OK .. so it looks like the Web, hyperlinks and ’social’ platforms for interaction are here to stay (unless electricity grids fail or corporations and governments completely take over the Web).

For the past couple of years at least there have been increasingly numerous and strident calls for fundamental make-overs of both management and leadership.  People everywhere are clicking into the fact that yesteryear’s models and ways are less and less effective .. and yet we all labor on whilst yelling “change .. change, or die .. etc.”

World-renowned organizational effectiveness guru Gary Hamel set out the fundamental challenge(s) in his 2007 book “The Future of Management“.  Others, such as John Hagel and John Seeley Brown’s “The Power of Pull“, have weighed in with equally sharp and challenging premises and theories.  All of these pieces signal an urgent need to innovate and adapt to a new set of conditions .. conditions which are rapidly on their way to becoming ubiquitous and/or expected by the generations entering or approaching their chapter-of-life in the workplace.

It sometimes feels like this is only the next round or wave of coming to terms with rumblings and dynamics that began back in the ’60’s and ’80’s.  After all, we began hearing about the critical need for empowerment, continuous learning, flexibility, agility and resilience at least two decades ago.  Most of the pioneering work in these areas came from the soft-and-squishy (or seen to be that way) world of Organizational Development (OD), from people like Eric Trist, Fred Emery, Bill Passmore, Marv Weisbord, Peter Block, Charles Handy, Meg Wheatley and many many others.

As the years have passed since these pioneers first addressed the human issues in organizational structures and processes derived from engineering and efficiency principles, various elements of their thinking and practices have inexorably found their way into managing processes and people.  I suggest that this is entirely understandable as the increasing frequency and intensity of complicated and complex organizational activities have grown over time, and along with the evolution of peoples’ expectations about work and meaning in a modern era.

My premise is that management innovation is available  from that world of organizational development, as it’s principles and dynamics are closely aligned to Hamel’s suggestion that “activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery“.

The New Context Demands New Principles

What was yesterday called Enterprise 2.0 and today is called “Social Business” can be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process, the analysis and control of operational activities AND the interaction and participation of people with information, opinions and knowledge to share.

These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception.  Thus, it’s essential to cast a critical eye on the fundamental assumptions of work design and how work is managed. The core assumptions embodied in widely-used methodologies today still present work as  ”static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific constellations on an organization chart” (see all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail).

It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of what started in the consumer realm as social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into and by web services … are finding (and have found) their ways into the workplace.

That they have migrated to the workplace makes sense.  People have always  (at work) been creating and building up “... knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things.” Such services and tools and the reasons for which people use them are the means by which general human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment.

So, as stated at the outset, it seems clear that we’re situated in a more interactive, less static environment.  Whether we like it or not, we are  passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable (able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form) to an era characterized by a continuous  flow of information.  Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.

The methodologies still in use today generally did not foresee working with networked information flows, and thus the way work is designed and managed does not really address how it could or should be managed.

We need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making.

Both Horizontal and Vertical

Horizontal flows of information and peoples’ engagement have already been put to work in a range of early Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business experiments.  But let’s be honest .. how these will work, or not, is to date less than clear.  There’s an enormous amount of inertia and habit to overcome, all whilst confronting continuously turbulent conditions seasoned with healthy helpings of ambiguity .. about economics, governance and peoples’ collective capabilities to adapt.

Hierarchy is not disappearing from the organizational landscape .. nor should it. It’s an useful construct for clarifying decision-making and accountability, and I believe it will come to co-exist with the core dynamics of networked people and information …

“a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results”

.. which, incidentally, is a fundamental aspect of all the ‘democratization’ (it’s probably too early to yet call it that, but let’s do so for the time being) we are witnessing in the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.  Would that our western governments and organizations watch and learn as they embark on the renewal of leadership and management in the 21st Century.

The implications are huge, will demand significant effort and responsibility on the part of all individuals, and may lead to very different ways of working and being in and of the world.

But clearly, we must evolve … what we have been doing looks less and less likely to be as effective as necessary in the rapidly-approaching future.

Several months ago I posted an article written by my colleague Harold Jarche titled “A Framework for Social Learning in the Enterprise” which synthesized the core concepts, ideas and past experience explored in a range of conversations with his ITA colleagues.

Harold in collaboration with Thierry de Baillon, a leading French management thinker in the Enterprise 2.0 arena, has built upon the initial article with a comprehensive look at where the increasing prevalence of networked information flows is taking organizational stucture and dynamics.

They conclude with a call to action, stating that in the networked environment enhanced learning is a mission-critical business imperative, and a series of pragmatic general guidelines for getting started with this fundamental organizational transformation.

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Simplicity and the Enterprise

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward.  With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth.

Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.

Complication: the industrial disease

As organizations grow, the original simplicity gets harder to maintain. Current management wisdom – based on Robin Dunbar’s research; the size of military units through history; and the work of management experts such as Tom Peters – considers the ideal size of an organization to be around 150 people. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible. Intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop above 150 people and companies then enter the realm of complication.

Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. To enable growth and efficiencies, more processes are put in place. This is what management schools have been doing for over half a century.  To ensure reliable operations and risk mitigation, the core competencies of decision-making and innovation are moved to the periphery. The company’s vision, if there is one, is now supported at the board level but not the individual level. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization.

As companies get even bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of  growth. At some stage of complication, companies do not even create jobs anymore. In France, a study from INSEE showed that large organizations have a tendency to destroy internal jobs: by transferring jobs to subsidiaries, contractors and subcontractors. Large firms barely participate in job creation. Similar studies conducted in other countries show the same results. However, knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training.

Complexity and the new Enterprise

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Many organizations today are also facing significant demographic challenges. Baby boomers, once the lifeblood of business, are retiring, while Generation Y wants to communicate and interact in a completely different manner. There may be four generations in the modern workplace and each has its unique traits and demands. There is growing complexity both inside and outside the organization.

Organizations need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding, as well as some existing, but minor, efficiency improvements in tweaking the old system, are the major barriers to adopting Enterprise 2.0 concepts and practices. Companies need to get a clearer view of the competitive advantages of Enterprise 2.0 before an organizational framework like wirearchy can co-exist with hierarchical structures and thinking.

Wirearchy: a dynamic two-flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by people and technology.

Here are some key organizational changes during the journey from simplicity to complexity:

Let’s look at how social learning can support emergent practices in the enterprise:

Implementing Social Learning

Knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. In a globally networked economy, based increasingly on intangible goods and services, constant innovation is necessary to stand out. Markets such as software, financial services, consulting and consumer goods have to continuously adapt their offers to keep up with changing demands and advances in technology.

