Michael Krigsman reports on Information Technology (IT) project failures, a great topic deserving of attention. On his hosted phone discussions, featured speakers share their stories.

Stories are wonderful mechanisms to thread together relevant facts. They often become objects of entertainment where facts are embellished with each telling — stories morph into ‘tales’. I suggest that failure often starts with basing business design on fairytales and folklore. Ironically, the best clues for changing this, are found among people who create fairytales professionally.

Pixar Storytelling

Lurking in your own DVD collection may be a treasure of clues. In the ‘extras’ for the movie Finding Nemo, is the documentary Making Nemo.

Their story starts with a premise, shared by Writer-Director, Andrew Stanton:

“We just want to make a good movie.”

There are many examples of journeys that started with “We just want to make/deliver a good [fill-in-the-blank]. A few ‘outtakes’ might suggest why Pixar’s results are different.

Executive Producer, John Lasseter says things I’ve never heard uttered from a leader in any enterprise I’ve been in, including some responsible for design (perhaps you have):

“I always believe in research. No matter what the subject matter is, you cannot do enough research…because so much believability will come out of what’s really there.”

Software, processes, products, services: these are all all abstractions of reality. To be successful they must approximate reality, they must be believable.

Lasseter then mentions:

“I went to every single person early on in the film and said…”

Whait! Personal contact from an executive leader? Is that in a rulebook somewhere? Lasseter continues:

“We cannot make a movie about the underwater world without you experiencing it firsthand.”

John insists they go onsite for research, and that they all get certified in scuba diving.

Suggesting any of this to Project Managers typically results in blank stares. Let’s start here: IT fails because of its methods. The methods are flawed. Requirements gathering is not the same as immersive research.

With a foot still in research, the Pixar team explores possibilities. Stanton asked his people:

“What is it that makes you believe that it’s under water?”

Figuring out what “under water” would look like resulted in “My First Ocean”. They got believable water, but it was more like a chlorinated swimming pool than ocean water. Stanton worked with his team:

“Each of these individual aspects of being under water looked great, but we couldn’t get them all to work in concert together. I just picked a couple shots of things above water and things below water from real footage [referring to live artifacts from their research] and I said, ‘Using exactly the tools that we have created and nothing else, I want you to see how close you can mimic these actual shots.’”

The results were too good. They came back two weeks later and the animation could not be distinguished from the live images. But their goal was believability, not reality. They still needed the feeling of a make-believe world for their animated creatures to live in.

Another telling differentiator in methods comes from Bob Peterson, Co-Writer:

“It’s really important for us sortof at the head of this big pipeline — before it gets to layout and animation, and lighting — to work this thing out right. That includes the pacing of a film, that includes the emotion — making sure that people are feeling things as the movie progresses.”

Unlike other projects, they started this one with a full screenplay, written by the Director. They thought this would make the effort easier. Lee Unkrich, Co-Director says:

“But the reality is that once you put these movies up in storyboard form, a lot of things come to light that aren’t clear when you’re just reading words on a printed page.”

Let me interject briefly: Requirements are just words on a printed page — they are insufficient for success. Another critical element that Stanton points out (the inverse of ‘final’ requirements as a goal):

“The thing that finally makes it on the screen is all about rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. A good portion of the rewrite process is not done by the screenwriter at a word processor…it’s the story department.”

They have a story department? Who are these people? Stanton explains:

“…the guys that sit in a room with you for close two years, batting out ideas, countering your ideas, drawing up story panels, putting them up on a wall, pitching things, putting things on a reel down in editorial. It’s a very maleable, messy, glorious process.

When it works, it’s amazing. The power of what you can do with a group of great minds. But at times it can be very frustrating.”

When they reached an impasse the co-writers would get in a car and drive to some destination on their schedule rather than fly (e.g. for TV interviews, etc.). Sequestered together for hours, this forced them to just “talk it out” with no other distractions. Peterson says:

“We worked a lot of good stuff out that way. When I watch the film now I remember where we were on I-5 when this idea was brought forward.”

Storyboards are followed by story reels — complete threads of a story with pieces of animation (often both digital and hand-drawn artifacts) with voiceovers, music and sound effects to approximate the complete film experience. This is the template for the movie.

Then it’s back to the drawing board for the details — LOTS of details. The sketches of the original storyboard are replaced by full-color swatches, hand-drawn with pastels, to show the color themes and inform successive levels of detail, like lighting and motion.

Animators don’t just draw characters, they develop them — drawing them from different angles, with different emotions. Sculptures are then created of the characters. Now we’re talking 2D and 3D artists who inform each other’s work. Art Director, Ricky Nierva:

“That’s really when the magic happens. Starting to see that 2D drawing come alive in 3D. I get all this amazing information from it. I start seeing it in a new way. I start turning it around. I look at it from the top and the bottom, because you never know if that’s the way they’re going to be seen in the movie.”

