by Joe McKendrick
August 18, 2010 at 10:31 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, Work 2.0
Social enterprises don’t just spring out of some primordial corporate soup, they need good leaders to get them to the promised tribal lands. And we’re not talking about aggressive, power-obsessed leaders — the new leaders for the Business 2.0 organization need to be willing to let their communities take the lead with new initiatives.
Our FastForward friend Francois Gossieaux, along with co-author Ed Moran, has just published a new book that leads managers and business leaders through this new connected economy, titled The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media.
There are many great points raised in the book, and I’ll focus on Francois and Ed’s discussion on what it takes to manage and lead a Hyper-Social enterprise.
Interestingly, the good news about all this is you don’t need to move the mountains and the sea to get to hyper-social nirvana. “You don’t need to do away with hierarchies, as some pundits would have you believe, nor do you have to fear that social media will destroy them — it won’t. ” (aw, shucks…)
But there will be strongly linked communities of employees, customers, and prospects forming within your orbit as a result. They will be part of your hierarchies, and they will be outside the walls of your organization. Questions you need to ask of your managers and leaders include: “Have we challenged ourselves hard enough in evaluating everything we do?” “If we could restart the company tomorrow, what would it look like?”
Francois and Ed also identified the eight essential qualities Hyper-Social leaders need to embrace:
- They behave like humans and demand that their people do too.
- They ditch the rule books and embrace values.
- They live their values.
- They trust their people and create trusted environments.
- The embrace transparency.
- They embrace diversity.
- They never compromise on the quality of the people they surround themselves with.
- They let go of control.
Not only do Hyper-Social enterprises need a new way of leadership, but this extends to talent as well. As pointed out above, moving to a social enterprise doesn’t require a great overnight upheaval. But there is a need to bring forward enlightened individuals who understand the power of social media and know how to effectively communicate across these new channels.
by Paula Thornton
July 3, 2010 at 8:40 pm · Filed under
Business 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Work 2.0
“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.
