My ongoing conversation with Michael Cook continues (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk), with these thoughts:

Harold: With the delays that seem to be following each of your recent responses to me you may be thinking I have fallen through the web someplace and cannot find my way back. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth, although I have been on a journey thanks to everything you have provided me to think about. From when we started by talking on the phone to where we are now has for me been a very long journey. I am reminded of one of those scenes from the Lord of the Rings films where one or the other of the wizards was looking into either a crystal ball or a boiling pot and could see something going on very far, far away. Maybe that time difference between where you are in New Brunswick and where I am in Washington is actually much greater than the four hours that show on the clock!

Perhaps you saw me after that last exchange wandering lost among the hyperlinks you provided. I wasn’t lost, that’s just the look on my face most of the time, especially when I am considering connectivity. Maybe its just my natural tendency to go inward to address a big question.

After spending a good deal of time with the various references you provided I found my mind wandering back to current client relationships. I have one in particular that years ago began by addressing a problem and providing a service that handles a complicated issue for clients. Over the years they added in a couple more twists to further reduce the complicated issue. Then, maybe 10 years ago they ventured outside the simply complicated and began to address areas of complexity, I say without recognition of the looking glass they had passed through. Since that time they have continued along the path of complexity and had increasing problems with their margins.

How might I begin a conversation with this client’s leadership to have them begin to consider that they have evolved into an entirely different type of animal than they were at the beginning? In the context of our conversation thus far around the use of social media inside business this would seem like a fairly fundamental threshold to cross before a management group might begin to consider the use of these technologies.

How do you tell people that the world is different? This is especially difficult for those in postions of authority who owe their position to the past. Why change what still works?

You could start with a list of events to describe how the world is significantly different, like when a singer from Halifax, Nova Scotia can publish a music video seen by millions of viewers and it affects the stock price of a major corporation: United Breaks Guitars or a group of distributed computer hackers shatter the diplomatic world as they join forces with traditional media outlets: Wikileaks. There are many other examples, such as regional protests coordinated through Facebook or some other social medium.

But you also have to show that the organization itself has changed.

If you have someone coming over for the first time, do you Google them? You can be pretty sure that if they’re under 30, they’ve already checked you out online. If you don’t have a profile on the Web they may even have decided not to show. For many people, if you’re not the Web, you don’t exist. Now that’s a change from a decade ago. Find out if the HR department uses LinkedIn to recruit. Maybe they don’t even know what it is.

Social media for marketing is the tip of the iceberg. The real power of social media is for getting things done. They facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones and always-on.

If the organization doesn’t embrace the values of the external network, it will move at a snail’s pace while the rest of the world spins around it. Does this reflect the inside?

Open & transparent
Need to share
Continuous learning
Conversation is valued
Time for reflection
Perpetual Beta
Business metrics are understood

It’s what’s happening outside.

Finally, you can throw some return on investment figures at them. Simply put, social media give you more time to get things done. There are many other reasons, some of which the folks at Socialcast have neatly put out as an infographic:

Not sure if this addresses your questions, Mike, but we have much more time and all the digital space we need.

My conversation with Michael Cook continues (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk), this time with no specific question, but some very good insight and commentary:

Harold: I just read your response to my latest couple of questions. In my view your response is profound. I especially like the reference to the address delivered to people in the HR field.  I am a former HR professional so what I’ll say next is grounded in direct experience.

In my opinion, the HR profession is badly in need of a new identity, one that demonstrates clearly to all members of senior management that HR has a strategic imperative which is to be accountable for shaping the management models and practices for the future of any organization.

As you have pointed out, and no doubt what was recognized by your HR audience, much of what is currently contributed by HR staffs falls in the category of “complicated work” which is increasingly a candidate for outsourcing. Where the largest opportunity lies, in my opinion, is to transform the current conversation around “employee engagement” from being held as a complicated matter to one that is viewed as complex. We have arrived at a point where increasingly an employee’s time in the workplace is merely an intersection in their lives, not necessarily a destination, one where their personal vision, talents and skills come together with a “place” or occasion to meet some but certainly not all of their personal needs.

To the degree that employee engagement, supported by HR practices, continues to be thought of as a “thing” to be tweaked, like the temperature of a room, companies will continue to either lose their best people or fail to attract the talent they truly need. The likelihood in these scenarios is that those same companies and their HR department staffs will be left scratching their heads and speaking in low tones about work ethic and attitudes of entitlement as the root of their problems.

