This blog, and the collection of esteemed writers herein, came together as a result of annual events that FAST Search & Technology sponsored, focused on Enterprise 2.0- related issues. In 2008, the last year before being purchased by Microsoft, Chief Technology Officer Bjørn Olstad offered a wonderful vision that FAST was working toward. Recast below, I’ve pulled a number of key quotes for review.

The theme of FASTforward ‘08 was “The User Revolution”. Based on what Bjørn spoke of then, one has to wonder what has happened to the potential of that revolution.

…previously people thought that intent was what they typed in a query box…And now people are seeing that intent can be captured in many ways. It can be what you type, it can be what you do, it can be how you collaborate with other people, it can be you as a person, it can be the team you work in… How do you capture intent? How do you act on intent?

Power is switching from a publishing perspective to a consumer perspective. That is a big challenge…

Bjørn explained that over time FAST had been focused more on the back end than the front end — the interaction space. And that they committed to a shift to the front end through their release of an Interaction Management module, part of their overall planned architecture.

If you can work on developing the user experience, that adds so much more value than developing deep in the core. So over time we have shifted most of the focus to create that richness about how search is powering actual algorithmic experiences far beyond what people believe was search — in portals, in deep applications, in rich applications — being powered by algorithms.

In the past, applications have kept various types of content, structured data and media as separate elements. FAST wanted to break down the barriers between these.

We have a new search core which is taking this to the next level…unstructured data, text, rich media all blended together but natively represented, and query languages of all types to access this that are also native.

…you get a new level of completeness, a data fusion model where you work on all types of data and it works on all types of queries, coming from applications (legacy) and users.

He goes on to talk about the significance of tags, but not only explicit tags, but things that can be inferred from behaviors.

That connection between work — that ability to tap into usage and convert that into metadata, implicit metadata, that subsequently can power more precise user experiences — has also been a key method.

He spoke of the difference of doing so at the individual levels and also making inferences at a team level (more social implications), moving lastly to the crowd level (wisdom of crowds implications).

In reflecting on the evolution of search, Bjørn notes while many companies have leveraged search as a mechanism for revenue generation, search can be leveraged as a business platform:

So it’s not just a technology — how can I put a search bar in the upper right-hand corner — this has become a platform as to how I can run my media company. Because the core assets have been changing. It used to be the content: I own the newspaper. Now…the power is with the user. How can they reach out to the user? Search is a key technology to do that.

It’s not just like the web search — you type a query, you get a list of links, you click on it and then you go and read it. What if it was quantitative? What if the value is not just in any document but is across documents and it’s only when you bring these pieces together that you actually see a pattern? …to get to a new level of analysis…bypassing the current BI level approach…using a much simpler access paradigm…

Talking about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 that had already started to be seen across the market, Bjørn noted that even for the adoption of SharePoint, collaboration is one of the top 4 focuses. From a search perspective you can close the loop on things that go beyond the content itself and can look at the use of the content to infer value.

At that time, looking to the future of FAST Bjørn said:

The next generation technology for FAST has 3 pillars, 3 cornerstones…content [how can we aggregate it]…the user [search moves from being an API for content to something that can be managed directly]…a search core [changing the physics of search]

We need to rethink information access: is it databases, is it search, is it a business platform? This is really now changing and the technology stack is going to change forever, based on these components.

I really miss these events. The energy was tremendous.

If FAST was already moving toward this reality in early 2008, complete with customers demonstrating same, how is it that Tim Berners-Lee was trying to sell a similar vision at TED in early 2009, touted as the Next Web and Linked Data?

And what happened to all this forward momentum? Have we buried critical technologies again?

This is a reflective piece, rather than 2.0 commentary. Credit to @ToughLoveforX who asked for more detail about something tweeted to him. I’ve often dropped crumbs of these stories, including a prior post.

I’ve learned two critical lessons from near-direct exchanges with Bill Gates. Clearly you can learn from both good and bad examples. I offer one of each.

To add a little context, I graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, circa 1980, the early PC era. Right out of college I was lucky to stumble into a technology role, as an administrative assistant on assignment from a temp agency.

I remember one day when the guys were quite excited about something they’d found being sold in our own drug stores, in the camera department: a TRS-80 pocket computer. They exclaimed that the unit had more memory than the first big box in our shop (we still had a card punch machine on the floor, for fixes to old programs in use).

As the department ’secretary’, I did a lot of work for the manager who was the first and only person in the company to get an IBM PC, which operated with CP/M.  At this time Bill Gates was wooing IBM with his disk operating system, DOS. I quickly learned to generate documents in WordStar.

Ten years later, Bill Gates was still just an average, but well-known guy speaking at local events. After one event, gathered for the informal Q&A, I asked Bill a question grounded in things I was learning from a certificate program in Data Resource Management. I asked him when he was going to separate the files he was creating with his tools from the tools themselves. At that time, content wasn’t portable — it was ‘jailed’ by the tool that created it. He said that he didn’t understand the question — and that was my answer.

Bill’s focus was software. The fact that the software worked and created something was the goal. What happened beyond that wasn’t his responsibility. This mindset would prevail for another 10 years. I was shocked to learn that Office 2000 was the first major release where the various product teams were required to work with each other.