Hyper-linked knowledge flows have made organizational walls permeable. Official channels are competing with an expanding number of informal communications. A collaborative enterprise is becoming  the optimal organization for such a networked economy, capitalizing on these expanding knowledge flows. To innovate, organizations need to collaborate internally and this is social. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

In complex environments, learning is much more than just a matter of structured knowledge acquisition. However, that is all that training enables. Corporate training methods often consist of delivering content and perhaps providing drill and practice sometime prior to doing the task. There is often a gap between training and doing. Training alone cannot address the wide variety of informal learning needs of workers. Nor can it help to transfer the tacit knowledge on which many of us depend to do our jobs.

We know that informal learning happens all of the time but often the best answers or experts are not connected to the person with the problem. Social learning networks can address that issue by giving each worker a much larger group of people to help get work done.  Regularly publishing to our networks is how we can stay connected. Here is an approach to embed social learning into organization work flows. This is an iterative process that can be adapted to fit the context.

Listen & Create: Being open to self-education is the foundation of individual learning. Part of this is the development of habits of continuous sense-making by recording what we hear, read and observe; e.g. personal learning environments (PLE) & personal knowledge management (PKM).

Converse: Sharing is an act of learning and can be considered an individual’s responsibility for the greater social learning contract. Without sharing, there is no social learning. Through ongoing trusted conversations we can share tacit knowledge, even across organizational boundaries; e.g. social learning.

Co-create: Group performance enables the creation of new knowledge and is a source of innovation; e.g. collaborative work, customer experience.

Formalize & Share: Some informal knowledge can be made explicit and consolidated through the formalization and creation of new structured knowledge; e.g. taxonomies, document management, storytelling.

Enterprise social learning

Social learning consultant Jane Hart[1] has created a comprehensive, and growing, list of social learning examples in the workplace. Companies listed here include British Telecom, Sun Microsystems, NASA, Nationwide Insurance, and SFR. The SFR case study, reported by Sue Weakes[2], shows how a younger workforce is demanding better access to social media.

French mobile phone company SFR implemented ActiveNetworker from Jobpartners to support its new social network. My SFR comprises a company blog, a central space for discussion, and the ability to build profiles that allow employees to share information on career progress, learning and development and aspirations. They can also join groups of interest … ActiveNetworker has been well received and SFR is averaging 80,000 visits per week from the 10,000 employees that are using it.

Dave Wilkins[3] at Learn.com, describes the case at ACE Hardware in which the company set up a web-based social learning platform for its 4,600 independent hardware dealers to share and seek advice. They were able to look for new sales leads, find rarely used items through the community and share merchandising display strategies. This social learning community strategy resulted in a 500% return on investment in just six months.

Cristóbal Conde, CEO of SunGard, a software and IT services company, was recently interviewed in the New York Times[4]. He discussed how he has flattened the company’s hierarchy as a way of dealing with the globalization of the company. One important social communication tool at SunGard is Yammer, a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter but used internally. NYT: “What kind of things do you write on Yammer?”

I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it takes.

A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

The Ford Motor Company[5] has used social media for learning, beginning with SyncMyRide[6], and now integrating it as a way to connect customers and the company.

Ford’s intention is to consider how social media can inform the company as a whole, rather than judging its efforts by the criteria of one department and those “holistic” lessons filter up and down through the company, says Monty [head of social media]y. That includes the company’s executive board and goes as far as putting up senior execs for online Q&As through Twitter and on the corporate Facebook page. “There is a healthy respect for [social media] and how we participate in it. Two-way dialogue is healthy for a company like Ford, and we’ve grown as a result of having participated in it,” says Farley [Chief Communications Officer]. At some point, as executives grow in seniority, they tend to become “isolated from reality,” adds Monty. Making the Ford board aware of and engaged with social conversations counters that isolation. “When [CEO Alan Mulally] says we are making the cars people want, well, how do we know unless we are listening?” asks Monty.

A business imperative

Deloitte’s Shift Index[7] of 2009 highlights the challenges facing several industries today, that of declining return on assets and the need for innovation. One recommendation is to enable knowledge flows, a key benefit of social learning:

Given the growing importance of knowledge flows, perhaps the most powerful form of innovation in this context may be institutional innovation –re-thinking roles and relationships across institutions to better enable them to create and participate in knowledge flows.

One of the great things about web social media is that they are for the most part free. Experimentation does not require an enterprise-wide software deployment strategy at the onset. As Seth Godin[8], marketing and branding expert, says:

You guessed it: new media is largely free. So why teach it in school as if it were a scary theory? Why encourage people to be afraid? Just do it. Build your own platform. Appear in the places that seem productive or interesting or challenging or fun. Experiment quietly, figure out what works, do it more. No need to be a dilettante, and certainly you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin or quit at the first sign of failure… but… quit waiting for the right answer.

Our social networks have a greater influence on us than we think. Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler explain the latest research in great detail in the book, Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives (Little-Brown, 2009). Robin Hanson[9] shows that we seldom change our behaviour based solely on getting new information. “People don’t believe something works until they’ve seen it work in something pretty close to their situation. A media story about something far away just doesn’t say much.” Again, social learning is about getting things done in networks.

Getting started

According to Rebecca Ferguson[10] at The Open University, social learning can take place when people:

• clarify their intention – learning rather than browsing
• ground their learning – by defining their question or problem
• engage in focused conversations – increasing their understanding of the available resources.

Following the process explained earlier:

Listen: The first step in social learning is paying attention and watching what others are doing. Finding trusted sources of information is very important. Hearing what others are doing and connecting to them with social media such as Twitter or blogs increases the chances of accidental and serendipitous learning. For example, one can follow conversations on Twitter by searching for “hashtags”. Typing “#PKM” shows current conversations on personal knowledge management.

Converse: By engaging in conversations and providing valuable information to others one becomes part of professional networks. Many experts are willing to help those new to the field but newcomers first must say what they don’t know.

Co-create: Over time one can engage more in co-operative activities, such as adding comments to a blog post or extending the thought in an article or discussion thread. For many people used to traditional work, working transparently in the open takes some time to get to used to.

Formalize & Share: Writing professional journals or lessons learnt can ingrain the important process of formalizing aspects of social learning. Sharing with others, internally or externally, over time becomes part of a normal daily work flow.

