Learning from Each Other

June 30, 2008 at 5:09 pm · Filed under Collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Learning, Web 2.0

A colleague of mine teaches a course in Online Social Networks the Computer Science department at Boston University. He’s done it for two years now, and his teach method has come under some scrutiny, for what he does is pretty novel in a traditional university setting. During the course, each student needs to create a web site as part of required credits for the course work. What my friend doesn’t do it is either to tell them how to do it, or provide him with tools for web site building. He gives them enough direction so that they know where to look and get started, but after that they are on their own — almost. What he aims for is that the students will ask each other what they are doing, where they found good (free) tools to build web sites, and so on. Most of his students come away delighted with the course, though there are always a few who complain that B. doesn’t teach them anything. They overlook, of course, the fact that they actually learned a good deal.

I had similar experience recently during Enterprise 2.0 and the blogging panel that I was on (see my blog on this at Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness). I am saving some bits about content and conversation for a more comprehensive note here on the AppGap anon. We on the panel had decided that we would like to do less talking and more listening so we did not do a usual panel with powerpoints. We merely introduced ourselves and started a conversation, intending to be open to questions and comments from the audience. We ended with a really rich discussion about blogging for business (that was, in fact, not really the topic we’d prepared to discuss). The audience participation was great, including a lot of information about blogging that we as panelists would never have known. Yet, in the conference wrap-up session, I took note when one of the attendees offered the comment that she was very unhappy with panels that didn’t provide content. That is, she came to be taught, and not to enter into a conversation. (We also had attendees who were thrilled with the way it all turned out.)

Learning from each other is a recurring theme for John Seely Brown (JSB), whom I heard talk a few months ago at a client’s. What he said was, “Learning from each other matters.” Speaking of formal education, he said, “we learn from other people in the room, not from graduate school.” Think of the best courses, the best seminars that you attend. Aren’t these the ones that generate the most conversation, that inspire people to share their stories? Learning occurs socially, which is why he feels strongly that Web/Enterprise 2.0 represents the future of learning.

At a subsequent panel on “Developing a Next Generation Workforce,” led by Mike Gotta. That was another great exercise in learning from each other. The conversation wanted to talk mostly about the “millennials/Generation Y” and the impact of their entrance into the workforce. An Xer piped up and made a comment that makes me understand how this shift to social learning is generational. She said, “It all goes back to how we learned in elementary school. When I was in school, we were told that when we finished our assignment we could work quietly on homework or other reading. The Gen-Yers are told that when they finish, they should help someone else.”

I see this as all of a piece: learning to share, learning to learn from others. The role of the instructor? As Andrew McAfee put it (in yet another session at E2.0), the best advice he received when he started teaching at Harvard was to “trust your students,” that is, to set up a classroom environment in which the students are learning not (just) from the teachers, but from each other and collectively building up knowledge.

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Enterprise 2.0 — The State of E2.0 as per Practitioners

June 20, 2008 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Change Management, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Reviews, Web 2.0, social networks

I’m still integrating and thinking about what I heard at the E2.0 conference in Boston a week back. My thinking was helped by a review of the excellent videos that are now available. Andrew McAfee moderated a panel whose membership was drawn from people who presented their (successful) case studies of E2.0 implementation. The panel represented a number of perspectives on introducing social tools:

• Simon Revell, of Pfizer,* adopted a “just do it” approach, introducing the tools, creating edgy introductory videos (see “Meet Charlie”), and nurtures the successes.
• Ned Lerner, Sony Computer Enterprises, responded to top-down management directives to use these tools (easy in a company whose business is internet gaming).
• Pete Fields, Wachovia*, who developed a concept for an integrated tool set that connected to corporate communications policies, and worked across the organization for 18 months to get buy-in before launching.
• Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, CIA*, who were inspired by Cal Andres “The Wiki and the Blog” to explore Wikipedia and see how discussion and history pages could naturally support the way that intelligence analysts work.

(* indicates a video of this case study is also available, on the same page linked above).