Another lesson I learned from Bill was in noticing a critical change in his public demeanor. At one time, especially onstage at their annual Symposium, Gartner analysts seemed to have developed a penchant for seeing who could make a CEO ‘lose it’. They would follow lines of questions that seemed to intentionally back technology leaders against the wall just to watch them squirm (or fake their way out). Bill was highly competitive. Over the years, when Gates was on stage with his competitors, you could feel the tension between them, and the analysts would bait them one against the another.

One year, mid 90’s, Gates was decidedly calm, even though he was onstage with the CEOs from Sun and Oracle. He sat back in his chair, rather than on the edge, and nothing the Gartner analysts said seemed to ruffle him. It almost felt like I was at a love fest, and there was a group hug about to break out. I was straining my neck (way in the back of a huge auditorium) to see if I could figure out what was going on. And then, in the line of questions, Bill offered the answer himself. He said, “I realized, this isn’t a zero sum game. When my competitors make a dollar, I make money too. The pie gets bigger.”

So what did I learn from Bill? You can make a whole lot of money solving a mass-appeal problem even if you just focus on the problem itself and not the larger context in which it lives. And, everyone can have major personal insights that fundamentally change the way they see things — where enemies suddenly become allys — when we look at what we have rather than what we have not.

Another 10 years has passed and I no longer have direct access to Bill. I know that his focus has changed considerably to the efforts of his foundation. And even there he is still learning: “the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade breaking down big schools into small academies (it has since switched strategies, focusing more on instruction).”

Perhaps there are others out there with more recent ‘lessons from Bill’ that they can share.

I’ve argued many times previously that technology does not create Enterprise 2.0, but enables it. I stumbled on a brilliant contextual example of this from George Lucas as he was explaining to Bill Moyers, in The Mythology of Star Wars, why the digital technology was critical to his capabilities as a director to bring his stories to the screen. He speaks of his struggle to bring an immaculate realism to a totally unreal fantasy world:

“It wasn’t until we created digital cinema that I was able to suddenly have my imagination go wild…it allows me to create sets that I could not have otherwise. Before digital technology…you couldn’t build a set big enough, you couldn’t create that reality.”

Effectively Lucas is pronouncing that technology enables the ability to embrace the myth. Suspend for a moment your alignment of meaning for myth as fantasy or unreal. While it is indeed those things, so is the realm of possibilities. You cannot have a conversation about innovation and not embrace the realm of the myth: an archetype for new realities…and existing ones.

Just prior to the interview, Bill Moyers mentions the influence of Joseph Campbell on Lucas’s understanding of the power of the myth. Campbell provides deep insight into the relevance of myth to the realm of possibilities:

“Myths…come from realizations of some kind that have to then find expression in symbolic form.”

From his own interview with Bill Moyers, Campbell says:

“All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again.”

On a related note Lucas says:

“The human race has always believed it’s known everything…that’s where mythology came from — constructing some kind of context for the unknown.”

But there are myths to represent the unknown and myths to serve as archetypes of the known. Every enterprise operates from its myths. The question is whether or not the operating myths are consistent across the organization and/or truly represent the ‘truth’ that all participants believe they are working toward. George Lucas spoke about his ability to create his own realities but that once he created a rule, he had to live with it — he couldn’t randomly abandon a fundamental rule (e.g. there is sound in space — which in reality, there is not) or his story would be unbelievable and would lose credibility. Loss of credibility undermines trust and fuels discontent and anarchy.

In an earlier reference, Joseph Campbell was speaking of the relevance of myth as a means by which to pursue a noble cause (in his case — earth). Through their research, the authors of Tribal Leadership seemingly discovered the power of a noble cause supported by a set of values (rules that cannot be compromised), which differentiate business cultures and behaviors. But 15 years earlier, Charles Handy had made a similar discovery through his own experiment, as referenced in The Age of Paradox:

“Logical, sensible, mature individuals were competing to the point of lunacy because I had kept them apart. By not allowing them to communicate, I had also prevented them from establishing an alliance, an agreed-on objective, and a means of proceeding. Only when I picked people who had had a chance to talk together were they able to achieve a common goal which benefited them both… A common cause, the willingness to deny oneself in the interest of that common cause, and trust that the other party will do the same –these are the essential of sensible organizational behavior. Much of the time this sensible behavior does not happen because people do not talk, do not trust, and have no common cause…

We instinctively work for our own immediate advantage unless there is an obvious common cause with people whom we can trust to that an initial sacrifice turns out in the end to be to our mutual advantage.”

George Lucas reflects on Star Wars:

“One of the main themes in the film is having organisms realize that they must live together, and that they must live together for mutual advantage. Not just humans, but all living things and everything in the galaxy is part of a greater whole.”

And yet how often inside of an organization are people making sacrifices based on myths which suggest “mutual advantage” but for which there is no intention or means of including them in the benefits? How many operating myths are created for the purpose of providing advantage to a few (a means by which a manager supposedly ‘incents’ his people in order that he might attain a bonus)?

