For the purposes of this post, let’s call Enterprise 2.0 the networked organization.  OK ?

(And I will put this caveat up front .. I do not know the answers to the issues I pose in this post, but I am willing to bet that as we progress further into the networked world and workplace, the issues regarding designing work – and the accompanying changes to practices such as compensation and performance management – will have to addressed).

I do have some ideas .. such as updating for networks some of the core principle in Elliott Jaques’ Requisite Organization theory.  I can imagine that someone eventually will come up with a new methodology (a set of ‘recipes’ ?) that can be followed to design work (and the derivatives such as competency profiles, compensation philosophy and practices, and performance management approaches) but I am not aware that any such coherent framework yet exists.

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Today, there’s a lot of chatter about bottom-up versus top-down, the collective wisdom of the organizational crowd, and various related themes.  However, there’s also ongoing dissonance or competition between the methods behind structured and defined organizational forms and activities, and the growing world of hyperlinked flows in which knowledge and meaning are built layer by layer, exchange by exchange (all those hyperlinked interactions that increasingly make up what we call “knowledge work”) as enabled by social computing.

At the heart of the issue is the way work is designed and an organization develops its structure.  A primary tool in designing work and structure is job evaluation (and derivatives like accountability mapping and redundancy analysis).

I don’t mean job evaluation as in assessing job performance – I mean what many HR professionals call work or job measurement – the function that assigns jobs to levels and pay grades based on job “weight” with respect to skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions (the legal criteria for assessing what a job worth, and what is used to assess “equal pay for work of equal value). These methods and their underlying assumptions are used to create the skeletal architecture of organizations … the hierarchical pyramid we all know very well and in which many people work.

Dissonance in job requirements

The methodology of job evaluation is, in my opinion, a very useful place to look at some of the reasons for the ongoing dissonance and resistance to change that I suggest we are seeing and will continue to experience.  Job evaluation is what creates pay grades, pay practices, thresholds for entry into bonus schemes, sometimes the criteria for distinguishing between management and non-management jobs, and so on.

Fundamentally, job evaluation (or work measurement in the professional jargon) relies very heavily on the assumption that knowledge is hierarchically structured and put to use.  It follows that the job requirements which have requirements for more knowledge —on paper—is the job that deserves to be “higher up” in the organization.

There are four or five major, well-known methodologies for measuring work.  They all use very similar factors (sometimes described a bit differently semantically, with a couple more or less factors or sub-factors) and they all essentially measure the same thing.

Redesigning work requirements

These fundamental principles of work design need to be examined and re-conceived if the significant power of social computing is ever to be realized.

As an example I will use the Hay Guide Chart Method’s factors, as I know them the best, but I have also worked with the Aiken Plan and the Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt (the two merged recently and the firm is now known as Towers Watson) job evaluation methodologies in the past.

The Hay Method uses the model that all work has three phases—input, throughput and output—and employs three core factors to measure that work:

1.  Know-how – knowledge and skills acquired through education and experience.
2.  Problem-solving - the application of the said knowledge to problems encountered in the process of doing the work.
3. Accountability – the level and type of responsibility a given job has for coordinating, managing or otherwise having impact on an organization’s objectives.

There is a fourth factor called working conditions, but in many cases this is treated almost as a throw-away factor, especially when it comes to knowledge work, as it relates to fumes, chemicals, outdoor exposure, dangerous physical conditions, unusual exogenous stress, etc.

On the face of it, these factors seem eminently reasonable and the method (and the related ones cited above) have, since the early 1950’s, largely served organizations well for designing one or another particular pyramid,.  These methods are put into practice along with other key assumptions from the era when today’s large organizations began to grow and prosper.  The assumptions as articulated are derived from the philosophy of Taylorism (aka scientific management) and the divisions of labour and packaging of tasks that have underpinned the search for efficiency and scale ever since the beginning of the 20th century.

Changing assumptions about knowledge

Just as important is the underlying assumption of these methods about the fundamental nature of knowledge. It assumes that the acquisition, development and use of knowledge proceeds slowly and carefully and is based on an official taxonomy of knowledge in a given domain, a vertical arrangement of information and skills that are derived from the official institutions of our society (Jane Jacobs has a fair bit to say about this in Chapter 3 titled Credentialing vs. Educating in her last book Dark Age Ahead, as do others like John Taylor Gatto and Alfie Kohn (Punished By Rewards – the Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes) as does David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous – the power of digital disorder) … an important book in my opinion.

