BLOG A Practical Guide to
Implementing Web 2.0 (aka Social Networking Tools) in Your Organization
A lot
of organizations
are
struggling with what to do with a host of costly, high-maintenance
technologies that they have introduced in the last decade, hoping these
technologies would produce (a) improved internal productivity, and (b)
better relationships with customers. They have achieved neither
objective. So they're stuck with some very large and expensive lemons,
three in particular:
Public websites
that don't reach customers
Intranets
(internal content management systems) that serve up content almost no
one uses
'Groupware' tools
(like SharePoint) designed to improve internal collaboration, that
actually discourages collaboration
Now, we have a host of new tools available, called variously Web 2.0,
KM 2.0, social networking tools, social media and social software. Many
organizations and software developers are trying to cobble these on to
the three lemons above to try to make these lemons less
useless. Because these lemons are so tainted in the minds of users, the
new add-ons don't stand a chance.
At the same time, we have a new generation of workers (Gen Y or Gen
Millennium) who have become comfortable using free, commercial Web 2.0
tools, and are using them in the companies they join -- only to run
into ferocious opposition from the IT security czars in these
organizations, who consider them a threat, shut them down and censure
the young staff who use them. Not to be defeated, the Gen Y'ers simply
use their own portable hardware to work around the prohibitions. The
war escalates.
So what are you, as the manager leading a Web 2.0 initiative, IT
department or KM group, to do? How can the three giant lemons be fixed?
Which Web 2.0 tools can be introduced effectively and usefully, and
how? And is there a solution to the generational culture war that Web
2.0 has provoked?
I.
What's Wrong with Corporate Websites, Intranets and Groupware?
an
unnavigable, unfathomable website from an advertising agency, profiled
by websitesthatsuck.com
Most corporate websites simply ported the sales and marketing material
that used to be distributed manually to a flat website with a
bewildering array of 'pages', accessed through either 'frames' or
'menus'. Tools to allow online ordering are often bolted on. Often the
user has to use a search bar to try to find what they are looking for,
and usually that's such a discouraging process they give up.
The bigger problem with corporate websites is that most of the
customers they're trying to reach simply don't use websites to buy
stuff. They prefer a more personalized, interactive buying experience.
So who 'uses' corporate websites? A study done by one large
multinational organization discovered their actual user audience
comprised, in order:
Needless to say, since the website was designed for customers, it
wasn't reaching its intended audience, and wasn't meeting the needs of
its actual audience.
Some organizations were persuaded that, because the number of 'unique
visitors' to their site was substantial and growing, their site must be
useful. But if they dug a little deeper they would discover that the
average amount of time these 'visitors' spent on the website was as
little as three seconds! As soon as these 'users' arrived, most of them
quickly realized that this was not what they were looking for.
The situation with Intranets is no better. Intranets provide a place
for 'content providers' in various parts of the organization to 'house'
their content somewhere visible to the whole organization, that they
can point to and say "I produced this; I'm doing productive work". They
don't generally know (or, often, care) whether that content is of any
use to anyone else in the organization. People put content on Intranets
because they can (and sometimes because they are rewarded for doing
so), not because it's useful.
What's worse, the same problems with menus and frames (usually designed
by 'taxonomists' who organize information in ways that makes sense to
content providers, rather than content users) mean that users have to
resort to the dreaded search bar on the Intranet, too. Most people I
speak to use this only as a last resort, and rarely find anything
useful -- they quickly give up and look for a real person to provide
what they're looking for. There's a whole discipline in KM for
taxonomists and 'enterprise search' experts, and these people are
busily employed like librarians indexing and filing books in a library
that nobody visits unless they've exhausted every other possible source
of information.
What Intranet designers and managers fail to appreciate is that the
principal way people share information hasn't changed in centuries --
people get it through real-time conversation with people they respect
and trust. This gives them comfort that the content they're given is
current and authoritative, and through the conversation they can also
appreciate the context behind that content, and ask questions to make
it more useful to them. The original idea that Intranets could save the
time of experts by reducing the number of conversations needed to
convey that information effectively, simply failed to understand human
nature and how information without context is worthless.
The final lemon in our trio is groupware (though the term, which is now
disparaging, is rarely used). Groupware, of which the most notorious
example is SharePoint, was designed to facilitate 'communities of
practice' (CoPs). The idea was that (a) if the Intranet became too
large to find content, there would be an alternative content repository
for smaller collections of specialized content that members of a CoP
had deemed useful, and (b) certain 'collaboration tools' (mostly those
that allowed people to e-mail all members of a CoP) could be bolted on
to the groupware tool, so that members could be notified of new content
and 'converse' asynchronously about this content.
Again, none of this has worked as planned, and most of the failures
were predictable if anyone had actually bothered to talk to users. Most
groupware tools are so horrifically over-engineered and bloated with
'features' that they require full-time IT resources to manage, and to
set up and 'authorize' new CoPs. Most of the 'features' that are added
to the tool were added because they could be, not because they actually
provided any useful functionality for more than 1% of users. The result
is that you need to take training courses to learn how to navigate and
use the groupware and CoP repositories and features. This is 19th
century design -- users today simply won't use a tool that is
unintuitive unless they are coerced to do so. Unless you use these
tools often, by the time you need to apply what you've learned, you've
forgotten it.
More fundamentally, asynchronous e-mail and
'forum'-style 'conversations', which were the basis for the
first generations of groupware, are simply not the way most people
communicate. If someone is looking for information, or has something
useful to convey, they will generally prefer to walk down the hall, or
pick up the phone, and ask or offer, in a real-time conversation that
is, like the best information communication, context-rich and
interactive. What groupware delivers is essentially another way to
throw context-free content into a shared repository that quickly
becomes obsolete clutter, and to send group e-mails to a large number
of people already suffering from asynchronous information overload.
II.
Can They Be Fixed?
In order to assess whether these three lemons can be re-engineered to
be useful organizational tools, it's necessary to look at the problems
they are trying to solve.
Corporate websites were designed to allow customers (current and
potential) to learn more about an organization's products and services,
without having to go through a sales representative. At least for
another generation, this isn't a need in business-to-business
organizations, who have to, or prefer to, go through a sales
representative, and generally will buy enough to warrant the company's
face-to-face investment in that customer. The best examples of
business-to-customer websites, like Amazon, eBay and Etsy, all offer a
range of products and services you can't get in a store -- they
aggregate products from many different, competing vendors, and/or offer
a vastly broader range than would fit in a single physical shop. So
they succeed because they offer customers something they can't get
anywhere else. Other than copycats and wannabees, they have no competition.
If a customer wants to comparison shop, they will go to an objective
comparison shopping site, like Consumer Reports, not to a whole bunch
of competing sites all out to paint their company and its products and
services as the best.
So what's the best model for a corporate website? If it's for
customers, that depends on what the segment of your customers who
actually research or shop online need and want. If you make the effort
to identify this segment, and go out and talk with them, I think you'll
be surprised at what you learn. You might discover that the best thing
you can provide is a directory of names and direct line phone numbers
of real individual people in your company that your customers can talk
to, without having to go through your god-awful automated switchboard
("if you know the extension number of the person you're calling...").
[And know that while the technology exists, they're probably not ready,
yet, to talk with you through their computer speaker.] And if you want
to design a taxonomy to index your products and services so that people
can browse online (if
in fact they tell you they want to), design the taxonomy around the
problem the product or service solves, the job it does,
not by its industrial category. You might
find that some tool that lets users self-assess their need for your
product or service meets a need, but be careful -- this requires a
sophisticated online customer, and you have to avoid hyping your
product.
For more advice, talk to your prospective online customers. Don't
assume you know what they want. It's changing, constantly. My guess is
you'll find that the website that meets their needs will be much
simpler, cleaner and cheaper to maintain than what you have now. And
remember, your website is about them,
not about you.
Just don't forget those other categories of people who prowl your
public Internet site. If you care about them, send them to a separate
corporate website designed for their specific needs -- and talk to them
about what those needs are.
Intranets are tougher to salvage, because they really were a bad idea
to begin with. The concept of having information inside a corporate
firewall that is different from what's available to your customers is a
bit bizarre. So to some extent, you need to do the same thing to fix
your Intranet that you do to fix your corporate website -- identify the
different constituencies of potential users and ask them what they
need, and deliver on that.