Two of the slides from your presentation struck me as particularly poignant, numbers 20 and 29. The first points out that the “cheese” for many people currently working as employees has actually moved. Waaay back in the early 2000′s Ken Thomas provided very grounded insight that could serve as a guiding light for the necessary transformation with the publication of ‘Intrinsic Motivation at Work: What Really Drives Employee Engagement’. Thomas uses a somewhat different vocabulary than yours yet to my ears and eyes it conveys much the same meaning. You say Autonomy, Mastery and Sense of Purpose. He says Meaningfulness, Choice, Competence and Progress. Samo/Samo to me. Then you point out (slide 29) that 90% of the learning that matters today in the workplace is the outcome of an experiential process, either personal or with the assistance of others. Yikes, suddenly it is no longer a question of if social media but which and how soon. Clearly the technology and the times have collided much like the chicken and the egg.

I realize there is not a question here but I have been wrestling with one for some time and it is; how can we break up the mythology around engagement, starting with the recognition that engagement cannot be controlled, it can be offered. Leadership appropriate to the reality now is supportive/offering and inquisitive/asking. HR Leadership can lead this transformation and as Peter Block might say, it is not a matter of how as much as are they willing to say YES!

“We have arrived at a point where increasingly an employee’s time in the workplace is merely an intersection in their lives, not necessarily a destination, one where their personal vision, talents and skills come together with a “place” or occasion to meet some but certainly not all of their personal needs.”

For too long we’ve had simplistic models of what motivates people. This is where the whole “incentivise” BS comes from [no, it's not a word]. People are complex beings. They have multiple, overlapping valences. Good leaders have always understood that.

I agree with Mike. It’s a question of which social media and how soon. This conversation about social media will be dead in a few years. Nobody discusses email any more, other than how many unread messages they have in their inbox. Social media will be there in less than five years. I give it 24 months. But that’s not the important point.

Control is the killer. It’s the basis of our industrial-rooted work systems. Many HR policies imply that people cannot be trusted. Almost all IT policies say that. But it’s a new world. Everything is transparent, whether you want it to be or not. Just ask Julian or Anonymous.

Image by Dave Makes

Once you realize you live in a glass house, you start thinking differently.

The latest question from Michael Cook (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk) continues from our last conversations:

Harold: I am still not certain about my future as a member of the blogging community but I have revisited our last exchange and rekindled my spirit for that dialogue…

Among the many things you said in your post of February 1st a couple have stuck with me as they pertain particularly to where I put my energies. Here is the first of these:

“Our industrial management models are based on a belief that our structures are merely complicated.”

To me this statement gets right to the heart of where I am stumped about how to support clients. Without fail, in the past five years every new client I have been engaged by has specified one of two things they really wanted to see change in their organizations culture. They said either 1) they wanted more leadership from their mid-level managers or 2) they wanted more ownership from their employees for the outcomes the business required. The phrase they often use is wanting people to “step up.”

In my dialogues with them I do my best to point out that to the best of my knowledge both of these changes are within reach, however, not without them, the client, making the first move. Among the moves that they need to make is to stop imposing a management structure designed to serve the interests of the ownership of the business on employees who are doing their best to fulfill the requirements of customers or clients.

The challenge of having this conversation make a difference lies in speaking this way into a system that believes that their company is really mechanistic in its operation and that they, the owner or senior manager, are really in control. This perspective is supported entirely by the belief that not only is the organization mechanistic, it is merely, as you have said, complicated.

How would you recommend breaking through this mythology? My guess is that a conceptual approach won’t cut it. Without releasing the grip of this perspective the outcomes they desire are virtually impossible to attain.

The second thought that you shared of particular interest was the notion of Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology. The truly stunning aspect of this idea is that it may in fact be possible to implement on some level without the use of technology. In my own experience some version of Wirearchies have been around for a long time, especially on complex development projects. What would you recommend as an approach to have a client see that the notion is less something new than something not yet formally recognized or empowered? Then, having accomplished that objective, how best to introduce the possibility of leverage deriving from some sort of investment in technology?

To me both your remarks and the questions they generated for me are interrelated and from an OD standpoint truly stand as the gateway to establishing new management models.

