Cathexis

End of Hierarchy - Gary Hamil at the Commonwealth Club

Gary Hamil's provocative views were on full display at the Commonwealth Club on April 7 in San Francisco. The noted business strategist and management iconoclast, postulated that hierarchical organizations are an outdated model in the age of the network.

Hierarchy and Ambition Deficit Disorder

In Hamil's description hierachies enable organizations to accomplish large scale things, building pyramids, manufacturing assembly lines but it also creates what he calls 'ambition deficit disorder' by structurally and pre-emptively empowering the few at the expense of the rest. The hierarchical model is a 'busted flush', a liability for innovation and market nimbleness and process improvements are 'fiddling at the margins' In a world that needs audacious ambition on all fronts, modern organizational modes of structure and behavior don't cut it in his view.

Modern management derived from a mashup of hierarchy and industrial engineering valuing precision, stability, efficiency and reliability. Benchmarking, he says a question for followers, not innovators (or to quote P.B. Pedawar 'dull and piffling problems yield dull and piffling answers'). How does one, for instance, benchmark a land rover for a Mars explorer?

Management hierarchies he sees as inherently a tax on the organization - if there's a 1 to 10 ratio for span of control, the structure becomes one with managers who manage managers rather than front line employees, and those employees often have little autonomy.  As he notes initiative and autonomy are correlated: shrink a persons authority diminish initiative. Hierachy's other disadvantage is to increase risk in decision-making. As you move up the ladder its harder and harder to challenge executive decision-making, fewer people are available to challenge inadequate decision-making.

In a world requiring rapid adaption, organizations often require a 'near-death experience' to adapt to new circumstance - deep change, he indicates is almost always 'belated, convulsive and too infrequent. At their core, organizations aren't very innovative, and it's often the newcomers who have new ideas, but incumbents have the resources. Resources are a poor substitute for innovation, as recent study by McKinsey noted, only 24% of CEOs are satisfied with level of innovation in their company.

Lack of Engagement = Lack of Innovation

Innovation requires inspiration, and Hamil notes that organizations are often not inspiring places to work. A Towers Watson global survey of employee engagement asked employees if they felt their ideas matter, and if they felt connected to a sense of purpose. Only about 14% are highly engaged, 24% are disengaged and 62% moderately engaged. The survey also asked employees what percent of senior management communicates reasons for businesss decisions? only 40% communicate openly and honestly, and 35% are sincerely interested in employee well-being.

Hamil bemoaned that year after year companies seem to accept the way we manage our human resources that yields such results. He noted Richard Florida's work, The Rise of the Creative Class-who documented how critical engagement is in a creative economy. For Hamil the negatives of top down structures add costly overhead, creates friction for innovation, communication flows and thoughtful decision-making, reduces diversity of thought, allocates power narrowly, and rewards sychophants. Before the audience could march out of the Commonwealth auditorium in a depressed state, he offered some interesting company examples of very different organizational models.

Beyond Hierarchy - New Model Examples

Hamil described a uniquely structured company located in the Central Valley of California. Morning Star Company is the world's largest processor of tomatoes with $700m/year in revenue. With 500 employees, the company has no hierarchy, no supervisors or managers.  The employees and functions by being 'radically synchronized.'   Each employee adheres to the company mission - all team members are expected to be 'self managing professionals, initiate communications and coordinate their activities with fellow colleagues, customers, suppliers and fellow industry participants, absent directives from others.'

From the company mission each employee develops a personal mission statement called a 'colleague letter of understanding' which is detailed and has performance targets. But employees also have high levels of discretionary authority to carry out their work. People have responsibilities, but no jobs, and there are no formal promotions. Employees are able to access real time information about their performance and the company's performance. Skills and tools not typically associated with front line workers have been pushed to the employee level. Employees are trained in consultation models of decision making, and business concepts and practices such as how to calculate and understand internal rate of return, net-present-value, and return-on-investment.

W.L. Gore has 3,000 employees organized as a lattice, not a hierarchy. Business cards are issued sans titles. They also use 360 degree compensation model -colleague committees review an individual's performance. Every employee has to rank 20-25 of their peers. It actually provokes interesting behavioral outcomes according to Hamil - people become more entrepreneurial and collaborative. One's peers evaluation is based on added value.

Companies around the world are looking to new models.   HCL Technologies in India  inverts the leadershop model, employees evaluate leaders and evaluations are posted on the internal intranet.   A large 80,000 person company in China has structured the company into smaller 2,000 person units to support a model of self-organizing communities, pushing P&L responsibilities to a lower level.

Mary Parker Follett was a noted early 20th century management theorist, and presaged these modern models in the age of the network.   She indicated that the role of leaders is to create more leaders - that is to empower.   As Hamil described organizational practice beyond hierarchy, employee become guardians of their institutions values, and the enemy of expediency.  They are worker-leaders who mentor and foster collaboration, and are other-centered not self-centered.  

Hamil was insightful and provacative, and more examples of new models and guidance on how to transform organizations would have been even more beneficial.   Hamil is Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London School of Business, and also has an active role in the Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) - an online community for business leaders to share their ideas on emerging models of organization.

