by Rob Paterson
August 29, 2007 at 8:36 am
· Filed under Charles Handy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, SocialText, Web 2.0
Why is collaboration so hard in organizations? Every organization that I know tells me that it is hard. Hard - all but impossible! Why? Why? Can Social Media help improve collaboration? I have had no success with just the introduction of the technology. Is there something missing?
I think that I stumbled upon the something that may be missing this week as I was struggling with this question of why it is so hard for organizations to collaborate and to adopt social media. I think that the missing link is having the right context. Throughout history, technology has changed before the prevailing context. Two examples:
- In 1941, the French had more and better tanks than the Germans. But they were decisively beaten in days. Why? Because the French’s context for using tanks was still based in static defensive warfare - Tanks to them were mobile pill boxes. The Germans saw them as a raging offensive torrent. Same technology - different context - different result!
- All airlines except one - use the traditional model of mechanical “efficiency” - usually by playing off pilots with flight attendants versus ground staff versus check in staff. All airlines except one - thought that fleet unification or better use of technology - would save them money. Only one understood that the key to the single most important factor in keeping costs low - having the highest fleet utilization rate (Planes in the air versus on the ground - was not through efficiency but through collaboration on the ramp. Their entire organization is deigned to promote cross fertilization and collaboration. A host of rewards and penalties reinforce this aim. That airline makes more money that all the rest of the industry. None have been able to change their context to follow it - of course that airline is Souhwest.
My aha was this - If you introduce Social Media into your organization without thinking about the new context for enterprise - you will fail as did the French and the other airlines
So then what context?
When we use the word “Organization” we default to this model. An organization that breaks up work and people naturally into separate and competing parts. I say competing - because this is also how we allocate capital and resources - the parts compete for the attention of the “father” as kids do for the car keys. At the centre of this context is Budget and the idea that everyone and everything inside the department is “Property” that has to be owned by the Head. Hence my Feudal analogy.
This model excludes all externalities such as suppliers and customers. Departments will rather die that share resources with another department. Of course the people inside cannot collaborate - it is logical and wise that they don’t. For the real aim of the department is not the customer or even the larger good of the whole enterprise but the expansion and or the protection of the department itself. Hence the reason why most organizations in the end default into being self serving. They are designed to be so.
So what is the new organizational context?
I think it looks like the logo for Ross Mayfield’s Social Text. It’s intellectual father is Charles Handy. It is his Shamrock idea made real by Social Software.
In The Age of Unreason (1989) he proposed the Shamrock organisation as a business model. Many have tied the symbol to his Irish background. The shamrock has long been powerful in the Anglican Church of Ireland because of its apocryphal use by St Patrick as a symbol of the Holy Trinity.
For Handy the first of the three leaves represented the professional managers and administrators � the organisational core. This leaf is shrinking in size. The second leaf contained the contractual fringe. Its contributors to the organisation were vital, but they were outsiders. In the third leaf were those including the portfolio workers, as well as temporary workers and part-timers. They contributed much, but they could never be considered part of the organisation. Many didn�t want to be. They wanted jobs but not careers. They frequently worked for a number of disparate organisations. In Handy�s language they were like fleas feeding off elephants. The latter were the large organisations. This was an analogy he pursued in the autobiographical The Elephant and the Flea (2001).
Social Text’s logo sheds for me new light on Handy’s idea or an organic structure whose role id to get a lot of resources for much less cost that by having to own them all like a Feudal Lord.
Let’s briefly explore this idea in practice.
You are the president of a small Public TV station. Your staff is already maxed out with putting the existing world on air. How are you going to make the transition to being a public media company? You have no spare resources. You have only modest internal expertise in the new. You have no way of having God suddenly give you the money to create the new. But you know that if you don’t - you will be dead in maybe 5 years?
In part 2 - I will offer up how such a President could solve this paradox by using the Handy Model and Ross’s Pentogram as a guide. In the mean time - give this paradox a whirl yourself
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Andries wrote @ August 29th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Hi,
Im about to embark on my own blogger experience… starting off with elephants and fleas…
I truly enjoyed your take on things and exploring reasons why sharing and collaboration are elusive, to say the least despite all the efforts, technological solutions.
Handy’s Age of Unreason has been a favourite of mine ever since I read it some years ago. Being in education, Im curious about collaborative learning. Must say, the current FaceBook and MMS, SMS and IPod generation look differently at sharing… in fact, hoarding is frowned upon. Maybe we must wait long enough….
Regards
A
John Naisbitt wrote back in 1984 that the emerging organization will be more of a “confederation of entrepreneurs” than a rigid hierarchical org chart of 9-to-5ers. I think this has come to pass in at least the forward-thinking companies among us. These organizations rely more on a network of independent contractors/service-providers, but encourage remaining inside-the-firewall employees to think in more entrepreneurial terms.
