Month: August 2011

Corporate culture

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Next month I’ll be discussing corporate culture at Sibos in Toronto. My view (not original) is that corporate culture is an emergent property. It is a result of the myriad properties of the organization and its environment. Culture happens, and like a child, once born, the parents are not really in control.

We used to think of organizations like machines, inspired by Newtonian physics 300 years ago. The scientific revolution followed the last communication revolution, the age of print.  Now we face a new revolution as we sit in the middle of the electric age, its disembodied words first spread by the telegraph and now the Internet. With increasing connections and speeds of transmission, our work environments have become much more complex.

In complex environments, emergent practices have to be developed by probing, sensing and responding. This is what I call perpetual Beta; constantly probing the environment, sensing what happens and then responding by creating Beta practices; but always ready to discard them should the situation change. Both culture and practice emerge from the organization and its environment. As John Seely Brown noted, in order to understand complex systems you have to marinate in them.

The one complex system that I know best is my body. I remember as a competitive athlete how in tune I was with my body, feeling the smallest changes. People would ask me what I thought about during races. Most of the time I was monitoring my systems, seeing if I could push a bit harder, change my stride or take advantage of some aspect of the environment. I was marinating in it.

For several decades the idea of the organization as organism has spread, popularized by the work of Peter Senge on the learning organization in 1990.  If you think of organizations like organisms and culture as emergent then it becomes obvious that understanding and monitoring systems is critical.  If you also understand the need to develop emergent practices in order to adapt and thrive, then you know you have to engage the entire organism. As a complex adaptive system, it cannot be directed and there is no obvious link between cause and and effect. You don’t push a button at head office and voilà you get a specific result at the field office. Instead, you keep the body healthy, engaged and constantly learning. The body, and all its constituent parts,  then adapts to its environment.

This is how you develop a healthy corporate culture. Nurture the body, which is composed of people and their relationships, using tools, within a framework of processes and procedures. But designing an effective work system is only part of the solution; it merely sets the stage. Marinating in the resulting complex adaptive system is essential. Monitoring all systems by engaging with them is how we can understand the organization as organism. It cannot be done by managers disconnected from the work being done. It cannot be done from behind a desk. To know the culture, be the culture.

From jobs to meaningful work

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The Company Men is a movie that “centers on a year in the life of three men trying to survive a round of corporate downsizing at a major company — and how that affects them, their families, and their communities.”  The movie is entertaining but I am most interested in how it showed the real work shift that is happening, not the effects of recession but the new nature of work.

[Spoiler Alert]

Movie synopsis on Wikipedia

Two factors appear to be at the root of the demise of this shipping company. Work is getting outsourced, as is obvious from the rusting shipyards, as well as automated, requiring fewer blue-collar workers. The worship of shareholder value is covered in detail, with the executives doing everything they can to drive up share prices, increasing the value of their stock options while delivering another round of layoffs.

Most of the movie centres on how a few managers/executives deal with losing their jobs. During this time they learn a couple of lessons.

  • Meaningful work is in creating something of value that delights customers.
  • A job is not the same as meaningful work.

When they finally embark on rebuilding a ship-building company, it is quite different from the original industrial era company.

  • All support functions, including sales and HR, are working collaboratively in the same room.
  • Everyone is committed and seems to have a sense of skin-in-the-game.
  • Management and employees are working together.
  • There is real communication among people who understand and respect each other, many having shared some tough experiences together.

The new company seems to have inverted the hierarchical pyramid, putting customers first, then creating an environment to support the front-line workers, understanding that they’re in a much more complex environment than before. This will be a smaller scale manufacturing enterprise, relying more on brains than brawn. Even though this had a bit of a Hollywood ending, it shows that the future of work in North America will be different.
titanic
In order to remain flexible, 21st century companies will be smaller. Workers will have to be more agile and will likely have to change companies more often, requiring more of a freelancer’s attitude. Everyone will have to be focused on the customer. Status hierarchies will crumble as everyone can ask, “What have you done for my company lately?”. The workplace will be less comfortable with less job security, but much more work will be meaningful. It’s obviously not that meaningful here and now at the end of the current industrial/information era, with 84% of workers wanting to change their jobs. It’s time for all of us — politicians, workers, managers — to stop thinking about jobs and create meaningful work. It will help us get on with the work of the century.