As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done. Workers have many more connections, to information and people, than ever before. But the ability to deal with complexity lies in our minds, not our artificial organizational structures. In order to free our minds for complex work, we need to simplify our organizational structures. According to the authors of Getting to Maybe, in complex environments:

• Rigid protocols are counter-productive
• There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
• We cannot separate parts from the whole
• Success is not a fixed address

This is the basis of the evolving social organization.

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[1] http://c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/corporate.html

[2] http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/11/18/48393/social-networking-e-learning-on-the-social.html

[3] http://www.slideshare.net/dwilkinsnh/embracing-social-learning-across-the-enterprise-860823

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html

[5] http://socialmediainfluence.com/2010/01/20/fords-fiesta-of-social-media/

[6] http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/supporting/syncmyride.html

[7] http://www.deloitte.com/us/shiftindex

[8] http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/09/if-tv-ads-were-free.html

[9] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/diffusion-by-learning.html

[10] http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/sociallearn/2010/01/13/what-is-social-learning-and-why-does-it-matter/

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The book Work 2.0 – Rewriting the Contract was published several years ago by Bill Jensen (@simpletonbill) which outlined four principles for the rapidly-approaching interconnected workplace of the near future.

That “near future” is now here and the impact of Jensen’s four principles are growing.  The principles are:

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1. Embrace the Asset Revolution – this speaks to Peter Drucker’s observation that “knowledge workers (now) own the means of production”. It’s a two-way street now – employees are deciding where they’ll invest their time, energy and intellectual capital, just as does the employer.

2. Build My Work My Way – Employees know they own the means of production … and they don’t want to waste time, in a complex, ever-flowing world. They’ve got other things to do as well … like try to lead a balanced life … which they’ll define, thank you very much.

3. Deliver Peer-to-Peer Value – Increasingly, employees are aware of how being networked together via email, IM, PDA’s, the Internet and the corporate Intranet necessitates collaboration. They like collaborating, and they don’t want artificial barriers to collaboration to stop them from adding value.

4. Develop Extreme Leaders – Leaders must be accountable … to exercise that accountability in a networked world, leaders must be willing to listen and to be challenged regarding the way work gets done.

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The Interconnected Workplace – An Ever-Changing Flow

The new conditions of an interconnected workplace world – free-flowing information delivered via integrated information systems, linked together in networks of relationships – are rapidly redefining the nature of work.

Knowledge work happens in workers’ heads and in the interactions and communications in which they engage.

Carrying out knowledge work usually involves interacting with large integrated information systems and communicating via email and conversations (whether one-on-one or in meetings). These information systems (such as SAP and PeopleSoft) are now second or third-generations systems, designed to have greater flexibility and customizability than the versions that first appeared in the early to mid-90’s. Nevertheless, due to the nature of information and the paths along which it flows … from the markets and the customers inwards to the organization … the work activities demanded of employees are becoming more complex.

No amount of business process reengineering can prevent this, and no system will be infinitely flexible. Customers’ needs, wants and tastes change. Most business processes that are effective today will need to change over time, with a horizon of several years at the most.

In The Flow – Knowledge Work Keeps Changing

Let’s combine this view of how work has changed with the observation that in many organizations competency models have become as important or more important than the core job description.  Competencies are the sets of skills, attributes and behaviours needed to provide flexibility and effective performance. Competency models are just that … models … and are often accompanied by Personal Development Plans. What we have is a new equation – from the employer’s side – about delivering focused performance and results.

Now, let’s look at it from the employee points of view.

During the past fifteen years or so, we’ve all experienced the large impacts of information and knowledge being brought to bear on most products and services that we need, want and use. We’ve learned about the one-to-one marketing relationships, in which what we consume is personalized to our “user profile”. We’ve witnessed an explosion of products and services available in all sorts of blended combinations, based on the understanding that personalization and a wide range of choice will enhance customer choice. This phenomenon is aided and abetted by the realization that tastes and appeal change rapidly – there’s a flow here too. Employees are the ones that buy Jones Soda, or move from one style of jeans to the next, depending upon what the latest buzz is.

The same dynamic is starting to appear in the workplace … and it seems as if it will be the way of the future. For at least the last five years (it actually started about ten years ago) people have been encouraged to:

• Forget about guaranteed employment … the business environment is unpredictable and unforgiving
• Think of themselves as a transferable set of knowledge and skills
• Focus on doing what they have a passion for, and take responsibility by believing first and foremost in themselves

Knowledge Workers Respond To The Flow

Today, a second wave of factors is combining to lend added impetus to these trends. The interconnectedness of networks, joined by the sophistication of information systems capabilities, is combining with a year-after-year wave of well-educated new employees entering the workforce. These employees are rapidly demonstrating that they know it’s their energy and their working capital that employers are using to drive organizational results.

They’re aware that it is their life energy, and their life choices, that are being impacted by the relentless demands for performance.

Guess what? – they like performing well, they like being competent and being well-rewarded, and they’re in tune with the markets out there. They usually know what it will take to deliver a good experience to a customer. They don’t have a lot of tolerance for policies and procedures that have been built to satisfy the company, not the customer.

They’ve been told, time and again, that they’ll have to be continuously learning. In order to learn continuously, they’ll tell you ! “I know how I learn best and work best, and I’d really appreciate it if you asked me how, rather than presuming to know“. People bring themselves to work each day.

What’s that famous line ?

“Treat your employees like volunteers, they can (often) choose whether or not to be at work each day“

The range of cultures, personalities and lifestyles in our society is vastly expanded compared to a decade ago, and it’s abundantly clear that people are infinitely variable. As this infinite variability continues to penetrate workplaces defined by business processes, individual employees will increasingly respond to continuous performance demands by needing, wanting and insisting on working their own way – in the way they know that they can deliver the best they have to offer. Their very own voice will be heard, their very own style will be seen.

The Mass Customization of Work is coming … a wide range of individual working / learning styles, combined in collaborative networks, generating a continuous flow of the necessary results.

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The question that kicks off this short four-minute video:

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Is Social Media a Fad ?  Or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution ?

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Thanks to Euan Semple for surfacing this recently-updated (current statistics) view of the spread and penetration of social media into our daily human activities.

It’s not hard to imagine similar patterns to the growth of social computing and informal, socially-driven learning for the average organization 5 or 10 years down the road.

Organizations everywhere will have to come to terms with the ubiquity of social tools, the fundamental necessity of personal knowledge management as a core element of productivity, and more useful-and-easier ways to create effective business processes in a networked environment, whether Barely Repeatable or Easily Repeatable.
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As some FASTForward readers may know, I’ve worked with organizations on human resources, organizational/work design and organizational effectiveness issues for most of the past two-and-a-half decades.