How does a company and its people discover what the operating myths are and whether or not there are conflicts of credibility which might undermine the larger common good? Through open conversations aligned to observable work — fundamental attributes of any meaningful Enterprise 2.0 initiative.

….
Postscript: Perhaps an alternate title for this post could have been “E2.0: Archetypes and Axioms”

There are any variety of descriptions and debates about what E2.0 is and isn’t. One of the challenges is that the answer is contextual for each circumstance: there isn’t a ‘right’ answer. But there is a ‘just right’ answer, borrowing a line from Goldilocks.

The potential for E2.0 is to help right the many wrongs that employees face each day, just trying to get their work done. It’s a matter of ‘fit’ — in too many cases, what they’re given to work with doesn’t ‘fit’ the circumstances. It has less to do with usable, than useful, and would preferably be the right fit: just right.

Let’s start with a classic: desktop software. How well does the classic desktop software meet the ‘just right’ needs of employees for the preponderance of daily activities? How much cognitive overload has not been designed out of these tools and related corporate processes?

How do we simplify for ‘just right’? We learn to design business fractals. Fractals are the means by which simple scales, the means by which to avoid too much and yet achieve endless possibilities: orderly chaos = complexity…vs. the complicated littering the halls today, which is simply a collection of stuff with no relevant underlying order (the operative word here is “relevant”).

Here’s where we transition from fairytale to reality. For Goldilocks’ scenario, in each case she was given a choice of three options and from those options she chose the one that ‘fit’ best. The problem is that those choices were pre-staged. There’s a cost to providing pre-staged choices. Because we’re not living in a fairytale, there is no way to pre-design for all the possible scenarios that would determine what would be ‘just right’.

I misspoke earlier. We don’t really want to design business fractals, we want to design ‘for’ business fractals — we want to provide an infrastructure for the fractals to emerge on their own. How do we do that? With structure…’just right’ structure — not too much, not too little.

We provide the means for stuff to happen, but don’t assume that it will happen. It requires active vigilance.

What form does such structure take? Micro-structure, just like the fractals. What does micro-structure look like? Ask any Marine who knows how to apply the Rule of Three. The beauty of the rule is its flexibility.

There is no set size (number of troops) assigned to any specific element. The size of an element of command depends primarily upon the type of unit and mission. For example, an aviation squadron would have a different number of troops assigned than an infantry company because it has a different mission, different equipment, and therefore different requirements.

While the reference used is “rule”, in reality, I prefer to consider it an axiom — something that can be applied in any variety of conditions and isn’t subject to a specific context to remain true.

The word “axiom” comes from the Greek word ἀξίωμα (axioma), a verbal noun from the verb ἀξιόειν (axioein), meaning “to deem worthy”, but also “to require”, which in turn comes from ἄξιος (axios), meaning “being in balance”, and hence “having (the same) value (as)”, “worthy”, “proper”.

Test that concept in any business setting. Most things in a business called “rules” are only relevant in particular contexts. Change the context: the rule breaks, just like baby bear’s chair — even though it was originally ‘just right’. Look for rules that need breaking or often have to be broken to get stuff done. Study it long enough to find the core truth that needs preserving and claim the underlying axiom. Find ways to make it observable, evident. As Eric Berlow suggests in his July 2010 TED talk, “Hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most.”

In reality, all businesses have a natural order. The problem is that we’ve been deluded into believing that we need to ‘create’ order. We need to embrace the natural order that is inherent — but to do that we have to find it first. We have to adopt eyes that can ’see’ it (like 3D stereograms).

Let Goldilocks be your guide for providing ‘just right’.

Postscript: A grand thanks to @hypergogue for providing much of the sample fodder that uniquely illustrate concepts that have been ruminating for some time — allowing me to get out yet another ‘blog post stuck in my head’.

I don’t own an iphone or an ipad. I nearly caused a familial meltdown years ago, rejecting my husband’s carefully selected birthday gift: a video ipod. Spending over 3 decades in the corporate world — particularly in IT where anything Apple has been (until more recently) an exception — I’ve just never had a desire to own anything Apple (I will admit to being turned into a ‘movie jukebox’ junkie by the AppleTV unit at my daughter’s house). This seems contradictory to my other purchasing decisions, which are mainly driven by good design criteria (especially cars). But I can and do respect the mind of Steve Jobs.

Reading through the transcript of an interview with former Apple CEO John Scully, I found many critical E2.0-relevant messages from Steve.

While understanding an individual is relevant to design, asking them what they want or think of something new might not be (circle back to the issues with requirements):

“How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.”

Steve effectively suggests that the gap between where things are and where they need to be next is often too large for people to traverse in their minds. One of the challenges with E2.0 is that it presents a gap that too many cannot bridge. Until they are immersed in a context-relevant scenario, the value will never be evident. That doesn’t mean immersing them in just any scenario — it has to be ‘their’ scenario.

Scully noted that he and Steve found common ground not through technology but through industrial design — in the beauty and function of a thing.

“Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewelry.”