My guess is that what most will be looking for is the same directory of
specific people to talk with that your customers want. When I worked as
a senior executive of a multinational organization, more than half of
the calls I received were from people asking me for the name (and
sometimes an introduction to) someone in the organization that could
help them with a specific problem, need or assignment. Don't expect
your employees to self-manage this 'corporate directory' -- there's a
completely different dynamic at work than exists in voluntary
communities of interest where there's a shared passion driving
behaviour. Instead of replicating the organization chart, explore what
kinds of questions employees are looking for answers to, and design and
maintain the corporate directory accordingly -- by the problem to be
solved and the job to be done, not by department and hierarchy. Make it
easy for people to find the right people, and easy for them to contact
them, in real time.
The other need you're likely to find in most organizations is for
access to company policies and procedures. This is mundane
administrative stuff, but it's important. Think from the perspective of
new employees -- what policies and procedures are they going to want to
look up, and how can you make it easy to find them.
From my experience, you should question the need for everything on the
Intranet beyond directories and policies. In my experience most of the
rest of the mountains of information in Intranets costs more to
maintain than it provides in value. I've looked at a lot of so-called
'best practice' repositories on Intranets, and in the absence of
context and contact, they're a waste of server space and maintenance
effort.
So what about groupware? A little study will probably show that the
vast majority of the groupware/'community' content, just like most of
your Intranet content, is unused and possibly obsolete (and hence
dangerous). And you'll probably find that the vast majority of the CoPs
are more or less dormant, or defunct. There are Web 2.0 tools --
simple, disaggregated, free -- that do everything groupware tries to do
more effectively. So my groupware legacy system advice may
sound extreme, but this is it: Seriously consider just closing it down.
Stop wasting time and money on it. Don't be sucked into adding Web 2.0
bolt-ons to salvage it, because that just makes an overly-complex tool
even more unwieldy. There are better ways.
III.
Which Web 2.0 Tools Should You Introduce?
Blogs, wikis and document sharing, IM and twitters, multimedia tools,
canvassing tools, sensemaking tools, risk management tools, personal
content management tools, environmental scanning tools, story
collection tools, desktop videoconferencing, simulations and scenario
planning tools, proximity locators, affinity detectors, e-learning
tools, unconferencing tools, mindmappers, virtual world tools, and
mashups customized to suit your particular business -- there are dozens
of different types of Web 2.0 tools to choose from. How do you decide
which ones are best for your organization?
In my experience, you have to follow five steps, which I'll
get to in a moment. This will be a lot of work, and will entail a lot
of conversations with a lot of people (it is 'social software', after
all)! My advice is not
to introduce anything just because it's easy, or just because one of
your vendors has thrown it in for free. Introduce a few tools, pilot
them first, and then, if they succeed with the pilot group, show the
rest of the people in your organization how they work and why they're
useful. Don't teach them, don't tell them, don't sell them -- show
them.
In one of my previous consulting contracts I ran a successful pilot
using a desktop videoconferencing and screensharing tool. When I
suggested it be used in another department, I was warned that the
department head was a total luddite, and didn't even like telephone
conference calls. So I asked her if I could demonstrate a new tool the
next time she was running a lengthy audioconference (which she did
often, but only because she couldn't get the budget to fly people in
regularly for face-to-face meetings). Just before the meeting I gave
her the URL of the videoconferencing "meeting room" and asked her to
e-mail it to the others on the conference call. The call was to edit,
paragraph by paragraph, a new government policy paper. She had the
previous draft on her computer and was making changes as they were
discussed by the other participants. Unbeknownst to her, as she made
these changes, the other participants were immediately seeing them on
their screens, through the screensharing feature of the software I was
demo'ing. They started saying how useful this was, and as they
discovered the other features of the software (notably the IM
backchannel) I could hear the users enthusiastically saying "wow!" and
"why didn't we use this before?" After a few minutes of this, the
department head covered the phone, said "OK I get it!", and motioned me
to go. All audioconferences in her department now use this tool, and
it's spreading throughout the organization, with no marketing, and no
training.
A few years ago, I started using a mindmapping tool on my own machine
to keep personal notes on what was being decided during
meetings I attended. One day one of my colleagues asked me to project
my 'map' of the meeting so that all of the participants in the room
could see it. The organization I was presenting to was so impressed
with this real-time, shared capture of the essential discussions and
decisions of meetings that they now use it for all of their meetings.
And when those meetings are virtual, they use the mindmap in
combination with screensharing so that everyone in the meeting,
everywhere, can track what is being decided.
These aren't sophisticated Web 2.0 tools, but they're simple, free, and
useful. They're the best candidates to start your Web 2.0 pilot
program. And the best way to introduce them is to just demonstrate
their value in a live application, in real time.
Here are the five steps you need to go through to make sure your Web
2.0 projects and tools will be the right selections:
Try
out the various tools out there.
Pick a half dozen or a dozen Web 2.0 tools and just start using them --
you'll learn a lot more about their value than if you just research
them or look at comparative specs. Be prepared to be surprised -- the
most popular social networking tools aren't necessarily the ones you're
going to find to be of any value in your organization. Some of the
simplest tools are the best. And the value of these tools bears no
correlation to their cost.
Talk
to prospective customers.
Discover which of your prospective (and current) customers actually
spend significant time online, other than answering internal e-mails,
and what they do during this online time. What do they need that isn't
already available to them? There are two industries developing a lot of
new applications that will soon be used in other businesses: gaming and
dating. Explore some of the applications these industries are using,
and imagine how they might be tweaked to improve the user experience
and social connectedness of your customers.
Talk
to your employees. Understand
what they do, and how they spend their online time. What do they need
that they aren't already getting? Who are the most 'connected' people
in your organization, and what tools are they using to stay connected?
Talk
to senior
management. They are probably
disconnected from the people on
the front lines of the organization, and their needs. You can help to
articulate these needs in ways the executive team can understand. At
the same time, you can discover what is keeping senior management awake
at night, and if you can develop social networking applications that
alleviate that executive insomnia, you'll buy a lot of leeway to
introduce innovations that have broader applicability across the
organization.
Talk
to young people. Finally,
talk to the kids inside and outside
your own organization, and ask them what's out there and free that they
use, that can be adapted for your organization's use. Have them show
you how they use these tools,
because it's often hard to understand their value without a
demonstration. The subject matter of their conversations may not be
relevant to you, but it's likely the same media they use for what's
important to them, can be used to facilitate conversations in your
organizations on matters that are important to you.
When you go through these steps, you're actually following the same
research process that good R&D departments use. You've
identified
your potential customer 'segments', scanned to see what's currently
available and how it's succeeding, doing secondary (online) and primary
(face-to-face interview) research, and then drawing together an making
sense of all this information to establish a 'portfolio' of unmet
needs. The final two steps are to discover (before you go designing a
new social networking application) why someone else hasn't already
invented it (there may be cultural, technical or cost barriers you're
not aware of), and to make sure you have the skill set and resources in
your organization to effectively introduce the social networking
application to your enterprise. Your focus should always be on the
needs portfolio, however -- as long as you're working on solutions to
problems that your customers (internal or external) have acknowledged,
you'll avoid the problem most organizations encounter: providing
solutions nobody wants.
What you should end up with is a set of perhaps 3-5 unmet needs that
lend themselves to social networking applications. You're likely going
to be able to identify off-the-shelf, simple, commercial software tools
(probably free of charge) that will address 2-3 of these needs. In one
or two cases, you're going to actually have to build the application
yourself, probably using open source applications (APIs) with a bit of
custom code to 'mash' them together and tweak them for your particular
needs. There are thousands of young tech-savvy programmers out there
who can do this for you. Writing custom software applications is much
easier, and cheaper, than it used to be.
IV.
Dave's Faves
There is no set of social networking tools that is right for every
organization. Much depends on your business, your size, and your
organization's culture. But everyone always asks me for my own
favourites, the ones I have introduced or am working to introduce in
companies I work with. So here are my current eight favourites. The
first four
are off-the-shelf commercial tools. Nothing exciting, just fast,
inexpensive improvement to work effectiveness. The second four are
leading-edge, and would probably need some custom coding, but could be
career-making improvements if you can pull them off. All eight, I have
to
stress again, are responses to identified needs from one or more of the
four constituencies I regularly speak with: customers, employees,
management, and young 'pathfinder' users. And all eight are about
connectivity, context, conversation and communication, not content.