 

Visual Problem Solving - An Evening with Dan Roam

We have convinced ourselves that the way to solve problems is to talk, according to Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin. But a focus on words short-changes one of the most powerful capacity humans possess - the power of visual thinking and problem solving.   Roam spoke at a packed session of the Silicon Valley Product management Association on February 6 in Santa Clara, CA.   By using the tools of visual problem solving and storytelling, we can clarify, create, convince and compel beyond words.

In terms of human evolution, half our brain evolved to look at little bits of the world, to focus on the particular, the other half evolved to put it all together, to scan and assess and scope. So humans have the power to focus, to be very good a staring at little bits of information at a time, as well as an ability to have a global perspective, awareness and capacity to synthesize, to see the whole. Roam used the example of an ancient hunter-gatherer, trailing and tracking a prey, at the same time being able to scan the horizon for dangerous predators.

Our memories, he says, are stored as images.    He presented about 15-20 visual images in a power point sequence, early on in his talk, and asked how many members of the audience could recall the images. While many in the audience could only recall a few, later in the evening, he showed each of those images again in a power point but this time next to a new image and asked the audience to identify which of the two images in each slide we had seen before (right or left image by raising our right or left hand).  The entire audience accurately recalled all the images.

In our culture we have come to associate the ability to apply words, assemble them together to discuss our ideas as being equated with intelligence while drawing is considered the 'training wheels' for intelligence. Kids love to draw and are encouraged to do so at a young age, but when they go to school and learn to read they stop drawing.

Visual storytelling is a way to use few words but communicate more - using visual thinking you can clarify complex problems by visually taking the problem down to its core visual elements. By creating a picture of those elements, you can convince people because they can see it.

Roam has done work with Boeing, for instance. He spent half a day, four years ago, with program managers, involved in building the new 787. This was a most complex machine, and involved groups from 15 different companies speaking twelve different languages. Roam coached them in visual thinking capacity building. How does such a global, geographically dispersed, and culturally and linguistically diverse group work together to build a new airplane where pieces have to be manufactured to within thousandths of an inch for accurate assembly?

Roam postulated - 'what if half of what they taught us in school is wrong?'  - that the way most of had been educated underserves the way we think and respond visually. The first thing that J.K. Rowling did for her most recent book was to draw a map of the fictional place she was writing about.  For her work, The Casual Vacancy as she stated "I have drawn a map of Pagford, it's one of the first things I did."    Roam showed a visual of her very detailed map of the story she developed for The Order of the Pheonix.  Similarly, accoriding to Roam, Joseph Heller developed a very elaborate map for his famous Catch 22 work, and authors such as Jack Kerouac and J.R.R. Tolkein drew maps of the places they created in fiction.    In stories of Steve Jobs, it's clear that he would take ownership of a meeting by taking the marker at the whiteboard.    Einstein has said that he rarely thought in words at all - mostly visual images.

As Roam points out, those who best describe a problem are most likely to solve it, and while we have convinced ourselves that our ability to solve complex problems is to talk, in his experience, those who draw the best pictures get the funding.  By visually representing a problem, you can quickly get at the the people involved - who they are, how do they act.

The ideas behind supply-side economics were literally drawn on the back of a napkin. Roam told an anecdote of a most influential sketch. In 1974, Arthur Laffer, a conservative economist from the University of Chicago went to dinner with two of Gerald Ford's senior white house staff (Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney)   Laffer drew what is now referred to as the Laffer curve on the back of a napkin, and according to Roam,  it was brought to the Republican National Committee, and eventually made its way to Ronald Reagan, (who, as it turned out loved to draw himself, and drew frequently), and eventually drove economic policy.

 

 

Six paths to visual problem solving

We see and process problems in the world according to six different paths - four of which are well documented and understood in neuroscience - Who/What, How Much, Where, When, How and Why. Roam pointed out that we can process the Who/What, How Much and Where paths at the same time.

In working through problems visually, you describe, analyze and work through problems along these six path ways.  The challenge for humans is that verbal, word communications take much longer to process than visual information.   Roam had the audience outline these six path ways literally on the back of a napkiin, and provided simple visual vocabularies to use in putting pictures together.   As Roam stated, when you are solving problems, even complex problems, you don't have to draw tens or hundreds of pictures - just six - addressing each of the paths.

You don't have to be an artist, or artistic to effectively use visual problem solving.  Roam indicated that people he's worked with who swear they can't draw, turn out to be some of the most power visual problem solvers in the end.  He's recently created an online instructional curriculum called the Napkin Academy, to help individuals master the techniques of visual problem solving.  

 

 

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #4 - Working Social

Understanding and learning to engage productively with internal collaborative communities and social technologies is a vital work skill.   The capacity of an organization's agility, productivity and innovation is in large part based on the tacit knowledge and know-how of today's (cross-generational) workforce. In a knowledge economy, it's the talent and knowledge of people, and the results of their productive interactions that create value - the ability to solve complex problems or invent new solutions, and engage with customers in more authentic and compelling ways.

What are some of the essential practices and capacities of working social and what are some of the skills and mindsets you need?

Adaptive adeptness -   If your company or organization is rolling out enterprise social networking (ESN)  and other collaborative tools and technologies -- learn them -- pro-actively.   If you're new to a tool or a new social environment, try setting small goals -- take ten minutes a week and explore two new functions or features.    I set a goal of 'tool of the month' and try to dig deeper into something I'm relatively new to or haven't yet tried.   Suggest that a project team begin to use the ESN environment together.

