I’m not going to comment on the general structural issues and dynamics, as they’re reasonably obvious. Suffice it to say that using wikis and blogs can easily become another form of ongoing 360-degree review process, running continuously.
Managers might think the lines of communication are open, but an unwillingness to listen to tough issues leaves many underlings fearful of speaking frankly. Rebecca Dube reports
‘Hi there boss, I just wanted to let you know things are going great! Really great. In general. Yeah … um, though, there are a few issues. Like, the marketing plan? That you drew up? Is not working. At all."
"Hmmm … I’m pretty busy now. Can we talk later?"
"Um, sure. It’s just that the numbers are sliding really badly, and we’re running out of - "
"Sorry, gotta take this call."
Sound familiar? No one likes bad news. But new research shows that unwillingness to hear tough messages is the biggest blind spot for bosses.
"There is, in general, too much fear in organizations," says Patrick Barwise, emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School.
He and a colleague analyzed more than 4,000 U.S. managers’ 360-degree reviews - so called because they incorporate feedback from subordinates and co-workers as well as superiors.
"The gap between managers’ self-evaluations and colleagues’ assessments is widest when it comes to gauging receptiveness to hearing about difficult issues," Dr. Barwise and Sean Meehan, professor of marketing and change management at IMD business school in Switzerland, wrote in April’s issue of the Harvard Business Review.
The biggest disconnect showed up when rating managers’ abilities to "Encourage others to express their views, even contrary ones," and "Listen willingly to concern expressed by others."
In other words, bosses think their "open door policy" is working well, while their underlings feel like they’re talking to a brick wall.
[ Snip … ]
One culprit is lack of time. Listening to a problem and solving it takes longer than nodding along to "everything’s great" updates. Of course, that’s time well spent if it prevents disaster in the long run, but too many companies forget that perspective.
Some companies actively try to foster an environment of openness. Dr. Barwise points to the example of Toyota, where any employee - no matter how junior - is empowered to stop the assembly line if he or she sees a problem.
[ Snip … ]
Ironically, Dr. Barwise thinks that as the world economy increasingly struggles, creating more bad news for business, the tendency for managers to evade hard truths only grows.
"I think it’s getting worse," he says.
Employee - Speaking truth to power
How do you talk so your boss will listen? Some tips:
Pick the right boss. If you work for a Stalin-type, all your lovely communication skills will be for naught. Keep a low profile and work on your résumé instead.
Present factual evidence. Make your case with data, not opinions. It helps if you’re right, too.
Don’t be a gloomy Gus. Discuss flaws in the context of making the company stronger, and focus on the benefits of fixing them.
Don’t sit on it. If you spot a problem, raise it in conversation as soon as possible.
Boss - Can you handle the truth?
If you’re the boss, here are some tips on encouraging honest communication so you find out what you need to know from your employees:
Repetition, repetition, repetition. You can’t declare an "open-door policy" on the first day of work and expect it to sink in. If you want truthful feedback, ask for it regularly.
Don’t shoot the messenger. Sure, you know that, but putting it into practice is hard. If you freak out when you hear about a cost overrun, chances are you won’t hear about the next one.
The truth takes time. If you rush through meetings and give your employees the impression that you never have time for them, they’re less likely to come to you with important concerns.
If your company does 360-degree reviews, pay attention to them.
I wrote this post about three months ago for my personal blog. Today I was talking with a colleague about it, decided to re-read it, and have now gone through and edited it (in an attempt at greater clarity). I hope it adds to this conversation on the future of work, and I’d also be delighted to learn what anyone may think of it … good, bad or indifferent.
Gary Hamel has called for fundamental management innovation in his recently-published book The Future of Management. This call to exploration, experimentation and action is aligned with the emergence of the much-debated arena of Enterprise 2.0.
Here’s a key excerpt:
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This may not be a detailed design spec for a 21st-century management system, but I doubt it’s far off. Argue with me if you like, but I’m willing to bet that Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0.
Most of us grew up in a "post-industrial" society. We are now on the verge of a post-managerial society, perhaps even a post-organizational society.