Social learning: the freedom to act and cooperate with others

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“Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy“ – Article #7 of The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999.

The Net, especially working and learning in networks, subverts many of the hierarchies we have developed over hundreds of years. Formal education is one example, as shown in this excellent article by Cathy Davidson:

Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone’s a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore for pointing out this article, but then that’s how much of my learning happens today. It’s social and comes via my online networks, in this case, Twitter.

Five years ago I wrote that a shift of focus (and development effort) away from the management aspects of learning and more on the social aspects of learning can only be positive for the learner. We need to better understand the social, network aspects of work and learning and build structures that support these. As we become more networked, status hierarchies are being replaced by task hierarchies [thanks to Esko Kilpi for these terms]. In both work and learning, our status in our networks is constantly changing and being renegotiated. We focus on tasks, and in doing these, our status changes. It’s no longer about who we are, but what we do. Isn’t this how our social networks function as well? Social learning, a key part of any community, is a dance with changing partners, each interpreting the music in their own way but influenced by every partner.

Social learning is the lubricant of networked, collaborative work. Therefore we need to redesign work structures that foster self-organized (social) groups for learning and working. If work is learning, and learning is the work, then shouldn’t the workplace be structured as a learning environment? And shouldn’t educational institutions foster this kind of integrated, collaborative, social learning? This is revolutionary. Peter Isackson describes the subversive nature of social learning in the Hole-in-the-Wall (HiW) learning experiments:

It seems to me that the fundamental key to the success of HiW is the notion of “self-organized groups” who learn on their own. If education is to become truly non-invasive, as Jay suggests, it must refrain from defining both the goals and the means to reach them, entrusting the groups with this task. If educational gurus (authorities) notice that a group is neglecting what is considered “essential” in the curriculum (for whatever reason, whether it’s basic security, survival or inculcating an existing set of values), the group could be challenged to account for why they may be neglecting a certain topic or reminded of the interest in pursuing it. Respecting the self-organizing group and its decision-making capacity is the sine qua non of success. It also happens to be the absolute opposite of the organizational principles of traditional education and training.

One current theme in the workplace and education circles is to “blend” social with the formal and structured. But social learning is not a bolted-on component of our formal educational and training programs. It is a sea change. It will disrupt institutions built upon the technology of  the printing press – all communication enterprises, including education. Yes, we have always learned and worked socially, but we have never had the power of ridiculously easy group-forming or almost zero-cost duplication of our words and images.

The network effect of the Web is explained in detail in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Benkler describes the changes that a networked society can have on our governance, economic and cultural structures [bold added]:

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.

One final note for all those managers, directors and others in status hierarchies: social learning is about giving up control.

Mimi & Eunice cartoons by Nina Paley.

Tumultuous times during the Big Shift

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Here are some interesting finds that were shared on Twitter this past week.

@EskoKilpi – “The big shift: Transformation from status hierarchies to task hierarchies – #networks” [I think this is a critical differentiation between the industrial/information economy and the creative/knowledge economy we are shifting to.]

Mike Wesch “I don’t want to help make students for the world. I want to help make students who make the world over.” – via @JonHusband

@JohnnieMoore – “I see so many promising “breakthrough” methods as if it can be guaranteed, controllable and risk-free.”

@RosabethKanter – “The first rule for change agents is “Stay alive” ”

Survival is more important than heroism. As a wise mentor once said, the first rule for change agents is “Stay alive.” That’s a lot more important than showing off. If you can’t force a major change or get the best possible deal, a lesser deal that keeps doors open for the future means living to fight another day. Baseball analytics show that getting on base is among the most important ways to win the game. If you strike out while trying to hit a home run, the whole side might go down. If you go for a lesser way to get on base, such as taking a walk, you keep the game alive. Sometimes backing down averts a major crisis and keeps the debate alive.

@dhinchcliffe – First Rule of Collaboration: If you can’t link to it, it didn’t happen, HT @maverickwoman No web of links = no social business

What ever tools you use to collaborate with others, make sure there is a way to log the conversations, keeping a history is vital. And beyond that, if you can’t share links to that history, then it may as well not exist.