McAfee started by acknowledging that Enterprise 2.0 hasn’t yet taken over the planet, for a variety of reasons:

• The tools are not yet perfected
• Management is impeding adoption in some way
• Users are slow to take up the tools

There was general agreement that the current use within these organization is less than 10% of the employee populations, but each see that the growth is continuous in a positive direction.

Many of the “lessons learned” from these early adopters will sound quite familiar to those of us who have been on the leading edge of introducing technologies for collaboration and knowledge management into organizations, but there are some new twists. What works:

• Acknowledge and reward the early adopters and champions
• Pfizer has consultants available to help business groups get started and use tools appropriately
• Change management is essential. Wachovia involved organizational development, organizational pyschologists, and corporate communications, but still underestimated the difficulty of traction beyond the early adopters
• Look for ways to implement the tools “in the flow,” as part of work. Look especially for existing work processes that can be vastly improved and implement there. Organize around big problems, and don’t keep all the social tool usage under the radar.

Cautionary tales:

• Middle management can be harder to convince than senior management. (They are rewarded for “making the trains run on time,” not for encouraging people to spend time learning new tools.)
• It’s faulty to assume that what’s true on the web will work the same way in the enterprise
• Fight against lockdown. Turn down requests by users to have “private” spaces accessible by only a few people (yes, this one from the CIA!)
• Not all organizations are ready for transparency.
• Don’t assume that because everyone can have a voice that decisions will be made by the majority (the crowd). Leaders must learn to use the opinions of the crowd to inform and shape decisions, not to make them.

True to the spirit of web 2.0, the conference site (linked above) remains available as a community archive of presentations, comments, and interactions. What is the spirit? I liked Pete Fields’ definition of “Enterprise 2.0:”

Connecting people for the purpose of deriving business value

Browsing through this site should help you find people with whom you might connect to delve deeper and find more… to help with your own journeys.

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Community 2.0 (Part 3: Leading Enterprise 2.0 Companies)

June 3, 2008 at 4:10 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Culture, Enterprise 2.0

One of the highlights, for me, of Community 2.0 was to hear Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com talk about the kind of company he built. Two of the fundamental strategic choices that have made Zappos so successful:

1. The decision to shift from shipping orders through suppliers to running its own 24*7 warehouse. This decision cost the company 25% in revenues, but made it clear that the focus of the company and its brand would be on customer service.
2. The equation of customer service = brand = culture. Zappos is rigorous about its core values and the culture that it wants to maintain, to the extent that 50% of an employees performance review is based on how the employee lives the companies core values and culture.

Among those core values is #6, Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication. Zappos goes all the way with communication, including its own Twitter feed (at http://www.twitter.zappos.com — when Twitter is working — you can click through to see the employee tweets.) You can also read (and you can assume that Tony does, too) the comments of customers that fill up the main page. This is open, this is leadership. This is being able to respond in the age of networks.

Today, I just read through Andrew McAfee’s post about Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. McAfee voiced the frustration he hears from his students who think that no other company can be like Google because it is just unique. He reports how Schmidt responded to the question of what other managers can learn from Google:

“They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”

In my book, Net Work, I offer two assumptions about leadership in this new era:

• That everyone in a network can influence the relationships in and thereby the outcomes of the network
• That the work of leaders is primarily to to create and maintain the conditions that enable relationships

It’s good to start seeing evidence of truly great companies that are led by people who have this respect for, who listen to, and who nurture communications. This is the future of work.

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Community 2.0 (Part 2: Measuring Success)

May 28, 2008 at 4:18 pm · Filed under Reviews

Francois Gossieaux led a workshop and panel on measuring progress and success in business communities. The presentation part of the session was derived from the preliminary results of the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study. Tribalism? Well, yes, because we are social creatures. And because we are social creatures, participating in online communities taps into our need to connect. Online communities also work because people want to help and be helped. I saw this first at Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid- to late 1980s. Our community tool, VAXNOTES, was designed for business (getting help with technical problems), but also adopted for social purposes (cats, dogs, ballroom dancing, dining in Geneva). Nancy White did a fabulous job on Tuesday of the conference mapping the history of communities. (Be sure to browse to parts 2 and 3.)