All those failing E2.0 projects, just how many UX resources were on those initiatives? There are some great E2.0 technologies out there. Most of them have major design issues. If the count of developers to design staff is not approaching 1to1, you may want to rethink your efforts. When you rely on technologists to design results, you miss adding the rich perspectives of other design disciplines — like jewelry, or commercial building, or landscaping.

Other quotes, taken out of context, reinforce this:

“you’re starting at the wrong end of the value chain. You are not starting with the components. You are starting with the user experience.

……The user experience is taken all the way from the experience of using the product, to the advertising of how it is presented, to the design of the product.”

I’d suggest that one of the biggest challenges for all IT output, not just E2.0, is that they’ve always started at the wrong end of the value chain. The problem is that they’ve been able to get away with it, until now. There was so much leeway that the error was tolerated. The gap has closed and the breadth of responsibility has widened — technology is only part of the solution.

“What Steve’s brilliance is, is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put into the context of his design methodology — everything is design.

… as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.

[...in comparison at Microsoft] everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.”

Does IT even have designers and/or are there designers that direct the work outside of IT? Are you seeing the issues here?

“What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist.”

Deciding what not to do is critical to E2.0. The methodology of pursuing requirements focuses mainly on determining what to do — that’s what makes the approach the antithesis of E2.0. The decision has to be a design one — but an informed decision. The first E2.0 function I ever designed was a rework of an existing function (the best place to look for candidate opportunities is with the stuff already happening). In this case it was a people directory built on LotusNotes. It worked, but the interaction to get to the results was cumbersome.

So I worked backwards. The individual profile page at the end of the application was great. I simply eliminated all the other parts before it (not literally, just virtually) and designed a new UI that capitalized on the most common scenarios: searching for first name or last name. The existing ponderous application was left in place for all the other special case scenarios, like searching for everyone in a department, etc. Yes, all of these could have been redesigned over time, but the initial goal is always to go for the high volume or high return activities. Using code from the Yahoo! patterns, a prototype was up in 4 hours and it was production in 2 weeks. While most of that time was spent grappling with issues getting the data exchange to work, there was also the scheduling for moving something into production — IT itself is a barrier to E2.0, from an operational perspective.

Steve Jobs has a no bozo policy; so does E2.0:

“The other thing about Steve was that he did not respect large organizations. He felt that they were bureaucratic and ineffective. He would basically call them ‘bozos.’ That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect.”

One of the grand potentials of E2.0 is as a superhighway for bypassing bozos.

Another key Jobs attribute:

“When he knows something is going to be important he tries to absorb as much as he possibly can.”

This reflects the influence of John Lasseter at Pixar, which I’ve reported on before. That said, there’s a grand connection between Jobs and Lasseter which predates 1996 (see Charlie Rose interview).

One of the issues with E2.0 implementations is that it’s more about discovery than anything else. E2.0 projects fail because they’re not focused on discovery. Speaking of Jobs’ fascination with Edwin Land, who brought the instant camera to Poloroid:

“Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed – it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them.”

“So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.”

Are your E2.0 efforts being understood through the lens of designing?

This morning @MrAlanCooper was on a roll with an anti-requirements theme of tweets. I replied that almost a decade ago I had given a conference presentation “Requirements Don’t Work”, which included many references from his books. Recognizing that I randomly perpetuate this conversation all over the place, I’ve gathered parts of it here, starting with one from today:

Requirements are a response to a design — they’re not the procuring cause of a design.

Let’s look at this realistically. If the current methods, which include requirements, worked then why is there a 68% failure rate in IT projects? Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman) postulated:

The solution lies in recognizing that requirements definition is critical.

Been there. Thought that too. But it’s been debunked (sadly, pre-internet, reference to the study is gone). I replied to Michael’s post:

Back in 1990 or so I found a one-page ‘editorial’ that reshaped my career focus. It effectively reported a study to ‘debunk’ the “we didn’t get the requirements right” theory.

So they audited the process. Were all the requirements captured as intended? Check. Were all the requirements met by the solution? Check. Result: Fail!

And this is where my life changed…they brought anthropologists into the environment in which the system was being used — an emergency room. They added more requirements based on their observations…the system was a success.

Now let’s talk about having the wrong skills…

Attempts to share this same story with a group of Business Analysts, was met with opposition. There I commented:

In reality, requirements (especially the way in which they’re gathered and managed in most cases) serve only one purpose — facilitating testing. They are typically useless for ensuring the success of a solution….

Another valuable analogy to consider is the model employed by commercial building. In that model, assume that Requirements and ensuing Development are not part of the activities of the General Contractor, but are one of the responding trades. That means that a larger architectural/design effort has gone on prior to the ‘response’. In that prior effort, blueprints are already drawn up and specifications (not requirements) have been delivered. The ‘requirements’ are the responses by the individual trades as to how they plan to fulfill the specifications.

The fact that we have a huge phase missing in the discipline of the SDLC and that it starts with some ‘poof’ ["...and then a miracle happens"] of requirements has been a fallacy for decades.

The author of this blog post was unnerved by the dissonance that ensued in the path to common understanding (a deplorable practice often seen in requirements gathering sessions) and closed the comments. Shutting down the conversation is a symptom of the problem: behaviors indicative of and reinforced in cultures of command and control — the antithesis of a 2.0 era. Design inherently insists on embracing creative dissonance.

