. Workers can also connect to massive amounts of information. As anthropologist Michael Wesch states, “when media change, then human relationships change“. The Internet has changed everything. The social contract that we call employment has been changing for a while. Unions are shrinking, the self-employed are growing and low wage service jobs are becoming our largest growth sector. What can unite us is our ability to easily connect with each other, without traditional intermediaries.

For me, an essential part of working smarter is showing people they have access to the most powerful communications medium in history and that individuals have to grab hold of it, understand it and use it for the good of society, because we are society. Working smarter is not about doing your job better. It’s understanding what it means to work, to create and to be responsible, while being visible to everyone else. This can be a bit scary, but I firmly believe that transparency is the foundation for a much better workplace.

Interdependence: a sense of purpose

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As we do more of our work in networks, workplace learning becomes an interdependent activity. Social and collaborative learning support the development of emergent practices needed for more complex work.

Esko Kilpi looks at different work tasks with the same framework as the above figure: independent, dependent or interdependent.

The Internet-based firm sees work as networked communication. Any node in the network can communicate with any other node on the basis of contextual interdependence and creative participative engagement. Work takes place in a transparent, wide-area, digital environment.

The focus is thus not on independent tasks, or predetermined processes, but on participative, self-organizing responsiveness that creates patterns of continuity and creativity.

Work and learning, as they merge, become increasingly interdependent activities. People haven’t changed over the years but with the Internet we have an opportunity to create work structures that may actually meet our core needs. Dan Pink discusses in Drive how various studies have shown that three basic things motivate people to do work (see video). These are:

  • Autonomy
  • Mastery
  • A sense of purpose

This applies to all but the most menial of tasks. We need to be in control, work at bettering ourselves and do this with the sense of some greater mission. We are social beings. As independent self-employed workers we were limited for centuries in developing our skills without support, adequate tools or feedback from others. We needed to study from masters and become part of a community of practice. Even with guilds and unions, there was limited access and individuals lacked autonomy. This same lack of autonomy and sense of purpose was magnified in the factory and is still evident in the modern workplace. Today, up to 84% of workers want to leave their jobs, in spite of the current economic climate.

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.

Perhaps there is a new middle ground between lone wolves and corporate sheep:

What is working smarter?

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I’m in the business of helping organizations work smarter. What does that mean?

Our industrial and information age is nearing an end as we transition into an era where creativity becomes the most important element in our economy. We are also living in a more complex time as traditional disciplines blur and as information explodes. For the developed world, that means the future does not lie in doing manual or simple work because much of it will be automated. Merely complicated work, which is most of the work done in traditional industrial or office jobs, is being outsourced to the cheapest source of labour. That leaves complex work, requiring initiative, creativity and passion.

How does this affect our daily lives?

First of all, look at the restructuring that is happening in our economy. Jobs are being shed that will never be replaced. Can your work be done remotely by someone who doesn’t cost as much? Then at some point in the near future, it will. Companies are finally realizing that they need to work smarter. That means automating and outsourcing where necessary (if they don’t, their competition will) and then figuring out how to get things done in complexity.

The core of working smarter in complexity is the integration of learning and working. It sounds easy, but it’s not. There are two major parts to this. At the individual level it requires people to think critically and embed sense-making processes into their work and their lives. This takes skill and practice. It also takes a work environment that supports and encourages individual learning, sharing, and collaboration.

Hierarchy is the enemy of creativity but we still need some structure to get things done. As Vera John-Steiner writes in Creative Collaboration; “…the achievement of productive collaboration requires sustained time and effort. It requires the shaping of a shared language, the pleasures and risks of honest dialogue, and the search for a common ground.” The risks of honest dialogue will be a major barrier for many organizations to transition to more creative work.

Successful organizations will need to:

1. support creative collaboration (not merely team work)

2. support each person in developing critical thinking skills

3. put this together in order to get things done

There is no specific recipe to do this. Every organization and business will have to find its own path. However, that path will not include:

– standard job competencies; job descriptions & JOBS;

– one-size-fits-all instruction;

– equating time to value;

– and many other vestiges of the industrial era.

