Email Policies and Social Construction of Technology

May 12, 2008 at 11:31 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

The other day a friend over at PricewaterhouseCoopers told me about a computing policy whereby employees receive notices discouraging them from sending emails over the weekend. They get these emails only when they log into their network during the weekend. (Coincidentally, Businessweek covered this policy in its latest issue). 

Is this the future of work? A world in which we need guidance on when to send and when not send emails? Have we lost all sense of control over our lives that we need the technology to tell us what to do? Are we turning social construction of technology on its head with our obsessive computer habits? It certainly seems like it. 

Social construction of technology or SCOT as its commonly referred to is a theory within the field of Science and Technology Studies which argues that human action shapes technology rather than technology determining human action. As a direct response to technology determinism, social construction of technology also argues that to understand a piece of technology, you have to understand it in its context of use.  

But here we are using a piece of technology so obsessively that we need it to tell us when to stop using it. We have human action not just shaping the technology but shaping how the technology needs to guide us towards specific human action in the future. When email was invented, was this a fear that we’d need help in limiting our use? 

I believe in social construction of technology and furthermore in the theory that technology cannot  be understood devoid of context. I want to find out what aspects of the PricewaterhouseCoopers culture encourages people to email each other over the weekend. I also want to learn about the thinking behind the policy and whether that was something driven by a cultural nuance too. Are some organizations more culturally attuned to policies and procedures that such a policy seems normal in it? Is this the next stage of social construction of technology? This week I have more questions than I have answers. 

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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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Technology and Management Innovation?

May 6, 2008 at 2:43 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management

Jon Husband’s April 26 post here asked:
 
“Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation?” 

Last year watching the buzz around Enterprise 2.0  in a blog post titled: “Enterprise 2.0 “Tips” Not Enough: wikiNOMICS, Chariots of Fire Velocity & Net Work” I wrote:

“…it occurred to me one could globally replace “KM” in most of the “Enterprise 2.0″ posts and you would see the same exchanges pioneers had striving to implement KM in organizations…”
 

Recently researching an article to be published in  Effective Executive Magazine’s June KM edition, I’ve had the privilege of an exchange with Robert H. Buckman whom Infoworld 2003 called “KM’s
 father figure”.  My interest in Buckman’s work grew reading his March 6 2007 post to the AOK Yahoo Group that included:

“Jerry, thank you for the kind words, but I never did try and manage knowledge. What I really tried to manage and nurture was a culture that would encourage and expand the flow of knowledge. It was because economic value could only be obtained in our environment when knowledge moved across the organization in response to a need.”  ~ Robert H. Buckman

We’ve folded every rich nugget of our recent Bob Buckman exchange into our article but suffice to say his focus remains as per the quote above on creating an organization that supports knowledge flow.  He told us:

“If you look at it from the standpoint of how much effort it takes to achieve and effect knowledge sharing across an organization, you will find that the technology piece is about 5 to 10 percent of the effort, changing the way work is done is the 90 to 95 percent of the effort. You can define the effort as time or as money, it still comes out about the same” ~ Robert H. Buckman

IBM’s just released CEO survey points to technology being a factor in causing change. Still as mentioned by 37% of CEO’s it ranked behind market forces and people skills, both 48%, as leading external change forces. 

 ~ Jenny Ambrozek

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It Takes A Long Time For Change To Happen Quickly

May 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

Taylorism changed a lot about the nature of work in North American and western Europe pretty quickly, all things told … but it still took thirty or forty years to emerge into its relatively full-blown effects.  At its heyday, the manufacturing might and effectiveness of the United States that Taylorism helped create enabled it (along with important agricultural and resources capabilities and growing financial clout) to become the world power economically over several decades at most. 

In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.

30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s.  He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.

It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case.  There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.

The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption.  It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).

Via Wikipedia:

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Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, which elucidated four core principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks

Management theory

Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.

[ Snip … ]

He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.

Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:

"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)

Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.

"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend

[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States

• Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
• H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
• Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
• Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
• Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
• Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
• Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
• Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
• Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
• James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.

I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web.  And today I am thinking about "the future of work".

It’s my assertion that the changes social computing will bring to knowledge work and knowledge-based workplaces may be even greater than the generally immature experiments that have taken hold today as early adopters play with tools that allow them to connect, create, converse, convulse, coopt, and carry on about all manner of things … including work issues, challenges and opportunities.

David Weinberger is a well-known expert on knowledge management and the hyperlinked web / organization.  He has from time to time written about how the digital infrastructure and the dynamics it fosters "cuts the slack out of interactions" (The Need For Leeway, October 2002) .  We need "slack" to reflect, to think, to imagine, to support the filling in and filling up of the connections we have made between people, information, task and problems.  And we need analysis and measurement, specialized skills, budgets, accountability and best practices to optimize work and eliminate what is clearly unnecessary, not useful and / or wasteful.

But efficiency is not and will not be the hallmark of human interaction, and human sociology in the modern workplace cannot forever take its architectural design principles for Taylorism.  As we watch Enterprise 2.0 emerge, I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, applications, platforms, services and people in equal measure) joining together, using the Web, to meld efficiency and slack … the "both / and" so often cited as characteristic of this new environment.  A flow of questions, responses and pertinent information soldered together to provide a design, or a service, is not the same as carrying out efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks the result of which are combined with other sets of efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks to produce repeatable products or services (You can have any Model T you want, as long as it is black).

There’s an enormous amount of resistance, both intellectual and cultural, to acknowledging that maybe work cannot be designed and structured based on the principles that have been in place for more than three-quarters of a century now.  A lot of that has to do with what "management" still means to us (especially the incumbents of managerial roles).  It’s hard to give up power and control, especially when you are charged with making stuff happen and the budgets and performance management and compensation bonus schemes reinforce that charge. So, while it appears that the Internet, and thus the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-control flows of information, are here to stay, it also seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".

Generally, I agree but with reservations.  Those reservations are that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).

Today I found this snippet from Clay Shirky’s now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

In my opinion he puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate.  Tomorrow’s workers won’t understand meetings, collaboration, supervision or accountability in the same way we do … all because of gin and that damned mouse.

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

… a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.

[ Snip … ] 

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.

Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”

And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.

Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

[ Snip … }

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.

And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.

But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

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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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Is This An Argument For or Against More Social Computing Inside the Firewall ?

April 28, 2008 at 3:04 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management, Web 2.0

Discuss the issues outlined in the excerpt below.

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.

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The full Globe and Mail newspaper article is here.

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The boss isn’t listening

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.

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Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?

April 26, 2008 at 12:48 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Talent Management, Web 2.0, Web Apps

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:

..

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."

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Tags: hierarchy, Enterprise 2.0, wirearchy, organizational development, management innovation

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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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Managing Your Flow …

April 6, 2008 at 10:46 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0, Web Apps

… 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.

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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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