Real-Time
Conversation: IM + Google Wave:
For all its hype, Twitter is really
nothing more than an IM tool tweaked so that the recipients, rather
than the sender, determine who the message goes to. Most groupware now
incorporates IM bolt-ons, but they're cumbersome and unintuitive, and
for security reasons usually unfriendly to recipients outside your
firewall. So whether or not you have an internal IM tool available
(it's probably not used much anyway), consider enabling all your
employees to use a free commercial tool like GMail's GTalk.
A large
multinational company I worked for introduced it several years ago,
with no announcement and no training, and discovered that within ninety
days it had become the principal communications medium for the
company's thousands of Latin American staff. Why? Because in many of
those countries, long-distance telephone is expensive, and telephone
service is unreliable. E-mail is asynchronous and too slow for
real-time needs. IM met the need perfectly. At a government agency I
worked at recently, the young staff used it almost to the exclusion of
E-mail, drawing on their networks (including cohorts in university, at
previous employers, and online friends) to get immediate real-time text
and voice-to-voice answers to every question they faced during their
work day.
This
fall will see the
introduction of Google Wave,
an open platform that integrates e-mail,
IM, Twitter-type services, and to some extent blogs, into multimedia,
flowing "conversations". It will be interesting to see whether the
hurdle will be too high for most businesspeople (who have generally not
adopted any of its components except, reluctantly, e-mail), or whether,
through Wave, we'll see a rediscovery of the advantage of real-time
communication and the welcome end
of
accursed e-mail.
Virtual
Presence: Screensharing
+ Document Sharing:
Face-to-face meetings are nice, especially
for groups that don't know each other, but they're becoming an
unaffordable luxury. Free, simple screen-sharing applications like Vyew
and Dimdim
let you set up a meeting or training session of 2-20 people instantly,
share your screen, upload and download files, see who's online, and
backchannel chat. You can even use VoIP and your webcam (though I find
these technically awkward bandwidth hogs and prefer to use a separate
teleconferencing line and use .jpg's of participants instead of full
motion video of speakers).
Once
you can get users
comfortable with the idea of sharing their screen contents in real
time, it's easy for them to get their heads around sharing documents in
real time as well. Once again, there are simple, free tools like Google
Docs that let you do this, using
the native editing formats people in
business are used to (the Microsoft Office formats), instead of having
to learn a new tool like wikis.
Mindmapping
Tools: Mindmaps are a simple,
graphical way to
document the results of a group discussion. By displaying a mindmap of
the discussion in real time at the front of the meeting room, or to
remote participants using screensharing, everyone can follow the
consensus-making process, and differences of interpretation of what the
collective decisions and learning have been during a discussion can be
immediately surfaced and discussed. At the end of the discussion, you
get a printed record of these decisions with a single click. And
mindmaps can provide hotlinks to supporting materials, so you can even
use them as the framework to communicate sophisticated ideas and
information. The simplest mindmaps are just tree diagrams with links,
like the one made with a free tool called Freemind,
illustrated above.
Another free tool, Mind42,
allows groups to collaborate in the
construction of a mindmap.
More
recently, some vendors like
Prezi
have produced presentation tools that are essentially mindmaps
where each node is a slide or video instead of a branch, and you create
a presentation 'path' to help users navigate through the nodes in a
logical order. Consulting firms have long used wall-sized 'single
frame' presentations to do the same thing in hard-copy format. These
are all essentially variations on mindmaps: high-level pictures of a
discussion that you can navigate at your own pace, in a logical order,
and zoom in to any node for links or other more detailed information.
You can even use a mindmap as the framework for a self-paced
training course.
Blogs
for E-Learning and E-Newsletters:
A weblog is
essentially a diary or journal that chronicles its author’s
stories, thoughts, or learnings, generally available for others to
‘subscribe’ to (so they receive new
‘articles’ or ‘posts’
automatically). While blogs have been an enormous popular means for
personal expression and informal communication, they have been largely
unsuccessful in business applications. The most effective business
use of
blogging software in my experience is for the creation and publishing
of courseware
and newsletters.
In such applications, the concept of a blog is ignored, and the tool is
used as a framework for managing content that is fed to users one
article at a time. Blog tools are designed to allow simple
'publication' of articles, such that as each article is published,
older articles automatically drop down lower on the page and eventually
into 'archives' that can be retrieved using an electronic calendar.
This structure is ideally suited to delivery of both e-learning
curricula and e-newsletters, which are generally released to users
according to a set schedule or calendar.
Canvassing
Tools: Some of the earliest
and most popular social bookmarking tools, like del.icio.us and Digg,
use a combination of voting (thumbs up or down, or the number of people
'pointing' to a web page) and folksonomy (tags selected by the users
themselves), to canvass 'the wisdom of crowds' for the best or most
interesting pages on the Web about particular topics. But suppose you
want to canvass your own 'crowd' (your customers, or employees, for
example) to get their consensus before you make an important business
decision, such as a new product launch? What you can do is use a
simple, free survey tool (like SurveyMonkey) to do so. But beware --
read James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds
first, to avoid asking the wrong questions, asking them incorrectly, or
asking the wrong crowd. The chart above shows the five
types of questions that Surowiecki says best lend themselves
to such 'collective wisdom' canvassing, and a process to decide exactly
how to put the question to the crowd, and aggregate and assess the
results.
Simulations
and Scenario
Planning: The world is full
of what Clay Shirky calls "cognitive surplus", mental energy that's
just looking for an outlet that is more interesting than the idiot box.
If you can engage that cognitive surplus you can create things like
Wikipedia, or Second Life.
You can create a simulation
or set of scenarios that will tell you what would happen to your
business if oil spiked back up to $200 a barrel, or inflation rates
jumped to 15% or fell below
zero, or a virulent global pandemic hit tomorrow. You can't predict the
future, but you can prepare for it, become more resilient to possible
changes. Scenario planning is an interactive social activity -- the
more informed people involved, conversing with each other about future
possibilities, the richer and more valuable the scenarios. I still like
Peter Schwartz' Art of the Long View,
a low-tech guide to strategic conversations and scenario development.
The gaming and 'virtual world' industry has brought the cost of
computer simulation way down, but even without such tools you
can conduct sophisticated 'tabletop exercises' that simulate crises
(natural, man-made, or competitor-induced) and help your organization
prepare for and mitigate them. And in the process you'll learn some
fascinating lessons about teamwork, collaboration and human nature.
Proximity/Affinity
Detectors: Google bought the
pioneer proximity detector, a dating site called Dodgeball, and then
closed it down. But the idea of being able to 'see' which of your
friends, colleagues or want-to-meets are in your physical vicinity, has
just migrated to the iPhone. The new contenders include Loopt,
Dopplr and Plazes.
The idea is simple: log in and tell the network where you are (or let
your phone's GPS do it for you automatically). If you wish, Twitter
what you're doing there. Identify others in your networks. Then you get
a map showing who's in your vicinity and what they're doing. Perfect
for impromptu meetups with people you really care to meet.
Affinity
detectors are the flipside of proximity detectors -- instead of telling
you which of your friends and colleagues are nearby, affinity detectors
tell you, of the people nearby (say at a big conference), what you have
in common that might cause you to become friends. The pioneer was nTag,
recently acquired by an RFID company that sees the potential in using
RFID as a social networking tool. The idea is that you fill in a
questionnaire of your interests and this data gets encoded into an
electronic stripe on the badge you wear at a conference or other event.
When you're close to someone who shares an interest, both tags signal
the common interests to both parties, so you can cut through the
small-talk. And if you hit it off, you just click your tag and your new
friend's contact information is automatically saved for later
electronic retrieval -- no need to trade business cards.
Imagine how, in your own organization, you could use tools like these
to replace the 'water cooler' for serendipitous meetings with business
colleagues, or to enable people at large gatherings of your employees
or customers to quickly discover issues they really care about -- and
possibly the spontaneous launch of innovation and collaboration
projects from the bottom up. Or at the very least, people essential to
your business more powerfully connected on subjects they are passionate
about.
Problem-Solving
Facilitation: The more I
learn about social complexity and effective facilitation, the more I
believe that collective problem-solving, using expert facilitators,
will probably be the most important business skill of this century.