Before you object, let me assure you that this doesn’t imply a future without managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn’t wipe out heavy industry, so the dawning of a post-managerial society won’t produce a world free of executives and administrators. Yet it does herald a future in which the work of managing will be performed less and less by "managers". To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery.
While Management 2.0 won’t completely supplant Management 1.0, the two versions aren’t entirely compatible. There are going to be conflicts. Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millenium won’t be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations. Richard Florida sees the same battle shaping up. In The Rise of the Creative Class, he puts it bluntly: "The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization." This is, perhaps, the most critical and intractable management trade-off of all, and therefore, the one most worthy of inspired innovation.
It will take more than advances in technology to issue in the post-managerial age. As I noted earlier, management and organizational innovation often lags far behind technological innovation. Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
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It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of consumer-based social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into web services though the use of APIs … are finding their ways into the workplace. Why wouldn’t they ? After all they are the means by which we are discovering how human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment. People have always been creating and building up "... knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things."
The 2.0 label is said to denote a more interactive, less static environment. Whether we like it or not, we are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and (thus) static form, to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information. Because these flows feed the activities of organizations large and small, they necessarily demand to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs — what we call knowledge work.
What today we call Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process and the analysis and control of operational activities. These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception. Thus, as Hamel asserts, it’s useful if not essential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific (and relatively static) constellations on an organization chart. See all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail
I believe that we need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making. I am not arguing that we need to replace hierarchy holus-bolus … rather, I am suggesting that the combined capabilities of information systems and social computing, and two decades of widespread experience with team and organizational development processes permits centralization (read hierarchy) where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary … both centralization and decentralization.
That both centralization and decentralization of information flows in the hands of knowledge workers can operate simultaneously and effectively is, I think, a significant state change, and should be used to inform the basic assumptions about the design of knowledge work.
As for the management innovation called for by Hamel … it is my belief that the organizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 - 50 years represent a large and pretty coherent body of work that stretches from Participative Work Design through QWL, quality circles, socio-technical systems approaches, self-directed and self-managing teams, GE-style "workouts", inclusive and participative large-scale strategic change methods and dialogue-and-consensus building models and approaches to "management" (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.) like Future Search and Open Space.
The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulled into place over the last several decades as software and integrated information systems have brought constant flows of information to the process of designing, developing and delivering products and services. This in turn has led to fragmentation of efforts ay productivity as well as potentially making it easier, faster and more effective to create flows that are integrated and focused. The trick is to be able to do both and choose which is necessary why and when.
Also, now we more and more often live and work in networks as well as hierarchies. The principles cited in the paragrapsh above have developed over the past several decades to soften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchical work and organizational design. The daily and copious flows of information both internally and from customers and markets essentially dictate, now, that much knowledge work takes shape as projects or as time-limited initiative. These require collaboration and the horizontal discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can best be put to use.
The architectural challenge is to design and implement both work processes and the ways humans interact (with both the work and each other) intelligently whilst allowing for change(s) as needed. That means understanding much better the structure and dynamics of networks and the new influence of greater transparency when addressing issues such as decisions about what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved and why (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), what is individual or group activity, and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities supervised,
Many examples of these factors and influences have appeared on the shelves as the management, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores have expanded rapidly during the past two decades. The experimentation with inclusive, participative and somewhat democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the core dynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web.
As similar tools, services and dynamics begin to penetrate our workplaces, I expect we will seek methods, practices and philosophies that track closely in parallel with the process of enquiry, exploration, sensemaking, negotiation and implementation set out by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge approaches to intractable issues and organizational complexity.
I think there is an important coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades or so. To reiterate, as this OD framework has developed much of it was aimed, bit by bit, at mitigating the harsher effects of having to lead and manage hierarchically under old models while striving to discover and use what actually works. Dave Pollard, a well-known knowledge management expert, calls these "workarounds", and has often suggested that most traditional management methods are becoming less and less useful but are still in place as the proxies for status and power. He and I both believe that generally people want to do good and effective work and so keep at it, constantly developing and using work-arounds. This is OD at its most basic … discovering what works best when people need to cooperate and collaborate to get things done and meet objectives, and then working at "learning" it, integrating it into the way things are done around here.
