It’s not news that there is resistance and confusion about why and how to implement Enterprise 2.0 technology and capabilities in today’s organizations, notwithstanding the continuous flows of information and the growing prevalence of interconnected customers and knowledge workers.

There’s a lot of chatter about bottom-up versus top-down, the collective wisdom of the organizational crowd, and various related themes.  However, there is an ongoing dissonance or competition between the world of structured and defined organizational forms and activity and the growing world of hyperlinked flows in which knowledge and meaning are built layer by layer, exchange by exchange (all those hyperlinked interactions that increasingly make up what we call "knowledge work") as enabled by social computing.

There is a lot of resistance on the part of senior managers and executives to the less structured, less ordered world they see the Web offering their customers, the employees that work in the organizations they direct and manage, and everyone else out there who might have occasion to enter into contact with the organization for which they work.

Organizations of any size and scope in the year 2007 still by and large use the assumptions about efficiency, division of labour and accountability that were developed in the first half of the 20th century, when those assumptions began to be codified into management science … standardized methods for organizing and managing work and productivity.

At the heart of these methods are the ways work is designed and an organization develops its structure.  A primary tool in designing work and structure is job evaluation (and derivatives like accountability mapping and redundancy analysis).  I believe that these tools and their underlying assumptions are used to create the skeletal architecture of organizations … the pyramid we all know. 

The methodology of job evaluation is in my opinion  a very useful place to look at some of the likely reasons for the ongoing dissonance and resistance to change that I suggest we are seeing and will continue to experience.  I have written a number of times before about these issues, but have never really descended into the nitty-gritty granular elements.

I believe these need to be examined and re-conceived if the significant potential and power of social computing inside the firewall is ever to be realized on a broad scale.

Job evaluation is what creates pay grades, pay practices, thresholds for entry into bonus schemes, (sometimes) the criteria for distinguishing between management and non-management jobs, and so on.

Fundamentally, job evaluation (or work measurement in the professional jargon) relies very heavily on the assumption that knowledge is hierarchically structured and, as well, put to use.  It follows that she or he who has more of the knowledge, on paper, is she or he who deserves to be "higher up" in the organization.

There are four or five major, well-known methodologies for measuring work.  They all use very similar factors … sometimes described a bit differently semantically, with a couple more or less factors or sub-factors .. but they all essentially measure the same thing.

I will use the Hay Guide Chart Method’s factors, as I know them the best, but I have also worked with the Aiken Plan and the Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt job evaluation methodologies in the past.

The Hay Method uses  the model that all work has three phases … input, throughput and output … and employs three core factors to measure that work:

1.  Know-How (knowledge and skills acquired through education and experience)

2.  Problem-Solving (the application of the said knowledge to problems encountered in the process of doing the work)

3. Accountability (the level and type of responsibility a given job has for coordinating, managing or otherwise having impact on an organization’s objectives.

There is a fourth factor called Working Conditions, but in many cases this is treated almost as a throwaway factor, especially when it comes to knowledge work, as it relates to fumes, chemicals, outdoor exposure, dangerous physical conditions, unusual exogenous stress, etc.

On the face of it these factors seem eminently reasonable, and the method (and the related ones cited above) have by and large served organizations well for designing one or another particular pyramid, ever since the early 1950’s.  These methods are put into practice along with other key assumptions from the era when organizations grew and prospered.  The assumptions as articulated are derived from the philosophy of Taylorism (aka scientific management) and the divisions of labour and packaging of tasks that have underpinned the search for efficiency and scale ever since the beginning of the 20th century.

But … and IMO this is an important BUT … these methods did not envision or foresee the Web, hyperlinks and the exchanges of information and bit-by-bit layering and assembly of knowledge and the peer-to-peer negotiation of results and responsibilities we are seeing emerge with greater frequency in this new networked world.

Just as important is these methods’ underlying assumption about the fundamental nature of knowledge. It assumes knowledge and its acquisition and use proceeds slowly and carefully and is based on the official taxonomy of knowledge … a vertical arrangement of information and skills that are derived from the official institutions of our society (Jane Jacobs has a fair bit to say about this in Chapter 3 titled Credentialing vs. Educating in her last book Dark Age Ahead, as do others like John Taylor Gatto and Alfie Kohn).

I’ve offered an example (the paraphrasing of the Hay Method’s semantic scales for measuring a job’s knowledge.  This vertical arrangement of Know-How (knowledge) is basically what supports and sustains vertical reporting relationships.  The other two factors (Problem-Solving and Accountability) derive from and reinforce the Know-How factor … for example, the rules of job evaluation are such that you cannot have a Problem-Solving or Accountability factor assessment that is of a higher order than the Know-How slotting.

The definitions of the Know-How ( knowledge and skills ) factor levels are paraphrased from the semantic definitions on the actual Guide Chart.

A - Unschooled and Unskilled

B - Some school, Some skill

C - Basic high school, routine work

D - Vocational school, community college, trades, senior administrative

E - University graduation, senior trades, managerial (reads the books)

F - University plus 10 years experience, grad school (puts the books to use)

G - Deep knowledge and expertise (writes the books)

H - God (has others write the books)

So .. let’s look at how information is shared and exchanged amongst networked individuals or groups.  I think it is (very) safe to say that problem-solving or accountability is assigned or accepted in that situation based on negotiation of "who knows what" or "how to get something done", and often a call (Skype, blog post, email) is put out to find and access some additional skill or knowledge that is required, and accountability is negotiated based on the constraints of the purposeful activity at hand.

The use of knowledge in a networked context is very often much more horizontal, sideways and based on accessibility and collaboration than is the use of knowledge in formally structured hierarchies.

The introduction of wikis and blogs for project work, for analysis and planning, for research and development and for other knowledge-intensive work is likely to introduce some reasonable levels of dissonance into the common and accepted organizational dynamics (or "organizational sociology") of formal, traditionally structured organizations. 

This is an area where David Weinberger’s phrase from the Cluetrain Manifesto … hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (or expose it, maybe better) … is likely to have real impact.  Performance objectives, job assignments, compensation arrangements and bonus schemes are generally almost always predicated on causality derived from the vertical arrangements of knowledge and its use in planned and structured initiatives.  As more and more knowledge work is carried out by people communicating and exchanging information using hyperlinks, in social networks where the places knowledge lives and that facilitate its routing to where it needed, at a point in time, the vertical arrangements for guiding the flows of knowledge are disrupted, if not subverted.

I have written before about the growing need for what I have called eOD.  As Enterprise 2.0 initiatives continue to proliferate, I cannot see how the latent dissonance I perceive and have tried to articulate in this blog post will be avoided.

I suspect that it is a strong awareness and felt sense about the perceived challenges to the power and status relationships that are the core of yet-to-change organizational structure that is behind many senior managers’ and executives’ struggles to understand or become enthusiastic about the possibilities of Enterprise 2.0.  There is no Guide Chart yet about problem-solving or accountability.

Never mind that there is much rhetoric about the need for leadership at all levels, or about the empowerment and democratization of workers in organization X or Y.  The performance management schemes, grade levels in the organizations and compensation practices have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and increasingly, in a networked world.

And if any of you have any experience with performance management programs or in assigning someone in a job to a different grade level, or in making changes to levels of pay or bonus schemes, you know what a minefield any of those can be.

I’d love to hear what you have to say about this.

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, FastForward, JOHO, Hierarchy, Taylorism, eOD, job evaluation, performance management, knowledge management, compensation practices, bonus schemes, knowledge work, wirearchy

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