“Maybe those who run our organisations will forget their management tools, and constant ‘tinkering’ with the system”

July 21, 2009 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Charles Handy, Collaboration, Community, Culture, Enterprise Social Computing, Organizational Design, Social Computing

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Thanks to Paul Thomas, guest-blogging at the Cognitive Edge, a networked organization focused on applying complexity theory in practical ways to complex issues and organizational problems.

(Dr Thomas is founder of the complexity theory think-tank organization DNA Wales, Head of Leadership at the Business School, University of Glamorgan and is also the BBC Wales ‘Business Doctor’. Paul works with private and public sector organisations of all sizes, including multi-nationals, trying to show them there is another way to run the workplace.)

The title is lifted from the Cognitive Edge blog (extract below).

I have not yet read the Macleod Report (I’ve skimmed through it) ) but it seems that the Cognitive Edge blog post lays out yet-another-argument for coming to terms (or grips, or whatever) with the probability that it (social computing) will become the main way of carrying out the bulk of non–routine knowledge work.

Oh .. and of course I don’t think that all management concepts and activities should be dropped holus-bolus.  I do, however, think, that managers everywhere should start really trying to understand the new social dynamics and methods of constructing pertinent knowledge that are now available, and making thoughtful and sensible decisions about why and how people get engaged with getting things done on purpose.

I know, I know .. it sounds like heresy to not constantly "tinker" in order to improve processes, efficiency and effectiveness.  After all, we’re all familiar with concepts like continuous improvement, orthodox performance management schemes, Six Sigma, reengineering, etc. 

However, how many of us have often wondered about whether or not people have an orientation towards doing things better, easier, faster, cheaper, if we find ways to honour their desire to do good work, to be respected, to make meaningful contribution, to be heard … 

Maybe (in some or many instances) there’s too much structure, too many goals, overly rigid mindsets and worldviews … not enough questions, not enough debate, too few mistakes (how many discoveries or innovations are preceded by mistakes?), not enough "failing faster to learn faster", not enough acknowledgement of the deep motivations of people to serve others and do more useful and meaningful work, etc. ?

There’s a reason why the word "unleashed" gets used so often in books, articles and conversations about organizational effectiveness .. and I don’t think it means turning a horde of web-bots loose onto the organization’s processes.  It has something to do with people and their motivation and guidance.

Anyone else ever wonder ?

I think that’s what this report from the UK government suggests.  But I will have to go beyond skim-reading it to confirm that guess.

What do you think ?

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MacLeod Review says people potential should be ‘unleashed’

[ Snip ... ]

The MacLeod Review of employee engagement, commissioned by the Department for Business, has said workers need to be properly involved in the future of their firms.

Author David MacLeod said he wanted to see people’s potential “unleashed” and said engagement was a key to innovation and competitiveness. Apparently the report’s authors were told during their research that “trust works two ways” and that not trusting staff had a negative impact. They were also told it was people, not machines, which made the difference to a business.

Responding to the report employment relations Minister Lord Young said: “Workers know better than anyone how the firm they work for can improve, innovate and succeed.”

If this all sounds familiar, that’s no surprise.There’s nothing radical, or even new, about this report.

[ Snip ... ]

Of course people are the key to a company’s success. Of course the best people to ask for a solution to a company’s problems are those within it and on the frontline. And it stands to reason that if you haven’t got everyone in the organisation fully behind what you’re trying to achieve, you’ve got less chance of achieving it.

The Government says it accepts the report’s recommendations and now there’ll be an action plan to deliver them.

Now that the message is becoming more mainstream, maybe those who run our organisations will forget their management tools, and constant ‘tinkering’ with the system and finally wake up to the fact that this is the only way to make them fitter for the future.

Let’s hope they don’t just pay it lip-service, and they actually do it.

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Listening To and Talking With Your Current and Potential Customers – SNCF

January 23, 2009 at 6:38 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Community, Enterprise 2.0, Interaction, Social Media, Trust, User Revolution, Web 2.0

During a recent business trip to France, I met with a range of business people interested in and involved with early Web 2.0 initiatives in the corporate arena.  There’s a lot of interest in the area (as there is in North America) and it seems to be growing rapidly.

Publicis (the advertising giant) has a consulting arm specializing in corporate-things-digital, and has been involved in helping some companies roll up their collective sleeves and go beyond using the Web to display information on a corporate web site.  I had the good luck to meet with Martin Menu (Community / Networking Manager at Publicis Consultants) and Stanislas Magniant (his colleague at that time and now with Linkfluence, purveyors of webpulse and visualisations of networked conversations on the web, in Washington, D.C.).

Martin and Stan introduced me to, and helped me understand, an interesting case study involving bringing a large and somewhat monolithic quasi-governmental organization (SNCF, the French national rail transportation company) into the 21st Century in terms of interaction with and listening to customers on the Web.