I’ll offer an example below (the paraphrasing of the Hay Method’s semantic scales for measuring a job’s knowledge).  This vertical arrangement of Know-How (knowledge) is basically what supports and sustains vertical reporting relationships.  The other two factors (Problem-solving and Accountability) derive from and reinforce the Know-how factor. For example, the rules of job evaluation are such that you cannot have a problem-solving or accountability factor assessment that is of a higher order than the Know-how slotting.

The definitions of the know-how (knowledge and skills ) factor levels are paraphrased from the semantic definitions on the actual Hay Guide Chart.

A – Unschooled and unskilled
B – Some school, some skill
C – Basic high school, routine work
D – Vocational school, community college, trades, senior administrative
E – University graduation, senior trades, managerial (reads the books)
F – University plus 10 years experience, grad school (puts the books to use)
G – Deep knowledge and expertise (writes the books)
H – God (has others write the books)

BUT … these methods come from the 50’s and early 60’s and did not envision or foresee the Web, hyperlinks and the exchanges of information, and the bit-by-bit layering and assembly of knowledge and peer-to-peer negotiation of results and responsibilities we are seeing emerge with greater frequency in this new networked world.

Multiple ways to structure knowledge

We are beginning to understand that the main way we have structured knowledge is only one way, and that this way is captive to core assumptions about the ordering and classification of information as created by some of the great thinkers, organizers and classifiers of information and knowledge who helped build up our growing understanding of the world around us (Linnaeus, Darwin, Dewey, etc.).

What we have developed into solid and maybe seemingly unassailable beliefs about knowledge are built upon the principles we have inherited from a time when human progress benefited greatly from regular and related discoveries about the world around us, both natural and man-made.

For example, it’s clear that there was a proliferation of written / printed material from the 1600’s through the 1900’s, containing amongst other things much codification of discoveries of the knowledge we use today in a wide range of domains and disciplines. More and more (too much ?) of this knowledge is accessible very rapidly on today’s Web in ‘fragments of one’ (nod to Dave Snowden’s assertion that the brain works most effectively with fragments of information) connected by search engines, hyperlinks and a range of easily used publishing platforms.

So … now let’s look at how information is shared and exchanged in order to build and use knowledge amongst networked individuals or groups.  The use of knowledge in a networked context is very often much more horizontal, sideways and based on accessibility and collaboration. Much more so than is the use of knowledge in formally structured hierarchies.

Linked knowledge

What we know today is that people with vastly different types and forms of knowledge can be or are linked together for a wide (and potentially limitless) range of purposes (though clearly we are learning quickly about the limits to cognitive attention as lessons in social surplus are offered up to us almost every day).

Addressing Purpose A connects individuals with Skills and Knowledge Set B, Interests and Knowledge Set B, and Connections and Knowledge Set C (and of course the second-order concentric ring of connections each of them brings to any given network in which any of them participate). Each of them subscribes to different sets of feeds and has is networked into different flows and sources of information than each of the others, but can forward to all those in the on-purpose network anything that comes across their attention that may be pertinent to the purpose at hand.  Then, they can (and sometimes do) get together to discuss, use and make operational the combination(s).

Using the knowledge described in the scenario above involves navigating the dynamics of attention and flow created by a continuous circulation of pertinent and relevant information.  Therein lie the roots of the power of social computing that KM practitioners have been noticing as Web 2.0 tools, service and capabilities become more firmly ensconced in knowledge work, in the guise of platforms for collaboration—and the domain increasingly called Enterprise 2.0.

I think it is (very) safe to say that problem-solving or accountability is assigned or accepted in that situation based on negotiation of ‘who knows what’ or ‘how to get something done’, and often a call (Tweet, blog post, Skype chat, email) is put out to find and access some additional skill or knowledge that is required, and accountability is negotiated based on the constraints of the purposeful activity at hand.

Any of us familiar with medium to large sized organizations can begin to see, I believe, that the fundamental Taylorist assumption that knowledge is structured vertically and put to use in siloed pyramidic structures and cascaded down to the execution level must be straining at the seams in the increasingly highly-connected social networks in which many people work today.

Social computing – first dissonance, then participative flow ?

Thus, it seems clear that the introduction of wikis, blogs and RSS feeds (and now micro-blogging a la Twitter) for project work, for analysis and planning, for research and development and for other knowledge-intensive work is likely to introduce some reasonable levels of dissonance into the common and accepted organizational dynamics (or “organizational sociology”) of formal, traditionally structured organizations.

Hey out there .. anyone know exactly what to do about this ?

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