This project required abandoning things learned before. All of the previous Pixar movies focused predominantly on bipedal characters (i.e. 2 legs). Dealing with marine life moving through water required new frames of understanding. No matter how talented or experienced the contributors, these circumstances were different. They had to adapt their work habits to a new set of heuristics.

As more and more people become part of the production, play and contests served a critical cultural purpose: getting people together to check out each other and their work. Their production is not a phase where leadership throws the work over to the team to be led by project managers — there is continuous review/feedback of the work by the leadership.

Their work is immensely collaborative. It’s not collaborating on bringing parts together. Various specialists touch the same pieces over and over again, adding their own value in its evolution. In the end, there are no individual star performers. The star power shifts to the results of the collective effort: the movie itself.

Let’s Recap

These are the artifacts of creative, immersive work at Pixar.

• Immersive Research
• Premise-Challenging Questions
• Multiple Leaders “Work Things Out” Together
• Possibilities Created by Storytellers, Sculptors, Animators, Modelers…
• Physical Reference Artifacts used for Conversations
• Specialists for: Color, Shading, Photography, Motion, Sound, even a Professor of Physiology…
• Plans that Change via Continuous Discovery, Continuous Design
• Incredibly Collaborative Work (including inspiring leadership)
• Immersive Play

Thank you Pixar, for giving the rest of us a real life example — a model — to look at from different angles, to perhaps see solutions and business in a new way. Imagine what we could accomplish if we were to fundamentally change the way we approach our work — right now!

Postscript: Tweetpeep @nenshad immediately shared this great piece from the Wall Street Journal “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity“.

The 2010 lists have started early. David Armano recently wrote “Six Social Media Trends for 2010“. I respect David’s contributions to the industry so I was quick to read and respond to his piece, noting first his closing question:

Thanks for filtering out some key items to focus on.

1. “Where do you see social media going next?” Social media doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere. Indeed, as others have said, it will simply become more ubiquitous. The comeback to requests for ROI on social media should be a request to see the ROI for the phone system, so you can use it as a guide for your response. It’s a channel.

2. Business is social. It turns out that the intimacy of the mom&pop era was all of the innuendos of the ‘persistence’ of relationships (the memory of the relationship transactions). Until the content that streams through social media is persisted, the intimacy will still be lacking.

3. Seems that the most common, high value use of social media mechanisms is to bypass bad operating designs (service models). At some point one will have to resolve to the other to relieve the schizophrenia (inconsistent identity).

So what do I mean in the second item by the “‘persistence’ of relationships”? To clarify, my use of the term “persistence” equals the “the continuance of an effect after its cause is removed”. A related term is “memory”. Many of the best recollections of great customer exchanges include some aspect of being remembered. Don Peppers used to give examples of hotels that remembered what your room service preferences were. These are the kinds of things that are part of ‘having’ a relationship. But a hotel doesn’t have a memory, and an international hotel  brand has to know you wherever you go. The only way an individual can have a persistent relationship with a company is for there to be a persistent memory, somewhere.

A common comparison is often made to the mom & pop business, suggesting that business is more personal when you do business directly with the owner. It’s a simple matter of memory. Even salespeople will tell you how important remembering personal details are for impressing customers/clients.

While social media introduces a new channel by which to interact with customers, as I pointed out in #3, these new mechanisms are often used as the ambulance network — helping injured customers, one at a time, just like mom & pop. Only mom & pop would remember who was injured and why. They may have even changed the way they did business to improve. But the distance between the knowledge and the corresponding action was minimal. Not so in modern enterprises. Building connections between the two requires technology.

As enterprises historically embraced information technology, they started first with a focus on the capture of transactions — the things that were directly tied to the flow of money that kept the business alive. In these technical systems, people were appendages to the transactions. This was most classically seen in the telecommunications industry. As a phone customer you weren’t a name or even an address, you were a phone number (BTN = Billing Telephone Number, does it get any more transactive than that?).

MCI brought new pricing pressure to the telecommunications industry by competing against AT&T. In the early 90’s the pressure was increased by a marketing campaign that capitalized on…human relationships: Friends & Family. The discounts provided by the relationships relied on data — making sure that the billing system knew which phone numbers you’d specified to get discounts on. Setting up and changing these numbers was all managed by one-on-one relationships — talking to a call center representative.

Everything was fine if nothing changed. But life happens. If you moved, your phone number would change and so did your history…it was gone, you started over.

Relationships are expensive to maintain. We can all relate to what we invest in personal relationships. The types of relationships we have or want to have with a business varies based on a variety of factors. Oddly, most of what we really want is to be able to get through a business transaction or receive the services we believe we contracted for with minimal inconvenience. And most of the problems businesses face is when this basic need is not met.