“Very nice piece by Marc Andreessen in WSJ saying software is eating the world and why that’s good” – @RossDawson

Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

@SteveDenning  – Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle In the USA – Disturbing piece on loss of US manufacturing in high tech:

The U.S. has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products. Amazon’s Kindle 2 couldn’t be made in the U.S., even if Amazon wanted to:

  • The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.
  • The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producing flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.
  • The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the U.S. supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.
  • The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.
  • The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.
  • The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.

@euan: Information Fertiliser: untidy information, like blogs, makes better knowledge fertiliser:

Finding the good stuff is one of the functions of bloggers. Information rag and bone men who curate the weak signal and the long tail. Seeing patterns in the small, the marginal, the messy. This is where those with nerdy curiosity and a good eye can find real value in what others have discarded or not noticed …

Note for all managers! Best study ever: Wasting time online boosts worker productivity – @TimKastelle

Surfing the Web is even better for productivity than talking or texting with friends or sending personal emails, the study found.

And smart bosses would stop snooping, researchers said: Excessive Internet monitoring and surveillance only makes employees do it more, they said.

@csmonitor – Video: Taking Advantage of Tumultuous Times [Much better than any Did You Know? video; this one sets the stage for the changes that will engulf us.]

Making sense of our world

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I define Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) as a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively and contribute to society. It’s sense making + getting things done.

George Siemens has made this rather succinct statement about knowledge:

When I externalize something, it’s information.
When someone connects it in some manner, it becomes knowledge.
Knowledge is essentially relatedness/connectedness.

PKM is about making connections, with ideas and with people.

As I keep developing my own processes and work with clients to promote a networked learning culture I look for clearer ways of describing what this PKM stuff is all about.

The image below is an attempt to state the Seek-Sense-Share framework as simply as possible.

To be effective networked learners, we need to seek information; pulling, instead of having it pushed to us by others. We can use human (e.g. Twitter) and mechanical (e.g. Google) filters to help us do this.

We connect to this information by making sense of it in a variety ways, such as validating it with our own experiences and observations (e.g. blogging). We have to  be more than just information filters. Our experiences inform us and our environment gives us feedback. Making sense of the present prepares us for the future.

Sharing information about what we have learned by narrating our work (e.g. activity streams) and making it transparent (e.g. Intranets & Web) can create serendipitous network effects through social learning. As Hugh Macleod says, “The network is more powerful than the node”.

Lead, follow or get out of the way

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A while back, it was only those nasty dictatorships that shut down communications, but now “enlightened” democracies like the USA and the UK are doing the same. However, it’s not really about social media, as they’re just the current manifestation of the Internet. The Cluetrain made it clear in 1999, “Hyperlinks subvert Hierarchy”. We are living in a complex, hyperlinked society and this interconnectivity is changing how we work and live.

Nine Shift likens it to 100 years ago when we left the agrarian age and moved into the industrial age: we are at a turning point in society (2008-2012) and the old way gives way to the new way (2010-2020). Mark Federman sees this point in time as just past mid-way in a 300-year transition of our dominant communication medium, from the print age to the electric age, starting with the telegraph and currently manifested with Web 2.0 [see Why Johnnie & Janey Can’t Read and Why Mr & Mrs Smith Can’t Teach PDF].

Social media for marketing was the tip of the iceberg. This didn’t shake much up, as there was no significant power shift. Corporations stayed in charge. But the real power of social media is for getting things done. Social media facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at the hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones. They give communication power to each person. Social media enable ridiculously easy group-forming, for both furthering democracy and enabling hooligans.

Institutions are just beginning to realize how profound these changes are and they are fighting back. The role of bureaucracy is to maintain the status quo. For the last one hundred years, our positions in the hierarchy have given us our purpose. In North America, people still ask, “What do you do for a living?”. It places us in the pecking order. This was very noticeable when I worked for the federal government in Ottawa 20 years ago. Each job title had a number of digits. The more digits you had, the lower you were, and therefore of less importance. Traditional, stable hierarchies will be blown apart by the interconnected, always-on electric age.