OD principles "understand" and play nice with Web 2.0 participative and collaborative dynamics.
I think OD has suffered from being seen as "soft" and a "nice-to-have-time-to-do", especially in the chaotic and ambiguous environment of the first decade of the 21st century. While it is a maxim in the OD field that "the soft stuff is the hard stuff", this can be and often is brushed aside or put down by the hard-nosed management hard-asses, the "I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack" crowd.
Clearly we need both objectives, metrics and well-defined processes AND enough slack and support to help people learn, adapt and work around ineffective or obsolete policies, practices and processes. I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a coherent and pertinent model available for working effectively in Enterprise 2.0. However it is not seen today as the dominant "management" model.
The dynamics generated by today’s networked knowledge workers using lightweight, easy-to-use social computing tools and web services welded together with existing integrated information systems are similar in reach, scope and pace to the the challenges explored by the field of organizational development … only with more regular frequency and greater intensity.
Taken together as a coherent management framework, perhaps the fundamental principles of organizational development and learning represent the beginnings of the innovation in management Gary Hamel is suggesting we need. Another of the great management thinkers, Stan Davis, suggested as much twenty years ago at the end of Chapter 3 in his 1987 book Future Perfect:
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"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it. What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company (see expanded definition above)as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.
Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both."
… as the constant flow of information and interaction is likely to never cease (unless there is a major outage in Internet service at some point in time, though that has not yet happened).
And yet, it can be argued that the ways we work with the constant flows of information are still very new. We are coming out of a good half-century of "work design" in which much information and knowledge was highly structured. Indeed, organizational structures (the architecture of the ways in which knowledge is put to work) have been designed to ensure that the flows of information and knowledge went "up" to the top, to the small executive group who watch, think, strategize and direct.
We used to … and still do … speak of "reporting relationships", as in "who, or what job, do you (or does your job) report to ?". As I think many people realize, over time that kind of structure tends to ensure that the kinds of information that "flow up" becomes edited (edit the bad news out, or frame it so that it is acceptable).
Given that we are arguably moving headlong into a new environment for working with information and knowledge in constant flows, I often find myself wondering what will be next .. and then next .. and then next .. in the endless stream of applications that help us manipulate, manage and sometimes mangle the process of writing and publishing to the Web.
The Web is now a major part of hundreds of millions of peoples’ lives. Personal publishing of some form or another, whether it’s using a wiki with your team or is called blogging or something else, won’t be going away any time soon.
As we use software and the Internet more and more for working with information and knowledge it is becoming clearer and clearer that every individual has her or his own working style (have you ever watched over your friend’s, or your sister’s, or your dad’s shoulder whilst they are doing something on the computer, or on the web ? I’ll bet you’re just like me, and everyone else I have ever seen … you just instinctively want to reach out ands steer, because they aren’t doing it the way you do) …
On the Web, info flows in to your conscious awareness all the time .. continuously. Whether it’s via an RSS aggregator, or through some search activity, or just by browsing and link-hopping. You’re always watching, reading .. using your cognitive capabilities and style to *interact* with the flows of information passing in front of your eyes.
The quest has been underway for some time … and won’t stop … to design, make and offer applications that give an individual maximum time for reading and thinking whilst (by definition) one is at the center of this continuous flow of information. Ideally, most operations - most anything you want to do, other than typing itself - down to one click, but it’s not likely that we’ll get every operation down to that level of simplicity. But many, if not most will be.
In the blogging / personal publishing environment, publishing all sorts of other digital content (podcasts, self-created mp3’s, photo slide shows, video clips) is quickly becoming as easy as publishing text, links and images are now. It will soon be the case for knowledge workers everywhere to employ formidably simple *information pivots* which will allow you, the personal publisher, read, think, write and express yourself as clearly and elegantly as possible … whilst still offering you significant flexibility, versatility and power to address the wide range of individual’s personal publishing habits.
This will require workers to become more effective at managing both theior cognitive capacity and the way(s) in which they put that to work in the ongoing, never-ending, flow of information. And this too is a never-ending quest.
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.