I think this may be a long response, Mike.

I recently gave a presentation to senior HR executives, discussing the need for new work and learning approaches premised specifically on the need to focus on complex (and creative) work.

Rob Paterson sums up complexity and why we need to understand how if differs from the merely complicated:

It’s a simple message, really. But if you don’t get it, you’re headed for chaos.

Simple = easily knowable.

Complicated = not simple, but still knowable.

Complex = not fully knowable, but reasonably predictable.

Chaotic = neither knowable nor predictable.

In that presentation to HR Execs I show that simple work is constantly being automated (e.g. automated tellers) and complicated work is being outsourced to the cheapest labour market (e.g. call centres). If companies want to be competitive in the global market, they need to focus on complex and creative work.

Work is changing as we get more connected. The old ways of organizing work are becoming obsolete, as 84% of workers in the US plan to change their jobs in 2011. They want out, in spite of a lacklustre economy. We are seeing mass, decentralized and social movements that confront existing hierarchies, politically and in the workplace. The recent examples of uprisings in North Africa are good attention getters. There is no normal. All our institutions are facing the challenges of always-on connectedness and the need to adapt to Internet time. Social media are just the current tip of the Internet iceberg, making work relationships much more complex. Workers do have to step up, but they also need the tools and authority. Encouraging workplace practices like personal knowledge management is a start.

When I show that our existing professional disciplines are like blind monks examining an elephant, I get some attention. The need for collaborative work and social learning increases as higher-value complex work requires passion, creativity and initiative. These skills are not taught in some training program, but shared socially through modelled behaviour and over many conversations. We need to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us  focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. The role of leadership becomes supportive rather than directive in this new knowledge-intensive and creative workplace. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag companies down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

The last slide of that presentation shows a type of servant leadership, supporting the real work being done.

I have learned that I need to start a conversation on complexity but it has to be simple enough not to lose my clients’ attention and not to seem like an academic lecture. This latest presentation is one more iteration of that. If you can can reframe the conversation, then you can talk about new ways of working and integrating learning. For example, most managers would agree that more work and effort is required for exception-handling. Social networks are an excellent framework to deal with these. This can start a new business conversation.

Analytical tools like value network analysis are also good ways to show what is really happening in an organization and its environment. Visualization is a powerful change agent.

The most effective technology to start with to see the value of more collaborative, less controlled, work practices is micro-blogging. This could be an open platform like Twitter or a cloud service like Yammer or Chatter or an in-house tool like Status.net.

I agree that it’s not necessarily about the technology, even though technology is everywhere.

Sometimes it’s just giving up control, as the wirearchy framework suggests. Adam Kahane wrote in Solving Tough Problems:

If we want to help resolve complex situations, we have to get out of the way of situations that are resolving themselves.

According to the authors of Getting to Maybe, in complex environments:

• Rigid protocols are counter-productive
• There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
• We cannot separate parts from the whole
• Success is not a fixed address [perpetual Beta]

None of these require technology, but they all require a new mindset. I have worked with clients who accepted the need to deal with complexity and change their work structures. Patience is a virtue.

The latest question from Michael Cook (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk) continues from our last one:

Wow, your response to my last question was a deep and wide one indeed. I think I may need to put some more definite boundaries around where my concerns lie. First, the line from your last response that captured my interest was this: “To stay engaged with interconnected markets, business must get more social.”  I am thinking about some of my clients and approaching them with the thought that they need to have their businesses become more social. Just to test my own understanding it seems to me that by using the term social, especially in view of the IBM quote you referenced, that you mean to say highly connective, many options for connectivity are now a must for the value proposition of any organization. I imagine you mean more than that but am I in the right ballpark?

What I think I need is some language that creates a new context for the term social because I am afraid my clients will consider the remark naive. ‘Business is business and social is social.’ This would be their natural response, thinking that “social” means not results focused. I know you are using the term in a context that may be transparent to you but I can assure you that my clients do not share the same transparency.

What I need to do is be able to connect your conversation to the critical relationship between companies and customers and show how social media plays an important part in sustaining these relationships into the future. Can you give me a couple of concrete examples where this connection was made using social media that I might be able to share?

Secondly, when I read through your response to my last question I notice that you did not directly address the last part of my question where I asked about the right time to bring a technical expert into a conversation with a client. I suspect it is at the level of strategic value because I know most of my clients would not have an extensive interest in the technology itself but more the outcomes it might leverage. Again, am I on the right track here?