Companies engage in social media to increase the intimacy of their conversations. We have to ask ourselves, is it the channel that makes the difference or the rules that are applied via the channel? Why can’t the same thing happen via the existing channels? At what point does the pattern of exchanges across all channels come together to serve as evidence for change in the business?

Would the delight of getting help via social media channels be as meaningful if as a customer you didn’t have any problems to be resolved?

Shouldn’t the real question for 2010 be more focused on how businesses changed/improved as a result of all of their channels of interaction, social media being just one of them?

Technology?

The term “technology” is as misused as the word “diet”. Anything you eat makes up your diet. You can’t go on a diet, you’re already on one. You can, however, go on a “restricted diet” or a “reduction diet”. The key modifiers are often dropped.

Andrew McAfee purports that Enterprise 2.0 is “not not about the technology.” Using the Christensen definition noted above, this is true. But is Andy missing a modifier? His writings seem to focus on “digital technology”, which can indeed enable Enterprise 2.0. And yet, many of these technologies have been available for over a decade. How significant then are these technologies and where’s the issue?

Digital technologies labeled Enterprise 2.0, will not provide 2.0 results if implemented with 1.0 thinking.

2.0 Thinking: Embrace Dichotomy

How is 2.0 thinking different? It relies on a shift away from many commonly held beliefs. It is not an abandonment of such beliefs, but requires that they be suspended to move to a more flexible, adaptive middle. It requires the ability to embrace dichotomy, to simultaneously consider opposing concepts to find new possibilities (see “The Opposable Mind” by Roger Martin, Rotman School of Business and “The Innovation Paradox” by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes).

Digital technologies are, well, fundamentally digital. They operate off of algorithms and binary code. As such, they provide approximations of reality. But knowledge work is not inherently defined by processes. Forcing knowledge work into processes defined by algorithms and binary code introduces ‘rounding errors’. The more algorithms and binary code you string together into a single solution, the more error you introduce.

The promise of object-oriented theory was to create reusable pieces of code. This was a fallacy. The true potential was not in the code itself, but in reusable functions – algorithms of process (the real essence of SOA).

Consider the following continuum:

Based on observations from Roger Martin, the adaptive middle requires a move away from (not an abandonment of) binary code. The entire continuum is relevant — optimal flexibility synthesizes all of these. Where the dynamic middle falls, depends on the context of the problem or opportunity at hand. Consider the left side Art and the right side Science. Synthesized, they lead to the optimal: context-relevant design.

One discipline that relies on the synthesis of art and science is architecture. While digital architecture might be considered both art and science, Enterprise 2.0 requires a form of Enterprise Architecture akin to, but not equal to the Zachman Framework (frameworks, the conceptual equivalent to technology platforms). No one individual can or should defend the various perspectives needed to shape such an architecture.

Structure Minimized, Not Eliminated

Fundamental to Enterprise 2.0 is simplicity. The most simplistic form in nature is that which emerges, governed by the laws of complexity – the middle between chaos and order (basic premises of complexity science, including feedback loops are assumed and not detailed here).

Emergence is strangled by order and dissipates in chaos. It requires “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”. In his book by the same name, David Weinberger lays out a “unified theory of the web”. Enterprise 2.0 embraces a unified theory of work, celebrating the most adaptive resource a company has: its people.

Enterprise 2.0 unleashes the potential of corporate resources by shifting control. While management does not go away, it is not an activity in the hands of a few.

Gary Hamel suggests, “Management is out of date. Like the combustion engine, it’s a technology that has largely stopped evolving…” Management is not a group of people with a title, it’s “the capacity to marshal resources, lay out plans, program work, and spur effort” and “is central to the accomplishment of human purpose.”

Fluid Structure: Think Lava Lamp

There’s no ‘big bang’ theory. Emergence does not evolve from nothing – it requires structure. Endless possibilities of form emerge from the elements and constraints of a lava lamp. Break the container and the possibilities of the elements end.

Where does structure come from? It depends – this, the ultimate design answer. The right answer comes from the context of the business.

There are no checklists for creating an Enterprise 2.0-enabled environment. The business is already operating. The challenge is akin to repurposing a Boeing 777 into a 787 Dreamliner mid-flight, except there is no ‘finished’ design, but there is a starting architecture (heuristics). Most progress is tested/validated in-flight.

The term “repurposing” should not be taken lightly. Tremendous potential exists for leveraging what’s already in place: “Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees” Arthur Schopenhauer. One form of this is the mashup, but there are many other ways to leverage existing resources by using pieces of existing designs and solutions or modifying them with new functional or UI patterns.

