by Jon Husband
February 4, 2010 at 4:37 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Interaction, Organizational Design, SharePoint, Social Computing
As FASTForward readers may know, colleague Rob Patterson and I have decided to put forth a series of opinions about the HR issues that may become prominent as the implementation of purposeful social computing proceeds in the enterprise arena.
I believe it’s fair to say that Rob and I come by our interest in this area honestly, as we both have had significant chunks of our past careers tangled up in the world of human resources management. Rob was Senior Vice-president, Human Resources for one of Canada’s major banks, and I spent a number of years in a relatively senior role with Hay Management Consultants, one of the well-known global HR / organizational effectiveness consultancies.
Today we are both dropouts from that career path. We both encountered the Web in its early days and decided that it would have a major impact on work, organizations and human activities, and asked ourselves the question “Do I want to belong to the past, or to the future ?” We came to the same answer, it seems. We’ve both been blogging etc., and proselytizing its usefulness, for what seems now like forever. I started blogging (arguably) in 2001, and if I remember correctly Rob started around about then, maybe in 2002 ? We’ve both been intimately involved in what’s now called social media ever since.
In my opinion, nowhere is the impact of hyperlinks, HTMLx, well-designed platforms, easier-and-easier-to-use tools, etc. more apparent than in the lively and far-reaching conversations all over the Web about the tug-of-war between structured formal learning and semi-structured informal learning as bedrock for equipping employees to deliver effective performance in their work. As my ITA colleague Harold Jarche often says,”work is learning, learning is work”.
Generally, the Learning & Development area of organizations tends to fall under the HR function, though in some instances teh Marketing department is getting involved. And, from what I can tell, the Learning (Training) & Development industry is in an uproar these days. More and more of the pros in that area are beginning to understand that fundamental workplace dynamics are probably forever changing in massive ways, as organizations and employees everywhere are exploring the benefits, the tools and the necessary organizational adaptations. The implications for stimulating, supporting, managing and measuring employee performance are important, and massive.
The L&D pros are wrestling with the fact that most often one of or the core accountability of their role is for choosing, implementing and supporting an LMS whilst the utility and effectiveness of said LMS is increasingly in question. The question of LMS effectiveness is feeling the impact of ‘work-arounds’, as of course employees everywhere are learning socially, in interaction with others on-and off-line. And (I think) there is pressure on mainstream LMS platforms also coming from the spread of collaborative social computing platforms like the most recent version of Sharepoint (2010) and its competitors.
How and why employees learn is directly linked to setting and managing performance objectives, which in turn is related to the design of (knowledge) work and individuals’ learning contracts and the acquisition and evolution of job competencies. Today, performance objectives tend to be developed top-down (which is necessary, as performance derives directly from an organization’s strategy and overall objectives). But that genesis does not take into account the whole picture of an organization’s or individual employees’ information-and-knowledge ecosystem.
As both horizontal and vertical networks inside organizations (or inclusive of connections external to the organization) become increasingly interconnected and intertwined, the impact on which objectives most clearly define effective and high levels of performance needs to be explored more deeply. This is also, I think, connected to the ongoing debate about the ROI of social computing, the value of intangibles like relationship capital and intellectual capital, and metrics about effectiveness in a networked environment
That exploration will be the subject of my next post in this series on HR in the Enterprise 2.0 context. If you’re interested, please stay tuned.
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by Rob Paterson
January 15, 2010 at 9:03 am · Filed under
Connected Enterprise
Follow up on Joe’s post before this
McDonalds will offer unlimited free Wifi at most of its outlets starting today.
This move is tied into their coffee strategy – and directly attacks Starbucks. Earlier Starbucks saw that making a coffee shop into a Social and Work place was a move that fitted into the more mobile social and work world. But in their rapid expansion, they seemed to have lost their way and ended up selling a commodity transaction. It is even more ironic that the shift to the public social and work space has accelerated as Starbucks withdrew. They could have owned this.