So what’s different now? Francois and panelists Mark Yolton (SAP Community Network), Ed Moran (Director of Product Innovation at Deloitte) and Rachel Makool (Sr. Director of Community Development, eBay) described an industry landscape in which it is imperative for companies to have a community strategy — for connecting customers, partners, users. The research found a diverse array of usage scenarios, business objectives, and strategic goals, which were elaborated by the panel members:

• At SAP, customer service has saved $10M in support costs by using a community-based model
• eBay’s work with communities has shown that sellers who participate in communities get higher ratings from buyers

These are two ways that companies can measure the success of the investment in creating online communities. The survey also delves into “what gets measured” and there is the usual distinction between qualitative data (web analytics and business measures) and qualitative data (”which community features contribute the most to effectiveness”). I liked the distinction of looking at transaction metrics vs. engagement metrics.

It is inevitable that as more companies adopt community strategies, for whatever reason, the nature of work inside the company will change. Employees will be more tapped into customers and more likely to be reaching outside the boundaries of the organization.  Because business is business, it is also inevitable that there will be a push for good metrics and measures. This study (which is ongoing) is surfacing many of the important issues and opportunities for how companies will build and use communities. The good news is that what the study has found (and what many attendees at C2.0 are demonstrating) is that communities can be built with predictable success. We have been working in online communities long enough to understand the pitfalls and the success factors. Being in communities will be a way of life at work.

The better (or perhaps best) news — and the parting message from this workshop is that once communities have been introduced into an organization, they are transformational (”game-changing”). They have a huge impact on the organization and offer new job roles and responsibilities, closer relationships, greater transparency, and a better work environment.

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Community 2.0 (Part 1: Bootcamp)

May 24, 2008 at 1:11 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0

I was pleased to be invited to talk about my book and “net work” at the recent Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas. The conference was focused on building online communities, community platforms, and the business case for extending the conversations among employees, customers, and partners through mediated and facilitated online means. The conference attracted a community owners and developers from a broad range of industries and nonprofits and afforded a lot of interaction.

Much of the interaction at C2.0 and since has been on Twitter, which was the “star” of the conference. I think that many people who attended had not started tweeting before, but certainly the activity from all those at the conference who tagged tweets with “C20″ made believers out of many. See the C20

To maximize my own learning experience from the conference, I attended pre-conference workshops and the keynote sessions. This experience helped me to understand better how work will change as more and more of our work and interactions will be conducted in these online communities. Two experienced online community builders (who offer the bootcamp as a consulting service to individual companies), Kathleen Gilroy and Sylvia Marino conducted the workshop”Bootcamp: Building a 2.0 Community.”

Their definition of a what constitutes a “2.0 Community” succinctly suggests the boundaries and features:

• It provides a repository and interface
• For the collection and distribution
• Of structured and unstructured content

The key to building a 2.0 community is working within a framework that includes:

1. Defining the business goals
2. Defining the audience (for many communities, the audience are consumers or customers, for many others an internal base of employees)
3. Defining the reach (type of content, extent of distribution)
4. Defining the business commitment (including the roles that are necessary
5. Defining the business stakeholders

Given this foundation, it’s then possible to think about what social tools can best help achieve the goals. And we have so many now: blogs, Microblogs(Twitter), Comments, Forums, Wiki, Photo / Video Uploading (publishing), Embed code, Widgets, Onsite Social Networking (friends lists, connections), Tagging, Rating, RSS, Podcasts, Social graphs… Gilroy commented that Amazon.com, on a single page, provides 24 social components, from book reviewing, to those who bought similar books, to tagging, ratings, comments, and so on.