While digital technologies contribute to the structure, they are only seeds. At the lowest level construct, Blog technology is not different than a Wiki: both provide functions to create and display content in a specific format. The main distinctions in Blogs and Wikis are the functions and formats they provide. But the same is true for all other common desktop applications. A Blog or a Wiki is no more inherently social than email.

Indeed, Blogs and Wikis are common to desktop applications in one very negative way: they can create more silos of information faster. This is the antithesis of the flexibility required by Enterprise 2.0. There must be a guiding architecture for Enterprise 2.0 success, one that separates the UI from the functions, the format from the content and data. A digital technology that earns an E2.0-relevant label, will be built around or support such an architecture, one that understands and leverages the fundamentals of fluid structure.

Architectures rely on operating assumptions: an HVAC system must be kept in good repair to maintain comfortable temperatures for building occupants. Enterprise 2.0 requires some form of facilities maintenance. The evolving details of the care and feeding of the environment can be embodied in a Governance Model, not to be confused with highly regulated models often used for restraint. The E2.0 version is more heuristic than algorithmic, but includes a blend of recommendations and process. It may define formal and informal roles. It simply reflects agreements.

No Beginning, No End

There is no prescribed starting point for Enterprise 2.0, but there is one capability that emergence fundamentally depends on: the ability for people to find each other by things that define relevance – work, topics, skills, affiliations, trust. As well, people must have ready access to relevant ‘raw materials’ for their work. Shorten the distance to finding relevant resources.

To be truly emergent, Enterprise 2.0 must be seamlessly integrated with knowledge work. It cannot be an appendage; it should not require adoption.

Enterprise 2.0 is inherently social. It is not about managing knowledge but is about rendering knowledge. It is enabled by, but is not achieved by installing a digital technology. It unleashes the potential of humans not with workflow, but by flowing work and thought on persistent conversations.

“John is an Imagineer, among the brightest of a bright bunch who are responsible for designing everything that’s associated with Disney around the world. Whether it’s a hotel or a thrill ride, it’s the Imagineer’s job to dream it up, figure it out, and get it built. Doing work like this — making a movie or building a building — at this scale requires the collaboration of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people. They’re all trained, they’re all talented, and they get the job done. But there are certain people, and John is one of them, who bring a really special quality, one that’s almost indefinable, one that can take ‘good’ and make it ‘great.’ John’s ability to do this, I think, is rooted in his curiosity and his love of people. His curiosity has given him a vast body of knowledge that allows him to approach problems from unexpected viewpoints. Event when specialists have given up, John will come in and suggest a simple and elegant solution — one that has never even occurred to anyone else. And John’s love of people — this is the best part — drives him to create things that are better than good. John knows that people respond to design on a deep level. It isn’t that difficult to make a movie that simply entertains or a building that simply provides shelter. But when you’ve got a love for people, you want them to have experiences that make them think differently when they leave. The quest for ‘great’ transcends genre. Be it a themed restaurant, a state-of-the-art attraction, or a beautiful garden, a great design makes people think, it inspires them, it makes them use their imaginations. John pushes everyone to a higher standard, a standard of excellence.” [emphasis added]

At the root of it all, is the ability to design great experiences. Most business information technologies do not deliver great experiences.

In the mid-90s, in the most unlikely of places — a database conference — through the eyes of a geek-turned-Imagineer I learned the subtleties of a culture steeped in designing great experiences. This database guy was clearly surprised by how much Walt still influenced the culture long after he was gone. He shared many examples of subtle design that create the unique Disney experiences, especially Walt’s reliance on the use of color to influence emotion. But the classic story related, shared the challenges faced in the early 60’s as Disney looked to combine animation with human interaction when Dick Van Dyke danced with the penguins in Mary Poppins. Before blue screen technology, Dick was working under yellow sulfer lighting with a screen and a grid that he was being asked to choreograph his moves around. Trying to hit all of the marks while dancing was exhausting. Walt found out what was going on and put an end to it all insisting that it was not Dick’s job to work around the technology but that the technology (including the animation) needed to work around Dick.

Both Frank Gehry and the geek-turned-Imagineer shared a common message. While the results rely on the collaborative effort of a lot of people, the factor that changes the good to great are the insights of a visionary. Not someone who makes things grander, but someone who can see the simplicity. Someone who’s willing to challenge the momentum with new clarity. A similar story was recently shared by David Pogue after talking with Steve Jobs at the recent Apple event. Questioning whether or not there would be a lag in product releases due to Jobs’ 6-month absence, Steve said that most of what’s coming up next had been started before he’d left, but that he just needed to “polish” them a bit.

For those of use who don’t have a Walt, a John, or a Steve to bring clarity to our work, Enterprise 2.0 is a means by which to focus on simplicity: making it easier for the people doing the work, to provide a better experience for those for whom the work is being done. But only if…it includes design.