It’s ironic that MCD is shifting from the commodity platform to the social platform. I think a lesson for us all.
So what do you sell? How do you sell? If your answer is a transactional commodity, then order your tombstone.
PORTLAND, Ore. — McDonald’s Corp. said Monday that it will soon offer free wireless Internet access at most of its U.S. fast-food restaurants as it tries to broaden its appeal still further.
“We’re not just about hamburgers,” said Dave Grooms, chief information officer for McDonald’s USA. “We are about convenience and all kinds of value.”
The company, the world’s largest fast-food chain, has offered Internet access for about five years.
In mid-January, it will lift the $2.95 fee it has charged for two hours of Internet access at 11,000 of its 14,000 U.S. locations. There will be no time limit after the fee is lifted.
“McDonald’s is about value – value in our food, value in our services,” Grooms said. “It’s a natural fit.”
It’s also a good fit with the company’s growing coffee business, which has upped the chain’s competition with Starbucks Corp., which also offers free wireless access. Coffee and the McCafe line of drinks at McDonald’s have helped drive its sales and increase its market share in the U.S.
by Jon Husband
December 11, 2009 at 3:31 am · Filed under
3.0, Change, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Control, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Management Theory, Organizational Design, Social Computing, Social Networking, Trust
Ed Lawler is a reknowned management thinker I have studied for years.
He was just interviewed (by Karl Moore, a management professor at McGill University) for the Toronto Globe and Mail on the need for new management models in the Interconnected Era.
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New World Needs New Management Model
Karl Moore: This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to speak with Ed Lawler, who is a professor at the Marshall School [of Business] at USC [University of Southern California] and the director of the Center for Effective Organizations. Good morning, Ed.
Ed Lawler: Good morning.
KM: Ed, you told me earlier that you are thinking about a book on Management 3.0. What do you mean by Management 3.0?
EL: Fundamentally, we need to think of a whole new approach to managing complex, large organizations. We certainly have the “command and control” era, which started way back with scientific management, and progressed over decades, really, to greater and greater levels of sophistication and expertise in how to make it run. That seemed to fit a certain kind of production-driven economy.
Clearly, starting in the 1950s, we began to say it has its limits, we have to use our workers differently, our employees differently, and I think that generated Management 2.0, which was around employee involvement, participation and moving more knowledge and information and power downward in the organization so people could add more value. And I think generally, it did impact the way most corporations operate.
The problem, of course, is that I think we are yet in another era. The economy has changed radically since then, the work force has changed radically since the sixties and seventies, and of course the economy has changed … globally, and everybody knows all those points.
So it’s kind of surprising, in many ways, that Management 1.0: command and control, or Management 2.0: high involvement or high performance, and various names for it, were [still considered] suitable.
I think we do need a Management 3.0, which recognizes the impact of information technology, different work forces, diversity in the workplace, and so forth.
So what I have been trying to do in a new book is say what that looks like, and yes, I have incorporated certainly some of the things that we did in Management 1.0 and Management 2.0. I think it really has to have a different philosophy and a different orientation with respect to both organizational design, how we treat the work force, how we think about the work force and basically how we lead in this kind of economy and in this kind of competitive environment.
KM: Ed, that is very interesting, but I need to know more about 3.0. What is it? Tell us about it so that we can begin thinking about it as managers.
EL: In many ways, to zero in on it, you can pick particular areas on how you would do that differently, or how you would manage, or general philosophy. Let me just pick one and carry it out: leadership, for example.
With the movement away from command and control management to high involvement management, we became fascinated with leaders and ascribed a lot of the effectiveness of organizations to the behaviour of leaders and so forth, and I think that has gone way too far.