Knowledge workers of the world, Collaborate. You have nothing to lose but your Managers!

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

This tweet of mine has become rather popular in less than a day:

Knowledge workers of the world, Collaborate! You have nothing to lose but your Managers!

& some other quotes:

“Organizations not engaged in real-time sensemaking are going to find themselves getting Dumb and Dumber” by Jeff Jonas (& others). via @jonhusband

“Don’t pity the blind man, for he has never seen PowerPoint.” @MeetingBoy

“Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis” via @jonhusband

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Twitter daily papers? “one-directional republishing of other people’s content”~@shelisrael – via @britz & @hamtra [I strongly encourage all Twitter Daily Newspaper publishers to read this]

These daily newspapers are gaining rapidly in popularity. I have this fear that I will find a second major pollutant in my stream, coming from some of my favorite Twitter friends, whose intentions may be good, but whose total output of one-directional content may block those conversations that I hold so dearly.

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Reason 543 Why You MUST Stop Site Blocking: Your Employees Can’t Solve Their Problems On Their Own. by @michelemmartin

Yesterday was a typical day for me as a knowledge worker–lots of unrelated problems to solve, ranging from troubleshooting an issue with a WordPress blog I was setting up for a client to gathering information on employment statistics for people with disabilities. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in having this kind of wide-ranging work to do. Even the specialists among us have found their job duties broadening in this tight economy.

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“Virtual teams really are different: 6 lessons for creating successful ones”  via @C4LPT

Lesson No. 1: Focus on people issues.
Lesson No. 2: No trust, no team.
Lesson No. 3: “Soft” skills are essential.
Lesson No. 4: Watch out for performance peaks.
Lesson No. 5: Create a “high touch” environment.
Lesson No. 6: Virtual team leadership matters.

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Evidence, Wikileaks, Machiavelli & the New Enlightenment: Evidence-based HR

The one thing that stands out for me from the WikiLeaks debacle is just how much the ‘old order’ is resisting the new. One group that has had to come out into the daylight are the diplomats who are berating Wikileaks for not playing the game according to their old rules – saying one thing in public and another in private. Their resistance to this seismic shift in thinking, equivalent to the Enlightenment when reason started to prevail over intuition and superstition, is rather pointless as they are going to have to adapt to it in one way or another.

Corporate Learning’s focus

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Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Q1) Close to 80% of learning happens informally and 20% formally, yet we spend most of our time and money on the 20%. How could we better support this and shift our time and money?

There are a few ways to address this imbalance.

The organization can adopt a performance improvement perspective and ensure that all formal training meets a need. HPT (human performance technology) is a broader design approach and should be seen as an enabler to get to instructional systems design (ISD). Without the proper analysis of the organizational needs, constraints and performance factors, a “learning” project may be doomed from the onset, because too often, training is a solution looking for a problem. By doing a performance analysis, it becomes obvious that many performance problems do not require training. I have developed a performance analysis job aid which is available for non-commercial use.

Another approach would be to divert or expand training funds to support informal learning. This could start small but would show that informal learning is important to the organization.  Starting small makes sense because the essence of implementing informal learning is giving up control. This can be scary for managers used to tight command and control. Start with the message that training  addresses less than ten percent of workplace performance. That might get somebody’s attention. Then look at ways to help with the other 90% of work.
One final note, don’t try to formalize informal learning.

Q2) Novices and experts have very different needs (curve from formal to informal). What needs to be in place to better support those differences? How can we support these differences across diverse business units (sales, service and specialized functions)?

Jay Cross and Clark Quinn have used this to explain the formal/informal mix by level of experience:
The above graphic is a good rule of thumb but should not be adhered to slavishly, as there are cases where informal learning works for new hires. I would look at ways to support do-it-yourself learning at all levels.