Today's complex problems just do not lend themselves to top-down or
outside-in 'expert' solutions. Increasingly, our collective
understanding of problems and solutions co-evolves. This means you need
a method that will identify who needs to be in the room to address the
perceived problem, and to enable them to self-organize and collaborate
effectively to come up with viable approaches to the problem. Probably
the best known method for doing this is Open Space Technology,
but there are a variety of other techniques that can be used, and an
effective facilitator can help you find the ones best for any
particular situation.
V:
Mediating the Gen Y Cultural War
I suggested earlier that there's a war brewing between the IT security
people in many organizations and the youngest recruits, Gen Y'ers, in
these
organizations. More generally it's a generational culture war. The baby
boomer generation that currently runs most businesses were largely
rebels in their own time, but they've come to believe in security,
hierarchy, expertise, and what I've called a cult of leadership. By
contrast, according to Gary Hamel, many in Gen Y, as the above slide
suggests, value experimentation, peer-to-peer
collaboration, learning from failure, and effort over results. It's a
collision course, but not much different from inter-generational
differences we've seen before.
The key to keeping the peace, and security, is, not surprisingly,
information-sharing and communication. If the CEO had any idea how
quickly and powerfully some Gen Y'ers can design, develop, test and
implement effective new tools that can make a major difference in
innovation, connectivity and work effectiveness in their organizations,
they would just get out of the way and let them happen. And if Gen
Y'ers
knew that some seemingly-innocuous information leaks can expose
organizations to legal problems serious enough to cause stock prices to
plummet and business leaders to end up in jail, they'd be a lot less
casual about creating information sieves in the process of working
around seemingly nonsensical security restrictions.
These generations literally speak different languages. Our job, as
people who appreciate the value and perspective of both generations,
and value diversity, is what Nancy White calls "building bridges" --
translating Gen Y's ideas and requests into language "the man" can
understand (value creation and ROI), and translating the
boss' and IT's restrictions into language that Gen Y'ers can understand
(the risk of catastrophic financial loss, loss of business reputation,
and
insolvency). The best way to build these bridges is by telling stories
-- of history, of unexpected and astonishing success, and of unintended
consequences.
Conclusion
This presentation has suggested an approach you can use to gently move
your organization from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, without a lot of
expenditure, other than in energy to actually talk to the users (not
the suppliers) of information and connectivity tools in your
enterprise. In the process, I think you'll find some ways to reduce the
cost of maintaining legacy sites and systems that no longer provide
value, get yourself some recognition as a shrewd and focused innovator,
and have a lot of fun helping the people in your organization to work a
little bit
smarter.
I welcome your questions, suggestions, ideas, and personal stories.
Thank you.
Six
steps to sustainable, community-based Natural Enterprise, from my book
Finding the Sweet Spot
I'm
in Denver for the weekend at the annual conference of BALLE,
the
international network of community-based sustainable businesses. The
reason I'm here is more about looking for ideas than personal
networking. One of the mandates I've taken on in my current work is to
make our association (the Chartered Accountants of Canada, equivalent
to CPAs in the US) champions of entrepreneurship and of new,
sustainable enterprise formation.
The
reason we're championing entrepreneurs is that no one else will.
It's an interesting paradox that the North American economy is driven
by entrepreneurs (virtually all new net employment in the last decade
has been in the entrepreneurial sector), not by big corporations, but
all the money and attention flows to the big corporations.
Entrepreneurs don't get bailouts, massive incentives to locate in your
community, or big unpublicized government subsidies. Universities say
they teach entrepreneurship but what they do is the minimum
('intrapreneurship') lip service to get big corporations to fund
'chairs in entrepreneurship' that let them hire and retain professors.
Economic Development Offices of governments at various levels are
designed to attract businesses (i.e. property and business tax
revenues) so their work for entrepreneurs is mostly low-budget,
low-value work like providing names of lawyers and accountants and
telling you how to get business licenses, incorporate and file taxes.
Accountants and lawyers (especially the smaller ones) will take on
entrepreneurs as clients, but generally are unenthusiastic and not
terribly helpful for businesses at the critical start-up stage. Bankers
(with the notable exception of credit unions) generally avoid
entrepreneurial businesses, and lenders of last resort are usually
vultures who create more problems for entrepreneurs than they solve.
BALLE founder Michael Shuman has written
about these challenges in his book The Small-Mart Revolution.
What's worse, in some progressive circles, the very word
'entrepreneur' is
suspect -- it's almost as if profit and enterprise are considered
necessarily exploitative.
If you've read my book, you know that what entrepreneurs need, more
(and sooner) than they need accountants, lawyers, marketers or
financing is:
Help to determine what
kind of work they're meant to do (something in their 'sweet spot')
Help to understand how
business fundamentally works (and how that's changing very quickly)
Help to find the right
partners (not
expensive consultants and suppliers with no stake in the enterprise)
Help to learn to do
excellent market research (to surface real unmet needs)
Help to learn to
innovate (so they do something sufficiently different from what's
already being provided, and hence are commercially viable)
Help to establish
strong business networks and relationships
Help to cope with
unexpected problems, and to become more resilient
Most of this assistance that prospective entrepreneurs need is
educational, but it's not the kind of learning that you can get sitting
in a classroom or reading a text. You learn this through conversation
and collaboration with other entrepreneurs, and you learn it by doing
it, and making (inexpensive, early) mistakes.
As I've written before, I've spoken to many universities about a course
curriculum that would entail students going out and visiting with
successful entrepreneurs, engaging in Q&A with the
entrepreneurs on how they addressed the seven issues above, and then
putting together and launching their own enterprise. No lectures, no
classrooms, no examination -- the measure of the course's success is
whether the students' enterprises succeed or not. The professors I know
are
enthusiastic, and I've had no trouble finding entrepreneurs who'd love
to volunteer their time to talk about and show off their businesses.
The problem is that the universities' business model is about filling
expensive class buildings with large numbers of students, and finding
work for, retaining and paying tenured professors, and my proposal
flies in the face of that, so when I talk with university Deans and
department heads, they are uninterested.
Same problem with high schools. You all know my opinion on the school
system -- it's anti-learning, bureaucratic, and
propagandizing. Most of those incarcerated there are bored, disengaged,
impatient and often angry. Even if we could get a good program into the
high school curriculum (which is doubtful) it's unlikely that the
students would pay attention or trust that it would be of any use to
them. My father is an honorary lifetime member of an organization
called
Junior
Achievement, an organization
whose objective is to introduce high schoolers to the fundamentals of
business and entrepreneurship. It's been around forever, and a lot of
volunteers have spent years working to make it a success, but it's
still marginal -- it's just too counter to the high school culture.
There is no political party in North America that authentically shares
the interests of entrepreneurs. There is no money, influence, public
sentiment or political advantage to be gleaned from this cohort. Like
the working poor, entrepreneurs are disenfranchised and have no seat at
the tables of lobbyists and decision-makers.
So what are we to do? If governments and politicians don't care (they
don't yet realize
that their economies rise and fall with the success and failure of
sustainable small enterprises, and that support for these enterprises
has 30 times the return on investment of large corporation subsidies),
big businesses are hostile, and schools and universities can't help,
who are the prospective sustainable entrepreneur's allies? Who cares,
or should care, about entrepreneurs?
The short answer is: people in communities.
Sustainable community-based enterprises create and keep local jobs,
keep the money in the community, provide goods and services customized
to local needs, and cause less pollution and waste than the
multinational corporate oligopolies. They also contribute more to the
GDP (if you think that's still a useful measure of anything).
The problem is that people in communities aren't organized, aren't
wealthy, and aren't informed. Most don't appreciate that they could
succeed (by every measure) in their own small sustainable enterprise
far better than in their current wage slave job. Few know how important
small enterprises are to the economy, or can imagine how uninnovative
our society would be without the impetus of entrepreneurs. What can you
do to address a need that hasn't been recognized by those who need it?
To launch a true sustainable entrepreneurial movement, we need to
figure out three things:
How can we teach
millions of people a survival skill (namely, how to make a living for
yourself) that many groups don't want them to learn (they want us kept
helpless and in thrall to the job market), and that most don't even
realize they need?
How do we then help
these millions to self-organize into Natural Enterprises?
How do we avoid
successful entrepreneurs quickly cashing out their businesses as soon
as they get a lucrative offer from a member of a multinational
corporate oligopoly?
I don't think books are enough to solve the first problem. Nor are
social networking tools the answer to the second.