We have lost a lot of the managerial blocking and tackling that people in supervisory positions have to do in order to make organizations effective. It seems to me that, if you are going to have a valid, viable 3.0, it has to include the right blend of leadership behaviours. Yes, where you inspire people by a sense of mission, sustainability, accountability – but also have a valid management approach which deals with fundamentals like goal setting and work specifications and product evaluation produced by employees. So we do not want to lose some of the key managerial skills as we have, I think, in searching for these magical leaders who are going to inspire and direct people.
KM: It is kind of a balance between leadership and management in these people: You have to be a leader but also, if you are not a manager at the same time, I think it’s Henry Mintzberg who talks about it, it’s dispiriting.
EL: Yes, I think that is exactly right, it is the balance. We have spent a lot of time training people on leadership, which some people learn and some people don’t, to be frank, and we have lost a lot of the fundamental manager skills or [they] were never developed. We still see managers doing terrible basic management – like performance reviews are done just awfully and the answer seems to be, “Well, let’s just eliminate them.” Well, to me, that is just insane. How are you going to direct and control behaviour if you do not have some kind of accountability and some sort of reviews that look at people and give them feedback and give them a sense of direction?
Just knowing that we are going to [have] sustainability as a major thrust of the company does not translate into day-to-day behaviour very easily. You need to be able to make that translation from the sense of vision and mission and so forth, to actual behaviours, and that is the managerial part of being an effective manager and leader.
KM: How about how we design organizations? How would that be different under 3.0?
EL: I think it depends substantially on what business you are in, how sophisticated the business is, and how complex it is, but I see much more self organizing, much more use of information technology, social networks, and perhaps even internal markets to create the forum and allocate financial resources within organizations, and that’s an area where there would be enormous differences.
In a book that Chris Worley and I did called Built to Change , we emphasized very strongly structures that would give people external interface with the market so that nobody is more than 2 or 3 degrees separate from the external market. I think that’s the right emphasis and we need to build on that kind of thinking because touching the market, being interfaced with the market, helps direct peoples’ behaviour internally and gives them a sense of how the business is doing and certainly motivates them to perform well.
So, I think that piece of the design is critical. What I don’t think we did enough with, in the Build to Change book, is to emphasize how organizations can be built out [using] social networks and how money can be allocated to innovations and start-up operations and how they can be converted from ideas to actual operating businesses.
KM: Is that something like the Wikipedia-tion, the LinkedIn, the Facebook-ization, if you would, of the world?
EL: Yes, I think it is, and that certainly relates to why I think it’s viable now and has not been in the past, and it has to do with a lot of people coming into organizations, partly the younger group, of course, but also more senior people are now much more familiar with those technologies and it is much more viable to use those technologies to organize.
So you are starting to see large companies, like the Ciscos and the IBMs, trying to take that technology which they have sold to consumers and say “How do we use it internally to create a more adaptable and flexible organization?” The one thing we clearly know is that Management 3.0 has to leave room for very adaptable and flexible organizations so that yesterday’s competitive advantage is ready to be today’s, yesterday’s business model is going to have to be pretty radically changed quickly, in order to keep up with the rate of change that exists today in the environment.
If there is a new normal coming out of the recession, I think it is one of change and one of innovation that companies have to be able to do that. Particularly if they are in knowledge work or situations where intellectual property and technology is the key to their business.
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Read the rest of the interview here …
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by Jon Husband
December 8, 2009 at 12:51 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Innovation, Jevon MacDonald, Measurement, Organizational Design, Social Computing
Ever since hearing of "Social Business Design" – a term associated with the Dachis Group’s positioning as a blue-chip expertise-and-experience based consulting firm focusing on helping enterprises operate more effectively in an interconnected business environment, I have been struggling to clarify for myself what is meant by the term ’socially calibrated’ as used in the Group’s tag line.
"Social business design helps companies reinvent themselves into dynamic, socially calibrated organizations that gain constant value from their ecosystem of connections"
Please do not get me wrong … when I say I am struggling, I am not seeking to criticize. I think the firm is on the right track, and I think parsing the syntax and vocabulary we are all bringing to this new party is an important exercise … mission-critical, in fact.