Postscript

Walt Disney was way ahead of his time as a businessman. He insisted on techniques that are just now being embraced as relevant to business. From Designing Disney:

“To design most effectively for our guests, we learned that we had to observe them up close, waiting in lines with them, going on rides with them, eating with them. Walt insisted on this by saying, ‘You guys get down there at least twice a month. For God’s sake, don’t eat off the lot. Stay there…lunch with the guests…talk to them.’ This was new to us; as filmmakers, we were used to sitting in our sweatboxes at the studio, passing judgment on our work without knowing how the public might actually respond to it. Going out into the park taught us how guests were being treated and how they responded to sensory information, what worked and what didn’t, what their needs were and how we could meet them in entertaining ways. We paid attention to guests’ patterns of movement and the ways in which they expressed their emotions. We got an idea of what was going on in their minds. Disney Imagineers prefer such an experiential process of gathering information from our guests to focus groups or surveys. When designers see guests in their natural states of behavior, they gain a better understand of the space and time guests need in a story environment.”

Moral: Consider work as an unfolding story.

People comfortable in a pre-2.0 era mindset appear to be uncomfortable with conversations that challenge the status quo. Heck, while I don’t necessarily agree with his approach, it was clear that many of us agreed with some of the rants that Dennis Howlett recently lodged against Enterprise 2.0 (and for which he sent out a tease today of more to come). Conversations such as these are critical. We must relish talking through the issues and making sure that we’re not just a bunch of bobbleheads not sure what we’re agreeing to and not willing to challenge everything that we embrace as assumptions (including the ways we’ve been used to doing business).

One of the principles that we support is that conversations need to be allowed to work themselves out — they need to be self-policing (with allowance for community ‘regulation’ — the level of ‘control’ that everyone agrees to). This is based on a reality that ‘flaming’ behaviors actually have a tenancy to burn themselves out (individuals are not taken seriously). In many cases, what is perceived as flaming is often mistaken passion and outright wrong conclusions being jumped to (we’ve all seen how quickly that can happen on Twitter due to limited context). Assuming that a blog post is not intended to initiate conversation, is clearly pre-2.0 thinking. Putting an end to conversation does not add to the understanding, nor does it allow for individuals to exercise their own ability to grow in the skills of ‘agreeing to disagree’.

Indeed, enabling such conversations to take place is fundamental to the entire 2.0 paradigm. So many times there are individuals who talk about making sure we spend more time in ‘live’ interaction. Clearly a balance in all things is relevant. But I’m beginning to suspect that we’ve suppressed our conversations for so long that we’re not really good at knowing how to have real dialog. You’ve likely been on those project calls where there is so much that goes unsaid, because everyone assumes that there is not enough time in the meeting to deal with the real issues — but then, they likely never get resolved. Sure, they might get ‘mitigated’: two people get together and work out some agreement that does not often include an individual that is critical to the conversation. Businesses are replete with unhealthy human behaviors — things that are ‘culturally’ acceptable as they reinforce all behaviors related to ‘not rocking the boat’. In psychology, suppressing such realities lead to any variety of psychoses. Never mind the fact that the boat is sinking.

Creative dissonance (perturbation) is fundamental to the principles of bifurcation (the precursor state to emergence) — a fundamental concept of complexity that not only is fundamental to the unstable ’shift’ we find ourselves in right now, but is also critical to similar ’shifts’ needed for all innovation. Yes, the noise of ‘feedback’ in a sound system is painful to our auditory sensibilities, but it’s a sure means by which someone is going to ‘fix’ the situation. The business reality is, it is often not economically feasible to grease the wheel until it starts squeaking. Enterprise 2.0 is the means by which to allow for considering squeaking wheels — sure we might grease it, but we darned well better be looking at whether or not it’s also about to fall off.

I welcome the addition of references to this post that reference things we need to consider to be able to be more successful at working through such dissonance — the things relevant to healthy dialog. Such references are essential for creating related E2.0 governance models. We’re not used to calling out such things as ‘conditions of use’, as part of the ‘deliverables’ — but for 2.0 they’re critical.

I’m enjoying all of the perspectives. In the interest of timeliness, I’m including a quote or two. I’ll leave the rest to you.

From @gyehuda “Denial is a River Full of Crocks”

“Dennis is correct. If your E2.0 guru is describing coattails, then reject it. I don’t believe in false idols either. [But] Enterprise 2.0 does not prescribe that all organization must transform themselves into social guilds.”

From @niallcook “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?”

“Yes, Enterprise 2.0 is a label. So was Groupware. Remember that? New things will always be given labels by the people trying to educate the market. Get over it.

