Another take on the future of work: Vanishing acts and the emergence of Crews

August 27, 2008 at 12:47 pm · Filed under Artisan Economy, Collaboration, Distributed Work, Talent Management, Work Design

Dave Pollard, who thinks and writes about the future of the world, has a good post on tools, technologies, and artifacts that will go the way of FAX and CDs. Included on his list: hard drives, “wall of text” reports & documents, “best practices,” email & groupware, corporate intranets, corporate libraries and purchased content, cell phones, classrooms, meetings, job titles, and offices. The notion of job titles going away resonated with my own recent post on the importance of well defined roles in some circumstances.

Pollard says,

“Generation Millennium members expect to have 12 jobs in their lives on average, and to work on varied projects with cross-disciplinary teams rather than in a defined role. Companies are outsourcing, offshoring, fragmenting, moving to Peer Production. What value or meaning do titles have in such an environment? (If titles are still a useful status symbol, companies could simply follow the example of the banks and make everyone a Vice-President.)”

I agree that titles in this case are meaningless, but that does not mean that people should not be clear about their roles in each of the projects that they contribute to. And sometimes these roles may also be “titles.”

Meanwhile, Dave Snowden has been developing an organizational model to support working across organizational silos; he refers to this concept as crews. A crew is an organization formed for a particular project, mission, or task. It “ritualizes and formalizes” cross-silo activity by ensuring that the crew starts with identifying the specific roles that it needs and then fills those roles by selecting people from different silos. This is, prima facie similar to the “Hollywood model,” which many researchers and writers have used to exemplify a potential future state of work wherein individuals belong to professional associations (”guilds”) and come together to work on specific projects. As Snowden goes on to say,

“A crew works because its members take up roles for which they are trained, and where their expectations of the other roles in the crew is also trained and to a large extent ritualised … A crew has cognitive capacity beyond the sum of its members, members occupy their roles for limited time periods…”

Being Snowden, Dave also integrates his concept of network stimulation into the crew model, in which he sees “people swapping between roles to allow for continuity. ” Within an organization (or, in the case Dave is writing about, a network of organizations) the requirement for working cross silos and swapping people in and out ensures that the network ties broaden and deepen over time.

Back to Hollywood: I found it very interesting to read “Can Hollywood Help LinkedIn?” in the New York Times this week. It appears that LinkedIn is looking for a niche in an industry that has long used a networked, “crew,” guild-based model in which roles and titles identify precisely what skills a person offers as well as access to relationship information that reveals context.

Change of Command

July 25, 2008 at 12:45 pm · Filed under Culture, Reviews, Work Design

My brother, Chris, just turned over the keys for the USS West Virginia (a nuclear submarine) to its new Captain during a moving ritual celebration called a Change of Command. As the program states, the Change of Command is a transfer of “total responsibility, authority, and accountability from one individual to another. The heart of the ceremony is the formal reading of official orders by both the relieving officer and the officer being relieved:

“I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved.”

And its over, 2 and a half years of being absolutely and completely accountable for one of the most complicated collections of machinery in the history of the world and of the 130+ officers and seamen on the submarine.

The work, the roles, the responsibilities of each and every man are carefully delineated. No room for ambiguity.

While in Georgia during the celebration of the event, LinkedIn told me that a colleague had a new position, a job title I had never heard before. I thought it was a made up title (though Google has since relieved me of that misapprehension) and was struck by contrast in official and formal duties with the emergent and informal roles in the networks that I write about so enthusiastically. Do made-up job titles come with a bounded set of job responsibilities and expectations?

And what happens when a project group forms? How do those in the project articulate their assumed responsibilities and overlaps? It feels counter to the spirit of self-generating networks to get all explicit about who does what, but I’ve recently seen some local volunteer groups falter because it was not clear, for a given task or project:

• Who was Responsible for each of the necessary tasks required (and who was responsible for coordinating those tasks)?
• Who was Accountable to the group for ensuring that the goals were met?
• Who was needed to Support each task, and the project as a whole?
• Who was available to Consult to those responsible for the task?
• Who needed to be kept Informed of the tasks process, issues, and status?

The acronym of these bolded letters — RASCI — may be know to many as a fundamental organizational development tool that I think is probably underutilized in the context of working in both ad hoc as well as formal production-oriented networks. Not that we all need the degree of specificity for maintaining a smoothly running submarine underwater for 2 months or more, but we do need to internalize the RASCI questions when we start a job, a task, and assign ourselves a title that we think corresponds with a role.

Design Dogma

June 30, 2008 at 2:42 am · Filed under AppGap Tips, Tips + Pointers, Work Design

I was recently reading through an article by Eric Reiss‘ on dogma for making websites usable. With a number of AppGap authors writing about work design and information design recently, I thought I would share Eric’s take on Orwell’s Rules for Authors applied to online information system design:

1. Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
2. Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
9. No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction without it.
10. Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.

Eric’s words are a reminder that often we forget that our designs often don’t fit the worker, but are implemented to suit something else, whether a management practice or someone’s ego. What we end up with is something that is less than fit-for-purpose.

When we bring new tools and practices into the modern workplace we shouldn’t forget the philosophy of user-centred design and take time to consider:

1. Who are the users?
2. What are the users’ tasks and goals?
3. What are the users’ experience levels?
4. What functions do the users need?
5. What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?
6. How do users think things should work?

Maybe if more of us drew on these questions in our craft, as do so many of those evangelists who’ve brought us web 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs, then practices like knowledge management would have been more successful.

M