Archive for November, 2009
by Jon Husband
November 14, 2009 at 12:24 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Management Theory
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These days there are incessant debates about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, tools and practices.
We’ve been here before … we just did not have the infrastructure or the tools, nor the awareness or skill levels of large numbers of people.
As information technology first began its relentless march into the daily lives of people in the areas of work (mainframes, early integrated systems, desktops computers in the workplace) and general information-seeking (early days of websites and the Web), thinkers and organizational development conultants began paying attention to the intersection of technology and sociology. Many of the grandfathers and grandmothers of the field of organizational development will find the material on socio-technical systems familiar, and perhaps refreshing in the context of networked workplaces.
The material outlined below comes from a comprehensive Wikipedia entry on Socio-technical Systems, and I have edited it for the purposes of this blog post.
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Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.
In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.
Sociotechnical systems theory is theory about the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of machines and technology. Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organisation. Sociotechnical theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of both excellence in technical performance and quality in people’s work lives.
Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimisation. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organisation, ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.
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It’s too intensive an experience to go into the deep details of STS here, but let me draw out a few of the core elements of socio-technical systems theory and principles. It should be self-evident that they are central to the examination and adoption of collaborative social computing in todays modern organizations
Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Sociotechnical theory is founded on two main principles:
- One is that the interaction of social and technical factors creates the conditions for successful (or unsuccessful) organizational performance. This interaction is comprised partly of linear ‘cause and effect’ relationships (the relationships that are normally ‘designed’) and partly from ‘non-linear’, complex, even unpredictable relationships (the good or bad relationships that are often unexpected).
- The corollary of this, and the second of the two main principles, is that optimisation of each aspect alone (socio or technical) tends to increase not only the quantity of unpredictable, ‘un-designed’ relationships, but those relationships that are injurious to the system’s performance.
Therefore sociotechnical theory is about joint optimisation.
Principles of Socio-technical Systems Theory
Some of the central principles of sociotechnical theory were elaborated in a seminal paper by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in 1951.
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The key to responsible autonomy seems to be to design an organization possessing the characteristics of small groups whilst preventing the ‘silo-thinking’ and ‘stovepipe’ neologisms of contemporary management theory. In order to preserve “…intact the loyalties on which the small group [depend]…the system as a whole [needs to contain] its bad in a way that [does] not destroy its good”.
In practice this requires groups to be responsible for their own internal regulation and supervision, with the primary task of relating the group to the wider system falling explicitly to a group leader. This principle, therefore, describes a strategy for removing more traditional command hierarchies.
Adaptability
“…the organisation tries to deal with the external complexity by ‘reducing’ the internal control and coordination needs. …This option might be called the strategy of ‘simple organisations and complex jobs’”.
Many type of organisations are clearly motivated by the appealing ‘industrial age’, rational principles of ‘factory production’, a particular approach to dealing with complexity: “In the factory a comparatively high degree of control can be exercised over the complex and moving ‘figure’ of a production sequence, since it is possible to maintain the ‘ground’ in a comparatively passive and constant state”
In Classic organisations problems with the moving ‘figure’ and moving ‘ground’ often become magnified through a much larger social space, one in which there is a far greater extent of hierarchical task interdependence. For this reason, the semi-autonomous group, and its ability to make a much more fine grained response to the ‘ground’ situation, can be regarded as ‘agile’.
Added to which, local problems that do arise need not propagate throughout the entire system (to affect the workload and quality of work of many others) because a complex organization doing simple tasks has been replaced by a simpler organization doing more complex tasks. The agility and internal regulation of the group allows problems to be solved locally without propagation through a larger social space, thus increasing tempo.
Whole tasks
Another concept in sociotechnical theory is the ‘whole task’. A whole task “has the advantage of placing responsibility for the task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership.” The sociotechnical embodiment of this principle is the notion of minimal critical specification. This principle states that, “While it may be necessary to be quite precise about what has to be done, it is rarely necessary to be precise about how it is done”
The key factor in minimally critically specifying tasks is the responsible autonomy of the group to decide, based on local conditions, how best to undertake the task in a flexible adaptive manner.