 

Cultivate a robust enterprise identity -  Old-style company directories may list the official, but often non-descriptive job title of an employee, basic contact information and maybe their immediate manager -- it's essentially your assigned identity by the company.   Rich profiling and transparent work streams in enterprise social networking environments provides a broader platform for you to convey not only relevant background and credentials (your claimed identity), but your activity streams can also create an understanding of your recent work and projects (your performed identity). 

Your knowledge, experience and background matters, to you, to your company or organization and to your colleagues.  Developing a robust profile, and activating and evolving your identity helps colleagues and co-workers readily discover and tap skills or knowledge they may need.   It can also help team members develop insight and affinity more quickly as new projects start up.  

A richer enterprise identity provides more agile talent discovery for internal recruiting, and creates a reputation advantage for you by making your various social roles (i.e., answers questions, contributes to communities of practice)  and social feedback (likes, comments, contributes to streams) more broadly visible (your recognized identity).   

Use activity streams to work transparently -  Enterprise social networking systems provide activity streams  to support the transparent, interactive, persistent threads of work streams, shared artifacts, and discussion comments.   There are several key value points in those characteristics -- transparency lets you  bring in, or add colleagues to an activity stream - all interactions are visible and persistent in one thread - no more email rat-holes.   

Relevant objects or artifacts to a project or team work stream can be attached, and versions easily identified.   Various contributions from team members are easily discerned and key issues, concerns or contributions  viewed.    Varied modes of interactivity and response are often available -- commenting, and adding your voice and expertise to the work stream, adding affirming tags such as a 'like' identifier, a 'favorite' tag, an ability to quickly share specific content from a stream.   Many offerings also support integration with email and other productivity applications.  Mobile interfaces also provide a range of access points. Varied contextual alerts let you and your colleagues know what is happening in key activity streams.

Tag it now-find it when you need it -  One of the key benefits to ESN is it's searchability of activity streams, people, communities, and artifaccts in the the organization.   Whether you initiate an activity stream, or join a team using ESN for project work,  it's important to identify and agree as a team on a small set of relevant tags.   Simplicity is the watchword - but doing this as a part of the activity stream set up will help with information flow and group productivity in the near-term, and allow the results of your work to be discovered across the organization later.  

Be a mentor, become a leader -  When you work transparently, and as the tenor of your productive interactions are viewed by groups and teams, you inherently model 'working social', and as such provide tacit mentoring to those you engage with.   

The dynamics of working social in turn supports a climate of trust that allows people to negotiate their way forward.   “Where trust is the currency, reputation is a source of power.”   - and is not only a driver of greater productive behavior but helps surface leader mentors.   As you grow your own facility in working social you can also actively mentor others, expand your social roles across the organization, and exhibit leadership.

Identify social learning opportunities - ESNs offers easy opportunities for communities of interest and practice to flourish outside of work group or projecct teams.    Such communities can help you advance and accelerate your own professional development, and support your own capacity for mentoring others and gaining affirmation for your skills, experience and abilities.    Look for ways to tap into these kind of informal resources.

Here are my earlier posts in this series.

• Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #1 - Think Community
• Enterprise Social Networking Mindshfts  #2 - Why  Community Matters
• Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #3 - Managing Social

Enterprise 2.0 Innovate: Beyond Adoption to Social Process Transformation

Many companies and organizations rollout out collaboration and enterprise social networking with an initial burst of early orientation and hoopla.  Once the initial excitement wears off, they are left with a “what next?” dilemma and ask themselves how to get sustained and building engagement in order to get all the benefits of working socially.

Richard Hughes, Director of Social Strategy at Broadvision and Paul Karazuba of QuickLogic reviewed some key considerations and strategies for getting past the “shiny new toy” phase and making enterprise social networking (ESN) a productive element in enterprise workflows.   As Hughes said it has to be a place where real work gets done and as it becomes an embedded experience, helps change the nature of work as well.   

Hughes cited an Altimeter whitepaper written by Charlene Li that noted a major social business challenge is that workers get pulled away to the reality of day to day business process functions often causing enterprise social networks to fail.   Most workers engage in specific business process activities that exist outside the social network - so there develops a 'to and fro' dynamic of people going to business process actions and come back to the enterprise social network.

Hughes noted that to address that problem, the processes need to come into  the social network so the work takes place and gets hosted within the social network. Hughes suggested that organizations need to consider how these processes change to a social network-enabled set of interactions.

There are specific benefits of a social business process

immediacy - better access to the information

serendipity - enabling discovery of new information

transparency - supporting honest and ethical behavior through openness

A business process does not become social simply because it's in a social network. Hughes called out the different types of social business processes

unstructured processes – the opened ended “hey I've got a question does anyone know the answer” or easy invitational “why don't we?” kind of interactions

semi-structured – direct queries to engage a constituency or cohort in a group conversation or comment about artifacts i.e., “please review  or provide feedback”

structured – business process workflow kinds of structure “approve my expenses - request time off”

While unstructured processes are the easiest to implement on social networks the sweet spot is semi-structured processes – where a transparent, "working in the clear,” benhaviors helps bring in, build and create new knowledge and insight, and accelerates revision cycles

The other benefits of enterprise social networking is actually towards “losing structure”  - by having more opinions early you have make better decisions.   A command and control model might see this as uninvited interference

One of the biggest challenges for Sunnvale-based QuickLogic, a global company that makes semiconductors for the mobile industry is what Paul Karazuba calls the “tyranny of distance," the challenges of working on globally dispersed teams.  QuickLogic conducted internal studies that show that “As you moved farther from Sunnyvale (HQ), you could track the drop in engagement.”