Clearly there are those who understand the difference — Alan Cooper’s comments today were retweeted by many. Some have traveled similar paths of discovery, such as @suredoc’s (Keith Anderson) “Prototyping Insights From a Guy Who Writes Requirements“, where he also takes direct aim at the classic Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC).

The SDLC mindset is based on the fact requirements drive everything. By “requirements” I mean a document of some sort that can either be well-written or, as I’ve seen of late, an Excel spreadsheet wishlist.

I remember a custom 9 volume SDLC manual set. I was fascinated by the ‘whole’ of it all. Imagine, 9 volumes of detail as to how the floor of hundreds of developers were to do their jobs (manuals for which I was the most frequent user…to insert page corrections — the cost of which I shudder to consider). In ALL of those hundreds of pages there was a reference to “start with the requirements” and not a stitch of information on what they were or how you got them — in the SDLC, requirements just somehow magically appear.

To better inform myself, I sought out leaders in the requirements process and attended training. Aside from helping us look for ‘nouns’ (clearly a data-focused paradigm), the instructor attempted to give us tracking and auditing skills — again, circling back to the feloneous assumption that requirements are somehow ‘lost’ and that’s the cause of failure. There was nothing discussed about eliciting requirements or the issues to do so — including the also infamous lament from developers “but they keep changing their minds” — as if the changing landscape of business wasn’t a design reality that needed to be embraced.

Similar to my inspiration from the commercial building industry, in “The Obsolete Idea of Requirements” @smalltalk80 (Niklas Björnerstedt) was inspired by the advertising agency model:

In advertising, a customer typically does not write a contract for a single project. The contract is instead the foundation of an extended relation. The advertiser works with the customer, looking at what the customer does and what the customer wants to achieve in the future.  The advertiser then formulates ideas that are elaborated on together with the customer. Some of these ideas result in “projects”, others are more open ended. Over time the customer uses a number of (imperfect) measures to assess how well the advertiser is helping it achieve its goals. Most of the goals a customer cares about are not related to a particular project, they are formulated in terms of the business itself.

Three things to add to great observations. First, Niklas is seeing the influences of design practices in the customer relationship. Second, advertising has a significant difference: creating need where none exists. Third, where he notes “They would describe what they were doing today and what their goals were for the future.” — this will lead to incremental improvements and often radically incremental improvements, but rarely innovative results (often also part of the “requirements”). But innovation isn’t always or even mostly desirable. There are many ’starving workers in the business landscape’ who would trade their paychecks for ‘good enough’. Many truly innovative solutions can be found in the amazing work-arounds that employees have created on their own, just to get their work done in spite of the euphemistic machine they’re forced to operate in.

The realm of Enterprise 2.0 insists on a more open, interative, collaborative and continuous means of making stuff happen than the methods of classic requirements can afford. In design, requirements are the collection of constraints that must be honored, or thoughtfully traversed. Requirements do not specify the results. But as my first quote embraced the classic definition of requirements — the things used to test results against — if everyone still needs to call those “requirements”, let it so remain.

Footnote: In re-reading a prior piece I’d written on Pixar, I was reminded of earlier ranting I’d done on requirements.

With considerable attention paid to Enterprise 2.0 adoption, it’s time to turn the light on something lurking in the shadows: engagement — or, more appropriately, disengagement. This isn’t a matter of rejecting the technology — this is a matter of people not being able to get along.

Consider typical relationships and interactions. A relationship or interaction is abandoned when:

• The useful reason for the relationship or interaction has been fulfilled
• There were ‘irreconcilable differences’

At work, people are most effective when they can leverage all the resources available to them. Well-designed Enterprise 2.0 capabilities provide critical value by connecting resources to one another. But then what happens?

It turns out that we’ve been conditioned into behaviors that ill prepare us for the new opportunities that follow:

• In school we are taught to listen quietly and raise our hand to speak — because one person speaking at a time brought order.
• In business we originally used Memorandums (Memos) to say anything. But there was an implied formality of a memo, wherein if you spoke you were speaking formally on behalf of the company. After all, the memo often bore the company logo.
• Memos were replaced by email which was more interactive, but clearly lacked the real potential of an open conversation, and still carried the vestige of formality that was inherited from it’s memorandum roots.
• Early forms of open conversations took place in digital bulletin boards, evolved from physical boards where people would post messages for each other: An exchange of messages; hardly a conversation.
• Then there were digital discussion groups, which have evolved in various formats. But there’s a huge difference between having a discussion via an email listserve and one on LinkedIn where you can see an individual’s profile and other evidences of who they are.
• Conversations often take place in meetings, but political dynamics often inhibit the exchange. Pixar executives (in extra features on The Incredibles DVD) talk about times when they’ve had to challenge people who have held back their real thoughts in a meeting, as such honesty is critical to their culture and the success of their projects.
• I was reminded via a LinkedIn conversation that we are often chided into certain bad behaviors where others believe we should only contribute to that for which we are formally recognized to have expertise, as defined by our role.