Does social mean highly connective? It’s much more than that. Social means human. It is an understanding that relationships and networks are complex. Our industrial management models are based on a belief that our structures are merely complicated. Here’s an explanation from Noop.nl

The main difference between predictable systems and complex systems is our approach to understanding them. We can understand simple and complicated systems by taking them apart and analyzing the details. However, we cannot understand complex systems by applying the same strategy of reductionism. But we can achieve some understanding by watching and studying how the whole system operates.

What’s important for managers is that this also works the other way around. We create complicated systems by first designing the parts, and then putting them together. This works well for mechanical things, like buildings, watches and Quattro Stagioni pizzas. But it doesn’t work for complex systems, like brains, software development teams, and the local pizzeria. We cannot build a system from scratch and expect it to become complex in the way that we intended. Complex systems defy attempts to be created in an engineering effort.

Social means the bonds that keep us together. Much of it is about trust. If I trust you, I might ask you for advice, so trust is essential for collaboration. We lose it if we try to micro-manage knowledge work. A framework like wirearchy is much better for complex environments than our traditional models of command & control, functional management and enforced adoption of work practices. Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

The argument that ‘business is business and social is social’ makes little sense today. Business is social because it involves people. Business must be more social the more complex the work and the greater the need for collaboration. We foster innovation through social interactions. The idea that a lone person working in a lab can come up with a brilliant idea is largely unfounded. Connections between people drive innovation, says Tim Kastelle; “Connecting ideas is the core of innovation, but without connecting ideas to people, there is no innovation at all.”

How does social media connect companies and customers? There are many case studies on social media for marketing and customer service available online . However, as my colleague Jane Hart writes:

There are many examples of how enterprises/organisations (profits and non-profits) are using social media for EXTERNAL marketing, customer support, etc, but few real-life case studies of strategic approaches to its use INTERNALLY for social and collaborative learning and/or performance and productivity improvement.

Making organizations more effective is what really interests me.

When working with clients, I would bring in technical expertise as late as possible. Technology is more often a business constraint than an enabler, especially internal IT departments. They will tell you what you can’t do. Determine the business requirements first and make sure they’re clear. Then figure out how to enable them with technology. Don’t let the IT tail wag the business dog. As Steve Woodruff writes, social media is not a business strategy. That also means that a self-proclaimed “social media strategist” should not be developing your business strategy.

This is the second of my conversations with Michael Cook (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk).

Michael:

I was thinking about the metaphor you used in responding to my question, that “social media are like new languages”, then after reflecting on that idea for a while I re-read your response and realized that you had actually said “social media are new languages” not like new languages, they are actually new languages. I was jolted into realizing where much of my current challenge is coming from. I keep attempting to learn about social media by comparing them to something I already know about rather than recognizing that while they have aspects that are familiar they are truly new phenomena.

So now I am wondering, email is email and it is ubiquitous. Anyone who has used email for any amount of time has had instances of recognizing its limitations. For one, it does a terrible job of conveying context and tone. Yet, there is no doubt that many of my clients (most of whom are senior managers, 45+ years of age) will do as I have done and think of an ESSP (Emerging Social Software Platform) as a glorified email system, and when I make a suggestion that they consider writing a blog they will give me the “devil eye” and shrink back like I have suggested maybe we hug. Since these are very likely the people in an organization that stand to gain the most by endorsing an investment in some form of social media, where would you suggest I begin a conversation with them about the topic and when is the right time to bring in someone with a technical background to support any signs of interest? It seems to me that starting with a product discussion is probably not where I would want to begin.

—

Harold: Once again, let me rephrase the question – “How do you start the discussion about social media with senior managers who think of technology as just more IT products and platforms?”

I like to start any conversation with a client from a business perspective. IBM describes the current situation as such:

The rapid growth of social networking and mobility has enabled people to tap into the experience of others to accomplish anything – ranging from their work to the way they purchase goods and services.

This pretty well sums up what is driving business change. People can connect to anyone, anywhere and at any time. This changes all the control systems that organizations have developed over the past century: pricing, pay, hours of work, product development, jobs, customer service – you name it.