Share: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
UPDATE: The post by my blog colleague Jim Ware directly below motivated me to first look for, and once I found it, decide to re-post this item here on the AppGap blog. The first time I posted it I mistakenly used the date from the original post (September 26, 2006) and so the item posted to the AppGap blog back in the archives rather than on the front page.
I sincerely hope no one gets too cross with me for doing so, and if they do, I am sure I will hear about it.
But I thought that it might offer some additional interesting perspective to the issue Jim has posted about directly below.
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They Are Your Future Employees … and they will be coming soon to a workplace near you.
The title itself (They are the future; And they’re coming soon to a workplace near you. The next generation of your staff is challenging the accepted ways of doing things in the business world) is evocative of the rest of the article (Lee Rainie explains who they are and why they are different - and what employers need to think about to attract the best.).
From the first paragraph on, the scene is set with an extract from a study carried out by Marc Prensky:
As consultant Marc Prensky calculates it, the life arc of a typical 21-year-old entering the workforce today has, on average, included 5,000 hours of video game playing, exchange of 250,000 e-mails, instant messages, and phone text messages, 10,000 hours of mobile phone use. To that you can add 3,500 hours of time online.
Our work at the Pew Internet Project shows that an American teen is more likely than its parents to own a digital music player such as an iPod, to have posted writing, pictures or video on the internet, to have created a blog or profile on a social networking website such as MySpace, to have downloaded digital content - songs, games, movies or software, and to have snapped a photo or video with a phone.
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Prensky also puts into perspective the age of this new generation of workers, notably in terms of their relationship with and to the Web.
“Today’s younger workers are not ‘little us-es’,” argues Mr Prensky, an educator, gaming expert, and author of Don’t Bother Me, Mom - I’m Learning. “Their preference is for sharing, staying connected, instantaneity, multi-tasking, assembling random information into patterns, and using technology in new ways. Their challenge to the established way of doing things in the business world has already started.”
Those challenges often flow from young workers’ embrace of technologies that have grown up with them. Today’s 21-year-old was born in 1985 - 10 years after the first consumer computers went on sale. When this young worker entered public school in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a computer program called the World Wide Web. Our worker’s college career saw the rise of blogs, Wikipedia, MySpace, Del.icio.us, Skype, podcasts, and YouTube.
And so, the reality is that these young "emigres" at home in the digital world are thrusting their way into a workplace where the royalty still consists of immigrants and illiterates, in terms of the demands of the digital world. There’s a clash in perspective, to say the least.
Now, this 21-year-old and his peers are showing up in human resources offices as digital natives in a world dominated by digital immigrants - elders who often feel less at ease with new technologies. Here are five realities of the digital natives’ lives that must be understood by their new employers:
The 5 realities that employers today must understand and integrate into their practices before seriously thinking about employing this new generation :
*Reality 1: They are video gamers with different expectations about how to learn, work, and pursue careers.
A host of experts has affirmed that today’s young workers have internalised the new realities of work. “Job entrants now do not expect lifetime employment from a single employer,” argues Edward Lawler, co-author of the forthcoming book, The New American Workplace. “To them, the word ‘career’ is plural.”
These attitudes clearly reflect the larger realities of the changing nature of work. Yet there is also some evidence that the ethos of video gaming plays a role. John Beck and Mitchell Wade argue in Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever that games are the “training programs” for young workers (especially males) that help shape the way they behave in a world full of data-streams, where analysis and decisions come at twitch speed, where failure at first is the norm, where the game player is the hero, and where learning takes place informally.
For companies, this puts a premium on designing engaging work that allows workers to make a clear contribution and be rewarded for the same. If “organisation man” has become “gaming man”, then the importance of worker morale is elevated - as is the value of basing work on completed tasks, rather than other measures of work effort such as hours on the job.
“Give them projects to complete and then stand out of the way,” argues James Ware, who helps run Future of Work, an organisation for facilities, IT and human resources professionals based in Prescott, Arizona. “These kids quit when they are frustrated trying to finish a quest that will ‘get them to the next level’.”
*Reality 2: They are technologically literate, but that does not necessarily make them media literate.