If speaking one’s mind can still be an issue in Pixar’s culture, imagine the challenge elsewhere. Many think that disagreeing with something or someone is, well, disagreeable. Participants often pounce on individuals who express non-consenting views. In online discussions, people repeatedly bail out of conversations over misunderstandings that they didn’t stick around to clarify or otherwise attempt to reach common ground. Others haven’t learned the gentleman’s art of agreeing to disagree.

The University of Wisconsin thought the issue to be significant enough that they created an employee reference to improve the effectiveness of conversations, titled “Having Conversations at Work that Work!”

In order for any organization to be truly successful over time, its people must build and maintain strong, professional relationships with one another and that promote productive conversations about the work that is to be accomplished. Unfortunately, such relationships do not come easily or naturally. They require commitment, know-how, patience, and practice. Even then, successful outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Failure to develop them, though, usually guarantees frustration, conflict, and alienation between those who need to work together.

Let’s apply the “So what?” factor for a moment. So what if people bail out of conversations? So what if people can’t agree to disagree? How is this any different than the many decades we’ve been operating this way?

It turns out that we’ve been operating within the boundaries of a ‘fudge factor’. Businesses got away with errors because there was leeway to do so. Just as the efficiencies of markets squeeze the margins out of profits, the rate of change in businesses today is squeezing out the margins for error. The margins are also being squeezed by the exponential increase in the number of potential errors that can take place, and do. Businesses are discovering that there are errors that have been accommodated by these margins, which have never mattered…until now.

Can you imagine the conversations now going on at BP, which had they taken place openly over the past year could have potentially averted the successive errors that resulted in a global disaster? In the hearings, there was evidence that people had been told of the risks. Had these been open conversations would others have pushed back on the decisions? With more voices involved, would there have been more of a chorus of support to express the seriousness of the risks? Were these issues not similar to those that put Toyota in the Congressional hot seat as well?

What is it about these cultures that allowed for these gross errors to occur and not be challenged by others? Are there biases toward action over talk? In his book Informal Coalitions, Chris Rodgers challenges a common bias of action over talk:

For leaders, talk is action. Amonst other things:

• Talk sets the context within which action takes place. failure to understand the critical link between context and action is, perhaps, one of the main causes of poor “follow through” and failed initiatives.
• Talk is central to sensemaking and the creation of meaning.
  …
• Talk is essential to the effective implementation of action by aligning effort, solving unforeseen problems and charting progress.
  …

Even where Enterprise 2.0 infrastructures provide the means for open conversations, will individuals have the courage and commitment to stay engaged in the exchange? Or will they revert to prior conditioning and disengage at the first sign of conflict?

Imagine the possibility of all businesses being at risk who lack the kind of open, supportive Pixarian leadership, who will encourage their people to stretch lethargic muscles of engagement. We will continue to witness the sad after-effects of those who do not.

“It has been asserted that Jung’s analytical psychological theory of synchronicity is equal to intellectual intuition.” Wikipedia

Let’s follow this logic: if synchronicity is equal to intellectual intuition, and intuition “is the apparent ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason” [not suggesting I totally agree with this definition] then isn’t this something that would be relevant in a new business era where reason seems to fail? Moreso, “Some scientists have contended that intuition is associated with innovation in scientific discovery.” Isn’t everyone suggesting that business now needs to focus on more innovation — thus requiring a higher reliance on intuition? Could it be that Knowledge Management has failed because it lacked support of synchronicity?

Synchronicity is a natural byproduct of Enterprise 2.0 done well.

Do we not want to bring together disconnected, yet common efforts and leverage their commonalities? If we are about to embark on a major endeavor, do we not want to know before we invest a lot of time on a proposal that someone else in the organization is doing the same thing and is further along than we are?

Coined by Carl Jung, he believed synchronicity was the means to glimpse of the underlying order of the universe.  It was a term that could help…

…describe what he called the “acausal connecting principle” that links mind and matter. He said this underlying connectedness manifests itself through meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by cause and effect. [source]

One of the challenges with modern enterprises of any scale is the ability to connect resources and their corresponding activities. We try to approximate activity through defined processes and status of said processes. The problem is that these approximations (algorithms) for what’s really going on and why are often grossly insufficient (depending on how repeatable and non-varying the activity might be). For activities related to manufacturing, where inanimate objects are the primary resources involved, process-as-algorithm is reasonable. For activities related to services where people and knowledge work are the primary resources involved, more variability is introduced and algorithms in the form of constrained processes often fail to meet the need.

Cause and effect are meaningful for linear process. They are nearly meaningless in living systems. While there may be perceived causes and effects, the reality is far more complex, and involves things unseen (esp. thought). We must give place for thought to be made manifest. Work products are often prescribed in ways that do not allow for the sharing of thought.

Indeed, as Patrice Livingston so passionately describes [at min 11:20] the need for sharing often transcends time and place when past problems are often lying dormant still waiting for a solution:

Along comes me, I’m here. I would not ever know about Person A or B or that they had a conversation, but I can exhume a dialog that took place two years ago between these two individuals that lays out the problem and the solution. I can say…the following technology is now available. Problem solved.