I also remember reading a Reuters or AP feed to the Globe and Mail a couple of years back in which Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis, clearly stated that he and his colleagues wholeheartedly believed that digital and the Web were the future.  He mentioned in the news piece that Publicis would be giving priority to learning more about Web 2.0 and incorporating a range of the elements into its offerings and practices.

SNCF’s web site is the largest e-commerce site in France.  The following graph gives you a sense of it’s presence on line and the amount of conversational activity it stimulates.

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In the last several years it has gone about updating  it’s web site to reflect a growing range of content and opportunities for customers to communicate / interact with the company.  Publicis is the digital branding / communications consulting agency that has helped it design and build these sites. 

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2006 SNCF Site

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2007 SNCF Site

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The changes year over year reflect the increasing opportunities and demand for interaction, and in 2008 SNCF decided to test, in a pilot project, the much-ballyhooed listening to and speaking with customers with a new site, a section of which (at the URL http://debats.sncf.com) carries the tag line “Talk To Us” (or “Speak With Us”).

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2008 SNCF Site

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The growing awareness of the need for and utility of hosting conversations with customers led SNCF to realize that it “is a company that people talk about a lot on the Web without it being able to answer the criticisms“.   They decided they wanted to explore “how can we create the conditions for dialogue with Web users?”

SNCF, with the help of Publicis, decided to take advantage of the launch of the newest version of the site to create an interactive space to stimulate and engage in conversation with (current and potential) customers who use the web site.

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2008 “Talk With Us”

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Creating this interactive and participative space involved the following steps:

• SNCF recruited voluntary spokespeople within their staff
• Web users ask the spokespeople their questions about the SNCF
• They are able to vote and comment on other people’s questions
• Every day, the “spokespeople” answer the questions elected by the Web users

Thus SNCF and the customer participants on the Web site co-create the content of this space.  From what I learned in talking with Stan and Martin, an important additional effect has been the feedback from customers working its way back into some of SNCF’s core business processes.  Are you surprised ?  I’m not. 

The short-term results of the pilot project seem to speak for themselves:

• 76,486 visits in a couple of months

• An average of 2,000 visits a day
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331,606 pages seen

• Average time spent on the platform is 2.30 minutes

• A community of 1,560 users

• 1,210 questions and 233 answers

Via debats.sncf.com customers asked questions mainly about services and pricing, and provided a wide range of feedback, while SNCF through its staff asked questions in order to solicit customers’ advice and better understand what kinds of new features and services customers were wanting or looking for.

It also became the de facto source for current information, such as:

Jan. 24 strikes announced

• Users worried about the impact on their daily journey
• Seeking for information on Google

Opinion & Debate is users’ first choice

• Opinion & Debate at the 1st rank of Google query
• Daily updated content
• Free referencing campaign

A key source of official information from and about SNCF

• Web users go to the platform
• Find answers

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All in all, the pilot project was deemed successful enough to make it a permanent feature of the SNCF web site.

 Now SNCF can legitimately state that it is a company that has experienced, appreciated and will continue to learn from being in dynamic interaction with its current and potential customers … thanks to the Web.

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How Much Longer Before It Dawns on “Everybody” ?

January 5, 2009 at 3:09 am · Filed under Change, Charles Handy, Community, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution

I’d like tp build on my FASTForward blogging colleague Bill Ives’ informative post titled "Deloitte Declares We Are in a Media Democracy", Deloitte of course being the major global consulting firm Deloitte Touche.

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Deloitte Declares We Are in a “Media Democracy”
Bill Ives

Dean Takahashi at Venture Beat shared with us a summary of a recent Deloitte survey on the state of media. The report concludes that, “We’re living in a media democracy, where no single form of media dominates the attention of Americans. It’s also an age where everyone contributes to the media, not just traditional media companies.” The last part is old news but I find the first part more interesting.

There has been discussion about whether blogging will continue in the age of Twitter. I have mentioned, as have others, that they have different functions and complement each other. Twitter may take away a few of the functions of blogs but there are many left that cannot be handled by Twitter.

There has been very few times where a new media actually completely replaces an old one. Each new advance in communication technology expands the possibilities for knowledge capture and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the requirements to enable them. Take text or writing for example: the invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.

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Deloitte’s organisational consulting has for some time now been involved in employee engagement and organisational change, and so its practitioners in those areas will understand more of the emerging sociology of the networked workplace environment than the other major consulting firms.  And of course, not to miss a beat, all the other major firms will all be out there now telling customers they have found a new ball to kick around, i,e, social computing.  They will come up with logical responses wherever there seems to be a growing market.  But beware of these firms’ response, in my opinion.  If you want to know why, email me.