I’ve also been reasonably deeply involved for the past decade with the evolution of the Web and networks and how they impact knowledge work, work design, collaboration, knowledge management, and individual, group and organizational learning.

I wrote this short burst of one-pagers a few years ago in an attempt to be succinct but pithy about the range of changes we all are or will be experiencing as the interconnected environment in which we carry out work contiues to spread and penetrate the inner workings of organizations.  I’ve changed a few words here and there to reflect that we’re now in 2010.

I’d love to know what you think, and what I’ve missed or need to change.

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1. Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has

This fact has large implications for any organization. It means that you can’t hide – anywhere.

Michael Schrage of MIT puts it very succinctly:

“Networks make organizational culture and politics explicit”

It’s essential, in this interconnected age of instant accessibility to information and knowledge, that as a leader and manager you are aware of the potent force that is contained in networks of connected information and people.

The implications are clear.

People have to understand and believe in what an organization is doing, why the organization is doing what it does, and how it’s doing it.

The messages from leaders have to be clear and believable, and the culture that carries out the organization’s mandate and mission has to be flexible, responsive and open.

Fear and cynicism, being driven to perform – as opposed to being invited to contribute your best – can’t carry the day.

2. The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization … more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight

Most organization charts reflect an organizational design that is intended to deliver a strategy developed by a small group of people sitting on the top of an organization

Evaluating and ordering jobs in terms of their size and importance is often used to implement the organizational design

Most methods of job evaluation use factors, logic and language that were developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s – perfect for the Industrial Age, less than perfect for the interconnected Information Age.

Often, reporting relationships and chains-of-command get in the way.

Why do you think the Dilbert comic strip has been so successful for so long ?

Probably because people know that lots of time, energy and effort is expended keeping bosses happy – usually at the expense of customers.

Many managers aspired to, and spent the last twenty years, learning how to become “bosses”. Do you know what prison guards are called by the inmates ?

You guessed it – Boss

3. People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other – and so they do that – all day long

People communicate. That’s what people do.

They share jokes, they send around interesting e-mails and web sites, they help each other get things done.

The nature of work in the Information Age has changed – dramatically.  And it’s likely that the nature of work will keep changing.

If you want to see what work might look like – watch developments in the usability and usefulness of blogs and wikis. Watch younger people as they bring the gaming mentality into the workplace and watch how they communicate using cell phones, e-mail, and IM and the (eventual) derivatives of podcasting.

Watch, too, for developments in telepresence.

Employees are people, too. They communicate just like all the other real people, in Social Networks. They’re the ones communicating with your customers and shareholders.

It’s essential for an organization’s success, and the personal success of each and every one of those employees, that they feel proud of what they communicate. They want to be engaged in positive ways in making a meaningful contribution – to the customers, to themselves and to their fellow employees.

4. Champion-Channel-Coordinate replaces Command-and-Control

Thousands of articles have talked about how command-and-control dynamics are less than effective in the new set of interconnected conditions found in the workplaces of the Information Age.

Remember how you felt (or feel today) when commanded by a parent or other authority figure?

All too often, going to work in today’s organizations feels like re-living the adult version of that experience.

Not all organizations are like this – but fewer and fewer of tomorrow’s organizations will be able to function effectively if command-and-control remains the dominant dynamic.

Coaching has become an important response to changing this dynamic. Coaches help leaders and managers listen better, respect other people more authentically, and become more effective at striking a balance between:

Clarity and Decisiveness … and … Flexibility and Openness

As change swirls and complexity keeps on growing, champion-channel-coordinate helps good ideas and effective responses come to the surface, be examined thoroughly, and get implemented.

Effective leaders and managers know how to (or learn how to) champion, channel and coordinate.

Bosses are different than leaders and managers – as both a conceptual construct and in the lived experience found in our relationship with them.

5. Conversations are where information is shared, knowledge is created and are the basis for getting the right things done

Human beings have been having conversations since time began. That’s how we’ve figured out all of the things we’ve invented and how we govern ourselves. It’s how we’ve gotten to how we are now.

In the Industrial Age, reporting relationships, and the assumption that the dog on the top of the heap knew more than all the other dogs, were the formalized structure for conversation. It doesn’t work very well this way, anymore.

The only way to deal with ongoing change is to create and sustain effective conversations – with your customers, with and amongst employees and with everyone else.

Sharing information, and creating new knowledge, in order to respond to ongoing change, is the only way that will work from here on out.

The structure, tools and culture of organizations will have to honor this fact.

There’s no other way it’s going to work.

6. Trust, Transparency and Authenticity are the glue that holds it all together

People want to trust, they want to believe – even in the face of large amounts of evidence that the system is being manipulated in the favor of a select few

In North America, we’re still trying to shake off the disbelief about the blatant dishonesty and fraud demonstrated by some corporate (and governmental) leaders. We actively do not want to believe things may be as corrupt as they seem … institutionalized dishonesty and deceit.

We don’t want to believe that these attitudes and behavior might be more widespread than is apparent, yet somehow we have a feeling that the common corporate culture rewards and supports this possibility.

Many people – checking their 401K’s or stock portfolios, or looking back at the job(s) they’ve lost – feel at best disrespected and at worst enraged that they have been taken advantage of.

The interconnectedness of the Web has created a means for people to challenge blind authority, and to push back. If their trust is abused, many will use this to establish their own authority or fight back

Let’s understand one thing … when people who have been abused decide to get organized and push back, they become a potent force.

Interconnectedness is a potent force for creating transparency and demanding trust, and many are just now learning how to use it more effectively.

7. The Workplace of the Future will be more diverse – in terms of demographics, values, gender, race and language

In the midst of all the interconnectedness and sharing of information, the composition and shape of the workplace will keep changing.

North America and Western Europe are landscapes of a changing population – different waves of immigration keep coming, and each new generation brings fresh change to the workplace. The workplace of the near future will be a sea of people from a wide range of countries, cultures and languages – and they will all be interconnected.

The range of diversity brings with an equally wide range of beliefs, values and reasons for working.

This emerging mix will bring new dynamics of relationship into the workplace – both online and offline

Learning to listen, respect and champion-and-channel will be an essential competency for success.

8. New, integrated and sophisticated technologies are being developed and implemented – and the knowledge workers of tomorrow will be more interconnected than ever

Web 2.0 has found its way to the workplace – it’s an infrastructure that’s decentralized and more open … and therefore more complex in terms of human dynamics … than that which came before.