So is Enterprise 2.0 trying to solve a problem? No. Because it’s just a label. Is it a thing you can go and buy? No. Because it’s just a label. Is it going to change the world? No. Because… you get the idea.”

From @shel “The Real-World Work of Enterprise 2.0”

“While Howlett rails that most people ‘just want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on,’ P&G saw the potential for social tools to allow ‘users to create value beyond their usual circles.’”

From @oscarberg “Enterprise 2.0 is a Process not a Solution”

I haven’t yet worked out a position about ‘process’. Right now, I’m not in agreement in the use of the term, but I still have to figure out why I used to think it was relevant and now not.

“You might agree or disagree on this point, but nevertheless I think it is safe to say that Enterprise 2.0 since long has got a life of its own, independent of the person who originally coined it. It is up to us together to fill it with purpose.”

From @mikelafleur: “The Problem Enterprise 2.0 is Trying to Solve”

“If the sole purpose of Enterprise 2.0 was to enable social networking in the business environment, then it would be difficult to come up with a compelling reason to implement it in the current economic environment. But this is a simplistic view of Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 is far more than creating communities; while the definition is still evolving, at its root Enterprise 2.0 conceptual and technological framework which provides agile and adaptable collaboration and information sharing combined with integration of enterprise data, presented to the user in one interface.”

From @chieftech “The Nonsense of Enterprise 2.0”

“Similarly there is a lot of truth to Howlett’s call for Enterprise 2.0 to step up and come clean, but on the other hand I think he is mistaken in thinking that Enterprise 2.0 is a solution looking for a problem.

[The] most important feature of Enterprise 2.0 that many people still don’t get is the concept of emergence. Emergence isn’t about creating social chaos inside organisations. Instead its about taking an abundance approach to IT using Web 2.0 technology that allow users to create their own solutions with few constraints or penalties for wastage. And this is why Howlett gets it all wrong. As faddish as it sounds, Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a solution – it actually describes an IT paradigm shift.”

The latter sounds a lot like my position in a recent ZDNet guest post “Debunking Enterprise 2.0 Failure”

“Enterprise 2.0’s true potential is to facilitate a paradigm shift that fundamentally changes operating models and leverages the existing reality of work.”

Andy: I agree that it’s ‘not not’ about technology. And as I always like to point out, we’d all be a lot better off if we understood and embraced the non-digital aspects of technology, especially as noted by Clayton Christensen “the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value”. But we don’t.

Due to the imperfections in language as a representation, we have to deal with common interpretations. The message “it’s not about the technology” does not infer that the technology is not necessary — it suggests that it’s not sufficient. In a reality where so many see and buy technologies as ‘finished products’, this mindset has to be overcome with a strong perspective. The common belief has to be challenged to start the conversation in earnest.

Yes, the digital technologies hold great potential. But they are ‘lost’ without the balance of all the components that make a sound technology, by Christensen’s definition. Because so few hold this understanding, anyone who is championing core principles must also champion the details of the broader definition of technology, else the story is only partially true. You speak of technology and then you specifically mention software. While software is a technology, not all technology is software. Even if we were to embrace, as you suggest, the technological aspects of Enterprise 2.0, software itself is a small part of it.

“A definition is not a discussion”. I would guess you’re suggesting that a definition is a placeholder, around which discussion can ensue (I believe the ‘contrarians’ are suggesting they’re not seeing a venue for such discussion). The essence of all things 2.0 is the recognition that ‘facts’ are contextual. The purpose of the flexibility that is borne of 2.0 is to accommodate growth and ever-changing conditions that are the reality of business.

Ever-changing has always been part of the business landscape, the difference now is the rate of change — which is forcing us to move away from the side of the Design Thinking continuum where lives “binary code” and “algorithms”, more toward “heuristics” and “mystery”. While there will be conditions for which all will be relevant, the focus has to be more in the tradeoffs between the heuristic and the algorithm. We are constantly learning and seeing things from different perspectives. A definition that is ‘locked down’ would be an embracing of ‘binary code’. That’s just not part of a 2.0 reality which embraces the need to facilitate the dynamic middle — providing the ability to harness the crest of the wave, capitalizing on kinetic energy (energy in motion) and order for free…the birthplace of emergence.

We offer gratitude and respect for your trailblazing this category. As well I offer as evidence other trailblazers: John Zachman originally only had 3 categories in his now 6 category Enterprise Architecture Framework (the other three came from the ‘masses’); Bill Inmon did not embrace data marts as part of data warehousing. Both evolved.

I look forward to the continued growth in our collective understanding of this topic as we seek to leverage its potential and improve the means by which we work together.