Is the general awareness of the effects of using computers, the Web and the easy sharing and consumption of information flows beginning to reach a critical mass ?  Bill’s blog post would seem to suggest so.

And I’ll argue, as I have done for some time now, that the spread and penetration of social media use into organisations large and small will lead to some major changes in the practice of leadership and management (Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation?, FASTForward, January 10, 2008) and slowly but surely the impact will be (or should be) the increased democratisation of many organisations.

My favourite astrologer does not agree … but we all know horoscope forecasts are somewhat suspect, right ?  But short-term, I can see the logic … in uncertain and ambiguous times, many people like the feeling of increased certainty offered by direction and control.  Just ask Lou Gertner what was the hardest part of the IBM turnaround in the early 90’s .. he’ll tell you "upward delegation"

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"In 2009, hierarchies will grow, democracy will ebb–"might is right" and pragmatic choices win."

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But indeed some form of democratisation reaching through a wide range of human activities, including work in an enterprise, seems inevitable.  The only alternative, I suggest, is the eventual use of information technology to control almost everything knowledge workers do, reducing computing activities to completing forms and updating various reports.  That does not seem too likely, but I suppose its true that you can’t predict the future.

Do you want your workplace to become more democratic than it is today ?  How will your workplace engage you a year from now … two years from now … five years from now ?

I was interviewed a bit more than a year ago by WorldBlu (Annual World’s Most Democratic Workplaces) founder Traci Fenton about the impact of social computing on organisational democracy.  If we believe that "knowledge is power" and that the days of a few people at the top of organisations taking all the decisions and telling everyone else how to do things are numbered (John Cambers of Cisco clearly believes that’s the case, and is not sacrificing organisational effectiveness with that belief), then it’s clear that eventually shifts in traditional organisational power will be more frequent, more observable, and carry more implications for major changes in the ways people are led and managed.  Gary Hamel clearly believes this is the case, as he outlines in his most recent book The Future of Management.

I’ve used this quote from business strategist and futurist Stan Davis before, but in this context I am not ashamed to repeat it because there are some very long term shifts underway for all of us, as the Deloitte study is beginning to recognize.  The media we use to work and interact with others is fundamentally different than it was at the end of the do com boom, and it ain’t going away.

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While there wasn’t something called social media or social computing back then, here’s Stan Davis on organizing in the future, from the 1987 book Future Perfect:

"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it.

What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.

Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both. We are still a long way from figuring out the appropriate and encompassing organization models for the economy we are now in."

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Here’s Stan catching up to the Web 2.0 world ("catching up" isn’t quite the right term … outlining what he think with respect to the most recent development so n the Web is probably better

Decision-making over the past quarter-century has continually moved from the center to periphery, down hierarchies to where decisions are carried out. Current technologies, especially of the Web 2.0 world, have moved that decision-making even further, overwhelmingly beyond firms’ boundaries and into the physical and mental space of the customer.

The differences between the two worlds are striking.

Whereas information is still hoarded and protected in companies, it is freely shared and reused in the connected Web 2.0 world. Hierarchy and command still rule the day in most organizations, while individuals are self-organizing, loose and flat.

Other shifts are from command & control to adapt & evolve, from provider-generated to consumer-generated content, from vertical to horizontal organization, and from an ‘audience-’ to a ‘community-’ approach to customers.

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It would be interesting to learn what you think.

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Enterprise 2.0 – France’s Excellent Chance(s)

November 16, 2008 at 12:50 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Change, Community, Culture, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Trust, User Revolution, Web 2.0

The following notes are an opinion piece, not a rigorously researched and articulated article.

I have just had the opportunity to spend a week in Paris, meeting and talking with the team at blueKiwi, under the leadership of Carlos Diaz and Christophe Rouitheau, two dynamic and intelligent young French entrepreneurs.  They and their team, thanks to live-wire Bertrand Duperrin, invited me and Stowe Boyd to speak at the launch of the 2009 version of blueKiwi collaborative platform.

I’ve also had the chance to connect with several young French entrepreneurs who are helping to raise the bar regarding the mass customisation (or personalization) of knowledge work with their application Personall.”.

Additionally, I’ve had the pleasure to meet and discuss with Dr. Miguel Membrado (co-founder of several leading search and collaboration related software applications), David Guillocheau and Patrice Malaurie of Talentys, and Philippe Colin of Itexium, an IT strategy and implementation consulting boutique.  There’s even an Enterprise 2.0 Institute at the Grenoble Ecole de Management, headed by Richard Collin

France has a long history and reputation of hierarchical organizations headed by (generally) imperial and autocratic top management (at least, I believe that’s a reasonable way of phrasing their reputations seen from a North American point of view.  I am certainly no expert in macro-economics but am aware of the general belief that France needs some economic revitalization (who doesn’t, these days ?) and that some of that has to do with its organizations and their structures and methods. However, France’s companies and economy still produce(s) some very interesting products and services, the country has healthy financial and medical care and educational systems

But .. and I believe this an important “but” … France also has a very well educated work force (compared to the North American workforce), a culture that enjoys examining and discussing issues (they cannot help themselves ), and workplace cultural habits that encourage and reinforce teamwork. In addition, in no small part due to the maturing of the EU, there are young people from all over western and eastern Europe living and working, and contributing their brainpower and energy, to the workplace in France.