My observations show these are some of the required qualities for what is currently called the social enterprise, a better way of working together:

Work is open & transparent
There is a constant need to share and work is narrated
Continuous learning is a must
Conversation is valued
There is time for reflection
A culture of Perpetual Beta
Metrics are understood and measured by the workers

These are at cross-purposes with most of our existing organizational structures, whether it be the non-democratic enterprise with the CEO as anointed ruler or the bureaucracies where process trumps purpose. There is little doubt that the powers-that-be will continue to fight against the new medium because it is already destroying many of the old forms of power. This has happened with each communication revolution.

Therefore it’s no surprise that we will continue to hear about the Web being censored or government controlling our communications. If we want open and transparent work, education and governance then we will have to fight for it. The good thing is that the next generation is already onboard. We only have to look to them for inspiration. It’s up to us to step up and provide some leadership.

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“Lead, follow or get out of the way”

~ Thomas Paine

Exposing that which lies below the surface

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Ken Carroll calls for leaders to be the miners:

You have to dig if you want to find the greatest possibilities within yourself and others. They are not – repeat, not – obvious.

But even simple discoveries can be transformative. They can change individuals and organizations. Seeing your own worst habits can do it. Knowing why you act as you do can do it. Sometimes self-awareness alone makes it obvious where you need to change or even transform.

I’ve often said that 21st century leaders really need to connect & communicate in order to support social learning and collaborative work.

Perhaps a better metaphor is leaders as miners, exposing that which lies beneath the surface.

Some notes on Bureaucracy

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In 2005, I wrote – Seth Godin’s quotable Bureaucracy = Death raises a number of issues on why preventive actions are seldom taken by bureaucratic organisations. Seth talks about the effects of bureaucracy on marketing, but it also results in inertia in healthcare, education, et al. I doubt that his idea of a Chief No Officer would be embraced by many companies or institutions.

My belief is that it is the basic nature of managerial organisations that is the prime contributor to a reactive versus a preventive mindset. Why were the levees around New Orleans not maintained? Why is there no funding for programmes such as Canada’s Participaction, but we continue to add more expensive acute care machinery to our hospitals? Why is early childhood education ignored when it is a prime contributor to healthy, contributing citizens? And finally, what can we do to change this?

My belief that bureaucracies are a key contributor to many of our societal and economic problems has not changed in six years, and I’ve picked up a few more references confirming this.

Bureaucracies can amplify psychopathic behaviour, writes David Schwartz, a psychotherapist:

Since psychopaths are usually very smart, they can be quite competent at impersonating regular human beings in positions of power. Since they don’t care how their actions affect people, they can rise to great height in enterprises dealing with power and money. They can manufacture bombs or run hospitals. Whatever the undertaking, it is all the same to them. It’s just business.

Daniel Lemire looks at bureaucracies from a computer programmer’s perspective:

Bureaucracies are subject to the halting problem. That is, when facing a new problem, it is impossible to know whether the bureaucracy will ever find a solution. Have you ever wondered when the meeting would end? It may never end.

Bureaucracies are the enemy of innovation, as they favour self-preservation over change. They are self-serving. They are preventing organizational growth and we don’t need them any longer.

Bureaucracies are (finally) outliving their usefulness, as the economy changes. Valdis Krebs wrote on Adapting Old Structures to New Challenges:

When change was slow, and the future was pretty much like the present, hierarchical organizations were perfect structures for business and government. The world is no longer predictable, nor are solutions obvious. Old structures are no longer sufficient for new complex challenges.

And bureaucracies may be in danger from social media, says Peter Evans Greenwood:

Social media – as with many of the technologies preceding it – streamlines previously manual tasks by capturing knowledge in a form where it is easily reusable, shareable and transferable. What is different this time is that social media is focused on the communication between individuals, rather than the tasks these individuals work on. By simplifying the process of staying in touch and collaborating with a large number of people it enables us to flatten our organizations even further, putting the C-suite directly in contact with the front line.

This is having the obvious effect on companies, eliminating the need for many of the bureaucrats in our organizations; people whose main role is to manage communication (or communication, command and control, C3, in military parlance).

However, some bureaucracies, like the Canadian military,  just keep plugging along, as Mark Federman notes:

On resistance to this report [LGen Leslie’s Report on Transformation].

“[At] a large meeting in December 2010 involving the generals, admirals and senior DND civil servants … it became apparent the tendency was to argue for the preservation of the status quo. … Though grimly amusing, these interactions proved that consensus has not and probably never will be achieved on any significant change.”

