The HR Problem #1 – The Traditional Organization is a Machine and We are Human

January 30, 2010 at 3:27 pm · Filed under Culture, Organizational Design

Picture from Delta7.com

Did you laugh when you saw this? I did. I laughed because the picture tells the truth that we dare not speak about. That the only thing that keeps the formal organization going are the informal, unseen, human, social networks that both inhabit it and cross its boundaries.

What really lives and works today are social networks. But all the rules that are used in the traditional organization are based on the central metaphor that it is a machine and that people are merely components.

This is the disconnect that Jon and I wish to talk about in this new series on HR and IT.

There are many reasons why the old model is not a good one any more. The disconnect between the machine model and our humanity makes us ill.

This slide is taken for Marmot’s historic study of the UK Civil Service. (The Whitehall Study) What it shows is that our hierarchies kill us. The issue is control. Those in the lowest levels are 5 times more likely to die of Heart Disease than those on the far left, the Senior Leadership. High demands and low control cause our immune system to be compromised. The traditional organization is all about control. CHD is not the only outcome. At my old employer, a major bank, more than 60% of the women staff used anti depressants. We were typical.

We are miserable inside these kinds of organizations – if a better alternative arrives we will go there. Many of my kids age group, about 30, will not work in such places. They just can’t cope with the control.

These organizations cannot cope with change. And Change is all there is right now. We also know how unresponsive these organizations are to change. I was stunned to know this week that most governments in North America still use Word Perfect! This of course is tiny when compared to facing the challenges that confront us all.

There are new organizations based on natural models that are now at scale and making a difference in the world. They are now ready as a model, to be applied everywhere. You think I exaggerate? Let’s look at these numbers.

Skype has 500 million customers/users and only 600 staff. How many people work for your Telco?

Mozilla has about 350 million and so does Wikipedia. Mozilla has 375 staff and Wikipedia 30.

Back in 2007, Craigslist had the 7th highest number of page views of any web company. It had 23 on the payroll. Yahoo, the # 1 had 10,000. Time Warner #2 had 90,000. No wonder the newspapers lost the personals and the locals and could never get them back.

Here is one I bet you never thought of. It is the grandfather of the natural model – the first Chaord or as Jon might the first Wirearchic Organization.

Back in the 1990’s Visa International had 355 million users, 23,000 partners and operated in more than 200 countries but had only 3,000 employees. The NatWest at that time had 81,000 and B of A 91,000 and a fraction of the scale. Here is more current information

All these organizations are designed as natural networks. They use Group Forming as their value proposition.

In the next few weeks, we will talk about what is it about these natural network models that make them so effective? What are the new rules? Why does social media make so much sense in the network model? Why is it so hard to install any of this in the traditional model?

How can a traditional organization stand up to this? After all an artisan weaver could not stand up to the big mill. So once again, a better model will trump the lesser. The industrialization of the world took less than 50 years to be dominant. How long will it take for the natural model to supplant the mechanical?

Is this something that you should know about?

There will be a lot of pain along the way. Especially for those that get caught by the transition. But there is good news. I think that we are about to return to a world where mankind is no longer separated by his tools and processes from nature but is in fact ironically taken home by his new tool set. The plow took us to a cold inhuman and unnatural machine world – the internet and the metaphor that it embodies will return us home. Home to a world where we live again inside the metaphor and rules  of nature herself.

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Survey: New Social Networking Patterns Among ‘Generation Jones’

January 29, 2010 at 11:11 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0

While social networking is seen as an activity dominated by younger generations, new research shows Baby Boomers are getting into  the game as well.  At least, the younger cohorts of Baby Boomers — the ones that missed Woodstock because it would have taken them way past their bedtimes.

Continuum Crew recently conducted a survey that dissected the attitudes and activities of Baby Boomers – those born between 1946 and 1964 — and the rest of the world. But, as this survey reminds us, we can’t view Baby Boomers as a single homogeneous group with the same attitudes and life experiences. There’s the loud and sassy bunch that had plenty of tantrums — “Generation Ike,” born between 1946 and 1954 — that upended society like nothing before or since. Then, there’s their younger siblings — “Generation Jones,” born between 1954 and 1964 — that have a different, mellower worldview, and came of age in the 1970s.

Generation Jones appears to be taking to social networking in a significant way, almost as much as Generation Xers, who already have a reputation for their computer savvy.

Consider these survey findings in terms of social network adoption — the percentage maintaining a page on one of these sites. Note that the GJers are slightly more active with Twitter and LinkedIn than their younger counterparts:

Social networking site             Ikes    GenJones     Gen X

Facebook                              39%        43%            50%

Twitter                                  5%          15%            14%

LinkedIn                                6%           11%           10%

MySpace                               11%          22%           29%

Interestingly, Continuum Crew notes that a majority of Boomers joined Facebook within the last six months. (Fifty-five percent of online GJers, versus 45% of GenXers.)  even dissected a growing active portion of Generation Jones that appears to plunging even deeper into social media, a portion it tags as “Social Media Mavens.”  The profile of this group is one that is heavily connected, exploring and expanding their networks, the survey shows. Social Media Mavens have more frequent contact with individuals across all types of groups within their social network, not just family or neighbors, but issue-oriented groups and co-workers as well (73% responded ‘People often come to me for advice’). Not merely amassing ‘friends’ or ‘connections’ within these networks, they are communicating regularly. They also have more face-to-face contact and use smart phones more than other Boomers or Generation Jones respondents (78% responded ‘New technology plays an important role in my life’).