So with so many to choose from, how do you construct a strategy? Kathleen and Silvia described how to use a “playbook” in a way that it can help to continuously evolve in conjunction with the foundation. The playbook goes through an iterative inquiry:

• The Promise (why) – why the ability for people to engage will enhance or improve the business experience
• The Tools (how)– select the tool(s) designed to fit the job, one appropriate for large or small groups and appropriate for the mode of interaction you want to foster.
• Bargain (what) – understand the value that introducing or providing a specific social capability will be to the target audience and to the community owners/initiators as well as the transaction costs

The workshop attendees were broken into three groups, each of which had to come up with a “play” for a particular strategy area. I worked with the group looking at a social network play for an established professional community. The promise of such communities (particularly inside organizations) is access to expertise, both to answer immediate questions but also to have role models and best practices to follow. We agreed that the tools should provide simple social networking that include discussions. There are a number of platforms to choose from on the Internet; many of these let you start a community for free, and then charge you when you want advanced services (like customization). One of the bargains for participants to share best practices is in developing a reputation for expertise.

The foundations and playbook are are deceptively simple. The actual work, of course, is much more complex; the more complex the set of interactions, the more complex the bargain will be, for example. It’s also important to be continually following a pattern of “probe, sense, and respond” as the plays are developed and introduced. You need to be able to back off something that is not working, and to reinforce good behaviors.

Some of the slides from the bootcamp are available on SlideShare.

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Knowledge Management 2020

May 7, 2008 at 9:11 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, KM, Scenarios, Web 2.0

Via Shawn Callahan this morning, a link to a scenario about the future of work by Dave Pollard. (These two apparently had a swell conversation in Melbourne this week.) In his post, Knowledge Management in 2020, Dave describes the work lives of two professional consultants at a global consultancy, “Omni,” and an entrepreneur who is an Omni client.

Omni’s business is focused on “personal productivity improvement, facilitation, cultural anthropology, and design and communication skills development services.” Managing the rich flow of information available via blogs and RSS feeds is core to Omni’s work; for itself and its clients, it digests, interprets, summarizes, and offers recommendations on the immeasurably large flow of raw information now available. Omni has “abandoned” their traditional website in favor of a its collection of blogs and interactive directory of people.

This is obviously a vision of the future of work for a small slice of the population, but it also triggers thinking about the importance of rediscovering (as Dave says) the value of information intermediaries, and this need will apply in many business and work scenarios. RSS was supposed to help us filter and customize, but Pollard supposes a legion of these intermediaries like the Omni professionals described in the scenario.

What a great conversation that must have been! Wish I’d been there. Now I wonder if future applications will allow us to enable eavesdropping via podcast…

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Dot Voting and the Four “R”s: Prediction Markets, Part 2

April 28, 2008 at 3:20 pm · Filed under Change Management, Collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Prediction markets, Web 2.0

In my first post on this topic, I looked at how prediction markets can work like a stock market — buying and trading “shares” that reflect a specific value, such as a ship date, sales forecast, and so on.  Another popular way to use prediction market technologies is an opinion forecast. Employees (or members of a community) can vote on the likelihood that an event will occur or the positive or negative impact of an event.   For instance, one person might enter a value range that indicates “I think there is a 25% to 45% chance that this will happen,” another person might think the probability is 40-50%, another may use wider or narrower ranges, etc.  In this variant of a prediction market, the “winner” is the person who comes closest to the final calculated aggregate percentage within the narrowest margin. For example, if the collective intelligence says the answer is 45%, then the user with the narrower range (40% to 50%) gets more points.

I happened to be in a room with a pair of scenario planning experts and a leadership development consultant during this informal discussion with Maurice Balick when we noticed the power of seeing others’ predictions. We’ve all used facilitation methods that rely on “dot voting” to display the collective wisdom in a room.  Dot voting is a great technique to use when there are multiple courses of action identified during a workshop or meeting and it’s important to narrow down the choices or see where people’s heads are at. Everyone in the room gets a certain number of colored adhesive dots and can use these as votes on particular topics or items. As dots accumulate on one or two of a long list, it’s easy to see where the room is, collectively.