Remember Napster ? The workplace versions exist and may be coming soon to a workplace near you. Indeed, the wider conversation about blogs and the workplace is only growing, and acquiring useful examples.

Many forms of “smartware” are also on the runway, getting ready to take off.  New tools are absolutely essential to deal with the overload of information that already exists – and grows more daunting with each passing week. This “smartware” will find its way into the workplace.

Smartware will either “dumb things down” (entering information, and the system does the rest), or “smarten things up” (helping people collaborate and create new knowledge).

Many of these tools will add capability and functionality to the continuing need for effective collaboration – and so will make collaboration more and more possible.

More technology-supported collaboration will in turn increase the need for effective leadership and coaching – champion-and-channel will become more necessary than ever. The game will get sharper again.

Adapting to the new tools will require new forms of social interaction in the workplace. As change keeps coming, and work activities become more interdependent, the required adaptation will become more social and cultural in nature.

9. We’re All In This Together

The interconnected Information Age is showing us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters.  Systems thinking is not new .. but the spread of networks makes it effects, impacts and challenges more visible and more immediate.

This applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.

New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.

Awareness is the key. Maintain an “open focus”.

Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.

10. There’s No Going Back to “Normal” – Permanent Whitewater is the New Normal

It’s almost trite to say this – the only constant is change.

However…over the past 15 years or so, there have been enormous amounts of energy spent resisting change – waiting and hoping for things to go back to “normal”.

It won’t happen. It’s useful to acknowledge and accept this, and get started … at learning how to learn, and equipping yourself for constant adaptability.

It’s a good – but not the only – way forward.

At the same time, you won’t survive by trying to make yourself into a chameleon. You can’t be all things to all people.

Connecting to your self – your values, your ways to build and acquire knowledge, and understand and use your intuition – is in my opinion the only way to go.

First … no answers here.  Only questions and ideas based on past HR experience, observations and some familiarity with interactive and participative dynamics online.

Back in January in one of the sections of a post titled “Exploring the HR Management Framework for Enterprise 2.0” I offered up the following:

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Employee Performance

Performance management has been a hot-button issue in most enterprises for a long time.  At its best, a well-designed and disciplined approach to performance management can play a positive and constructive role in delivering sustained high performance, and can be central to creating a performance oriented culture in the enterprise.

All too often, however, performance management schemes serve to remind us that too many workplaces are the adult version of grade school, with report cards and a parent-like boss who has unwanted power over employee’s future and fate.

360-degree feedback processes (soliciting input on performance from subordinates, colleagues, superiors and even external customers and liaisons) have been around long enough now to have most of the kinks worked out, and are probably a decent pre-cursor to forms of ‘crowdsourcing’ input on employees’ performance.  Many (most ?) of the social computing / collaboration platforms out there have features and functionality designed to offer support to gathering and processing information about peoples’ performance.

The culture of an enterprise is an all-important aspect of why and how performance management is used.  I expect that this aspect will become more important as social computing and collaboration continue to grow and spread.

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Let’s talk a little bit more about how managing peoples’ performance might be practiced in an interconnected, interactive (and cross-silo / cross-organization) and more transparent organization.

Sharing information and building pertinent and applicable knowledge from that sharing is one of the core (and still much-discussed) tenets of knowledge management (KM) – the buzzword that won’t go away.  Sharing information .. links, content, opinions, specific expertise, etc. … is also at the core of using social computing in the enterprise.  Some of the skepticism about being able to control it comes from not understanding clearly how it will fit into, or with, existing business processes, and I suspect that there is an accompanying fear that it may upend or distort some or mamy business processes, if the inmates are handed the keys to the gates.

At the same time, we are at the back end of at least 20 years of calling for breaking down or at a minimum de-rigidifying the walls of specialized functional silos in most hierarchical organizations.

In some sense, the invaders, or the barbarians if you will, are at the castle gates clamoring for the gatekeepers to let them in.  They’ll argue, with some reason, that customers have more power, and that empowered and trusted employess can and want to contribute more to any given organization’s effectiveness.

So … let’s assume that Enterprise 2.0 implementations continue to spread and grow.  Let’s further assume that many of them are at least semi-successful, and that net-working in collaboration with flows of information feeding increasing flexible business processes gains more and more traction.  Will we need to begin setting objectives and targets differently, and will that in turn necessitate that in a socially-networked or ’social business’ environment employees’ performance will need to be assessed and managed differently ?

My sense is that the answer is probably Yes.  People will be working differently, and in all likelihood in more interdependent ways than in more traditional teams.

Setting objectives, for example, will probably need to consider more the role and dynamics of the networks that are pertinent .. whether it involves greater connections to/with customers and markets, or to what purpose and degree the work that addresses the objective involves net-working inside the organization.  In other words, I think it will mean considering the nature of the work more than ever before.

Bring an organizational objective down into an individual net-worker’s performance objectives will also require consideration of how she or he works in the relevant networks, and what kinds of contribution are generated from the interaction in which they engage with others in the network(s) that are addressing the organizational objective.

I believe that there are a range of work design tools that can be useful with these issues .. mainly drawn from the organizational development (OD) field, such as the RACI matrix and accountability mapping.  They would need to become more commonly and frequently used, and I suggest that they would become as or more important than the traditional job description, with its assumptions about relatively static tasks and accountabilities.

Competency models are the most recent work design tool (I’ve written briefly about them here) that has become embedded in most workplaces in support of recruitment, employee – performance fit and as a foundation for assessing individual performance.  I also believe that the competencies associated with most roles (and certainly those that operate mainly in networks and with social computing and social networking tools and platforms) will need to be re-visited as the cross-functional, cross-organizational and internal – external connections proliferate.

In terms of actually assessing performance against objectives and required / desired competencies, today’s organizations have a foundation upon which to build.  Many organizations have implemented and have experience with using what is called 360-degree feedback as a core element or the input about demonstrated performance in a role or job.  The 360-degree feedback process can, I think, be reasonably well-adapted to the E2.0 context … the more difficult challenge is articulating the performance objectives in clear and meaningful ways whilst acknowledging that the roles being performed are participating in a range of networks and flows of information and activities.

Additionally, most (if not all) E2.0 collaboration platforms have or will have mechanisms that track activities, whether around objectives or around issues using tags, click counts, and elements of social network analysis (SNA), organizational network analysis (ONA), or value network analysis (VNA).  As organizations acquire more experience and expertise in using these concepts, I think there will come to be a base of information that will enable new forms of ROI .. namely what I and others have called Return on Investment in Interaction (ROII).