They are equally likely to be male as female (53% of this subsegment), which defies the stereotypical female profile of the voracious social media consumer. Of this Social Media Maven group are more likely than the other segments to own their own business (22%), most likely to engage in volunteer activity and to have the highest household income. Social Media Mavens are more likely to try new products, technologies and seek new experiences. They are recommenders who embrace the role of technology in their connected lives.

Lori Bitter, president of Continuum Crew, had this to say about Generation Jones social networkers: “The aging of America is shaping global marketing trends and no one is fueling the zeitgeist more than Boomers, who are craving a story and a reason to align themselves with a brand. Although they are the ‘have-it-my-way’ generation, many companies are missing the invitation and the opportunity to personalize their message.”

Jonathan Pontell, who coined the term for 53 million-member-strong Generational Jones, describes this generation as stuck “between Woodstock and Lollapalooza:”

So who are we? We are practical idealists, forged in the fires of social upheaval while too young to play a part. The name “Generation Jones” derives from a number of sources, including our historical anonymity, the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ competition of our populous birth years, and sensibilities coupling the mainstream with ironic cool. But above all, the name borrows from the slang term ‘jonesin” that we as teens popularized to broadly convey any intense craving.”

President Obama and Michelle Obama are members of Generation Jones. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is also a member. So is Sarah Palin and Simon Cowell.

Marketing Guru Jim Welch (longtime head of marketing for Hallmark Cards) says members of this generation  have different memories of events associated with baby boomers. But this is a prime group for business to target. They are “still longing for fulfillment,” he says.  “They are individuals that are much more open to influence at this point in their lives.  They are very open to change, and considering change. They are much more open to being persuadable, and open to being persuadable to trying new things.”

At the younger end of the scale, even Generation Y doesn’t fit so neatly into a single definition or value set.  Brad Stone, writing in the New York Times, says “the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.”

For example, today’s pre-school children think nothing of playing computer games and even fiddling with smartphones. Teenagers are fully immersed in social networking and text messaging. 20-somethings are more inclined to still be using email. The younger they are, the more likely they are multitaskers — typing messages into Facebook, text messaging, and watching television all at the same time.

The pace of technology is shaping generational perceptions at a rapid pace, as cited by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project:

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology. College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

The youngest component of this generation may not even really know what printed newspapers are, and, as Stone puts it, “will believe the Kindle is the same as a book.”

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IT and HR – Change or Die – A series?

January 29, 2010 at 6:46 am · Filed under Adoption, Culture

Are the IT and HR practices in your organization making it impossible to break out of the silos, the firewall, the bureaucracy?

Are you being held hostage by the “Experts”?

Is the Chasm between the connected reality outside your organization and the prison inside becoming a strategic problem.

Does the idea of a static “department” make a lot of sense when all you do is project work?

What does “manager” mean when what is needed are project managers or coaches?

What does “Job” mean when what people need to know is whether you are any good at the work that is on the table?

What do skills mean when your character and your network are key values to what you bring?

What does “employee” mean when half of the workforce are contractors?

What is a contractor?

What is performance? A contractor knows – she is hired to do a job – not told how to do it. If she completes it well she has done well and gets more reputation. Her best rating is to be rehired – why is this so simple for them and yet so tortuous for an employee?

Why can’t you connect to the outside using social media tools? What are the real risks and solutions?

Are you really “working” on a task 8 hours a ay and so cannot look Outside?

What about when you are at home or on the road?

Why when millions of people look after their own tech are you so helpless at the office?

Why when you have all the latest gear at home do you use semaphore at work?

Why when you go to the CEO and complain about all of these things and she agrees with you that HR and IT still get their way.

It takes a poacher to become a good game keeper.

Jon Husband, ex HR Consultant with the Hay Group and I ex SVP HR OD at CIBC will be tackling these issues over the next week or so.

But first – what about your stories? Please fire away in the comments about the strange world of HR and IT – what do you see and what do you think can be done?

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What evolutionary biology has to tell us about organizational behavior

January 29, 2010 at 12:33 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices,

Lawrence, Paul R. and Nitin Nohria

What happens when you combine what we are learning about evolutionary biology with what we have learned about how organizations work? One of the wellsprings of thinking about organization and organization design has been the Organizational Behavior group at the Harvard Business School. The Hawthorne Effect was articulated based on the earliest research efforts of this group in the 1920s.