We need to reinvent management so that it does not include bureaucracy. Steve Denning suggests dynamic linking as a better alternative to bureaucracy:

Even the best intentions to delight clients or empower staff will be systematically subverted if the work is coordinated through hierarchical bureaucracy. Meshing the efforts of autonomous teams and a client focus while also achieving disciplined execution requires a set of measures that might be called “dynamic linking,” The method began in automotive design in Japan[1] and has been developed most fully in software development with methods known as “Agile” or “Scrum,”[2]

“Dynamic linking” means that (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the management sets priorities in terms of the goals of work in the cycle, based on what is known about what might delight the client; (c) decisions about how the work is to be carried out to achieve those goals are largely the responsibility of those doing the work; (d) progress is measured (to the extent possible) by direct client feedback at the end of each cycle.[3]

 

Sharing in need of some creativity

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Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.” – G. K. Chesterton – via @albybisy

@umairh – “Being airlifted into a triathlon is probably a pretty bad way to check if your leg’s broken. And similar is true for social contracts.”

Economist – “The Internet has been a great unifier of people, companies & online networks. Powerful forces now threaten it.” – via @dhinchcliffe

Yet it is another kind of commercial attempt to carve up the internet that is causing more concern. Devotees of a unified cyberspace are worried that the online world will soon start looking as it did before the internet took over: a collection of more or less connected proprietary islands reminiscent of AOL and CompuServe. One of them could even become as dominant as Microsoft in PC software. “We’re heading into a war for control of the web,” Tim O’Reilly, an internet savant who heads O’Reilly Media, a publishing house, wrote late last year. “And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform.”

IBM poll of CEOs (2010) found they deemed creativity to be “the NUMBER ONE leadership competency of the successful enterprise of the future” – via @charlesjennings

Image by ibmphoto24

 

 

Communities across the chasm

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How do you get ideas to spread, especially in organizational communities of practice (often behind the firewall) to encourage innovation?

In Connecting Ideas with Communities, I figured that if you want to foster large-scale change in an organization or even a network, then you would:

  1. Connect the right Mavens with the potential Innovators,
  2. target the Early Adopters via the Connectors, and then
  3. find the Salespeople who will influence the Early Majority.

The oft-quoted 90-9-1 rule, would infer that you only need 1% Creators (Mavens):

User participation in an online community more or less follows the following 90-9-1 ratios:

  • 90% of users are Lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
  • 9% of users are Commenters. They edit or rate content but don’t create content of their own.
  • 1% of users create content and are Creators.

This article goes on to disprove 90-9-1, as do others, indicating that as more people get used to sharing online, the figure rises to 10% or more Creators in active communities. This is further reinforced by research that shows that a 10% level of commitment is necessary to spread ideas:

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

One percent just doesn’t give you the necessary critical mass. Going back to my original premise from two years ago, I would think that a good rule of thumb would be to nurture communities of practice from a kernel of Mavens & Innovators plus Early Adopters & Connectors, aiming to engage enough to compose 10% of what will be the actual community. Inside organizations, this is relatively easy to calculate. Let’s say you have 100 nuclear scientists in R&D. These professionals already feel an affinity to their field but they are spread across the world. Some of them get together once a year while others may seldom travel. Knowledge is often kept in silos or sits on a hard drive or in some lost shared-drive folder. How would a newly-minted community manager help this community of 100 share its knowledge?

Ignoring technology selection (which is usually the easiest aspect), I would start to identify the Mavens; those who are respected by their peers for their knowledge and experience. Then I would find the Innovators. Now comes the hard part, getting these two groups to dance. This requires a lot of listening and preparation in order to see and seize opportunities for collaboration. Once something innovative is identified that interests the Mavens, such as sharing conference notes and views on the Intranet with the greater community, then it’s time to get the Connectors to help spread the word, but not to everyone, just the Early Adopters who don’t take all that much convincing. Once this group becomes about 10% of the desired size it’s ready for an open launch. Given the gentle hand of the community manager, a bit of publicity and easy ways for Lurkers to drop in, you may have the roots of a community of practice.

A major difference with this approach is that you don’t try to convince the Majority from the onset. You cross the chasm once you have a bridge, not before.