Performance management in organizations has always been a complex set of sociological and political processes. It doesn’t promise to become any easier, but there are signals on the horizon that suggest some ways forward.

Like I said .. no answers, just ideas and questions at this stage.  Beyond the ideas outlined above, there are more far-reaching ideas and issues being discussed in some of the conversation circles I inhabit that are examining more human-centered notions of knowledge work and how they may come together in new forms of organization. Those ideas and issues will no doubt continue to evolve as collaboration platforms and the Web continue to grow their impacts upon today’s organization and the work that is carried out in those organizations.

I’d be really interested to hear what you think.

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]]> http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2010/03/12/hr-series-performance-management-in-an-enterprise-2-0-context/feed/ 57 http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2010/02/26/a-framework-for-social-learning-in-the-enterprise/ http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2010/02/26/a-framework-for-social-learning-in-the-enterprise/#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:34:06 +0000 Jon Husband http://www.fastforwardblog.com/?p=4579

My colleague Harold Jarche often says … “work is learning, and learning is work”.  And my FF blog colleague Rob Patterson is unpacking our current understanding of what a “job” is (Marshall McLuhan long ago signaled that when we began communicating with each other at the speed of light, it would mean the demise of “the job”, and that rather we would get into “playing roles”).

It seems clear that the environment we are all moving into demands serious consideration of such statements, and that Enterprise 2.0 adoption and implementation will make these issues even more important.

Here is a blog post Harold developed recently that synthesizes well some core concepts.  It may be useful to those who are considering adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities and what work design issues will come up and how to address them.  I am re-publishing it here with his permission.

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A framework for social learning in the enterprise

The social learning revolution has only just begun. Corporations that understand the value of knowledge sharing, teamwork, informal learning and joint problem solving are investing heavily in collaboration technology and are reaping the early rewards.

- Jay Cross

Social learning

Why is social learning important for today’s enterprise?

George Siemens has succinctly explained the importance of social learning in the context of today’s workplace:

There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

The Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate on a scale as large as the printing press or the advent of written language. Charles Jennings explains why we need to move away from a focus on knowledge transfer and acquisition, an approach rooted in Plato’s academy:

We are moving to the world of the sons of Socrates, where dialogue and guidance are key competencies. It is a world where the capability to find information and turn it into knowledge at the point-of-need provides the key competitive advantage, where knowing the right people to ask the right questions of is more likely to lead to success than any amount of internally-held knowledge and skill.

Our relationship with knowledge is changing as our work becomes more intangible and complex. Notice how most value in today’s marketplace is intangible, with Google’s multi-billion dollar valuation an example of value in non-tangible processes that could be deflated with the development of a better search algorithm. Non-physical assets comprise about 80 percent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500 US companies in leading industries.

From replaceable human resources to dynamic social groups

The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.

However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.

A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it.

MIT’s Peter Senge has made some important clarifications on terms we often use in looking at work, job classifications and training to support them.

Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life.

Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results.

Learning may be an individual activity but if it remains within the individual it is of no value whatsoever to the organization. Acting on knowledge, as a practitioner (work performance) is all that matters. So why are organizations in the individual learning (training) business anyway? Individuals should be directing their own learning. Organizations should focus on results.

Individual learning in organizations is basically irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.

Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing. Over a century ago, Charles Darwin helped us understand the importance of adaptation and the concept that those who survive are the ones who most accurately perceive their environment and successfully adapt to it. Cooperating in networks can increase our ability to perceive what is happening.

Making social learning work

Jon Husband’s working definition of “Wirearchy” is “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. We are seeing increasing examples of this on the edges of the modern enterprise. World Blu’s annual listing of our most democratic workplaces continues to grow and gain attention. Google’s dedicated time-off for private projects, given to its engineers, promotes non-directed learning and collaboration. Zappos directly engages with its customers on Twitter, fostering higher levels of two-way trust. As customers, suppliers and competitors become more networked, being more wirearchical will be a business imperative.

Wirearchies inherently require trust, and trusted relationships are powerful allies in getting things done in organizations. Trust is also an essential component of social learning. Just because we have the technical networks does not mean that learning will automatically happen. Communications without trust are just noise, not accepted and never internalized by the recipients.

Here are some ways to make social learning work in the enterprise:

Think and act at a macro level (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each worker or team. The little stuff is changing too fast.

Engage with Web media and understand how they work. The Web is too important to be left to the information technology department, communications staff or outside vendors.

Use social media to make work easier or more effective. Use them to solve problems for work teams and groups.

Make traditional management obsolete. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If the organization is maintaining a steady state then it has failed to evolve with the environment.

Analyzing social learning

Most 20th century workplaces had two types of learning: formal learning through training and informal learning (about 80% according to research) which just happened by accident or the result of observation, conversation and time in the job. This focus on formal training, for skills and knowledge, missed out on our social nature. Business has always been social, especially at the higher levels of management and with ubiquitous access to networks, this is once again part of everyone’s work. In the global village, we are all interconnected.

Jane Hart has shown how social media can be used for workplace learning and that instead of just training, there are five types of learning that should be supported by the organization:

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning – keeping the organization up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities

GDL – Group Directed Learning – groups of individuals working in teams, projects, study groups, etc Even two people working together in a coaching and mentoring capacity

PDL – Personal Directed Learning – individuals organizing and managing their own personal or professional learning

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – individuals learning without consciously realizing it (aka incidental or random learning)

FSL – Formal Structured Learning – formal education and training like classes, courses, workshops, etc (both synchronous and asynchronous)

Notice that traditional training (FSL) is only one of the five types. Three of these (IOL, GDL, PDF) require self-direction, and that is the essence of social learning: becoming self-directed learners and workers, all within a two-way flow of power and authority. Social and informal learning are not just feel-good notions, but have a real impact on an increasingly intangible business environment.

Jay Cross has looked at the ways that social learning is becoming real and developed this table to highlight some of the workplace changes he is observing:

Implementing social learning

The changes in becoming a networked workplace can be further analyzed using Jane Hart’s five ways of using social media for learning in the organization.

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning: from Stocks to Flow

Learning is conversation and online conversations are an essential component of online learning. Online communication can be divided into Stocks (information that is archived and organized for reference and retrieval) and Flows (timely and engaging conversations between people, including voice or written communications). Blogs allow flow and micro-blogs, like Twitter, enable great flow due to the constraint of 140 characters

The web enables connections, or constant flow, as well as instant access to information, or infinite stock. Stock on the Internet is everywhere and the challenge is to make sense of it through flows of conversation. It is no longer enough to have the book, manual or information, but one must be able to use it in changing contexts. Because of this connectivity, the Web is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning than the outdated course model. ASL is shifting from looking at knowledge as the collection of bits and engaging in the learning flows around us, without any conscious plan. We are working and learning in networks and the only thing a network can do is share.