The truth about human nature is that we don't change our minds or our
behaviour until we believe we have no choice. When the economy really
collapses, wiping out whole industries, currencies, and wealthy
conglomerates, the choice for millions, as it was in the 1930s, will be
between entrepreneurship and starvation. Only when this happens will
people scramble to find ways to learn entrepreneurial skills, and to
find business partners.
We are heading into a period of great economic uncertainty, turbulence
and volatility. The job market for the next two decades is likely to go
"wildly sideways". By that time, the centenary of the last Great
Depression, other crises like the End of Oil, the End of Water, global
political upheaval and climate change will combine with the crisis of
an overextended economy (unsustainable personal, corporate and
government debt levels, exhausted natural resources, whipsawing
interest, inflation and currency rates, and plunging consumer spending
and confidence) to produce a prolonged economic inferno. The resultant
massive unemployment will spur an entrepreneurial explosion out of
desperate necessity. After some initial stumbles, we'll see a change as
profound as the Industrial Revolution. The community-based economy will
be born, and it will be entrepreneurial by default.
That doesn't mean my association's championing of sustainable
entrepreneurship now is futile. People may 'get' the 'sustainable' part
(and make their businesses, of all sizes, greener, simply because it
makes good business sense), without getting the 'entrepreneurship' part
-- and that would be much better than nothing. And enough people
(especially boomers and new entrants to the job market) will make the
effort to learn entrepreneurial skills because, for these substantial
cohorts, wage slavery is already ceasing to be an option -- the wage
slave jobs are rapidly being offshored. When they realize that MBA
schools don't teach entrepreneurship (and change too slowly to start
doing so), they'll use online and real-world resources and
relationships to teach each other the necessary skills, and
self-organize. And my association will be poised to provide a platform
and resources for them to do so.
One way or another, a sustainable, community-based entrepreneurship
revolution is coming. Sooner or later, we'll have no choice.
I've
been asked to be a panel member at a conference on Thursday with
the intriguing theme What's Next?
My role on the panel is to talk about What's Next in Business. So I
thought I might rehearse what I might say there, here, and get some
comments from you, dear readers, before I make my presentation.
The interesting thing about forecasting What's Next is that, usually,
forecasters simply project that the future will be like today, only
more so. There is little perception of possible upcoming
discontinuities, and little imagination for what might follow such
discontinuities. So if three years ago I had predicted that the Dow
would be at 8000, the major American banks would all be substantially
broke or nationalized, and that almost every major newspaper chain
would be failing, my audience would have laughed me out of the place.
Today, however, despite the constant drumbeat of pundits proclaiming
the end of the recession and the return to growth as normal, those who
predict radical discontinuities might be afforded a little more
attention and credence.
In that light, here's what I'm thinking of listing as the ten most
important current trends in business:
The
dawn of an age of uncertainty, and a refocusing on business risk and
sustainability: What we have
witnessed recently -- turbulent markets, vacillation between good news
and bad news, and growing skepticism over the veracity of what we're
being told -- is actually a historical normal state, but since the
1960s we have experienced such a protracted period of invariability
that we have come to think of it as normal. It is not. We can look
forward once again to astonishingly rapid and unpredicable cycles of
boom and bust, collapse and reinvention of corporations and entire
industries, the fall of empires, belief frameworks and conventional
wisdom. Our whole approach to health care and education, on which so
much of our tax money is spent, is poised for revolutionary change.
Insurance may soon become so risky to insurance companies that the
industry disappears. Mexico may well fail as a state, and become as
dangerous and expensive to keep in check as Afghanistan -- and a lot
closer. We will probably witness environmental phenomena that are
almost unimaginable -- hurricanes, droughts, flooding, hail and ice
storms on a massive scale. And when a real, high virulence, high
transmissability flu pandemic hits (and it will, we just don't know
when), a simulation done by Homeland Security says it will cause
business disruption on the order of the Great Depression. As a result
of this there will be agrowing realization that
the primary purpose of business is sustainability.
This is not to say that all businesses will become green. It means that
there will be a huge new emphasis on risk management as Job One in most
businesses, and an appreciation that short-termism, the propensity to
obsess about short-term profits over longer-term viability, is
extremely dangerous. It means that climate change will be discussed in
board rooms not because the company wants to be seen as socially and
environmentally responsible for PR reasons, but because executives and
directors realize that if the planet is sick and depleted and
constantly coping with catastrophes, every company is imperilled too.
More than trying to mitigate their emissions and waste, companies will
be struggling to figure out how to adapt themselves to what comes next
-- when they don't know what comes next. Competent scenario planners
and experts in simulation will be in popular demand.
Rethinking
the religion of growth: In
business guru Charles Handy’s book The Age of Paradox,
Handy interviews the natural entrepreneur who owns a top-rated winery
in California. He writes: "After one sun-drenched day in the wine
country of California I asked the owner of the winery about the future.
He was passionate about their winery, he said; they were putting back
every cent they could into its growth. 'Where can you grow?' I asked,
looking around at the valley where every inch of land was now fully
planted with other people’s vines. 'Oh, we don’t
want to expand,' he said, 'we want to grow better,
not bigger'." Natural entrepreneurs understand that your business
doesn't have to grow to succeed, and a lot of companies whose future
has depended on double-digit annual profit increases to placate their
investors, are now looking at ways they can thrive by simply being
better, and staying the same size, so that even when we move to a
steady-state economy, these companies will stay prosperous.
The
new business model: Your basic product/service is free:
This is the world that marketing whiz Seth Godin describes in his books
and blog, and was to some extent predicted by Clay Christensen and Mike
Raynor in The
Innovator's Solution. And
it's beginning to force every company to re-examine its business model
before some competitor comes in and prices its bread-and-butter product
or service at zero dollars. The 'freemium' model ("Give your product or
service away for free, acquire a lot of customers virally, then offer
premium priced value added or enhanced products and services to your
most loyal customer base.") is no longer limited only to software
firms. For the next few years, this business model innovation is likely
to change what we buy, how we buy, and what we pay for virtually
everything in the marketplace.
A
'World of Ends' for
business: In their famous
treatise explaining the Internet phenomenon,
Doc Searls, Dave Weinberger et al said that what made the Internet so
powerful and so resilient was that it had no control 'centre' and no
hierarchy: All the value was added, by millions of people, at the
'ends'. And if someone tried to disrupt it, these millions of users
would simply work around the disruption. There is growing evidence that
the same phenomenon is happening in businesses, which have long
suffered from diseconomies of scale and bureaucracy that stifle
innovation and responsiveness. Think of this as a kind of 'outsourcing
of everything' (parodied in the cartoon above). Already companies like
Levi Strauss make nothing at all -- they simply add their label to
stuff made by other companies, and distribute it (largely through
independent companies they don't own either). The Internet can allow
this fragmentation to be carried to its logical limit --
R&D, manufacturing, sales, logistics and service can
all be done by different companies, cutting out the 'management
middleman' entirely. And even beyond that lies what is called Peer
Production, that even blurs the line between these 'suppliers' and the
customer, such that the customer 'invents' what she wants and then
works with various partners to produce it. I described this in an
earlier article:
Suppose
I want a chair that has the attributes of an Aeron without the $1800
price tag, or one with some additional attribute (e.g. a laptop holder)
the brand name doesn't offer? I could go online to a Peer Production
site and create an instant market, contributing the specifications, a
bunch of technical links available online about just what makes this
chair so special, and, perhaps a maximum price I would be willing to
pay. People with some of the expertise needed to produce it could
indicate their capabilities and self-organize into a consortium that
would keep talking and refining until they could meet this price --
and, if not, they might counter-offer something close. Other potential
buyers could chime in, offering more or less than my suggested price.
Based on the number of 'orders' at each price, the Peer Production
group could then accept orders and start manufacturing. The
possibilities are endless -- somebody might want customization or some
other attribute, to which the same or some other Peer Production group
might respond. Another Peer Production group might self-form and come
in with a lower price, perhaps creating a new or larger market. People
might 'subscribe' to this market to watch bids and offers progress, or
put in 'silent' bids if the offer fell to a certain point. Perhaps
Herman Miller (maker of the Aeron) might enter the bidding itself,
meeting my bid and offering the intangible value of their brand as
well. Perhaps eBay would chime in with used Aeron chairs that meet my
specifications at an even lower price (in fact eBay would be a natural
host for these virtual instant markets), bringing their reputation
systems into play.