And so, there is often a lot of debate about terms in evolving disciplines. For Enterprise 2.0 there are no exceptions. Having conversations with the same terms that mean different things gets pretty confusing. Even industry colleague Sameer Patel (@SameerPatel) recently admitted that he’s avoiding use of many terms except among colleagues (or at the end of conversations), because they hinder understanding more than not.

Concepts are powerful. People who lament them being ‘vague’, misunderstand the purpose and value of them being exactly what they are (such individuals are also likely to complain about water being wet). So, I’m offering a concept to be considered for our conversations: Participatory Architecture.  This is one that I cannot take credit for, as clearly much brighter minds prevail here. I offer as evidence a fabulous talk by John Seely Brown (who also inspired FFBlog colleague, Tom Mandel in the past) at the 2008 IIT-ID Strategy Conference and summarize some of John’s critical thoughts below.

• Consider how Innovation can lead to New Types of Institutions
• Why Now? There is no Equilibrium [therefore no control or stability]
• Rethink: Notions of Authority [quality] and Learning [continuous]
• Understanding is Socially Constructed
• We Learn In and Through Our Interactions with Others
• Support with Participatory Architectures: Web 2.0 is such a medium
• Social Groups are Bigger than Boundaries due to Social Networks
• Start with the Long Tail: Participatory, Interest-Driven Learning [tapping natural energies first]
• Support “Productive Inquiry”: Spiral Form of Learning that Moves Upward
• Support Ecology of Learning/Doing Niches
• Pedagogical Shift: From Authority Based Teaching to Peer-Based Learning [in relevant contexts]
• Epistemological Shift:
  • From Tools as Instruments to Tools as Productive Inquiry [to create learning artifacts -- hello, E 2.0! morphed with Design Thinking and Visual Thinking]
  • From Knowledge [goodbye KM!] to Knowing [active]
• Tinkering as a Learning Platform [the remix and the mashup]
• Shift: From Instruction to Interest-Driven Participation
  • From Assessment to Feedback and Reviews
  • From Teaching to Sharing/Recommendations
  • From Standardization to Specialization
• Reinvent: Community Library Becomes After-School [Learning] Center
• Accreditation From Personal Artifacts: Portfolio [not what you know but what you've done]
• Back to the Future: The One Room Schoolhouse, Goes Global
• 20th Century = Scalable Efficiency | 21st Century = Exponential Learning [refer back to Zappos 'training' approach, at end of article]
• Shift: From Transaction Economy to Relationship Economy [requires culture of trust]

We repeatedly mention that 2.0 is not about the technology. If that’s truly the case, then the advice should not be about the adoption of the same technologies for which this is not about (bear with me…at some point there ARE technologies involved, but it’s focusing on those technologies and not on the REST of the stuff that goes on where failure begins).

Let’s talk about examples I’ve come across in the past 30 minutes, where companies are not applying the principles of 2.0 thinking, in all the everyday little things that go on. While these examples may be more Web 2.0 in focus, the analogies can readily be transferred to Enterprise 2.0 scenarios. Exercising related 2.0 thinking at all levels, makes the actions second nature — hopefully, enough that we can stop focusing on the topic at all (that’s the goal).

Amazon and TD Ameritrade Send Relationship Spam

I’ve been a customer of Amazon long enough to remember the annual Christmas gifts and letters that we got from them as customers. Clearly, Amazon led the way in many 2.0 principles and practices even before we codified the term and the focus (shortening the distance to done = 1-click ordering). But Amazon has gotten big and lazy in their attention to detail (which is likely to happen when dealing with the volumes of relationships and touchpoints they have stewardship over). Amazon is not alone in this. In the same 30 minutes I had interactions with two companies (remember, EVERY interaction is a critical point for which relationship equity can be added upon) and they both failed at exactly the same thing: dead end emails.

As I pointed out in my response to TD Ameritrade (which will likely not find its way to any human eyes, and if it does it will be promptly ignored as ‘noise’ — understanding the value of noise is a topic I’ve covered in the past), sending an email which is asking/prompting for action, or even might incidentally be the impetus for action, is a PRIME opportunity for investing in a little relationship equity — furthering the relationship by adding to the interaction. Let me repeat that last part again: “furthering the relationship by adding to the interaction” — think of expanding the relationship chain in the ways many businesses look to expand their strategic focus along a supply chain (clearly the latter is of less value without the former). Replace this notion with what in 1.0 was referred to as stickiness (stickiness is dead).

I got an email from both Amazon and TD Ameritrade. Amazon wrote to tell me that another book I had just posted, had sold and that I needed to fulfill the order. How does Amazon “further the relationship by adding to the interaction”? — by word and not by deed.

“1. Go to your Seller Account by clicking “Your Account” at the top of any Amazon.com page, then clicking “Your Seller Account” on the right side of the page, under Marketplace.”