Balick had previously explained that Newsfutures uses four “R”s as design principles in setting up prediction markets. These must be designed into the environment for successful adoption of prediction markets:

• Relevance - it has to matter to the company or participants
• Rewards - appropriate rewards (monetary rewards, stickers, tee-shirts) need to be in place
• Recognition - people who are the most successful should have “bragging rights”
• Relationship - the market must engender conversation

“Aha!” I said again (but only to myself this time). It comes back to relationships and conversations. While the specific value of the knowledge created by the collective wisdom provides value data to management (who must ultimately decide and act), the process of participating in this medium sparks conversations: it’s about getting people to see not just where they agree with others, but also to see that there are a range of positions possible. By seeking the outliers in estimating and rating, there is the opportunity for the isolated expert or group who may have special knowledge to be recognized and listened to.

When we facilitate a dot-voting session, it’s always important to understand the minority view. The workplace of the future is inclusive; tools like prediction markets  can leverage the necessary diversity.

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Employee Participation in the Flow: Prediction Markets, Part 1

April 20, 2008 at 12:27 pm · Filed under Collective intelligence, Prediction markets, Web 2.0, social networks

It’s been nearly four years since Time Magazine published “The End of Management?”, an article about the emergence of prediction markets. It’s been about that long since I heard Bernardo Huberman of HP labs talk at a Complexity and Social Networks Symposium directed by David Lazer. Also about that long since I was introduced to Art Hutchinson, whose blog, Mapping Strategy, includes many entries on prediction markets.

More recently, fellow blogger Jenny Ambrozek and her collaborator Vicky Axelrod published an article in Inside Knowledge Magazine, “Co-creating an organisation’s future“, McKinsey published “The promise of prediction markets: A roundtable,” and the New York Times writes, “Betting to Improve the Odds.”

Here on TheAppGap, prediction markets creep into our conversations but we haven’t brought them to the forefront: Jenny Ambrozek has speculates on how prediction markets might bring more diversity of opinions to geographically dispersed organizations. Jon Husband on Gaming and the Workplace of the Future suggests that video game technologies will enter the workplace; I see prediction markets as perhaps (though Jon may dispute me) an aspect of bringing gaming into the workplace.

All these weak signals got very loud last week, after I spent a morning (hosted by the aforementioned Art Hutchinson) with Maurice Balick of NewsFutures, and a number of concepts started resonating strongly. I can’t cover them all in one blog so am starting a series on some of the ideas that started meshing.

The basics of prediction markets are well covered in the various articles referenced above, and so I’ll just do a brief summary to kick off this series.

In its pure form, a prediction market works like a stock market (people buy and sell shares) in which the stock is a bet, which can be:

• An opinion about the probability of a particular event’s occurrence at a specific time. Will this product ship on its scheduled date?
• An opinion about a specific value of a forecast item. What are the estimated sales of a product? What should we price this product at?
• An opinion about the viability of a new product. What is the likelihood that this product will succeed in the marketplace?

The software applications that manage these markets inside companies tap into the “wisdom of crowds,” (as so beautifully exposited by James Surowiecki in his book by that name). Research and experience with these markets has shown that the aggregated opinion of employees (and sometimes of customers) is almost always more accurate than the forecasts of experts or senior managers. It enables those with marginal or distance voices in the organization to be heard, it leverages a potentially vast diversity of opinions and can shape the way that a company thinks. Note that these tools do not obviate the role of management in decision-making, but rather provide management with augmented intelligence to inform their decisions.

One of the notions that intrigues me so much about these applications (and there are more than I’ve suggested above) is that it enhances the potential for employee engagement and participation. John Seeley Brown has said that Web 2.0 is “a profoundly participatory medium.” Companies like Google and Best Buy have integrated prediction markets into their business processes, and many more companies are introducing them.

Yet, the AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 shows that less than one third of survey respondents understand prediction markets, while the rest reported to be somewhat familiar (19%), vaguely familiar (22%) or having no idea (27%). The signals will continue to get stronger, and I think must, for these applications, brought into the enterprise, make for potentially profound employee participation and can perhaps bridge the social gaps between employees and management.