Four adoption strategies

Collaboration was identified as a key strategy to improve engagement and improve interactions among global teams.  To advance adoption Quicklogic developed four key strategies: identify pain points of communication and collaboration,  ask why, reward, recognition and responsibility programs, and an approach Karazuba called "a gentle nudge never hurt anyone."

To bring up a form factor for a customer system in Asia, for instance, requires support from teams in Asia, the U.S. and Canada.  With times zones being 12 hours apart, synchronous meetings are difficult (someone is either working very early or very late, and in either case not optimum performance hours).   A typical method of interaction method therefore is email.

Time-zone induced delays in response result in solved issues being reopened by late comers to a thread, creating confusion.  Conversations often go from group to a 1-to-1 dialogue, then often opened back to the group without complete transparency of the side-road conversations.   And email threads can become so long that original context is lost,  people tune out of the interaction and critical information is buried.

QuickLogic introduced wiki and blog-based communication and collaboration that allows bringing the required work product out of email.  Now there are no more mornings with dozens or hundreds of emails, open issues remain present and not buried. 

Karazuba indicated there is now a significant decline in email volume without issues being dropped or stagnating.  All relevant stakeholders are informed equally including new people in the conversation and information is retained in perpetuity and easily searched.  Unlike email, if the user is not interested or not needed the process doesn't distract them.

Improving employee engagement

Another challenge of globally dispersed corporate organizations is all-company meetings, with the typical method of participation being in-person or teleconference attendance.  The disparity in time zones make worldwide synchronous attendance logistically impossible.

QuickLogic introduced a meeting archiver that moves the experience from a “live-only” attendance to a video—based enterprise social networking hosted location.    The entire company gets to see the original meeting as it was presented but at times that work best for them (and can increase understanding as the video can be replayed for better comprehension and review).   In follow on surveys, QuickLogic has determined that the dispersed workforce engagement has really improved.

Re-evaluating practices

Another technique QuickLogic uses is to ask ‘why’ questions to help re-evaluate operational practices that might inhibit deeper engagement.  Here are some of their ‘why’ questions that let them re-examine practices and leverage enterprise social networking in new ways.

• Why do companies insist in distributing all employee emails
• Why force employees off of the ESN to find information
• Why not find other uses of ESN that might not be 100% work-related
• Why stifle creativity with limits
• Why continue to do things 'the way they've always been done."

QuickLogic has good employee handbooks and company policies, so they look at opening up practices, inventive use cases with new tools like enterprise social networking, knowing that they have solid base policies in place.

The company encourages creativity and work product improvements through intangible rewards.   They also recognize innovation and build on it through applications in other areas or departments.  The marketing department, for instance, posts and track metrics in the ESN and they encourage others to do the same.   They also reward employees for process improvement responsibilities, and don’t consider this solely the responsibility of management

Karazuba gave some examples of the "gentle nudge" category to adoption practices.  First, they published information on the employee stock option buying program through the enterprise social network -  employees could only find out about it through the ESN instead of being sent an email.   They also shut down the company intranet three months after the ESN rolled out.   But they do provide bridges from the old to the new by supporting email integration with the ESN.

Hughes refered to the Gartner Hype Cycle and noted that enterprise adoption often follows that curve.   Karazuba said at QuickLogic they made the mistake that everyone makes – they ‘threw it out there and stepped back.”  It was the shiny new toy under the tree for about two months, and then moved into the trough of disillusionment in months 3-5.  Finally they moved on to a thoughtful, adoption strategy with programs to support it and through concentrated effort on specific strategies, adoption grew and improved.

E2Innovate: A Collaborative Enterprise: Thoughtworks Leads the Way

Dinesh Tantri, of Thoughtworks gave a compelling talk at E2Innovate on Tuesday. An IT services company of 2000 people in 27 global offices, Tantri shared the secret sauce of building a collaborative enterprise.  It starts with a collaborative work culture that they've evolved around a core set of practices and principles and he outlined ten key approaches that Thougthworks focus on.

Cultural strength = market resilience

The topmost is that Thoughtworks tends more towards culture as opposed to business models for building long term company viability.  As he indicated, business models will be obsolete every 18 months, but a strong culture will let you be resilient. The key behaviorial traits they look for is "the substrate for our collaborative culture" -- individuals who have a capacity for empathy, are intrapreneurial, optimistic, reflect openness, even rebellious, and selfless. He noted that traditionally social collaboration initiatives have been led without HR but he recommends close engagement early on.

Keeping Dunbar's number in mind

Thoughtworks is a growing company, but as Tantri says "We're big with small offices." They typically limit the number of people in their offices in the 150-200 range. This helps foster a sustained productive connectedness of group and reflect their adoption of an insight from Dunbar's number- that "there's a cognitive limit to the number of people we can have a meaningful social relationship with". So even within in the same city they might put together two smaller offices.