The
intellectual capital associated with this instant market becomes part
of the market archive, available for everyone to see, stripping this
intellectual capital cost, and the executive salaries, dividends and
corporate overhead out of the cost of this and other similar product
requests and fulfillments, so that all that is left is the lowest
possible cost of material, labour and delivery to fill the order. And
the order is exactly what the customer wants, not the closest thing in
the mass-producer's warehouse. See a fashion design by a big-name
designer on FTV that you really like, but which sells for $10,000? Get
a generic for $200, with your own custom modifications, before the
big-name designer can even get the originals into the stores.
A
shift from 'free trade' to 'fair trade':
Free trade is a euphemism for unregulated trade, and it's been a
colossal failure for everybody except multinational corporations and a
few third-world workers. Its cost has been the collapse of the middle
class in many affluent nations, horrific working conditions in many
struggling nations, and massive environmental destruction everywhere.
As WTO talks dissolve in disarray and we begin to see NAFTA for the
social and environmental disaster it truly is, we will start to see
trade regulated to ensure protection of working-class jobs and local
environments. This will be a huge boon to local and green employment
and businesses opportunities, that will far outweigh the additional
cost of imported junk.
Growing
oil scarcity: Our
economy -- from the fertilizer that produces our food to the energy
that accounts for virtually all the 'productivity' improvements we have
benefited from since the dawn of the industrial revolution -- runs on
oil. There is no way to reengineer our economy quickly, even at a cost
of trillions of dollars, to wean ourselves off it before its
availability begins to plummet. Once it becomes scarce we will have to
decide between closing down factories and letting people freeze to
death. Even if we were able to find enough new oil, even at the cost of
creating more environmental holocausts like the Alberta Bitumen Sludge
Mines (sorry, the "oil sands"), the cost of that oil will quickly soar
to $200 and then $2000 per barrel by simple supply and demand. What's
worse, climate scientists tell us that even consuming half of the known
oil and coal reserves of our planet will push atmospheric CO2 past the
350ppm tipping point and produce calamitous climate change by the end
of the century.
Growing
water scarcity: Next to oil,
our economy runs on a staggering level of consumption of fresh water.
The Western half of North America, according to agronomists, is losing
its fresh water supply so quickly because of glacier melt that they
will face severe rationing within 10 years and absolute shortages -- to
the point where, as happens now in many struggling nations, the water
supply will only be turned on for a hour per day, and each household
and enterprise will be limited to a fraction of what we now use. You
don't want to know how much water the Alberta Bitumen Sludge Mines use,
and turn into toxic ponds, already.
A
three-stage entrepreneurial boom:
Even before the recession, in the 1997-2007 period Canadian businesses
with more than 500 employees created less than 20% of net new jobs, and
in the US the situation was and is much worse. If you're young, or a
boomer looking for a 'second career', chances are you'll either have to
start your own business, or work for someone who recently has done so.
Last month virtually all of the sudden surge in job growth was
entrepreneurial. I've been watching the entrepreneurial market for
years, and I'll make a prediction: In twenty years, working for a large
company will be rare. But there will be major hiccups in the transition
to an entrepreneurial economy. The first burst of entrepreneurs will
almost all fail for one reason: they will be sole proprietors who try
to do everything in their business alone. They will find this so
difficult that they'll burn out, or run out of money, or scurry back to
the job market as soon as they see a recovery. The second wave will be
younger -- educated new graduates who are too impatient or idealistic
to claw their way up the increasingly steep corporate ladder. They will
fail because they have to fail to learn. Many, unfortunately, will fail
badly and find the experience so unnerving that they'll lose the heart
and confidence to try again. But the third wave will be educated and
experienced at failing quickly and inexpensively, and they will blaze a
trail for others to follow that will be transformative. It will become
the norm for new graduates. It will reduce the big corporate
oligopolies and the big professional associations to minor players in
the economy.
The
Gen Y phenomenon: There is
something fundamentally different about those coming of age in the 21st
century, as Don
Tapscott has documented for the
past decade. This generation is very sociable, connected, trusting,
collaborative, and protective of each other. They're comfortable using
technologies the rest of us haven't really got the hang of, and they're
fearless and masterful at finding workarounds when corporate policies
or restrictions or firewalls or bureaucracy get in the way of them
doing their job the way they know is best. They're going to work, on
average, in 12-14 jobs over their lifetimes, so they aren't as easily
cowed, dictated to, or influenced by bribes or threats as previous
cohorts of workers. You won't be able to tell them what to wear, when
to do their work, when to do or not do 'personal stuff', what tools
they must or cannot use, or where they must work. They know none of
these rules make a difference to their performance, so get used to it.
But also know this: Unless they've worked as entrepreneurs, they won't
have the faintest ideas what 'business' is really about. You'd better
be prepared to tell them, show them, explain it in terms they can
understand, because if you don't, they won't be able to help you do
what's important to your business, and its success.
A
shift back to basics
and real value: There's
nothing like a recession or three to make you refocus on what's really
important in your life. There are already signs that people are valuing
their time more than they have for decades, and that may mean that
workers will seek careers that allow them time to do what's more
important than their jobs. Fewer hours and less overtime means they'll
have less disposable income, and that means they'll do more things
themselves that they used to 'outsource' -- less eating out, more
do-it-yourself home and car repairs, purchase of clothes and other
durables that are well-made and timeless, more self-made entertainment
and recreation (good for your health and creativity!), less willingness
to commute, less tolerance of low-quality goods and services,
preference for locally-made and hand-crafted products, more saving and
less spending in general. That means companies that are depending on a
rebound of frenzied consumer spending after each recession will not
fare well, and those that help customers to be self-sufficient, to
connect with each other, and to learn, those which have a reputation
for quality and attentiveness, and which get most of their business by
word of mouth, will flourish.
Oh, and in the process, twelve
tools that you are getting used
to in your business will disappear. They include corporate websites,
Intranets, e-mail, groupware, cell phones, classrooms, 'best
practices', and most of the types of boring text-based documents you
love so much.
A
couple of years ago (Dec. 7, 2006), I wrote a review
of Peter
Schwartz's 1989 book The Art of the Long View,
which outlined an approach to scenario planning and then presented
three scenarios looking forward to 2005 using that approach. Here's my
synopsis, from that review, of how those scenarios missed the mark, and
why:
Back
in 1989, when The Art of the Long View was written, Schwartz (with
Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold and others) produced three
scenarios for the year 2005 that
they called Global Incoherence, New Empires, and Market World. These
make fascinating reading, coming as they did before the dot-com boom
and bust, before social networking, and before 9/11. The scenarios
greatly overestimated
our willingness and ability to do anything about global warming and the
environment in general. They also overestimated the impact of new
technology on society, the amount of change that the
‘information economy’ would bring about, the impact
of then-teenage Gen X’ers (and the trend to cultural
homogeneity in general) and the degree of innovation in business and
the media. It underestimated
the degree of political upheaval, cultural clashes, genocide and war
that have turned out to be the hallmarks of the 1990s and 2000s. It
incorrectly foresaw the "replacement of political ideology with
pragmatism" as a result of "a world weary of war". The End of Oil is
contemplated but discounted as highly improbable. And while interactive
TV is contemplated, there is no mention of anything like what we now
call the Internet.
The fault of these scenarios, and of most attempts at imagining
alternative futures, is the human tendency to assume the future will be
like the present, only more so. Those of us who say this will be the
final century of human civilization produce raised eyebrows because the
majority cannot conceive of a significant discontinuity between what
has happened in the past, what is happening right now, and what is to
come. When sudden discontinuous reversals occur (the fall of the Soviet
Union, the dot com bust etc.), our tendency is to discount them
entirely as unsustainable anomalies and do our political and economic
prognosticating as if neither the rise nor the fall had ever happened.
When other unexpected discontinuous events occur (9/11, Katrina), our
tendency is to exaggerate their significance, to ignore our learnings
from everything that happened before them, and to start predicting more
of the same, mentally creating new continuities to replace the ones we
have lost. That’s just the way we are.
More recently (Nov. 19, 2007), I reviewed
Michael Raynor's book The Strategy Paradox,
which recommends using scenario planning to manage strategic
uncertainty (keep doors open and be aware of and ready to commit to
various alternatives as they emerge), to create strategic options (make
small risk-conscious strategic investments, each of which will pay off
big if that scenario plays out), and to get operating divisions to
commit fully to certain short-term strategies (by giving them
sufficient resources and indemnifying them from blame if the scenario
their efforts are predicated upon does not play out). The idea is that
competitive advantage will accrue not to
the companies that assume the status quo will continue unchanged
(because change is inevitable), but rather to those that take strategic
risks across of a whole range of plausible future scenarios.