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Approaching Web 2.0 at Boeing

April 15, 2008 at 5:36 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, KM

I heard a great talk by Jim Coogan this morning on the monthly SIKM call that is hosted by Stan Garfield of HP. Jim leads the Knowledge Process team in Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems group. Jim described a rich tapestry of KM capabilities that support Boeing’s definition of knowledge management: ” a disciplined holistic approach to effectively utilize expertise for competitive advantage.”

Boeing’s KM community is mature in that knowledge management expertise is spread widely across the company; practitioners in different roles in different divisions work as a community of practice to provide tools, methods, and techniques that can be applied to specific business problems and opportunities. Jim’s current approach and attitude to the onslaught of Enterprise 2.0 is, I think, typical of that of mature KM folks, and so I’d like to highlight a few of the topics that came up on the call.

• The past year has seen an upsurge of wikis, blogs, and the use of RSS feeds. He cited 300 active wikis as well as instances of senior managers who blog regularly.
• Instant messaging is in very wide use, and is used very specifically for getting business done.
• They are using SharePoint (MOSS) and getting ready to deploy SharePoint’s MySites, which they see as an opportunity to help people make connections and spread knowledge around the company even more.
• New hires need a jumpstart on building their social networks, so Boeing is careful to make sure that new hires get introduced to people who can help them build their networks quickly.

Despite the availability of new tools, many of the technical communities continue to use good old fashioned LISTSERVs, and Jim does not see that these will go away for a while. LISTSERVs are perhaps the original social tool. As I have seen, and as Jim suggested, they are a way to build a community, for people to get assistance and introductions into a specific knowledge space very quickly, and allow a great deal of freedom for conversation within a secure, behind-the-firewall environment. The challenge for companies who want to embrace Enterprise 2.0 is to integrate the LISTSERV content into the rich ecosystem of social tagging, linking, and expertise location.

Recall that leveraging expertise in their very definition of KM. I believe that for technology companies, and possibly for many others as well, it’s vital to be able to “connect the dots” as Jim says and bring experts together. Moreover, the big gap right now is having intelligent agents that anticipate what you need, bring it to you, and tell you how to connect with those others.

My previous blog on this topic touched on how important it is for search engines to return information about our connections with people who may have the expertise and experience we need to tap. We must also arrange for people to bump into each other (in physical and virtual spaces) who may not know that there is experience available for the tapping. Jim calls this the art of making “accidental collisions” — causing people to bump into each other so they can whatever sparks may be, will ignite.

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Collaboration Quiz

April 5, 2008 at 9:20 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

Colleagues Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk from Anecdote, along with Nancy White have pleased a teaser on the Anecdote site about their work-in-progress on collaboration. They offer a quick quiz on collaboration capability.

[Update: The full paper Building a Collaborate Workplace is now available.]

They have made a useful distinction about three types of collaboration: team, community, and network, which enables them to offer a quiz with yes/no answers in these three categories. I like the quiz and I like the distinctions even more, as they actually offer an historical perspective on collaboration.

• Teams (a defined set of people working on a focused deliverable), and the importance of teams to workplace performance. Our workplaces were full of books on teams, training, and team metaphors.
• Communities (in which the boundaries are more loosely defined and there are more likely to be shared learning goals rather than fixed deliverables). We became conscious of communities and working with communities in the mid90s, as the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger spread through the knowledge management community.
• Networks (undefined and unbounded groups of people who contribute to and draw from the value produced by the network as a whole). We are still in the early stages of understanding and harnessing networks in organizations.

Tools have evolved — or made possible — each of these levels. Project management tools for teams, collaboration software for communities, and Web/E2.0 capabilities for networks. Here’s one of the network questions from the quiz:

• People can recount stories of where they have found information from someone else’s book-marks, blogs or wikis that made a significant contribution to their work. True/False?

Funny, we couldn’t even have asked this question a year ago.

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