This principle is isomorphic with ideas like Effects Based Operations (EBO). EBO asks the question of what goal is it that we want to achieve, what objective is it that we need to reach rather than what tasks have to be undertaken, when and how. The EBO concept enables the managers to “…manipulate and decompose high level effects. They must then assign lesser effects as objectives for subordinates to achieve. The intention is that subordinates’ actions will cumulatively achieve the overall effects desired”
Meaningfulness of tasks
Effects Based Operations and the notion of a ‘whole task’, combined with adaptability and responsible autonomy, have additional advantages for those at work in the organization. This is because “for each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure” as well as the requirement to deploy a multiplicity of skills and to have the responsible autonomy in order to select when and how to do so.
This is clearly hinting at a relaxation of the myriad control mechanisms found in the more classically designed organizations.
In classic organisations the ‘wholeness’ of a task is often diminished by multiple group integration and spatiotemporal disintegration.
The group based form of organization design proposed by sociotechnical theory combined with new technological possibilities (such as the internet) provide a response to this often forgotten issue, one that contributes significantly to joint optimisation.
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I’ve done a significant amount of editing above (by chopping out significant-but-complicated-and-jargon-laden parts of the extract from Wikipedia). Suffice it for now to say that socio-technical systems theory and principles anticipated the dynamic tension between the (potential) every-which-wayness of hyperlinked human activity and the need for concentration on setting and achieving meaningful objectives that drive organizational performance.
It seems clear to me that as organizations explore and take action regarding the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, knowledge work will need to be designed differently .. away from the linear ’cause-and-effect’ and sequential thinking evident in today’s job descriptions and organizational charts, towards adaptability, autonomy, whole tasks and individuals taking responsibility for the effectiveness of the networks in which they are engaged that address the organization’s objectives.
The socio-technical systems approach involves complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces, as a subset or mirror of the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behavior.
The elements of the approach brought to a specific organization are:
Job enrichment – giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties.
Job enlargement – increasing the scope and reach of a job’s duties and responsibilities. This argues against over-specialisation and the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is performed repetitively by an individual worker.
Job rotation - an approach to employee and management development. A schedule of varying assignments gives people a breadth of exposure to large parts of or the entire operation.
Motivation – stimulating and enhancing the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of positive and constructive behaviors, or more simply increasing the desire and willingness to do something.
Process improvement – actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. ‘Process’ in a networked environment is an emerging area of study, as the linear BPR that has dominated the past two decades will be impacted, sometimes dramatically, by the dynamics of purposeful network activity.
Task analysis – how tasks are accomplished - information which can be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design and automation. Again, the notion of ‘tasks’ will sometimes (often ?) see dramatic impact as networked activity around an objectives increases.
Work design – the application of sociotechnical systems principles and techniques to the humanization of work. The aims of work design to improved job satisfaction, to improved through-put, to improved quality and to reduced employee problems, e.g., grievances, absenteeism.
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Many thinkers and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space are recognizing and discussing the need to re-design knowledge work and the small and large structural elements of organizations, due to the growing pervasiveness of today’s information-flow infrastructure.
The principles and elements of socio-technical systems theory, and offshoots like Emery and Trist’s Participative Work Design (on which I have written before), are in my opinion very useful and practical sources for thinking through and implementing some of the changes … in mental models and in practices … that I believe will be necessary to obtain the latent potential available in purposeful social computing aimed at an organization’s objectives for better and more responsive performance.
I’ll be glad to learn what you think.
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by Rob Paterson
November 14, 2009 at 9:22 am · Filed under
Adoption, Clayton Christenson, Posterous, Twitter
Here is a very special interview between Robert Scoble and the founders of Posterous. The interview I think highlights many issues that seem to escape most of us in North America and Europe as we think about the 2.0 world.
There are billions of people who are now connected but whose primary tools are handsets, texting and email.
These people are very poorly served by our western tool sets – computers, the web and social software.
While the uptake of Facebook is impressive at around 300 million – this is nothing compared to the universe who rely on the handset, text and email.
Like Twitter, Posterous is amazingly simple to use. It gets around many of the barriers for the hesitant. Billions know how to text or use email. Now they can have a place to share and show what interests them without having to learn anything new or to buy anything more.
I suspect that the Posterous guys have spotted something huge here. They have truly been thinking about the “underserved” Clay Christenson concept. They also know that it is best to start with “Good enough”.
But Posterous also helps the Western Hard Core Blogger.