Within those offices Thoughtworks focus is on open workspaces - cubicle-less workplace that are structured as large open floors with project teams sitting together at round tables. Teams sit together a tables, and because of the large open workspace, cross-project collaboration becomes easier. The periperhapy of the space has small conferences rooms for private time, or small group meetings when needed. Dinesh noted that leaders don't have secretaries, and sits at the same tables as the teams - they don't reinforce hierarchy. 

Situational leadership

Leadership at Thoughtworks is situational. They reference the fishnet model (wirearchy) where centralization of power based on purpose and need - not based on hierarchy.

Thoughtworks, Tantri says practices situational leadership quite well and what this means on the ground is that they are not a permissions based organization there's a lot of trust. Ideas do not need to be sequenced through a hierarchy.

Thoughtworks they talk about practices and principles before they talk about the platform. Successful social implementations need to do as much on the people site as the platform side.

Thoughtworks actively use collaborative engineering practices - especially through the use of agile methodology which is essentially collaborative with the use of pair programming and distributed agile teams

The porous enterprise in a networked world

The culture at Thoughtworks also brings in the perspective of 'porous enterprise boundaries.' Tantri noted that a lot of focus by companies on the social area has been outside the firewell using social media to collaborate with customers or partners. Thoughtworks engages in specific ways to enable flows inside and outside the company in ways that balance the internal and external knowledge flows that are key to refresh what they know and dovtetails into the marketplace view of the enterprise.

Affirmation and recognition that's tuned for culture

The other area that's important is smart incentives.  Their foray into a gamification program was less than successful, and he says that gamification needs utmost care. They defined a points scheme that tended to work at cross purposes with their very egalitarian culture where they hire very talented people and reinforce sharing.  He indicated they mis-judged the effectiveness of a leader board.

A gamification platform that says A is better than B - when you have seasoned experienced people, these simple point systems that rank people doesn't express enough of the context of their experience, achievements, background. He indicated that when you start comparing people, a lot of these dynamics start going wrong, so gamification won't work out of the box. You must understand deeply your cultural context or it will backfire. They now rely on peer recognition and intrinsic motivation to drive collaborative behavior.

Community strengths

Another strength of their collaborative enterprise are strong communities, and not just virtual ones. Tantri noted that in many organizations where virtual communities thrive, there are also physical communities underlying them. They have actively engaged employees who regularly adapt and create opportunities and gatherings in their regions for conversations, shared learnings, and regular dialogue. If physical communities or lack of sharing behavior persist in the culture, then the likelihood building thriving virtual communities will be challenging.

Thoughtworks builds these thriving physical communities through local knowledge sharings and events -- they have a process they call 'away days' a two-day event of sharing and social learning.  And every region has it's own style and rhythm.  Their UK office has Thirsty thursday's and this in turn reflects on the nature of conversations in the virtual realm.  

Transparency supporting a culture of trust Transparency and trust are major cultural values at Thougthworks -- as much transparency as people can tolerate. The large floor workspaces at Thoughtworks offices have ample mechanisms for sharing, with bulletin boards, wall postings, making visual project team information with dashboards, operational metrics. Building an ecosystem of trust through transparency goes a long way to building a collaboration culture.

Thoughtworks gives people on the ground access to resources and trusts that they will make good decisions. And it's had a huge impact on how people relate and perceive each other within and across regions. The success of this kind of practice was underscored by Ben Fried CIO of Google in the morning keynote,

Social platform value proposition

In Tantri's view the social platform strategy helps the company scale some of these principles and practices especially as the workforce becomes more distributed. They have multiple applications; Jive, Google Apps, wikis. It does give them new opportunities, but essentialy it helps them scale those communities to be global so when they have an innovation in one office they can use the tools to help easily seed it to others.

Both their culture and adoption of social platforms, allows leaders to emerge bottom-up, as opposed to being appointed top down. They have had people who have done a brilliant blog piece that became a service practice. Individuals and teams become more productive and enterprise KM becomes a side effect. They look at patterns of use and tools, and instead of doing a formal RFP process - a bottom's up approach to the tools that people were leaning to.

Thoughtworks uses one primary enterprise-wide social network, Jive, but are moving to this as a social layer rather than a place. They have a mix of other platforms like wikis and mailing lists. A lot of social business people say email is dead. Thoughtworks is a developer centric company so they are heavy users of mailing lists. Three years ago, Thoughtworks didn't have a social platform but used mailing lists.

Next steps are to work toward socially enabling some of of their business apps. They have some heavy information based processes especially resource management software.

Integrated profiles - an emerging priority

Integrated profiles is a huge challenge for SaaS platforms. He noted that profile information is getting scattered creating social silos. You may have a dozen apps that have profiles, and how do you reconcile this?. They're nowlooking at the idea of a unified, integrated profile system. Some of these conversations go back to social as a layer. Should Jive own it, should Google apps own it? Enterprise search is also in this category bringing unified view of company -- how do you get people to find the information they need. On the HR/Performancem for instance they use Rypple (now a Salesforce company). Tantri indicates that the more that companies go to SaaS or hosted solutions there are issues around creating operational silos.

Thoughtworks really exemplifiies a thoughtful approach to reaping the benefits of collaboration.