Our research has found consistently that the dominant metaphor for the internet in users’ minds is a vast encyclopedia, especially among younger users, who have grown up relying on it to complete school assignments, perhaps too often clipping and pasting from websites into term papers.
Sandra Gisin, who oversees knowledge and information management at reinsurance giant Swiss Re, says her colleagues marvel at the speed with which younger workers communicate and gather information. But she has had bad experiences with younger workers accepting uncritically the top results from a Google search: she says the firm will begin training programmes next year to teach workers how to evaluate information and to stress that “not all the best information is free”.
Dow Jones news organisations have similar worries. They have created programmes for journalism educators and reporters-in-training to drive home the point that journalists should not rely on a web source without checking its origin and confirming the information in other ways. “We drive home the point that it’s not good enough to say, ‘I read it on the internet’, without taking other steps to verify it,” notes Clare Hart, president of Dow Jones Enterprises.
At the same time, younger workers’ comfort with online tools can be a boon to marketing departments. Ms Hart, 45, says younger workers on the staff “convinced us baby boomers” to put more information from Dow Jones conference presentations online and to create podcasts of the best of them. Since then, e-mail offering podcasts is opened about 20 per cent more frequently than traditional marketing e-mail.
*Reality 3: They are content creators and that shapes their notions about privacy and property.
More than half of American teenagers have created and shared content online. They think of the internet as a place where they can express their passions, play out their identities, and gather up the raw material they use for their creations.
So, why shouldn’t a young employee think it clever and fun to post on his blog pictures of Apple computers being delivered to the loading bay at Microsoft headquarters? That is what Michael Hanscom, a temporary employee for a Microsoft vendor, did and was fired for violating the company’s non-disclosure rules.
In the many-to-many broadcast environment of the internet, the prospects for data haemorrhage from companies have grown exponentially. Clearly, companies need to create policies about how internal bloggers should treat company information, what kinds of intellectual property need to be protected, and basic norms of behavior that should guide people who want to create online material.
*Reality 4: They are product and people rankers and that informs their notions of propriety.
This is the wisdom-of-crowds generation that grew up rating peers’ physical attributes (amihotornot.com), pop culture creations (Amazon metacritic.com reviews), teachers’ style and grading practices (ratemyprofessors.com), and products (epinions.com). No surprise, then, that there are websites drawing decent traffic for people to rate their bosses, their clients, and their customers. The tone of online commentary is often racy and retaliatory.
So, organisations might ponder a new clause or two in the policy manual about online etiquette inside and outside the workplace. “Most companies have policies in place against harassment based on things like sex, race, and ethnicity,” says Lynn Karoly, an economist at the RAND Corporation who has studied the 21st century
workplace. “But we should probably create new categories of policies to handle unacceptable online behaviours where liability might emerge.”
*Reality 5: They are multi-taskers often living in a state of “continuous partial attention”, where the boundary between work and leisure is quite permeable.
The ubiquity of gadgets and media allows younger workers to toggle back and forth quickly between tasks for work and chatter with their friends. Many marvel at their capacity to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. An even sharper insight comes from Linda Stone, a technology consultant, who has noted that many technophiles function in a condition she refers to as “continuous partial attention”, where they are scanning all available data sources for optimum inputs.
Those who operate in such a state are not as productive as those who stay on task. They also do not make distinctions between the zones of work and leisure, consumer and producer, education and entertainment. “Their worlds bleed together,” argues Charles Grantham, another principal at the Future of Work. “It is pretty useless to try to draw borders around different spheres for them. It’s better to let them shift among them at their choosing as long as the work gets done.”
Again, companies would be wise to spell out their tolerance levels for the amount of personal activity workers are allowed and their expectations about the availability of workers outside the office and after hours.
Many companies see no option but to embrace the world of digital natives. Agilent Technologies, a top global measurement company, began early this year to distribute iPod Nanos to new employees hired from US college campuses. The Nanos were preloaded with podcasts describing each of the benefits offered by the company, such as the 401(k) retirement plan and options for health insurance. “The college kids loved getting the benefit overviews preloaded on the iPod, while our older workers often preferred to read about these things on our website,” notes human resources manager Cathy Taylor. “There are different generational learning styles.”