Instead of reading those instructions (which are relevant and great for mobile and JAWS), I could be clicking on a link that would DO all of that for me — and shorten the distance to done (I went to their site and quickly pointed this out to them — even though I had to invest considerably more of my precious time — which they’d already eaten into, to give them valuable feedback…which again, will likely fall on the machine room floor). It’s an email: “Luke, Use the Force.”

TD Ameritrade regularly sends confirmations of trades by email (something I signed up for in lieu of the paper version — never mind that the email contains NONE of the detail the paper version does). But there’s a significant distinction here — this is an institutional account. I’m not initiating the trades — my personal advisor is. So the most relevant scenario to be initiated by this receipt of an email is that I likely would like to see what it is that has been transacted on my behalf. [insert silence]…TD Ameritrade sends the emails, but treats them like spam. I just delete them. Why? I can never remember HOW to get to my account, I’m not in it enough (my advisor is). The email could easily shorten that distance for me. But, it does not.

Suddenly, I feel like a revivalist and have the urge to say, “Brothers and Sisters…” — we have to start with the little things. It’s actually less about transparency (although that is important) than it is first about sincerity. Where’s the sincerety in sending out a message that is not designed to BE a conversation?

2.0 IS first and foremost the means by which to converse — one with another (even vicariously). Can we start there and then add the other stuff? Seriously, at the top of your E2.0 initiative ‘list’, should be assessing the reality and start fixing that first. In doing so, you will learn so much more about what’s truly relevant to be done, for real 2.0 success.

Learn first to ‘apply’ 2.0. Exercise the craft as an apprentice and earn your way into mastery.

I’ve been listening to this piece over and over again — each time additional depth is gained (including evaluating Martin’s style as to ‘how’ he tells the stories to his audience, and where he chooses to focus). It’s a topic he’d written about previously for Business Week, but his talk makes it a lot more meaningful and significant. He illustrates the significance of the tension by differentiating them:

Reliability

• Consistent, Repeatable, Predictable
• Certainteed Outcomes
• Validated on Past Data
• Measurable, Avoids Bias
• Limited Variables

Validity

• Diverse Variables (possibilities)
• Embraces Bias
• Validated by Future Events
• Outcomes Vary by Context
• Relies on Heuristics and Analogies

The challenge is that they’re inverse concepts. Moving toward one, requires minimizing the other. Does it mean that there’s not a middle? Not at all — indeed that’s the real goal. While Roger (probably for great ‘making a point’ purposes) puts business on one side and designers on another, I fundamentally believe that optimal design is actually in the middle (middle, not being a spacial thing, but somewhere other than one of the ends). Design is simply asking business to shift away from the thing that it’s intent on driving toward: science. But reality suggests that there is no ‘ideal’: there are too many extenuating circumstances (context). Therefore, the only way to optimize is to add a good dose of art. Design is what happens when you successfully find the optimal blend between science (the observable facts) from the art (celebrating the ‘unseen’).

Martin notes in his Business Week piece:

If a corporation wants to enjoy the benefits of design in its products, services, processes, or business models, it must go considerably beyond simply hiring designers or declaring itself design-oriented. The CEO must take responsibility for safeguarding validity. If the CEO doesn’t, the corporation’s natural inclination toward reliability will win out.

…certain corporate divisions — including powerful ones like finance — are more insulated from direct market pressures and can more easily slide into deep reliability.

Every CEO needs…to understand that he can’t let finance or any other division run roughshod over validity, or he’ll unknowingly drive design thinking completely out of his corporation. That’s why an additional task for the CEO is to act as the CVO — chief validity officer — in order to protect and nurture a design culture.

P&G’s CEO A.G. Lafley in a discussion with Roger Martin in 2008 is a living testament of this vigilence. He shares the tremendous effort it took to shift their business to a design culture. Between the many insightful examples of ‘how’ P&G shifted their business, by Claudia Kotchka, you can hear her repeatedly give credit to Lafley for being responsible for initiating and supporting the shift to design thinking at P&G.

Enterprise 2.0 is a shift to validity over reliability — not to replace one over the other, but to move toward a balance — bringing the yin to balance the yang, while celebrating the significance of both. Trying to implement a shift to validity while trying to hang onto the ways of reliability (without changing them radically) will lead to continued failure. As well, abandoning reliability will also fail.

Enterprise 2.0 is specifically set up to fail faster — make the future turn into the past sooner, but do so with smaller risk, smaller investments, smaller bits of focus. Or to use another 2.0 term — it’s the mashup between the two, making it fundamentally different than either one.

Circling back to the opening statement, I truly do belived that one means by which to bridge this gap is to bring the reliability artifacts of validity to the table — create the corresponding collection that was described as design research or customer insight, in the former piece.