 

E2Innovate: Innovation Inside and Out

If you're thinking about innovation for your organization or company, you have to understand  Gen Z - which Ari Lightman of the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon indicated are those young digital natives who were born in 1995 - the same year Netscape went public.  

Lightman and his colleague Chris Labash gave a day-long workshop on innovation at E2Innovate in Santa Clara today, bringing perspectives on the major disruptors, trends and frameworks for innovation. Gen Z are adepts with interactive and social communities at a younger age than Gen Y (born in the late '80s).  

Generation Z - gaming engagement comes naturally

We might think of the baby boomers as a population bulge, but right now 45% of the world's population is under the age of 25.  Gen Z, Lightman says, are inherently gamers (in the U.S., over 90% of kids under 18 play online games and 80% of the time spent in games is 'failing' - experimenting, re-trys, re-boots.   But as they overcome barriers, collaborate in joint experiences gamers experience the positive emotions of joy, relief, creativity, excitement and contentment and want those experiences in their work.  

From an increasingly younger age. Gen Z has  learned not just how to access information, but to exercise an ability to find and access applications that let them manage and manuveur their own experience, and do their own lightweight programming.  

Culture trumps strategy

Perhaps the most compelling remark from Lightman was that culture trumps strategy, and as the incoming generation arrives they need to fine an environment where they can be fully engaged.    The overall lack of engagement in the workforce is startling - Lightman cited a 2010 Gallup poll that indicated that 49% of U.S. workers were not engaged, 18% were actively unengaged (at a loss of $300B annually) - leaving only 33% of employee fully engaged.   

But Gen Z doesn't stick around -- according to Lightman, he queried a financial services company recently about new college recruit retention rates - 60% of them left the company.   With Gen Z, he said, they will either innovate around you or leave, and either way the company loses insight and measurement of an emerging workforce.

Empowerment, adapation, productivity

Whether it's Gen Z or older, highly enabled employees, what this means for organizations and companies is that they're empowered across a spectrum of abilities, with a capacity for self-directed engagement that is highly interactive and social.  According to Lightman, workers are able to understand the overall work dynamic without as much signal interference from hierarchical, middle management filtering, their direct understanding of strategy is heightened. and their ability to adapt and respond enhanced. The result?  An increase in productivity - the number of optimal projects that any one person can work on successfully at any one time is being pushed out from 1 to 2 projects to 2-3 projects.

As companies think about innovation and a culture that supports it, workers orient themselves into teams, communities and tribes.   With tribes, he indicates, you have innovation baked into the group - a social structure that includes roles, tasks and self-identification mechanisms -- but somewhat orthogonal to hierarchical organizations.

How do companies in the U.S. fair with respect to innovation?   Chris Labash cited a Boston Consulting study that noted that 72% of U.S. companies indicated they want to invest more in innovation, but 46% thought that it would be the rapidly developing economies (RDE's) that would be the most innovative (i.e, India, Brazil).  Labash also noted that only 13% of IT investments go to innovation, with the rest going to existing programs and infrastructure.

Lurkers are lessening

For Labash, a key question is can innovation be social (and I think, can it be anything else?).   He noted the oft-cited metric that online communities and engagement has been shown to be 90% 'lurkers', 9% contributors and 1% active creators, but a recent survey in the U.K. showed a shift to 23% lurkers, 60% contributors and 17% creators.   Quite a shift.

Labash teaches an 'i+t' (innovative and technology course) at Carnegie Mellon and articulates five phases of innovation -- imagination, creation, consideration, integration and participation.  As one moves through an innovation process, Labash noted that creation is really about opening up possibilities.  Western models of progress and innovaton have often been focused on looking for the right answer.   

He suggested looking at models of how children conduct parallel play - for instance a group of children doing chalk drawings on a playground.   They each work on their own drawing, and then begin to adapt and make connections to one another's drawings.   Labash offered the techniques of joint whiteboarding in a similar vein.    Other techniques include the 25 x y process, an extension of Taiichi Ohno's 5 x y process for Toyota, and storyboarding processes (one that helps creative people stay organized).

In the best of situations, innovation is flow, says Labash, and that flow of innovation should come from both inside and outside the organization (as the Proctor and Gamble model) - but in both cases, that flow needs to have a focal point on the customer 

Arriving at innovative ideas is one part of the equation, and it's important to bring those ideas to fruition by aligning with the organization, having the right team lead and ream composition, making sure organizational trade-offs are vetted, influencers and champions are aligned and poised to engage at the right moments. And for your customers, it's about making sure that you're bringing innovations to market that provide relative advantages to what they are currently using, not too complex and easily integrated with their current consumer practices and choices.  

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #3 - Managing Social

Understanding how to derive repeatable business value from collaborative community is an important senior management skill to master. In an economy where the tacit knowledge of knowledge workers is the mother lode, continuing to manage those workers in a compartmentalized, command and control model of the mid-20th century can stifle business success. The data is daunting - nearly two-thirds of U.S. employees are not fully engaged in their work - affecting productivity. 

What are some essential capacities and practices for managing social? 

Social tools and enterprise social networking systems need to be chosen and implemented to suit your organization's needs, but it's vitally important to adopt an approach that supports and enables collaboration behaviors.  It's about facilitating a network and emphasizing a coordinating stance from your management vantage point in the organization. 

The keys to managing in a social business is to set purpose and provide parameters instead of immediately directing.  As a leader you're also functioning as a connector in the network.