Still, the ethic of podcasting information is now spreading through the company and some of those older workers have caught the bug, too. For a recent retirement party, staff from Agilent’s far-flung offices collaborated on a podcast for the retiree. “You Raise Me Up” by Andrea Bocelli was dubbed over the voiced well-wishes and the podcast was played over a WebEx teleconference. “It was a first for a virtual retirement party,” enthuses Taylor. “We’ll be doing it again.”
In a recent keynote at SXSW, Charlene Li of Forrester Research predicted that social networking platforms will be "like air" … "They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be."
More specifically, she broke down the use of such platforms into four components of utility and impact:
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Profiles - universal identities
Relationships - a single social graph
Activities - a social context for activities
Business Models - social influence as a key definer of marketing value
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Here’s an item from the NY Times about recent speculation that Yahoo may join OpenSocial, the Google-led social networking alliance that aims to bring significant degrees of openness to social networking platforms, thus (eventually) stimulating and enhancing ubiquity and pervasive use.
Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial, a Google-led alliance that is developing a common set of standards so developers can create programs that run on many social networks and other Web sites, according to a person with direct knowledge of Yahoo’s plans.
Yahoo’s backing, which could be announced as early as this week, would bring a large base of users to the OpenSocial alliance, which is seen as a counterweight to Facebook’s successful courtship of application developers. The alliance, which was announced in the fall, already includes MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites.
Yahoo’s participation “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial,” said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research.
When asked about Yahoo’s OpenSocial plans, a company spokeswoman said: “Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole. While we are evaluating OpenSocial as an emerging standard, we do not comment on speculation or rumors.”
Yahoo has said it wants to speed up efforts to open its site to outside developers. Although it is not a social network, Yahoo could benefit from third party “social” applications that allow users to share, say, their favorite photos, music or movies with their friends.
I think that much of what is written here at the FASTForward blog by my colleagues also supports the distinct probability that the foundation is being created for the step-by-step (depending upon take-up and implementation) of collaboration and social computing platforms, tools and services which will redefine the dynamics of knowledge work and tie, tightly, into Charlene Li’s four key components of social networking platforms.
Every week or two it seems that another example of ways that software, network dynamics, bidding and negotiation between sets of skills, collaboration, cooperation and similar activities are leading to an emerging synthesis of social networking, brainstorming, collaborative work, predictive markets, and peer-to-peer negotiations (see Michel Bauwen’s work on Peer-to-Peer Economies)
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“Knowledge workers own the means of production in a Knowledge Economy” - P. Drucker
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Kluster is a platform for crowdsourcing and then organizing and putting to use skills, energy and availability on projects and initiatives. It presented (unveiled itself ?) at the recent TED conference in Monterey, California.
Here’s an excerpt of the early review from ReadWriteWeb.
Crowdsourcing firm Kluster officially launched yesterday at the TED conference, which is underway this week in Monterey, California. Founder Ben Kaufman, who bankrolled the company in part with money from the sale of his last company Mophie, has organized a gimmick over the course of the TED conference he hopes will prove Kluster’s worth. Kaufman intends to let TED attendees — and users from around the world — design a completely new product over the course of 72 hours.
The idea behind Kluster is that a group of passionate people working together can come up with better solutions for any decision-making problem than a single person. Whether that is planning an event, designing a new logo, or creating a new product, Kluster believes their system can.
[ Snip … ]
The Kluster system works by breaking down products into manageable chunks. For each chunk (or “phase”), people submit what are called “sparks.” Sparks are proposed solutions for that phase. For each spark, other participants can submit “amps” — which are improvements to that idea. Users also assign “watts” to sparks and amps they like. Watts work kind of like investments. You accrue points based on participation and other factors, and can invest those points (watts) in ideas you like.
Then an algorithm that takes into account “each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history” goes to work to determine which sparks are the best. Companies interested in using the Kluster system, put up cash prizes that are doled out along the way (at the completion of each phase).
It seems more like wirearchy than hierarchy as an organizing principle to me .. though I am sure that pertinent elements of hierarchy based on direction (setting up of initiatives), ranking and filtering will come into play.