Here’s what I find on the Dachis Group’s web site that addresses ’social calibration’:
Hivemind
A primary social calibration
As social tools and functionality are adopted more widely, it becomes less important for businesses to use traditional methods to force collaboration in the workplace, e.g. panoptic cubicle arrangements. Employees are entering the workforce socially engaged and used to collaborating. The social business hivemind is a new kind of corporate culture whereby all participants move together towards common goals. Physicists refer to this as “synchronous lateral excitation.”
Distributed governance
The social business hivemind makes decisions and receives continuous reinforcement through business interactions: a social inclination resides within a company’s culture and tempers planning, decision-making, and work output. Employees approach work with a social and collaborative mindset; customers expect participation and engagement; suppliers anticipate optimized and efficient process towards common goals.
Measurement and cultivation
Hivemindedness can be measured by assessing levels of collective awareness, engagement, and participation. Measurement here focuses on subjective perceptions – analytics can include surveys, interviews, text analysis, and so on. The goal is always to gain insight into constituents’ attitudes towards the value they get from participating versus the potential for trust issues and conflicts that they perceive. Once perceptions are measured, they can be constantly cultivated and remeasured to move the dial.
The explanations on the site continue, explaining the importance of Dynamic Signals and Metafiltering, and culminate in analyzing the various elements of a connected enterprise-customer-employee ecosystem for meaning, and thus the co-creation of economic value for all parties in the ecosystem.
I like this. I think that it’s becoming clear to many that we are into a world of increased and dynamic complexity, and that we need design principles and implementable practices that are based on the constant presence of flows of information and feedback loops within connected eco-systems of purpose and value.
This new environent has been building in scope, reach and intensity for years now. I think that the Dachis Group has thought this through quite well. But … I am still wondering about ’social calibration’.
As I read the site’s explanation of the Dachis Group approach, it brought to mind the "sense-making" approach that is being promoted and taught by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge Network, and other leading-edge thinkers and practitioners (and I have opined previously on the similarities to socio-technical systems theory and leading-edge OD (organizational development) principles and practices).
It was about three weeks ago that I started noodling on this. Back then I made a few notes to myself regarding what I thought ’social calibration’ might mean. Here are those notes:
Social Calibration ?
I think it means that you look at the social ‘architecture’ of an enterprise, including its markets, customers and employees and how they interact with the organization’s business processes.
I think it means that (initially) based on observation and some knowledge of current patterns of behaviour in networks of people operating ‘on purpose’, you experiment with and implement
- new work designs
- hyperlinked productivity platforms for exchange and collaboration
- the aggregation and use of collective intelligence using tagging, enterprise search and other collaborative processes.
Before this, however, you set baselines or thresholds of organizational performance and productivity from which to measure forward performance,
And then you work at understanding what works, why it works and in what conditions it works really well or may not work.
From there you clarify where changes need to be made in leadership style, management practices, work design and organizational structure(s), internal and external communications and engagement, and performance measurement and support.
With an initial framework in place for watching and ‘nudging’ the ecosystem, you begin to show and publicize in realistic ways why these ways of working are important for both future organizational success and personal work satisfaction and enrichment.
How’s that for consultant-speak ?
I think that’s what I inferred, off the cuff, from the term ’socially calibrated’.
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Please bear in mind that the above points were just rough notes I made to myself before I went looking at the Group’s web site.
I am left with my struggles with the term ’social calibration’, which I do not doubt the Dachis Group has chosen carefully and wisely.
I think my struggle is with the question of "calibrate against what?", given that there are no real models of success against which to calibrate (which in my opinion is a large part of the ongoing frustration with the difficulty of calculating the ROI of implementing social computing in organizations).
