Enterprise 2.0: Infrastructure for Synchronicity
by Paula Thornton
“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.