As a long term blogger and user of the western tool set – my use of Posterous has transformed my own participation on the web. I find it sooooooooooo easy to use. In particular it enables me to aggregate the best material that I can find on my blog and to ensure that what I post gets the widest distribution.
Here I think is the nub.
Aggregation in focused areas - mine would include the emergence of the network (local and global) in all sectors – such as in organization of all kinds, food, media and energy – is where content value is enhanced. I have my own ideas but they are made better when I add related ideas of others – not just as links – but in large chunks – for after all I have a lot of real estate. You can see in a second whether you wish to read on or not. A set of links is more of a mystery ride.
I am finding that my blog has much more depth for very little added effort – my readership is up both in terms of views and time on the page. So others seem to agree.
The other part of the value is in giving me better distribution. With one simple action on Posterous – I not only post to my blog but to Twitter and to Facebook where I have overlapping but often different readers. As the social web becomes every more real time, I can throw a bigger rock into the river and cause more ripples.
These features I think can help those in media who are also seeking more focus on their web offerings and who seek a wider following. Posterous will enable hard pressed TV and Radio staff add more value and widen their reach.
Like Twitter, Posterous is deceptively simple. But also like Twitter, I think that we will see that this simplicity is key to its potential power.
Is this not a lesson for all adoption? To own a car in 1900 was to demand that you also had a mechanic. Over time, cars inside became ever more complex, but using them became ever more simple. The more simple, the cheaper, the more people adopted them.
Simple isn’t it!
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by Jim McGee
November 13, 2009 at 9:27 am · Filed under
Book Review, Enterprise 2.0
Makers, Doctorow, Cory
Cory Doctorow is turning into one of my most useful ‘cheats’ in making sense of the ongoing collision between technology and human drives that is today’s world of electronic commerce, social media, enterprise 2.0, and the teeming mix of catchphrases, acronyms, and neologisms cluttering my inbox and browser windows. Doctorow does just the opposite of "teching the tech;" that lazy approach to storytelling of sprinkling random technological terminology into an otherwise ordinary story. Instead he takes a solid understanding of current and near term technology trends, extrapolates them in not just plausible, but defensible directions, and then explores how real people are likely to react and respond to that imagined environment. The result is an absorbing, and sometimes moving, story of our human need to create, connect, and matter.
The core of Makers is the story of two tinkerers, Perry and Lester, driven by the desire to make interesting stuff out of whatever is lying around. In Doctorow’s near future, this includes last year’s kids toys loaded with robotics, speech synthesizers, and multiple sensors discarded for this year’s models. Rip off an idea from an old Keystone cops movie, mix in some open source software and he has you imagining a golf cart maneuvered by half a dozen creatures out of Toy Soldiers. Down one path, this creative energy might lead to radically new models of work. Down another, it might trigger ugly immune responses from a threatened corporate economy and their lawyers. Doctorow explores several of these and other paths. Through it all he keeps us and his story grounded in human scale and human needs and wants.
Along the way, Doctorow generates multiple scenarios of new models of organizing work and likely responses from existing organizations and professions threatened by change. Because of his keen eye for the human reality of his stories, Doctorow’s scenarios are both more plausible and more compelling than similar efforts from pundits and consultants peddling their theories.
From time to time, government agencies and large organizations invite certain kinds of writers to come in and help make sense of the changes on and just over the horizon. These efforts draw an extra share of ridicule from outsiders who assume that the exercise is about predicting specific inventions and innovations. Here, Doctorow offers a stellar example of how the process really works. In a recent essay titled "Radical Presentism" he offers more reflections on how this imagining process works. But you’ll have more fun reading the story itself.
by Bill Ives
November 12, 2009 at 3:01 am · Filed under
Event Announcements
I have written many times that cloud computing will become pervasive in the enterprise. Of course many people smarter than me on the topic have said the same thing. I recently spoke with Miko Matsumura, Vice President and Chief Strategist at Software AG and author of the Wiley book “SOA Adoption for Dummies” about how mature organizations can best adopt cloud computing. We also covered some related enterprise 2.0 adoption issues.
Miko said he is working on a long paper on cloud adoption and shared some of the thoughts he is working on. He began with a definition of an enterprise as an organization that requires size, and longevity to carry out its mission. This has implications for IT. First longevity tends to create IT segmentation and silos and this leads to complexity in IT supply. Size and growth create organizational fragmentation that leads to complexity in user demands on IT. These factors can impact IT strategies. For example, SOA can be a rational response to simplify the complexity of IT supply but it can fail to address the complexity of user demands in not implemented correctly.