Q3) How can we shift from teaching content to developing search & find skills, critical thinking skills, creative thinking skills, analytical skills, networking skills, people skills, and reasoning and argument skills?

Organizations should start with Dan Pink’s advice – create an environment where workers have autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose. A key factor in innovation is to allow people to do meaningful work, in their own way.  The skills listed in this question directly relate to critical thinking. Teaching critical thinking skills may take some time for people used to getting content served on a platter and then being tested on short-term mastery of that content. I don’t see these changes happening overnight.

There are web tools that can be used for critical thinking skills, but tools are not enough. Good informal learning skills are directly linked to critical theory – to question authority, seek the truth and question our own perceptions of reality. All workers need to be good learners but learning cannot be controlled externally, only supported. I like this quote from an unlikely source, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood: “I was going to Martha Graham [College] partly to get away from Lucerne, but also I had to do something so I might as well get an education. That’s how they talked about it, as if an education was a thing you got, like a dress.”
Start by giving up total control of the training process and focus instead on connecting & communicating.

Q4) What training programs do we need to provide, at minimum,  for legal compliance purposes?

Compliance training is a symptom of the current disconnect between learning and working. Meeting compliance training objectives is usually not a worthwhile goal for the organization, though it may keep executives out of jail. Ray Jimenez summed up the issues with this type of training when he commented on my post, compliance of an industry:

“This is bold, cut and dry and thanks for the exposition.

I see debilitating effects across the training industry when many of our training colleagues accept “compliance” as the norm for training. a good example is the blind loyalty to testing for retention with little concern for applications in real-job situations.

Why not fight this culture? I might be wrong, but our industry might be too “onion-skinned” to accept self-reflections and self-criticisms that we rather continue to hide the dirty linens than confront them.

How do we lift ourselves out of this mindset?”

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In subsequent posts, I look at Amanda’s other questions on:

Patterns emerge over time

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Andrew Cerniglia has an excellent article that weaves complexity, cynefin and the classroom together. It is worth the read for anyone in the teaching profession. I became interested in complexity as I moved outside the institutional/corporate walls and was able to reflect more on how our systems work. The observation that simple work is being automated and complicated work is being outsourced seems rather obvious to me now. Complex work has increasing market value in developed countries and that is where the future lies. However, our schooling, training and job structures do not support this.

Cerniglia explains how complex the classroom can be, when we factor in the outside that touches each student daily:

But there is another, most important factor, life outside of the classroom. What happens beyond the classroom walls, in other classes, and more significantly outside of school, affects each learner. The combination of these variables supports the idea that classrooms should be classified as “complex” with the Cynefin Framework. If we review the traits of “Complex” systems, it is clear that often times there is “no right answer” in terms of instructional choices, that classrooms are “systems in constant flux”, and that the “ability to understand” (from the teacher’s perspective) comes after class has been dismissed.

This is the situation for many people outside the classroom, whether at work or in general life: there is no right answer. Cerniglia has created an excellent concept map that summarizes the cynefin framework and is worth exploring.
Here is a detail from the map:

The patience to watch patterns emerge over time is almost non-existent, though it’s what I’ve been able to do as a freelancer, and perhaps less engagement on a job site is part of the future of work. Furthermore, there are organizations that send tacit and explicit signals which could  result in these dangers:

  • The desire to revert to simple strategies, like simple PowerPoint presentations, executive summaries and three-phased operations.
  • Impatience with results that take more than one fiscal quarter to materialize.
  • Over-control of staff and resources, negating workers’ innate need for autonomy, mastery and purpose.

A strategy of probe-sense-respond (P-S-R) means testing things out and taking action before all the data are available or fully analyzed. So far, one of the few places I’ve noticed a P-S-R approach is in web development, especially with software as a service, like Google, where not-fully-baked applications get released and are then relentlessly analyzed in action. P-S-R is the mindset for life in perpetual Beta.