Anyway … I don’t have any real answers to my questions, other than I think that if you compare my notes to the Dachis Group’s more complete explanation (on their web site) there are parallels and the general direction of thinking is aligned.
That said, I am sure we are all going to learn a lot about what works and what does not work in the coming decade.
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by Jon Husband
November 14, 2009 at 12:24 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Management Theory
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These days there are incessant debates about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, tools and practices.
We’ve been here before … we just did not have the infrastructure or the tools, nor the awareness or skill levels of large numbers of people.
As information technology first began its relentless march into the daily lives of people in the areas of work (mainframes, early integrated systems, desktops computers in the workplace) and general information-seeking (early days of websites and the Web), thinkers and organizational development conultants began paying attention to the intersection of technology and sociology. Many of the grandfathers and grandmothers of the field of organizational development will find the material on socio-technical systems familiar, and perhaps refreshing in the context of networked workplaces.
The material outlined below comes from a comprehensive Wikipedia entry on Socio-technical Systems, and I have edited it for the purposes of this blog post.
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Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.
In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.
Sociotechnical systems theory is theory about the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of machines and technology. Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organisation. Sociotechnical theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of both excellence in technical performance and quality in people’s work lives.
Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimisation. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organisation, ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.
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It’s too intensive an experience to go into the deep details of STS here, but let me draw out a few of the core elements of socio-technical systems theory and principles. It should be self-evident that they are central to the examination and adoption of collaborative social computing in todays modern organizations
Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Sociotechnical theory is founded on two main principles:
- One is that the interaction of social and technical factors creates the conditions for successful (or unsuccessful) organizational performance. This interaction is comprised partly of linear ‘cause and effect’ relationships (the relationships that are normally ‘designed’) and partly from ‘non-linear’, complex, even unpredictable relationships (the good or bad relationships that are often unexpected).
- The corollary of this, and the second of the two main principles, is that optimisation of each aspect alone (socio or technical) tends to increase not only the quantity of unpredictable, ‘un-designed’ relationships, but those relationships that are injurious to the system’s performance.
Therefore sociotechnical theory is about joint optimisation.
Principles of Socio-technical Systems Theory
Some of the central principles of sociotechnical theory were elaborated in a seminal paper by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in 1951.
[ Snip ... ]
The key to responsible autonomy seems to be to design an organization possessing the characteristics of small groups whilst preventing the ‘silo-thinking’ and ‘stovepipe’ neologisms of contemporary management theory. In order to preserve “…intact the loyalties on which the small group [depend]…the system as a whole [needs to contain] its bad in a way that [does] not destroy its good”.
In practice this requires groups to be responsible for their own internal regulation and supervision, with the primary task of relating the group to the wider system falling explicitly to a group leader. This principle, therefore, describes a strategy for removing more traditional command hierarchies.
Adaptability
“…the organisation tries to deal with the external complexity by ‘reducing’ the internal control and coordination needs. …This option might be called the strategy of ‘simple organisations and complex jobs’”.
Many type of organisations are clearly motivated by the appealing ‘industrial age’, rational principles of ‘factory production’, a particular approach to dealing with complexity: “In the factory a comparatively high degree of control can be exercised over the complex and moving ‘figure’ of a production sequence, since it is possible to maintain the ‘ground’ in a comparatively passive and constant state”
In Classic organisations problems with the moving ‘figure’ and moving ‘ground’ often become magnified through a much larger social space, one in which there is a far greater extent of hierarchical task interdependence. For this reason, the semi-autonomous group, and its ability to make a much more fine grained response to the ‘ground’ situation, can be regarded as ‘agile’.
Added to which, local problems that do arise need not propagate throughout the entire system (to affect the workload and quality of work of many others) because a complex organization doing simple tasks has been replaced by a simpler organization doing more complex tasks. The agility and internal regulation of the group allows problems to be solved locally without propagation through a larger social space, thus increasing tempo.