Paul Lawrence has been part of this group since the 1950s and Nitin Nohria has been part of it since the 1980s. Their laboratory has been large-scale organizations and their primary methods have been anthropological and ethnographic. They’ve been in the field observing how real people operate inside real organizations. In Driven, Lawrence and Nohria take time away from the field to reflect on that knowledge in the light of what others have been learning about evolutionary biology. The result is a fascinating and provocative book. Warren Bennis, in an Editor’s Note, describes it as a near perfect book "applying the truths of one domain, the biological and neurological sciences, to another, the embryonic and needy organizational sciences."

Instead of working with the overly simplistic theories of human behavior that seem to underlie most current business and economic thinking, Lawrence and Nohria develop a simple theory grounded in the biological sciences that may account for what we actually observe in organizations in the wild.

They propose an model of human behavior built on top of four fundamental drives. Each drive is distinct and like elementary particles in differing combinations they account for all the more complex behaviors we see in organizations. It’s a strong claim but Lawrence and Nohria make a strong case for why their hypotheses are plausible in light of what we do know. Moreover, they propose straightforward ways we could go about testing them.

The four drives they propose are:

1. To acquire – both actual and reputational assets and power
2. To bond – with other individuals and with groups
3. To learn – new things and new skills
4. To defend – the above against threats

Lawrence and Nohria draw on everything from fMRI studies to ethnographic accounts to establish that they choices are plausible. In the process, they take us through a powerful synopsis of what multiple scientists in multiple disciplines have to tell us about human behavior. In an effort to develop a unified theory, they pursue of strategy of triangulating from these multiple perspectives to close in on a likely underlying model.

Given this hypothesis of four fundamental drives, Lawrence and Nohria then turn their attention to how these drives interact with cognition and emotions to create behavior. They synthesize their model using the following schematic:

One of the more interesting aspects of this model is the central role that emotions play in decision making. Lawrence and Nohria believe that their fundamental drives operate through the brain’s limbic center. First, signals from the outside world are filtered through the drives and essentially prioritized in terms of their emotional relevance. Nothing gets through to the rational centers of the brain unless it has been tagged as emotionally relevant by one or more of these underlying drives. Second, emotions provide the motivating energy to translate thought back into action.

Although the principle goal of this book is to lay out a theory consistent with what we’re learning from the biological sciences, Lawrence and Nohria do draw on four broad case examples to test the essential plausibility of the emerging model. They examine GM, HP, Russia, and Ireland in terms of how their model helps interpret where these institutions have been and where they are likely to go. They do so in enough depth to make a plausible case for their model.

Lawrence and Nohria have been engaged in working out the implications of their model since Driven was first published in 2002. Lawrence is at work on a new book extended his thinking and developing materials can be found at http://www.prlawrence.com/. In the meantime, if you are trying to make sense of the complex world of the human animal operating in complex organizations, Driven ought to be at or near the top of your reading list. Warren Bennis made the following claim at the beginning of this book:

When you dig in and begin to understand the four-drive framework of human nature, I doubt that you will ever look at your organization, your work group, your world, your family in the same way. Or yourself, for that matter. I also doubt that you will cling to or be content with a simplified hegemony of one basic Uber Alles motive anymore; the sort of stuff we read in the pages of economic texts that venerate acquisition and self-interest exclusively or in the classic Freudian writings that elevate the psychosexual drive to the exclusion of others, or certainly in the faux-heroic pages of Ayn Rand
                                                    (Warren Bennis, Editor’s Note, pp. xiii-xiv)

I thought this was a bit of marketing puffery before I finished Driven. Since then, I think Bennis has it just about right. More and more, I am finding myself integrating the ideas from this book into my thinking and my practice.

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The iPad and the Chasm between Work and Home Computing

January 27, 2010 at 8:20 pm · Filed under Event Announcements

The difference between the web experience at the office and outside has just become a chasm.

I sent an email today to a client with four text attachments – not only did the firewall block it but stripped attachments off and destroyed them. The firewall is so extreme that it is getting all but impossible to send information in.

I was setting up a conference call with another client last week. It was a UK, US and Canadian call. I suggested Skype. But we could not use it because one of the parties, a university would not allow it. They also ban Twitter and Facebook.

Many I know have to go home to get much work done.

I have a friend who is working in the security arena for the Olympics. They were all given really heavy duty laptops. Great I thought, they can be in touch at any time at any place if there is a problem. But the problem is that the security is set so tight that the laptops only work when docked at the office.

So in the outside world – the cloud – iPads – a world of amazing connections and content – a world of conversations and sharing where all the tools that make life better can be applied.

In your office – a 3 year old Dell box – Windows XP – Word or worse Word perfect – and a firewall that wont allow anything.

And you want to join the 2.0 world too?

Oh I forgot – an HR and an IT department that makes the Gestapo look like nuns

Jon has put the fox among the chickens – what is all this control about?

More soon on HR and IT and how their grip on the culture of your workplace is so toxic.

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