It will be very interesting to see how much organized work will resemble this form of organization in another ten years. I hope I am around to see and comment.
GroupSwim provides on-demand software to support online communities both within and outside the enterprise. I spoke recently with Jason Rothbart, their VP of Customer Success. The company was founded with a focus on consumer web communities to provide a better solution for online forums. These forums can use a lot of help as they are often disorganized and the information is not easily accessed. GroupSwim shifted to enterprise collaboration as they saw even greater opportunities there. Their focus is small to mid-size companies who often lack the infrastructure or budget to provide effective tools.
Their goal for internal communities is to facilitate collaboration and enable knowledge sharing across departments, divisions and geographies within a company. GroupSwim sees online communities as ideal for companies that are growing quickly, geographically disbursed, focused on knowledge work, and utilize multiple systems and platforms. Jason comes from a professional services background where he was often involved in a three-way partnership with clients, software vendors, and solution integrators. Jason mentioned a project that leveraged GroupSwim where IBM was the solution integrator, newScale was the software provider and American Express was the customer. The collective group used GroupSwim to share best practices and document project decisions. I certainly agree with his perception that a community tool can lend invaluable support to such efforts. It also allows you to build an accessible knowledge base as a by-product of using a common community platform over email, document storage applications or even wikis that can become silos if not actively managed.
To provide a more robust community platform, GroupSwim has built-in intelligence to help surface what is likely to be most important to community participants. Content is organized by topics and automatically tagged based on semantic analysis that GroupSwim performs on all discussions, documents and emails. You can override these tags and produce your own. Your response to the auto-generated tags helps to train the system. I find that people are often lazy (me included) and do not persist in their tagging so I would find this feature useful. Experts within the community are identified by their behavior and the reaction of the group. This is also done automatically as people are even less likely to vote on content as tag it. The same strategy is applied to content to determine what is valued by the group. You can also see the top contributors to a topic.
You can search on both text and social behavior to uncover content and experts that might meet your needs. RSS feeds on topics are available and you can create watch lists on people, topics, and tags. There is a single sign-on that allows you to enter the GroupSwim environment and access all of your communities.
GroupSwim also offers the ability to create outward facing communities for companies to connect with their customers, prospects, and partners. Their site summarizes some of the advantages of this. “Online customer communities…offer valuable insight on your products or services. You can see on a real-time basis exactly what your customers want and need. The community becomes a channel for identifying opportunities to address problems and/or offer new solutions. Second, customers can help each other reducing your costs. Customers want to swap best practices, tips and tricks and technical solutions. When they are collaborating with each other, they reduce costs for you and enhance the value they get from your solution.”
One example I found intriguing was the support GroupSwim received from a well known financial services blogger, Tim Knight. He writes “The Slope of Hope” offering investment advice. He has a GroupSwim community to allow his readers to collaborate and extend the conservations that Tim starts on his blog. Tim’s GroupSwim community now has over 800 members since its early Fall 07 start. In another example, a sales training firm offers a GroupSwim community to allow their course alumni to stay in touch and share best practices. I find that sales training is often “one and done” - and then forgotten. This follow-on could really help embed the learning. GroupSwim offers a blog, The Diving Board, to support their community.
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Much of what the average knowledge worker of today sees as "work" is through the daily communion with the computer screen on her or his desk. They access the software with which they work and communicate with other employees through portals, on the company’s infrastructure of applications, or (increasingly) via the Web.
As we have learned more about how to integrate all growing software-based capability into our daily work lives, we have seen various forms of employee portals, partnership portals, project management portals and, more recently, comprehensive real-time enterprise computing applications take root and grow in many organizations. Organizations’ IT infrastructures, coupled with ongoing growth in the scope and use of smart software, will create a type of integrated nervous system, providing top management and workers with an improvement-and-learning focused feedback loop.
When software connects customers directly to business processes, and employees have "line-of-sight" responsibility for making a clear contribution or directly impacting business results – when most of an organization’s strategy and value proposition is directly coded into its CRM, ERM and B2B applications, will the types of supervision and management we learned in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s continue to be effective? There’s a very real issue here that is helping to create the emerging dynamics – the more that work activities are encoded and embedded into integrated systems, the more the human will and spirit needs to surface, assert itself. This polarity is, I think, here to stay and is behind much of the ongoing discussion of conversation, collaboration and social computing.