I'm working currently on a project with Michael to envision and think
about a range of options for the 2010-2014 period, that businesses can
use to anticipate and prepare for discontinuous risks and opportunities
that they might otherwise not consider.
Last week my friend Dave Snowden chimed
in with a post on scenario
planning in complex environments. In an earlier article, he had
proposed three important principles for managing organizations in these
new environments:
Distributed Cognition:
using the capacity of diverse networks to contribute to decision making
Granularity: small
things (blogs, anecdotes, crews) are more adaptable and hence useful
than large things (books, treatises, organizations)
Disintermediation:
eliminating layers that separate unfiltered information from
decision-makers, to improve context and opportunity for important
pattern-recognition
As Euan Semple has pointed out, these are aspects of organizations that
can be effectively managed -- using and encouraging networks,
increasing the granularity of information and organizational
structures, and disintermediation, are all things that management can
actually do, that will improve work effectiveness and enhance
decision-making.
In his latest article, Dave says that scenario planning is designed for
complicated environments (where one can reasonably anticipate all
possible future outcomes) not complex environments (where prediction is
substantially impossible). He summarizes the basic scenario planning
approach (his diagram is shown above): brainstorm future possibilities;
cluster them into a framework; produce a full narrative for a few
plausible scenarios at the 'corners' of the framework; monitor to
detect whether these scenarios are coming true. And, of course, decide
what you would/will do if each scenario does appear to be coming true.
In my work with Michael, our framework is based on the predominant
economic outcomes (positive or negative) and the degree of economic
volatility, to create four 'extreme' but plausible future economic
scenarios; our assumption is that the actual economic future will be
somewhere within the bounds of these four scenarios.
Some of the dangers with scenario planning that Dave identifies:
empirically, it has
been shown to expand employee thinking about possible future events,
but not to improve resultant decision-making
the risk of premature
convergence on one intriguing idea or well-articulated framework, with
most of the brainstormers not thinking critically or creatively about
other possibilities
insufficient
consideration of unlikely, discontinuous and unforeseen events ("black
swans") that, if they did occur, would have extraordinary consequences
failure to look at
events outside the business environment (e.g. external political
events, resource constraints, changes in suppliers) that could
nevertheless significantly affect the business
lack of diversity in
the brainstorming group (and commensurate tendency to groupthink)
Dave argues that instead of trying to anticipate (predict),
organizations need to increase their level of "anticipatory awareness"
(capacity to imagine, envision and assess how they might deal with,
different futures, so that the organization is more resilient -- not
caught by surprise -- and able to react quickly when occurrences that
have at least been imagined occur).
To achieve this "anticipatory awareness" Dave suggests increasing the
number of people canvassed for their ideas on future possibilities, and
the number of future possibilities ("micro-scenarios") considered, and
then using techniques to assess ("signify"), index, and search for
patterns in these micro-scenarios. You can see the use of his
Distributed Cognition and Granularity principles in this approach. When
"monitors" are put in place to early-detect symptoms of any of these
micro-scenarios, managers will have a basis to continuously assess the
likelihood of each of these micro-scenarios occurring, and the
consequences if they were to occur, and make decisions on how to
mitigate or adapt to the risks each micro-scenario presents
accordingly. So, as Dave explains, even a maverick can proffer
micro-scenarios that will capture management attention when the
"monitors" suggest those micro-scenarios are becoming more likely -- in
most organizations, the mavericks with the boldest ideas and
predictions tend to be filtered out by middle managers before senior
executives hear of them.
After reading Dave's article, Vera B, one of my readers, commented:
Heh.
Looking at [Dave's article], it
occurs to me there are two kinds of complex systems: Those that manage
themselves, as a forest, and those that must be managed by humans, just
a few steps away from falling apart. Human management brings into
existence systems that must keep on being managed. Rarely well. Nature
brings into existence systems that arise within self management, and
therefore never need a manager.
Vera's comments resonate with my own: That because of our imaginative
poverty, and our inability to really understand and follow nature's
model of self-management, we are unable to conceive of, let alone
develop "anticipatory awareness" of, discontinuous future events. We
can recognize patterns, we can do environmental scanning and constantly
watch for 'weak signals' that forebode changes ahead, we can
extrapolate and project, and we can even (though too rarely) recognize
the recurrence of patterns from our past history. But we, and our
man-made systems, don't have the resilience, the sheer numbers of
data-providers and of data to draw on, or the billions of years of
experience at mitigation and adaptation that nature does, and we can't
hope to. Just look at most science fiction, which presumes that all
sentient creatures everywhere in the universe, throughout all time,
have and always will look, feel, communicate and act astonishingly like
humans today, and will deal with problems depressingly like we do today.
As John Gray tells us in Straw Dogs,
our species is preoccupied with the needs of the moment, and despite
our fascination with stories about the future, it is just not in our
nature to do nature's job of managing complexity. I read about the
inevitability of us using geophysical engineering to "solve" the
climate change that our ignorance of complexity has caused, by seeding
the upper atmosphere with millions of tons of heat-reflecting metal
particles, and I shake my head and sigh. The apes have been left in
charge of the laboratory for far too long.
BLOG What's Next After
Knowledge Management? A Scenario
Major
information flows in organizations, c. 1975
One
of the most important things I've learned in the last few years is
that, except for senior management, no one in most organizations really
understands what the business of the organizations is all about -- how
decisions are made, what information is used and how, etc. And, at the
same time, senior management really has no clue about what goes on at
the front lines of their organization, or outside their organization --
what potential new recruits think, what customers really think about
the organization, etc.
This should be obvious, if you think about it. Senior managers are
insulated from the front lines and customers. No one wants to tell the
boss what's wrong with the organization -- it's a career-limiting move.
And senior managers are too busy to spend much quality time with either
employees or customers. To the extent they interact with customers it's
with the senior managers of those customers, who are likewise
unenlightened about what is going on in their own organizations. So
decisions are made, often, in a vacuum, based on deficient and filtered
information.
As for the line employees, they usually have never been exposed to or
taught about what goes on in other parts of the organization, or how
managers make decisions. This is getting worse: The current generation
of young employees are likely to work in 12 organizations in their
careers -- not enough time to really figure out "the business of the
business" in any of them. The tragedy is that often neither they nor
their senior managers think they need
to know what the business is all about, unless and until they become
senior managers themselves. So most employees spend their entire
careers feeling under-appreciated, disconnected, unconsulted, and
annoyed at stupid instructions and useless information requests from
management. An they have a ton of very useful information about
customers, operational ineffectiveness, and what's going on in the
world and the marketplace, that is never solicited, and never proffered.
I care about all this because I have spent about 1/3 of my career in an
area called Knowledge Management. This discipline began about 15 years
ago, and has largely followed the track of other business 'fads' like
business process reengineering and total quality management -- a flurry
of investment and enthusiasm, followed by disenchantment and finally
abandonment.
The problem with KM is that the people charged with introducing it into
organizations were mostly front-line back-office people -- middle
managers with a background in library management, IT or training. Few
of them really knew how decisions were made and resources allocated in
their organizations. The library people saw KM as a content management
exercise. The IT people saw KM as a set of technology projects
(intranets, extranets, groupware). The training people saw KM as an
e-learning vehicle. Senior managers were mostly unenthusiastic, worried
that it would spawn more IT bureaucracy like e-mail, and not seeing any
new value provided by it. Their hope, tragically, was that KM might
automate some back office functions and allow cost savings (e.g.
blowing up the corporate library).
We might be able to understand the reasons for KM's failure if we
looked through the eyes of senior managers, front-line employees, and
customers, at the value of information to organizations. The diagram
above shows how this looked in the days before ubiquitous computers --
say, in 1975.
At that time, internal memos, typed up by secretaries, instructed
front-line and back-office employees what to do, and required them to
report production data that managers could use for making
decisions. Written information flowed vertically, not horizontally.
Managers talked with other managers, and employees talked with other
employees, and occasionally with outside colleagues, to learn their
jobs and share what they had learned. A few employees had started using
the Internet and other electronic sources of information for research,
but most research was done using the internal library or outside
journals. Customers received printed marketing material from the
organization, and submitted their orders. These were the principal
information flows in organizations at that time.