Additionally, the social culture in France is essentially based on discourse, examination of ideas, arguing in friendly (mostly) ways about almost  any issue under the sun. I believe that makes fertile ground for the enracination (taking root of) using social computing to build more responsive and effective knowledge workplaces than was possible before.  It allows for the best parts of the French mindset and culture to flourish, on purpose.

We bloggers with a strong interest in Enterprise 2.0 and who carry out research and practice consulting, strategizing, theorizing, or coaching tend to believe that social computing in the workplace is inevitably tomorrow’s foundation for knowledge work.  According to almost any theory, its use along with the inputs of factual information and decent brainpower should lead to increases in intellectual capital, organizational capability and thus enhanced productivity over time.  If this is the case, then it’s my belief that France’s workplaces of the future should be interesting places should the stereotypical dependence on elite autocracy and its orientation towards hierarchy be reduced.

If the traditional reliance on top-down dynamics can be viewed with a critical eye, and if France’s leaders of tomorrow can bring themselves to adapt to th e new leadership style(s) born of listening, sensing and helping interdependent systems respond to the ongoing rapid changes we face today, then France has a lot of potential with which to work with regard to the promise(s) of Enterprise 2.0.

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An Early (and Smart) Step Towards “Mainstreaming” Enterpise 2.0

October 11, 2008 at 1:50 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Community, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Robert Scoble, Social Computing, SocialText, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0

At the end of September (seems so long ago now, doesn’t it?) Ross Mayfield’s Socialtext announced the go-to-market of SocialText 3.0 (Connected Collaboration With Context), involving the integration of Facebook and Twitter functionalities into the wiki-based Socialtext collaborative platform.

In my opinion this reinforces a major trend that I believe will redefine how knowledge work is designed (I wrote about this massive trend and its importance in the Ark Group publication "Making Knowledge Work – The Arrival of Web 2.0"). 

What I mean by trend is that over the past two years all the major workplace software vendors – Microsoft, IBM Lotus, Open Text, Google, Oracle, EMC Documentum, SAP, Adobe and so on – have all launched (or acquired companies that provide the elements of) "renovated" platforms that have collaboration and social computing at their cores.  As just one example of the ongoing evolution in this arena, see Bill Ives’ recent post about Microsoft’s investment plans for Sharepoint, in which he notes "The next release of Sharepoint, Microsoft will be investing for the paradigm shift to more web 2.0 capabilities".

When a critical mass of large organizations have upgraded or migrated to platforms with collaboration and social computing at their cores, I expect that the changes to the ways people work with information and each other to create and use pertinent knowledge will accelerate.

In the case of Socialtext 3.0, I think it’s very smart to make explicit the "transfer" of massively-adopted consumer technologies to make it easy for people to connect, collaborate and co-create as they are already doing outside the firewall.  Leadership and management will change (or have to) to see this as an opportunity to focus people on what is important and what needs to be done – including increased tolerance for new ideas and potential innovation – and not as a crisis of control.

Rather than recreate all the links, I’ve let Robert Scoble do the work for me from this excerpt from his blog post of September 30th.

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SocialText Brings Enterprise Facebook and Twitter to Wikis

Socialtext is making big news all over the Web this morning. Here’s a rundown, later in the post I’ll talk about why. I also have an exclusive video of Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext demonstrating the new features to me.

Ross Mayfield, for my cell phone camera last night, explains the changes in this 18-minute video.

Ross Mayfield, co-founder of Socialtext, writes on his blog “Hello Socialtext 3.0!”

BusinessWeek: Socialtext 3.0: Will Wikis Finally Find Their Place in Business?

Webware: Socialtext co-founder: Enterprise Twitter isn’t enough.

eWeek: Socialtext Signals Marks Wiki Provider’s Move into Enterprise Microblogging.

Dawn Foster notes the move of Enterprises to social.

Zoli Erdos says “Socialtext Becomes Really Social.”

ZDNet: “Socialtext enters Twitter for Enterprise sweepstakes.”

TechCrunch writes “SocialText 3.0 blends Facebook, Twitter, and the Enterprise.”

So, why are these changes important? Because they bring the social features that many people have gotten to know on Twitter and Facebook into the Enterprise along with advanced wiki functionality.

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I would add "They represent an early look at the ways most people will work (and the kinds of tools they will use) within another five to ten years"

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