A Harvard Business Review paper from 2005, Collaboration Rules, written by Philip Evans and Bob Wolf reported on extensive studies of collaborative Linux and Toyota communities. As they note, markets are ruled by cash and contracts, hierarchies by authority and accountability.

Community rules, however, are about "how individuals and small groups work together, how and how widely they communicate, and how leaders guide them toward a common goal." The key elements they found were around a common work discipline, widespread granular communications and leaders as connectors.

When you manage in social business you're an engaged participant in your team's community as well. As such, you foster and inspire a climate where the key characteristics of a networked enterprise can thrive. That climate must be transparent, robustly inclusive, activate independent participation by individuals with the conversations and dynamics persistent across time to allow emergent cycles of activities to arise and support co-creation.

Greg Moran, CIO of Nationwide, spoke recently at YamJam 2012, about the company wide deployment of enterprise social networking.  He's created an infrastructure and operations community as a trusted environment for open dialogue. It's 2000 members who report to office of the CIO can engage in trusted conversation to discuss new ideas, issues, challenges and solutions.

Be a power user of all relevant social and collaboration tools. You will not only be a great example to your teams, but will gain vital, direct insight into the value and opportunities of enterprise social networking. If you're challenged in that arena, or have managers that are reluctant, create a reverse mentoring process where younger workers with more native social networking skills can assist.  

Recognize and advocate for network-based incentives - reciprocity (sharing content, participating in open dialogue, contributing and peer influence are essential engagement and productivity motivators.

Bring new perspectives to productivity. John Sheehy, President of Global Operations, Starcom MediaVest Group spoke on a "Engage Locally, Connect Globally" panel at YamJam 2012.  He highlighted a group catalyzed by the planners in the company called "Brains Aloud" (brilliant!) and is used to expand idea conversations beyond the planning group and to engage the broader group in specific challenges.  The process and group dynamics has been brought to clients. Starcomm uses the approach as an effective selling process - demonstrating by using effective collaboration they can show clients that a 9-month process can be a 9-day process.

Assess engagement as indicators of team vitality, and as individual indicators of productive contribution and performance of employees. Marketers and online community managers often have refined processes for metrics and analytics that can be incorporated into management models.

While you're managing for effective collaboration, it helps to get clear about what really motivates people. Dan Pink in his book Drive, reviews the research on motivation and distills it down to three things - autonomy, mastery and purpose.  While money and recognition are vital, it's the intrinsic motivation embodied in those three characteristics that are most powerful to manage towards. Here's how enterprise social networking and related collaboration tools support motivation

Autonomy-Individuals can move independently about the network, making their own connections, deciding how to work and communicate

Mastery-The network becomes a platform for seeking expertise, new information, developing communities of practice that support mastery of new skills and knowledge - and receive peer recognition for that mastery

Purpose-Through autonomy and mastery, employees can navigate more efficiently through the process gaps between strategy and execution and engage more directly and more closely to team, group and organization purpose.

Here's some things to let go in a networked enterprise.  

Hoarding information to amass power - Obviously senior manager and executives can't share everything, but hierarchical models promoted behaviors where managers became the focal point of information flows - often a way to manage power, not people.

Compartmentalizing your teams - a sister habit to hoarding, creating silos with little or no cross-team visibility may provide control points for managers, but affords minimum cross-learnings of practice, insight and problem-solving.  

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshift #2 - Why Communities Matter

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshift #1 - Think Community

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1. VLADGRIN/shutterstock.com

2. ljan/shutterstock.com

3. suphakit73/shutterstock.co,

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #2 - Why Community Matters

What makes enterprise social networks and communities relevant and valued today? It’s useful to look back slightly on a significant market dynamic that occurred in the last two decades of the 20th century.

The asset base of S&P companies shifted dramatically from tangible to intangible assets.  Prior to that the activities of American industry primarily created value through extracting raw materials and transforming them into product.

At the start the 21^st century the economy shifted towards a service-oriented and knowledge-based economy which predominantly rests with added value: returns beyond the costs of capital, through innovative work in strategic management, product and market development and by creating deeper and expanded relationships with customers, business partners, employees or ecosystems of contingent workers.

In this kind of economy, it’s the talent and knowledge of people, and the results of their productive interactions that create value - the ability to solve complex problems or invent new solutions, and engage with customers in more authentic and compelling ways.

Yet companies and organizations often continue to organize and relate to their workforce or customers as if it is still 1982.

This is a profoundly transformative era.  Now the value of organizations is its ability to connect those intangible assets  - the ideas in peoples mind, the tacit knowledge of their experience - to bring business or social value.  

In the move to social business, that’s where the focus of the organization needs to be, and why the rise of communities is so important

In the ensuing first decade of the 21st century the proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies has fostered the emergence of a category of company that McKinsey called ‘the networked enterprise' reflecting the connectedness externally with customers as well as internally with employees.

A 2010 McKinsey report, The Rise of the Networked Enterprise: Web 2.0 Finds Its Payday, showed quantitatively that networked companies showed significant margin share gains, higher operating margins and advanced their market leadership position.

The companies that are fully networked, on the inside and the outside are the real winners.

Many companies have embraced external facing customer communities to support them more effectively, foster dialogue and exchanges of information from customer to customer, reap new ideas and engage in ways that are more direct, personal and insightful.    