This, she was only able to accomplish in a true Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure that supported what she knew was needed:

I knew at an instinctive level that what we were doing — all the unstructured communication, all the relationship building and stuff that our team was doing — was much more valuable than the work we were doing in written reports and meetings and minutes, which is what consumed the body of our time.

And yet, in most storage mechanism the work products themselves are stripped of the reality in which they were created. All the context as to why certain decisions were made at that time are all missing from the painfully-scrubbed collections of results and conclusions. The painful truth is, knowledge work products are not accurate representations of the work. The real work is on the cutting room floor and/or still in the minds of (or faded from) those that did the work and who may be gone. While there will always be ‘waste’ in any process, might the cuts from one project be relevant for another? Work products by themselves are often meaningless as they reflect what made it through the cuts. They lack the context of the work itself. When time and resources have past, how does one reconstruct the context for which the work product was created and you can no longer ask the workers questions about their work?

While I’m not going to delve into it here, a related topic that has been coalescing common energies recently is observable work. Whereas process-as-algorithm typically specifies certain work products, observable work is a term that casts a net wide enough to include the stuff on the cutting room floor.

For as much as people want to make Enterprise 2.0 about technologies, then I’m willing to concede this: Enterprise 2.0 is the means by which to achieve Work 2.0 to deliver Business 2.0.

There are many technologies to help support an Enterprise 2.0 reality, but often only for a piece of the total infrastructure needed. A blog provides a mechanism for broadcast and some conversation but doesn’t provide the continuity of a project and related work products. If multiple technologies are used, is there a common layer by which synchronicity can operate, or is blog content separate from wiki content, separate from discussions, separate from the work products themselves?

Synchronicity is the perfect test for certifying a true Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure. And the reverse is true, as well — a true Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure will support the natural emergence of synchronicity.

]]> http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2010/07/03/enterprise-2-0-infrastructure-for-synchronicity/feed/ 86 http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2010/06/11/biz-2-0-orchestrated-improvisation/ http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2010/06/11/biz-2-0-orchestrated-improvisation/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:36:21 +0000 Paula Thornton http://www.fastforwardblog.com/?p=5013

Reading Andy McAfee’s recent piece “IT’s Three Key Organizational Transformations”, spurred a personal thinking theme today. I was a bit disturbed (and disappointed) by what Andy seemed to miss in his thought — stuff that 2.0 thinking hinges on (but it wouldn’t be the first time, or likely the last).

Indeed now that I look at the comparison of his title and mine — the difference is clear — the evidence is in the language patterns.

There’s an inherent flaw in the language “Organizational Transformation”, similar to the flaw in “Driving Adoption“. The language itself carries a negative tone which almost ensures the failure that Andy points out in his piece:

“The difficulties of getting people to comply with the essential details of redesigned work explain why failure rates among the first wave of business process re-engineering efforts were as high as 70%.”

Compliance is another ‘wrong language’ term…so is change when it’s used as a verb rather than as a noun to describe the effect.

Andy also uses the word orchestration:

“Orchestration means designing how work will be done, then assuring that it actually is executed as designed.”

Here he deeply misses the positive nuances of a musical analogy. If we look at orchestration as something that brings together multiple ‘voices’ and differing moments of focus, all contributing to a structured output, that’s one thing. But it takes a really talented conductor with great passion to bring out the ‘feeling’ that truly defines a stellar orchestrated result.

Before any orchestration can occur, there is first a composition or script. This is the common reference point for all that is orchestrated.

And yet, all performers know that no performance is ever the same — there is no “assuring that it actually is executed as designed”, nor would you want it to be so. Different conductors and directors bring a different life to the intended performance of the composition or script. Why? Because of interpretation.

A conductor or director can have a great interpretation and still fail — without an equal ability to transfer the understanding of that interpretation to others. They alone do not deliver the results — they rely on others to do so.

A composition or script is brought to life through human potential. A focus on the human potential is critical to 2.0. Any related 2.0 failures can surely be traced back to a lack of such focus.

In the midst of a great orchestrated musical event, the performance itself is ripe with improvisation of emotion…collective emotion, not only from the performers but from the audience as well (any thespian knows that their best performances were on the nights with great audiences).

Yet, for beliefs to the contrary, great improvisation relies heavily on structure. For all such endeavors there’s a defined beginning and end, and often many key transitional points in-between. Those moments of transition are often communicated by subtle cues and expression of emotion. Those who assume that improvisation (or self-organization) is the antithesis of orchestration, truly misunderstand how the full potential of orchestration and improvisation is achieved.

One of the critical subtleties of 2.0, is the paradox: if you’re not operating in the paradox, you’re not exploring the full potential. In music, orchestrated improvisation represents such a dichotomy.

I see far too many Enterprise 2.0 practitioners who neither understand or think it’s relevant to embrace the paradox. Indeed, as technologists they still suffer from binary blinders. Regardless of what they say or do, it’s still fundamentally framed by an internal language of “if…then”, “either…or”. The realm of 2.0 is always “and”. The answers are in the “both”.