The challenge for business leaders is to manage work with porous organizational boundaries. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. We need to change our mental models and even invert the management pyramid.The typical branching organization chart does not reflect the way that work gets done in networks. Work is really done in the white space within and now outside the organization.

Work today has few time or geographical boundaries. As our water coolers become virtual, social relations online will be the glue that connects us in our increasingly distributed work. Every little tweet, blog post, comment or “like” online shares our individuality and humanity. These actions help us be known to others in the digital surround. They help us build trust to get things done, be productive and innovate. However, we cannot benefit from professional social networks unless we engage in them. This requires more than merely mastering the technology. It means being social in our work. Not using social media to connect, contribute and collaborate is like sitting in a closed office all day.

According to McKinsey, the main reason that businesses today use social media is to increase the speed of access to knowledge. It’s not a question of why we should understand social business but what can we do to survive and thrive in what has become a social business ecosystem. Social media are necessary to keep up.

Here is an indicator of the changing nature of business in a highly networked and social marketplace; the “app” market:

This rapid adaption to what customers want requires a very different organizational structure than at many companies. It must be able to adapt rapidly to new information and it must move that information around rapidly … Staying engaged and being adaptive – the successful companies will have both of these attributes.

To stay engaged with interconnected markets, business must get more social. Social learning, which can involve many of these web social media, is how we get things done in networks.  Most organizational value is created by teams and networks, not individuals working alone. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Organizational learning really spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance.

Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization. Senior managers need to understand social media in order to support learning in social networks which will enable practitioners to produce results.

This post is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing conversation (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk) between Michael Cook and myself. Mike contacted me after having read my posts through the Human Capital League, which cross-posts many of my articles.

Michael:

“Thanks again for both the time and the conversation we’ve started on social media and uses in the workplace. As a starting point for our dialogue I’d like to begin with a broad question…I am an OD consultant by profession with a passion for improving the overall return on investment that a company makes in human capital and a co-equal commitment to improve the overall experience of being at work in any environment for each individual. Honestly, I want to see less suffering in the working experience.

Given these two commitments why, in your view, it is consistent with what I am already working on to give myself over to gaining a better understanding of some of the newest developments in the social technologies. I mean to say here that I am first and foremost a people guy. Won’t getting involved with these technologies simply be a distraction, a boost more for my ego than necessarily moving my commitments forward?”

Hi Mike:

Let me restate the question. Why should I, as an OD professional, concerned with the human aspects of organizations, have to understand web technologies? As Andrew McAfee says, “it’s not not about the technology”. McAfee addresses much of this question in his post, so I won’t repeat what he says.

All organizations use information and communication technologies to some extent, whether it be email, data management systems or more recently, social media. The one technology that is changing how we work, learn and relate is the Internet, especially the web. Many information technologies are just exploiting Internet connectivity in some way. Saying we don’t need to understand the Internet is like saying we didn’t need to understand speaking, reading or writing to do our jobs before. In my experience, most organizational issues boil down to one factor: communication. The Internet is where we communicate; from voice to data to social networking.

With this ubiquitous connectivity, more of our work is at a distance, either in space or time. Telework and distributed teams are becoming the norm. If we are going to support people doing this kind of work, we need to understand it. However, working online takes practice to be proficient. It is difficult to understand theoretically. For example, even though I have worked online for over a decade, I did not really understand Twitter until I used it.

But can’t we understand these communications media theoretically, or get advice from our IT department? For example, a doctor does not have to have suffered a disease before discussing how to treat it. Many academics in business school have never started a company, yet they can talk about the fundamentals of business.

Why is the Web, and especially social media, so different?

I think that one fundamental difference about social media is they have a strong influence on the user, very much in a McLuhanesque medium/message/massage way. Those who come to web media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. You cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors that you have in your primary language. Furthermore, if you do get to an advanced level in your new language, its idioms, metaphors and culture may have had a strong influence on how you think in that language.

Social media change the way we communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing (and thinking) will change. Use Twitter for some time and you will get a sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Patterns emerge over time. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how you react to being apart from friends. Social media can change the way you think.

When you adopt a new web social medium you are also starting on the bottom, or at the single node level. You have to make connections with what will become your network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like writing a blog post. Starting over, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.

Yes, you need to use the tools in order to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare you for this. Therefore you won’t know what you’re talking about until you learn the new language of online networks. The only way to learn a new language is through practice.

Social media are new languages.