This kind of engagement not only allows the development of new market potential, but helps companies yield more complex, nuanced and sustained relationships - a realization of  'long-tail'  potential.  

Internally companies focus on strategic plans and annual business plans identifying the resources and organizational priorities that need to be devoted and aligned to achieve business results. Those priorities are focused on the front, large end of the tail and as such are high cost transactions.

While focus and alignment are important, it can also diminish the opportunity for innovation and ideas that might be slightly off-topic to high level priorities, but nonetheless can alone or in aggregate yield productive ideas, streamlined or new economies in business process enhancements, or better customer engagement.

When community collaboration is fostered by both access to simple, adaptable tools and technologies, and a cultural and management approach that supports collaborative work styles, productive ideas and work habits can flourish.

Internal communities can help fosters lots of “cheap, plentiful transactions,” of ideas, innovative ad hoc projects, or simply accelerate every-day project work.

Community dynamcis and value

Communties possess a unique set of dynamics that in turn yield value.   The quality of participation is catalyzed by a clear sense of purpose for the community, with the dynamics of transparency, persistence, the sense of both independence of contribution as well as collective engagement all reinforcing a positive flow of participation.

In this era of networked engagement, there are emerging models to assess and understand how value is achieved through community dynamics and participation mobilized to a purpose.

Depending on the nature of a community the value can be various forms such as the immediate value from the interactions and activities or the potential value of various forms of knowledge capital (i.e., sharing personal assets [human capital], developing relationships [social capital, gaining access to resources [tangible capital], collective intangible assets i.e., the prestige of the community or profession [reputational capital] or the transformed ability to learn [learning capital])

Etienne Wenger, Beverly Trayner and Maarten de Laat wrote a terrific paper in 2011 on the understanding and assessing of value in communities and networks.   

The dynamics of community in turn support a climate of trust that allows self-selected, self-motivated people to negotiate their way forward whether they are on a work team, are a customer assisting other customers with product usage, or partners bringing new ideas for business opportunity.     “Where trust is the currency, reputation is a source of power.”   - and is also a driver of productive behavior and the surfacing of leader mentors.

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #1 - Think Community

Enterprise social networking is not a backbone of the enterprise yet, and according to a report released by Ovum last week, there's about a ten percent (10%) adoption rate in organizations.   While Ovum says the market this year is $500m, this summer IDC indicated it was a $767.4m market in 2011 growing to $4.6 billion by 2016. Despite the difference in the market numbers range, one could agree this is an emerging market with great growth potential.

But what if you're on the ground in one of these early adopters, or soon to be adopters?   Enterprise social networking isn't just a new enterprise app, it about interacting through internal networks and communities and new ways of thinking, working...managing.

Everyone's embedded in an email inbox, and distribution lists swamps, but it's time to think transparent activity streams and internal networks and communities. If you're a new user to enterprise social networking, or trying to help colleagues engage here's some thumbnail profiles of community types to guide your thinking towards getting productive... and social.

Project/Business Process Communities

• Groups or teams aligned around short/long-term projects, or around a business function
• Primary dynamic - workflow - group productivity, efficiency, accelerating insight, enhancing communications
• Ongoing meetings, discussions
• Shared deadlines and deliverables
  • Co-creation of project content
  • Coordination of tasks and plans
• Shared calendaring and project coordination
• Community management becomes part of project or program management
  • Facilitating productive interactions
  • Guiding best practices
  • Managing, overseeing governance

Communities of Interest or Practice

• Groups sharing a common professional practice or discipline, or shared interest in topical area
• Primary dynamic - Enhancing the knowledge and personal connectivity around shared interests
• Shared content and news
• Posting to activity streams or blogging - Commenting - sharing expertise, building knowledge base
  • Discussion threads-active dialogue
  • Shared artifacts (documents, videos etc)
• Shared event calendar and news
• Community management and facilitation is important to nurture and champion work of community
  • Monitor and maintain tone
  • Facilitate group connectivity and support community champions
  • Catalyze activity and invite expertise and contribution 

Communications/Awareness Communities

• Resource for creating interest and engagement across a broader spectrum of stakeholders and topical interests
• Primary dynamic - awareness, engagement, networking
• Shared content
  • Posting to activity streams or blogging  - sharing news, resources, information 
• Promoting dialogue and networking
  • Timely, compelling discussion threads
  • Rich communications content
• Community management and facilitation relevant
  • Personal face of community
  • Facilitate dialogue and connection and interest
  • Reach out and activtate connection with other internal networks and communities

Building Online Community - from Strategy to Engagement and Adoption

Communities are now a vital element of organizational structure and company collaboration and engagement with stakeholders - customers, partners and employees.   It's important to understand why communities are strategically important, and how to effectively structure, manage and facilitate them - esepcially as enteprise social networking (ESN) is being more widely deployed.

You'll find the slides from my presesentation at Enterprise 2.0 in June - Building Online Community, from Strategy, Planning and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption, a helpful guide to the process of planning a community, getting it through initial launch phases and fostering and facilitating the process towards community health and vitality.

 

Whether you're building a public facing community, an internal organizational community, a community of partners or customers, you'll find important strategy, planning and community management concepts to enable effective community building and community management processes.