PDL – Personal Directed Learning: from Clockwork & Predictable to Complexity & Surprising

Complexity, or maybe our appreciation of it, has rendered the world unpredictable, so the orientation of learning is shifting from past (efficiency, best practice) to future (creative response, innovation). Organizing our own learning is necessary for creative work. Workplace learning is morphing from blocks of training followed by working to a merger of work and learning: they are becoming the same thing. Change is continuous, so learning must be continuous. Developing emergent practices, a necessity when there are no best practices in our changing work environments, requires constant personal directed learning.

In complex environments it no longer works to sit back and see what will happen. By the time we realize what’s happening, it will be too late to take action. Accepting surprise is similar to the delight an artist may have on completion of a work and only then see an emergent quality not consciously understood during the process of its creation.

GDL – Group Directed Learning: from Worker Centric to Team Centric

As mentioned earlier, the real work in organizations is done by groups. This means that sending individuals on a training course and then re-integrating to their work group is relatively useless. With work and learning merging in the network, groups need to find ways that support each member’s learning, while engaged in tasks and projects. Tools that can capture activities and keep group members focused should be used to reinforce group learning.

Social learning requires a certain amount of effort to maintain regular contact and association with our colleagues. Developing social learning practices, like keeping a work journal, may be an effort at first but later it’s just part of the work process. Bloggers have learned how powerful a learning medium they have only after blogging for an extended period. With the increased use of distributed work groups, it is even more important to foster social learning and web media are the current tools at hand.

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning: from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks

Mark Oehlert recently coined the term Subject Matter Networks as a new way of finding organizational knowledge. Instead of looking for subject matter experts from which to design training, we should extend knowledge gathering to the entire network of subject-matter expertise. Once again, the emphasis is no longer on the individual node but on the network. Good networks make for effective organizations.

Networked communities are better structures in dealing with complexity, when emerging practices need to be continuously developed and loose ties can help facilitate fast feedback loops without hierarchical intervention. Collaborative groups are better at making decisions and getting things done. The constraints of the group help to achieve defined goals.

Building capabilities from serendipitous to personally-directed and then group-directed learning help to create strong networks for intra-organizational learning. This is exceptionally important because the emerging knowledge-intensive and creative workplace has these attributes:

• Simple work will be automated.
• Complicated work will go to the lowest bidder, as processes & procedures become more defined and job aids more powerful (e.g. mortgage applications).
• Complex work requires creativity and is where the value of the post-industrial organization lies.
• Dealing with Chaos sometimes has be confronted and this requires creativity as well as a sense of adventure to try novel approaches.

FSL – Formal Structured Learning: from Curriculum to Competency

There remains a need for training in the networked workplace but it must move away from a content delivery approach. The content will be out of date before the training is “delivered” (another outdated term). Work competencies will still need to be developed through practice and appropriate feedback (what training does well) but that practice will have to be directly relevant to the individual or group (group training is an area of immense potential growth). Jointly defining work competence with input from individuals, groups and subject matter networks should become the new analysis process, enabled by social media. Think of it as social ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) for the complex workplace.

Summary

Our workplaces are becoming interconnected because technology has enabled communication networks on a worldwide scale. This means that systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster and more effective. We need to know who to ask for advice right now but that requires a level of trust and trusted relationships take time to nurture. Our default action is to turn to our friends and trusted colleagues; those people with whom we’ve shared experiences. Therefore, we need to share more of our work experiences in order to grow those trusted networks. This is social learning and it is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.

Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was merely complicated. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. Social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations.

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I don’t think traditional hierarchy-pyramid organization charts are going away any time soon. Nor do I think they should.

While it seems clear that connecting, linking, joining-small-pieces-loosely, and a growing frequency and intensity of more-or-less horizontal flows of information and knowledge are bringing change to how people work and how that work activity is organized and managed, by and large many people still need instantiation and direction (and follow-up and measurement) in order to function effectively together.

Not everyone is automatically able to participate in the flows of networks, or ’social business’, a couple of weeks after learning how to link and publish, etc.  Most people are still used to a clear and relatively static set of work activities, and a relatively clear understanding of the imposed limits on their creativity, responsibility and scope of agency.   That said … much has also been observed and written about the potential for job enrichment, boundary-spanning and innovation latent in the ‘organic’ nature of social computing activity, and the new black, ’social business’.

So, I dusted off a blog post from about a year and a half ago, wherein I was musing abut what we could do with tags, links, competency profiles and collaborative scheduling software … in short, I’m pretty sure we could create hierarchies that are more flexible, at times temporary, and perhaps more useful for today’s (and tomorrow’s) interconnected conditions of flow.

This post by Hugh Macleod titled “Buckets” got me thinking …

If nature was designed like today’s business and software, water would trickle down the valley in buckets, from bucket to bucket.

More specifically:

We have wireless in coffee shops, Skyping on transatlantic flights, Blackberries, smartphones and laptops wherever we go – why not let (server based) systems do the delivery of work-orders, run the events, do the transactions and capture the data? Why not have the flows defined with loops and warts and all ready to be refined daily as the organisations learns and grows?

“Anataxonomy” and “Flow”, combine those two principles and use the wonders of technology accordingly.

(Sig Rinde, creator of ERP 2.0 platform Thingamy)

The notion of “flow” has been around for a few years (discussed by KM and intellectual capital theorists, and a bunch of bloggers and social computing enthusiasts who noticed early that flows of information was one of the key outcomes of connected people (brains & fingers-on-keyboards) and information content that could be hyperlinked and circulated), but it’s now starting to  get REALLY important.

Notwithstanding the creeping colonization by networks of the workplace that is currently underway, there are many smart and knowledgeable people who have studied deeply the issue of why hierarchy seems such a durable concept.  By and large, they tell us to get used to it …  there are good reasons why hierarchies thrive, even in the face of these increasing flows of information and spreading forms of networked semi-transparency.

But hierarchies don’t have to remain static … and this is one of the big deficiencies in current models and with the existing tools of organizational design. Think about it. How often are there reorganizations, changes to departmental structures, downsizing, mergers or acquisitions – and the org chart gets tossed up in the air like a set of pick-up sticks. In the case of larger organizations, the “pick-up sticks” always come down in highly-organized, very neat looking boxes with straight lines that essentially state … “this is the right design .. this time we’ve got it” !