Joe, that sound like wirearchy to me:
Joe I really liked your prior post on this - helps to show that major firms are going here - leaves open the question why not YOU?
Vera wrote @ August 29th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Hello Rob,
Your examples in this post are not reading to me as being primarily about context, but as more about conflict and competing agendas. My definition of context is influencing factors. These include preceding events on both a personal and societal level as well as influencing factors, which can include environment, culture, and family and peer pressure. Full context helps us derive meaning, whereas conflict can obscure or destroy meaning. This is not to say that win-win conflict resolution, or winning a war against Hitler, is not meaningful. Full context is also one of the most valuable tools available in conflict resolution, in my personal experience.
Vera
Hi Vera
I am struggling a bit with understanding your point - can you expand please?
When I say context what I meant was that The French approached war in the context of it being a static and defensive activity - the Germans as a fluid and offensive activity:- That most airlines see efficiency as mechanical and Southwest see it as cultural:- When most people think organization they see the context as owning preserving and expanding the unit and controlling it whereas a 2.0 organization sees the context as facilitating meeting the needs of all parties.
This is how I see context - am I still off base with you? If I am am could you help me by being more clear - for me that is
Thanks
Rob
Vera wrote @ September 1st, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Hi Rob,
I apologize for inadvertently causing any confusion by inserting my personal view here 
and am happy to explain it further.
In your comment, each use of the word context prompts me, almost instinctively, to substitute either agenda(s), goal(s) or strategy(ies). Each of these things is a context for actions on a personal level, and this level of context is critical to identifying conflict as well as to achieving goals. In my personal experience, though, it often does not suffice to resolve conflict completely, or to go beyond conflict resolution to creating mutual benefit and harmony. Each step back to a wider view that takes in expanded situational and societal context tends to increase the scope of the participants’ or analysts’ depth of understanding.
In a historical example, the context surrounding the actions taken also resides in the entirety of the society, time, and place. Whether those actions are offensive or defensive, and whether they are well advised, successful, or have positive/negative ramifications on the people involved is certainly a matter of things such as strategy, goals, leadership, etc. The context that informs those things also includes, in addition to personal agendas, the mores, standards, and resulting behavioral patterns of the participants (a societal context), recent experiences of the participants which tend to increase in influence the closer they are in living memory (a time context), and the opportunities afforded and barriers created by physical constraints (a place context). The first two of these are also influenced by the concurrent actions of other peoples. ie. having certain allies with their own approaches and resources in a war can influence strategy the same way that competitors’ approaches can in a marketplace.
In organizational examples, context as I describe it above can be complicated by the fact that large organizations develop their own cultures over time. Contextual elements such as peer pressure, or community roles that an organization makes room for and supports, can vary from place to place and from one organization to another. Large organizations dealing with large communities of ‘outsiders’ tend to rely on individual interpreters rather than encouraging general understanding of full context, and this can lead to more conflict and interfere with achievement of goals.
This broader view of context is easier to see when components such as personal or organizational goals are defined as such. My ongoing protest against the common use of the word context to identify only some of it is based on the fact that it can sometimes cause us to forget about the rest.
Specific to your post, addressing the inherent conflict between hierarchical organizational structures and an alternative model that somewhat more resembles a community structure does suggest a positive direction. Creating community models that represent the participants’ non-organizational point of view, and examining ways in which the models conflict, for example, might reveal more specifics of conflicts such as culture clash, or lead to clearer delineations between the commercial and personal. This could suggest new paths to resolution of conflicting interests and goals.
Here is an on-topic example related to societal context:
Where and how do social network participants typically draw their ‘chinese walls’ between work and play, especially if they are using the same networks for both? How does an employer recognize, understand, and respect the personal needs underlying this? Wouldn’t doing so be a powerful intangible benefit to employees? Might it not even improve productivity and loyalty?
Vera
Thanks Vera
Your last point - in traditional societies there was no division between your close friends and the people that you “work” with and only a small division between work and play.
In corporate life these are indeed strictly kept separate - but not in my life and in a good number of people now. I mainly work with close friends and we tend to have a really good time too.
So I do inhabit a different reality - not sure that a corporate one can accommodate a life more akin to Hunter Gathering
I was privileged to take a 3-day master class with / from Charles Handy in a London hotel suite in 1992. Hands-down the best 3-day course I have ever taken, eclipsing even my more recent 3-day session with Dave Snowden.
I wish that social media, and notably its (still very early days) entry into the enterprise world had been happening back 15 or 20 years ago when Charles was more actively involved with the organizational world. I suspect that he would have been a very strong voice coming down on the side of its strong potential for enhancing human effectiveness at work.
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