Whole tasks
Another concept in sociotechnical theory is the ‘whole task’. A whole task “has the advantage of placing responsibility for the task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership.” The sociotechnical embodiment of this principle is the notion of minimal critical specification. This principle states that, “While it may be necessary to be quite precise about what has to be done, it is rarely necessary to be precise about how it is done”
The key factor in minimally critically specifying tasks is the responsible autonomy of the group to decide, based on local conditions, how best to undertake the task in a flexible adaptive manner.
This principle is isomorphic with ideas like Effects Based Operations (EBO). EBO asks the question of what goal is it that we want to achieve, what objective is it that we need to reach rather than what tasks have to be undertaken, when and how. The EBO concept enables the managers to “…manipulate and decompose high level effects. They must then assign lesser effects as objectives for subordinates to achieve. The intention is that subordinates’ actions will cumulatively achieve the overall effects desired”
Meaningfulness of tasks
Effects Based Operations and the notion of a ‘whole task’, combined with adaptability and responsible autonomy, have additional advantages for those at work in the organization. This is because “for each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure” as well as the requirement to deploy a multiplicity of skills and to have the responsible autonomy in order to select when and how to do so.
This is clearly hinting at a relaxation of the myriad control mechanisms found in the more classically designed organizations.
In classic organisations the ‘wholeness’ of a task is often diminished by multiple group integration and spatiotemporal disintegration.
The group based form of organization design proposed by sociotechnical theory combined with new technological possibilities (such as the internet) provide a response to this often forgotten issue, one that contributes significantly to joint optimisation.
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I’ve done a significant amount of editing above (by chopping out significant-but-complicated-and-jargon-laden parts of the extract from Wikipedia). Suffice it for now to say that socio-technical systems theory and principles anticipated the dynamic tension between the (potential) every-which-wayness of hyperlinked human activity and the need for concentration on setting and achieving meaningful objectives that drive organizational performance.
It seems clear to me that as organizations explore and take action regarding the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, knowledge work will need to be designed differently .. away from the linear ’cause-and-effect’ and sequential thinking evident in today’s job descriptions and organizational charts, towards adaptability, autonomy, whole tasks and individuals taking responsibility for the effectiveness of the networks in which they are engaged that address the organization’s objectives.
The socio-technical systems approach involves complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces, as a subset or mirror of the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behavior.
The elements of the approach brought to a specific organization are:
Job enrichment – giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties.
Job enlargement – increasing the scope and reach of a job’s duties and responsibilities. This argues against over-specialisation and the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is performed repetitively by an individual worker.
Job rotation - an approach to employee and management development. A schedule of varying assignments gives people a breadth of exposure to large parts of or the entire operation.
Motivation – stimulating and enhancing the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of positive and constructive behaviors, or more simply increasing the desire and willingness to do something.
Process improvement – actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. ‘Process’ in a networked environment is an emerging area of study, as the linear BPR that has dominated the past two decades will be impacted, sometimes dramatically, by the dynamics of purposeful network activity.
Task analysis – how tasks are accomplished - information which can be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design and automation. Again, the notion of ‘tasks’ will sometimes (often ?) see dramatic impact as networked activity around an objectives increases.
Work design – the application of sociotechnical systems principles and techniques to the humanization of work. The aims of work design to improved job satisfaction, to improved through-put, to improved quality and to reduced employee problems, e.g., grievances, absenteeism.
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Many thinkers and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space are recognizing and discussing the need to re-design knowledge work and the small and large structural elements of organizations, due to the growing pervasiveness of today’s information-flow infrastructure.
The principles and elements of socio-technical systems theory, and offshoots like Emery and Trist’s Participative Work Design (on which I have written before), are in my opinion very useful and practical sources for thinking through and implementing some of the changes … in mental models and in practices … that I believe will be necessary to obtain the latent potential available in purposeful social computing aimed at an organization’s objectives for better and more responsive performance.
I’ll be glad to learn what you think.
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