Until the next change.

Really, organizational structures are basically a rolling flow of change. Why the assumption of stability, of more-or-less static structure ? In my opinion, it’s just that many executive and management types don’t really like the feelings of messiness and control based only on engagement and willingness that accompany the conditions of continuous change.

So … what if work meant that at different times and for different projects, you could get *tagged* with different tags for different skills, and *linked* with other relevant of pertinent skill and personality *tags*, and so on ? Then, these new-style indicators (of capability) could be combined with availability / scheduling optimization software, and you’d have the basic format for a new form of organization chart.

Hierarchies could be developed at a specific time, for as long as may be necessary, and may involve different people or peoples depending upon the situation, the problems and the desired or hoped-for outcomes. So too for teams and purpose-focused networks of skills, abilities, competencies, willingness and availability.

If you stop and think about it for a moment, you can almost *feel* that this would probably seem more natural and more probably effective. But, we have a large legacy system in place.

Hmmm …  (addendum .. I am aware of several such ‘new org-chart’ initiatives and in the interest of disclosure, I am an advisor to one of them).

Back in the mid-1980’s there was a brief eruption of self-managing teams and what was called socio-technical work systems, where some of these types of issues were addressed – except that then the concepts of *knowledge work*, and mechanisms for manipulating information flows, like tags and hyperlinks, were only really fringe ideas.

Not anymore … but the org charts and the performance management and compensation practices are still (generally) what were used 30 and 20 and 10 years ago.

How much longer will yesteryear’s tools continue to suffice ?

This is basically the question Gary Hamel addresses in his recent book The Future of Management.

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The Web is a near-ideal mechanism in which to culture new strains of social organization. From Craigslist to MySpace to FaceBook to Second Life to eHarmony, from instant messaging to podcasting, blogging, video chat and virtual worlds, the Internet is radically changing the ways in which people find romance, manage friendships, share insights, learn, build communities, and more.

For the moment, though, most of this joyous and frenzied experimentation is taking place outside the plush-carpeted hallways of the corporate old guard.

I find this ironic.

While no company would put up with a 1940’s-era phone system, or forgo the efficiency-enhancing benefits of modern IT, that’s exactly what companies are doing when they fail to exploit the Web’s potential to transform the way work of management is accomplished. Most managers still see the Internet as a productivity tool, or as a way of delivering 24/7 customer service.

Some understand its power to upend old business models. but few have faced up to fact that sooner or later, the web is going to turn our smoke-stack management model on its head.

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Competency models and profiles are a cornerstone of HR methods and practices in today’s enterprise.  They play a central role in:

• recruiting
• learning / training & development
• performance management, and
• (increasingly) compensation philosophy and practices

Competency analysis and profiling was developed from the work of David McLellan, a professor of psychology at Harvard University in the 50’s and 60’s.  In the course of his research and thinking, he came to question the conventional wisdom that IQ and aptitude tests were the best / most accurate predictors of successful and/or superior performance in a job or work role.

McLellan hypothesized that past performance was the best predictor of future successful performance, and set out to prove that.  His subsequent work became an accepted theory, then a methodology for several high-profile projects, and eventually was codified into a methodology that all HR consulting firms now practice.

In 1963 McLelland and several of his Harvard doctoral students set up McBer and Company, a small Boston-based consulting company in the early 80’s.  One of those students, Lyle Spencer Jr., wrote “Competence At Work – Models for Superior Performance“, the definitive book on competency profiling, and another of the McBer gang, Richard Boyatzis (a professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve), wrote “The Competent Manager – A Model for Effective Performance”, the definitive book on managerial competencies.

In 1989 / 90 a major HR consulting firm, Hay Management Consultants, acquired McBer and Company and began the long-ish process of bringing competency analysis and modeling to the enterprise world at large.  I was there, and actually worked on a couple of projects with Lyle Spencer … lucky me, he is a smart man and was a good teacher.  From 1989 to 1992 he travelled the globe, training a cadre of Hay consultants in the methods outlined in Competence At Work.  Then, the firm started selling .. today, most organizations use competency models.

So today all major and most smaller HR consulting firms sell and implement competency analysis and modeling.  Also included in that work is the field of Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman).  Emotional (and social) intelligence are only going to grow in importance as the  presence of  of what is called Enterprise 2.0 continues to grow and spread.

If you are familiar with the book “Emotional Intelligence – Why It Can Matter More Than IQ“, you will note that EI is a derivative subset of generic Hay-McBer competency models. Generic competency models provide a good solid foundation for work design.

So, what about Enterpise 2.0’s networked work ?  When the generic competency models that underpin competency analysis were developed, the Web and hyperlinks, collaboration platforms and hyperlinked social networks did not exist, per se .. remember, this was the early 90’s, pre-browser.

McKinsey & Co. (another well-known consultancy firm, has recently published What Matters: Collaboration types and tools:

“To improve the productivity of collaboration workers (those who interact to solve problems, serve customers and conceive new ideas), we must understand the details of how their work gets done.

We identified twelve segments of these workers, each characterized by the day-to-day activities required by their jobs.”

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In the link to the McKinsey piece, you can mouse over each job / role, and there’s a capsule comment about what’s required.  This is mainly aimed at cataloguing what collaboration tools and dynamics are most appropriate for the role, but …

It’s far from a rigorous competency analysis or model, but it is a beginning to placing these generic roles into the context of the networked business environment and workplace.

Given that I worked at building competency models for about a decade, I have some familiarity with the techniques.  I remember building a generic competency model for networked knowledge workers about 4 or 5 years ago, but I think it was too early and so it got lost in the drifting currents of too much information passing too rapidly under the bridge.

I believe (if I recall correctly) there was an early example also to be found on David Gurteen’s knowledge management web hub (hang on, I’m going to pop over there and see if I can find it).

Aha !  Here it is … What makes an effective knowledge worker ?

I remember it well, because I had posted a comment to it about it being a beginning list of possible competencies for effectiveness in networks, but it looks like David has deleted the comment (I hate that, BTW).

Anyhoo … it seems clear to me that we’ll hear a lot about the competencies required for effective and superior performance in the networked information-and-knowledge flows enterprise (aka Enterprise 2.0).

McKinsey’s typology is an early beginning to that work, and I am sure that the issue(s) will be much studied in the next couple of decades.

If I worked at a major HR consultancy today, I’d be licking my chops!

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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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