Miko puts these complexity factors in a 2 x 2 grid. Organizations tend to start in the simple supply and demand quadrant. The ideal situation would be a simply IT supply that can meet complexity users needs. However, most organizations have developed a complex IT supply before all of their complex user needs had emerged. So, lacking a green field, this approach becomes difficult. If there is already a complex IT supply, the cloud can add to complexity, rather than simplifying it.
How I asked Miko how can you be successful in this typical situation. He replied that several factors need to be present. First you need a mature understanding of how the behavior of the organization connects to the mission. This requires strong leadership. Then you need an enterprise IT architect that reflects this understanding. Unfortunately, most IT architectures are limited to IT issues and not business issues. It is not about optimizing IT, but optimizing the business.
This lead us to a discussion of process. Miko said that processes are done at the micro level. Part of the challenge for an organization is to become best in class in the many niches that their processes inhabit. Processes are often done in a silo and not at the enterprise level. The goal should be to align these silos but not to tear them down. Miko said that the goal of enterprise 2.0 is not to break down silos but to align them allow for cross-silo communication and collaboration.
This makes a lot of sense to me. It reminded me of some work I was involved within the early 90s that was done in the spirit of enterprise 2.0 but with the tools of the day. In a property casualty insurance company we created new processes for underwriting, claims and sales. The best practices of the organization where embed in individual applications. Then these applications were aligned and connected. We were trying to break down silos of communication but not silos of processes and applications. These latter two types of silos were essential for efficient processes and should not be destroyed. Now alignment of silos along a value chain is an enterprise level task and can benefit from enterprise 2.0 approaches.
This line of thought took us back to the question of cloud computing. To be successful it needs to recognize and deal with the complexity of user needs and the alignment of silos, but not the destruction of necessary silos. I am sold.
by Paula Thornton
November 9, 2009 at 8:21 pm · Filed under
IT Department
Is asking ‘why something fails’ the right question to find or solve the real problem?
Michael Krigsman reports on Information Technology (IT) project failures, a great topic deserving of attention. On his hosted phone discussions, featured speakers share their stories.
Stories are wonderful mechanisms to thread together relevant facts. They often become objects of entertainment where facts are embellished with each telling — stories morph into ‘tales’. I suggest that failure often starts with basing business design on fairytales and folklore. Ironically, the best clues for changing this, are found among people who create fairytales professionally.
Pixar Storytelling
Lurking in your own DVD collection may be a treasure of clues. In the ‘extras’ for the movie Finding Nemo, is the documentary Making Nemo.
Their story starts with a premise, shared by Writer-Director, Andrew Stanton:
“We just want to make a good movie.”
There are many examples of journeys that started with “We just want to make/deliver a good [fill-in-the-blank]. A few ‘outtakes’ might suggest why Pixar’s results are different.
Executive Producer, John Lasseter says things I’ve never heard uttered from a leader in any enterprise I’ve been in, including some responsible for design (perhaps you have):
“I always believe in research. No matter what the subject matter is, you cannot do enough research…because so much believability will come out of what’s really there.”
Software, processes, products, services: these are all all abstractions of reality. To be successful they must approximate reality, they must be believable.
Lasseter then mentions:
“I went to every single person early on in the film and said…”
Whait! Personal contact from an executive leader? Is that in a rulebook somewhere? Lasseter continues:
“We cannot make a movie about the underwater world without you experiencing it firsthand.”
John insists they go onsite for research, and that they all get certified in scuba diving.
Suggesting any of this to Project Managers typically results in blank stares. Let’s start here: IT fails because of its methods. The methods are flawed. Requirements gathering is not the same as immersive research.
With a foot still in research, the Pixar team explores possibilities. Stanton asked his people:
“What is it that makes you believe that it’s under water?”
Figuring out what “under water” would look like resulted in “My First Ocean”. They got believable water, but it was more like a chlorinated swimming pool than ocean water. Stanton worked with his team:
“Each of these individual aspects of being under water looked great, but we couldn’t get them all to work in concert together. I just picked a couple shots of things above water and things below water from real footage [referring to live artifacts from their research] and I said, ‘Using exactly the tools that we have created and nothing else, I want you to see how close you can mimic these actual shots.’”