The proliferation of information technology, business process re-engineering and wrenching changes to established business models created by the rapid development of the Internet are exerting significant pressure on long-standing business hierarchies. Top-down, command-and-control management structures and dynamics struggle to maintain effectiveness in the face of free-flowing streams of content-rich information, coming from all directions. The dynamics of how people relate – to work, to markets, to bosses and to each other – are changing. A new organizing principle posited on network dynamics - "wirearchy" - a dynamic flow of power and authority based on connections and conversations, may be emerging as a social dynamic for organized activities in both business and society.
Wirearchy is an informal but pervasive emerging structure of governance, strategy, decision-making and control based on knowledge, trust, meaning and credibility. Things get done and results are achieved through the interplay of vision, values, connections and conversation. Wirearchy is generated by an open architecture of information, knowledge and focus, enabled by connected and converging technologies. It suggests a fundamental change in the dynamics of human interaction in – and with – organizations of all sizes, shapes and purposes, and represents an evolution of hierarchy as an organizing principle and dynamic. Wirearchy will not render hierarchy obsolete, nor the need for direction and control; rather, it will render them more necessary. However, it will change the meaning of those terms and how they are used and experienced.
People won’t accept authority easily any more. While old-guard keepers-of-the- keys still cling to authority and power, the older models of how to lead and follow are unravelling. Organization charts are still useful, but only as they become more fluid. Certainly, they appear in a much wider range of shapes than before, and often convey new messages about power, status and control. "Organigraphs," or pictures of the ways organizations flow and operate, are clearly more pertinent, accurate and useful, according to strategy and organizational structure guru Henry Mintzberg.
How do today’s leaders and senior managers respond to these forces? Clues are evident in initiatives emerging in the fields of customer and employee relationship management, organizational development, human resources management and organizational change: The use of techniques such as scenario planning, dialogue, open space, 360 degree feedback, emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring have all grown significantly over the past several years. Together, these soften the rigidity of outmoded structures, and help people respond and adapt.
Most organizations carry out ongoing initiatives to create, clarify and improve capabilities in each of these emerging areas. Indeed, a large percentage of the global consulting industry is focused on diagnosing, developing and implementing strategies for these goals. Wirearchy is significantly different in that it focuses on the structural and psychosocial dynamics generated by interconnectivity and access to knowledge. It begins not only with what’s happening at the top, but also what’s happening in the roots and branches of an organization. Where hierarchy created focus and meaning through the control of knowledge, wirearchy implies that the control and use of knowledge acknowledges and involves a much wider range of stakeholders..
Yesterday’s success factors involved secrecy and control, size, role clarity, functional specialization and power. Today’s emerging factors are openness, speed, flexibility, integration and innovation. The concept of wirearchy allows readers to develop a strategy for creating, implementing these factors in ways that respond with value to continuously changing conditions. Its core components are:
* a crystal clear vision and values * a strategically designed and integrated technology infrastructure * comprehensive, clear and completely open communications * pertinent objectives and focused measurement * characteristics of culture that create, support and enable responsiveness, adaptability and fluidity * leadership that is clear, focused, open, authentic and shared
It will take time and experience in this new era to know what "success" and "effectiveness" mean and look like. In such an era, where there is literal meaning in the phrase, "everything is connected to everything else," we will have to watch, learn and imagine how to lead and manage in ways that foster continuous developments in the effectiveness of individual workers, small working groups, the organizations with which they work and the societies in which we all live.
Clay Shirky is a well-know Internet / Web expert who has just published a new book titled "Here Comes Everybody". While it does not focus exclusively on the workplace, it’s a decent bet that the concepts and dynamics Shirky addresses will have major impact on the future of work. As the forces he describes continue to spread throughout society and grow in impact, this organizing principle – Wirearchy — is likely to impact the design of collaborative software and the architecture of workplaces, business, governments and societies in ways that we have never before encountered in human history.