We see evidence of such language subtleties in Andy’s question:

“What are the most compelling examples of digitization that you’ve come across?”

The language here makes ‘digitization’ the goal, the focus. This is where the problem starts. It’s the same as a chef working to draw attention to the condiments: it’s just the wrong thing to do.

He goes on:

“What cases of technology-enabled business orchestration, self-organization, and/or science have you found most persuasive, instructive, or surprising?”

This is the antithesis of 2.0 thinking. There seems to be an implied “digital” missing in front of “technology” in that question (I’m pretty sure Andy’s not operating from the Clayton Christensen definition). If it were truly a 2.0-focused question, it would have ‘design’ in it somewhere (not the kind of ‘fixed’ design that Andy alluded to), for it is there that:

• Orchestration is balanced with improvisation
• Emergence is born of constraints
• Science is useless without art

In this realm, as in music and movies:

• Process becomes squishy and fluid — it flows
• Passion gives life to purpose
• People are guided, not managed
• Quality emerges from relevancy AND reliability

It is only through design that paradox is embraced. It is only through embracing and capitalizing on the human potential (which is ripe with paradox) that we have the opportunity to capitalize on truly great performances.

We need more leaders who are willing to lead people, not protocols.

The significance of language patterns was spurred by yet another recent article.   A discussion among practitioners ensued around the subtle differences between terms like “systems thinking” vs. “systemic thinking”. I’m now wondering if perhaps we might all be better served by a little “symphonic thinking”, of the Gustavo Dudamel variety.

Main Entry: sym·phon·ic
Pronunciation: \sim-ˈfä-nik\
Function: adjective
Date: 1856

1 : harmonious, symphonious
2 : relating to or having the form or character of a symphony <symphonic music>
3 : suggestive of a symphony especially in form, interweaving of themes, or harmonious arrangement <a symphonic drama>
— sym·phon·i·cal·ly \-ni-k(ə-)lē\ adverb

Everybody’s talking about social: social networking, social CRM, social-this, social-that. It’s all just noise to me. We’re social. Get over it. It’s redundant. It only has to be called out because the stupid technology wasn’t designed for real people. We get it already.

Heck, I’ve even been blathering about transparency, bladda, bladda. While all of this is still relevant, I now see the value in fine-tuning our focus just a bit. The real potential — the power curve — is in focusing on sharing.

Sharing is something that comes naturally to people — we want to help each other. Indeed sharing is at the top of the list in All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Working with each other ensures the survival of the species. It turns out that survival of the fittest isn’t just about strength, power and the ability to overpower others by competition — everyone for themselves — but that truly sustainable species rely equally on cooperation, or social sharing.

What we see in the wild is not every animal for itself. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy. Indeed it has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life.

Business cultures are ripe with language and actions of competitiveness. Many seek to ‘protect turf’. These behaviors are relevant during times of duress and/or limited resources. But embracing such language and mindsets can actually create duress and serve to unnecessarily limit the potential of existing resources.

A very telling visual representation of the limits imposed by such mindsets is the chart grabbed from a TED presentation by Johanna Blakley who spoke about the real issues that Intellectual Property protection impose on creativity and growth. [Thanks to @jorgebarba for sharing]

On the left are the 2007 Gross Sales in US $BIL of industries with low IP protection, on the right are the high IP. The evidence is staggering. Johanna also created her own chart to lay out a comparison of common items and where they fall into a copyright scheme.

Indeed what most intrigued me was when Johanna made the subtle distinctions between the idea and the expression thereof. We’ll just leave that as a pending topic to explore further, another time.

We’ve talked about IP on this blog before. The topic had high visibility at FASTforward ‘08 with a banner exclaiming (a quote that appears to be attributable to Bill Gates): “Intellectual Property has the shelf-life of a banana.” Heck, I even remember the most significant change I noticed in Bill Gates demeanor toward his competitors (even in close range on panels at Gartner conferences where the analysts relished stirring up trouble), when he exclaimed (paraphrasing):

I learned, this isn’t a zero sum game. When my competitors make money, I make money too.

And in a panel I hosted at FASTforward ‘08, I recall the most significant points brought up, related to IP and the negative implications in our changing environment:

• It’s both expensive and time consuming to actually protect intellectual property
• The rate of turnover of products is increasing at a rate that the window of opportunity to protect them is becoming shorter than the time it takes to do so
• The costs to protect IP are rising at a faster rate than the potential earnings to be gained

[Kudos to @jhagel @jobsworth @jmcgee and @billives for BE-ing the panel, and to @skemsley for covering it. I find it none-too-coincidental that they're all active on Twitter.]

Even the almighty dollar (euro, yen, etc.) is wielding its influence on concerns over publicly-shared infrastructure as companies rethink their opposition to operating in the cloud.

Enterprise 2.0 seeks to shift the balance away from oppressive, limiting cultures by facilitating open, sharing ways of working and ‘being’. Even in cultures where this is not the norm, E2.0 technologies and approaches will allow for the natural working and sharing tendencies of people to emerge and return the critical balance needed not just for sustainable survival but for productive striving (another great s-word).