The results were too good. They came back two weeks later and the animation could not be distinguished from the live images. But their goal was believability, not reality. They still needed the feeling of a make-believe world for their animated creatures to live in.
Another telling differentiator in methods comes from Bob Peterson, Co-Writer:
“It’s really important for us sortof at the head of this big pipeline — before it gets to layout and animation, and lighting — to work this thing out right. That includes the pacing of a film, that includes the emotion — making sure that people are feeling things as the movie progresses.”
Unlike other projects, they started this one with a full screenplay, written by the Director. They thought this would make the effort easier. Lee Unkrich, Co-Director says:
“But the reality is that once you put these movies up in storyboard form, a lot of things come to light that aren’t clear when you’re just reading words on a printed page.”
Let me interject briefly: Requirements are just words on a printed page — they are insufficient for success. Another critical element that Stanton points out (the inverse of ‘final’ requirements as a goal):
“The thing that finally makes it on the screen is all about rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. A good portion of the rewrite process is not done by the screenwriter at a word processor…it’s the story department.”
They have a story department? Who are these people? Stanton explains:
“…the guys that sit in a room with you for close two years, batting out ideas, countering your ideas, drawing up story panels, putting them up on a wall, pitching things, putting things on a reel down in editorial. It’s a very maleable, messy, glorious process.
When it works, it’s amazing. The power of what you can do with a group of great minds. But at times it can be very frustrating.”
When they reached an impasse the co-writers would get in a car and drive to some destination on their schedule rather than fly (e.g. for TV interviews, etc.). Sequestered together for hours, this forced them to just “talk it out” with no other distractions. Peterson says:
“We worked a lot of good stuff out that way. When I watch the film now I remember where we were on I-5 when this idea was brought forward.”
Storyboards are followed by story reels — complete threads of a story with pieces of animation (often both digital and hand-drawn artifacts) with voiceovers, music and sound effects to approximate the complete film experience. This is the template for the movie.
Then it’s back to the drawing board for the details — LOTS of details. The sketches of the original storyboard are replaced by full-color swatches, hand-drawn with pastels, to show the color themes and inform successive levels of detail, like lighting and motion.
Animators don’t just draw characters, they develop them — drawing them from different angles, with different emotions. Sculptures are then created of the characters. Now we’re talking 2D and 3D artists who inform each other’s work. Art Director, Ricky Nierva:
“That’s really when the magic happens. Starting to see that 2D drawing come alive in 3D. I get all this amazing information from it. I start seeing it in a new way. I start turning it around. I look at it from the top and the bottom, because you never know if that’s the way they’re going to be seen in the movie.”
This project required abandoning things learned before. All of the previous Pixar movies focused predominantly on bipedal characters (i.e. 2 legs). Dealing with marine life moving through water required new frames of understanding. No matter how talented or experienced the contributors, these circumstances were different. They had to adapt their work habits to a new set of heuristics.
As more and more people become part of the production, play and contests served a critical cultural purpose: getting people together to check out each other and their work. Their production is not a phase where leadership throws the work over to the team to be led by project managers — there is continuous review/feedback of the work by the leadership.
Their work is immensely collaborative. It’s not collaborating on bringing parts together. Various specialists touch the same pieces over and over again, adding their own value in its evolution. In the end, there are no individual star performers. The star power shifts to the results of the collective effort: the movie itself.
Let’s Recap
These are the artifacts of creative, immersive work at Pixar.
- Immersive Research
- Premise-Challenging Questions
- Multiple Leaders “Work Things Out” Together
- Possibilities Created by Storytellers, Sculptors, Animators, Modelers…
- Physical Reference Artifacts used for Conversations
- Specialists for: Color, Shading, Photography, Motion, Sound, even a Professor of Physiology…
- Plans that Change via Continuous Discovery, Continuous Design
- Incredibly Collaborative Work (including inspiring leadership)
- Immersive Play
Thank you Pixar, for giving the rest of us a real life example — a model — to look at from different angles, to perhaps see solutions and business in a new way. Imagine what we could accomplish if we were to fundamentally change the way we approach our work — right now!
All images from Pixar
Postscript: Tweetpeep @nenshad immediately shared this great piece from the Wall Street Journal “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity“.
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