This actually made a lot of sense, when you consider how senior
managers saw, and operated, their organizations. The job of senior
managers was and is to make the organization sustainable. Managers do
this by making critical decisions, issuing instructions, capturing
performance data, and tweaking those decisions accordingly. The
variables they need to watch and make decisions about are:
Cash flow: The net
result of sales, investments, loans and share issues, government
incentives, operating expenses, R&D, dividends, and capital
expenditures.
Share price:
Investors' assessment of future growth in cash flow, which is critical
to obtaining low-cost capital.
Risks and
opportunities: Threats from new and existing competitors, a variety of
threats to reputation and business continuity, regulatory changes, rate
changes, supply changes, frauds, disasters, and opportunities to
innovate, make acquisitions, outsource, reorganize or change capital
structure
To manage cash flow, they pressure employees to find ways to increase
sales and reduce costs. Budgets, resource allocations, and monthly
targets and reporting are their levers for doing so. To manage share
price, they need to ensure that cash flow is always steadily rising.
When cash flow from operations fails to meet targets, they look at
layoffs, outsourcing, capital budget reductions, increasing government
incentives through lobbying, cutting dividends or reorganizing (e.g.
divesting unprofitable operations).
To manage risks, they will acquire, sue or out-advertise competitors,
hire PR firms to whitewash and greenwash their social and environmental
misdeeds, put controls in place to reduce risk of fraud, buy insurance
and hedges to reduce exposure to rate changes and disasters, lobby
against new regulations, lock in or acquire suppliers, outsource
non-critical operations.
To manage opportunity, a few will invest in innovation, but for most
larger organizations, it is much safer to acquire small innovative
companies, to use leverage (borrow from the bank) when interest rates
are lower than profit margins, and through planned obsolescence by
constantly forcing customers to replace or upgrade, and locking them in
to the organization's product.
This is what senior managers do. It is not surprising, therefore, that
they tend to see IT, KM and training as "non-value-added" activities.
They were getting the information they needed before the advent of
computers, so why should they invest in new IT and KM projects? And
since they expect and receive little loyalty from employees, why should
they invest in training them, when the essential knowledge they need
must be obtained "on-the-job" anyway?
In the 1980s and 1990s, most organizations invested in three new
technologies, mostly reluctantly: fax, e-mail, and intranets. Fax was a
faster and cheaper way to send marketing materials to customers and to
receive orders, and send instructions to and collect performance data
from remote operations, and it was not an expensive technology to
introduce. Its heyday was a mere decade.
E-mail and corporate intranets were introduced in most organizations in
the 1990s. Senior managers expressed concerns that e-mail would be a
scourge, and many attempted to limit its use. They were right about it
being a scourge, but not successful in limiting its use. It was a
stealth success -- permitted because it was not that expensive, but
quickly used for mostly inappropriate purposes. Corporate intranets
were used at first to automate the two dominant types of shared
organizational information: policies and procedures, and directories.
Eliminating hard-copy manuals and directories was a welcome change, but
intranets quickly became massive repositories for millions of
context-free archived documents that were of almost no use to anyone
but the author. The consequence has been an explosion in complex server
technologies, taxonomies and search technologies -- for information
that almost no one finds to be of any value. Documents touted as
'reusable best practices' were dumped into the corporate intranet and
abandoned. Some organizations ended up hiring intranet 'garbage
collectors' to remove the most useless and obsolete content.
To try to connect to customers, many organizations in the 1990s and
2000s have invested in 'extranets' (websites that only customers had
access to) and sophisticated, interactive public websites.
They found to their chagrin that decision-makers in most organizations
were too busy to visit their websites, and that most of the people
browsing the web pages they had so carefully crafted were job-seekers,
students doing papers, the competitors, and the media.
So here we are in 2009, and the principal information flows in most
organizations are still exactly what they were in 1975, as depicted in
the chart above. What's changed:
Instead of typed
memos, instructions are now sent to employees by e-mail; performance
data is sent back up to management by e-mail, or captured
electronically automatically.
Peer-to-peer
conversations are still mostly real time and face-to-face or
voice-to-voice (or IM); asynchronous conversations in e-mail threads
are arguably the least effective. E-mail has allowed more conversation
with colleagues outside the organization, and with young workers much
learning occurs through such conversations, though IT security in most
large organizations prohibits many of the social media used by young
workers to communicate outside the organization, nullifying much of
this advantage and creating considerable animosity.
The library has been
largely supplanted by the Intranet, but it is now much harder to find
things and there are fewer information professionals able to help you
find stuff, so searching takes longer and is less effective. The
Intranet in most organizations is still used principally for the same
two purposes: looking up policies and procedures, and directories. Most
other Intranet content is unused or in some cases misused.
E-mail has allowed a
massive increase in the amount of work delegation between employees in
most organizations. It is easier to delegate work when you don't have
to face the person you're asking to do it, even though the chance of it
being done well is less. E-mail also allows much more procrastination
in organizations -- people send requests for information to others
Friday afternoon, as an excuse to put off working on a project until
the next week. There is considerable evidence that e-mail has had a
significant negative effect on productivity and work effectiveness,
because there is no accountability to the sender for time of the
recipients that has been wasted, and because it costs nothing to send
an e-mail to an unlimited number of recipients.
After a period of
disintermediation (people doing their own on-line research instead of
having librarians, assistants or information professionals do it for
them) there has been a swing back to reintermediated research, as most
employees learned they lack the significant competencies needed to do
quality research. Young workers tend to still do their own on-line
research, but only until they find an appropriate intermediary and
reach the level at which they are permitted to delegate research.
Most marketing
material is now sent by e-mail and also duplicated on the
organization's public Internet site, but in these electronic forms it
is mostly unread.
In other words, in adding to the volume and complexity of information
systems, we have added relatively little value, and in some cases
actually reduced value. The reason for this is simple:
We have not done
anything to substantively improve the ability of senior management to
manage the business (i.e. to manage cash flow, share price, risks or
opportunities).
We have not done
anything to substantively improve the effectiveness of any of the
information flows (arrows in the above diagram) that matter in
organizations, or the quality of the information.
We have, in short, implemented a solution that addressed no problem. We
introduced new KM tools because we could.
If that were the end of the story, we could just shrug off KM as
another business fad and move on. But there is something happening in
organizations today that is beginning to improve the quality of
information and the effectiveness of information flows that
matter, something that creates a second opportunity for KM people to
actually do something useful.
What is happening is that people are beginning to manage their own
information, and information processes. They are finding workarounds to
the dysfunctional processes in the organizations they work in. They are
finding ways to draw on people in their growing online networks to do
their jobs better. They are realizing that, if tomorrow's workers will
end up working in a dozen different jobs in their lifetimes, they need
to take responsibility for their own learning and their own knowledge,
and take it with them from one job to the next. Increasingly, they are
keeping their knowledge in their own personal repositories, and in
their own personal networks.
I have written before about what I call Personal Knowledge Management,
which is an attempt to enable workers to do this more effectively. My
problem was that PKM is impossible to sell to senior management,
because it has no value for them. I toyed with the idea of trying to
sell it front-line workers directly, perhaps by starting a magazine
called Working Smarter. The problem with this is that everyone is at a
different stage in their evolution towards PKM, and there are no
standard answers or approaches -- we each have to muddle this through
for ourselves, based on our own 'knowledge set' and information
behaviours.
But perhaps if we outlined a future scenario of where this PKM trend is
headed, we might be able to evolve an approach that would accommodate
the needs of both individual workers and the organizations struggling
to cope with this phenomenon.
To this end, let me start with a story of a young business analyst
named Jon:
Jon
spent the first week in his new job with Giant Co. trying to port all
the information, contacts, subscriptions, and software tools he had
been using in his three previous jobs to his new company-supplied
computer. He was stymied at every turn. He was not allowed to put the
tools he was familiar with onto his new computer because they were "not
supported" by his new employer. He was blocked by the security firewall
from using webmail in the office ("we consider this to be something
employees would only use for personal non-business purposes") even
though all his business contacts and subscriptions were on it. He was
blocked from accessing YouTube (where many of the videos he had
prepared for his previous employers, and some educational videos he
referred to regularly, were stored). He was blocked from using IM and
Skype, so he was cut off from his global network of experts and
colleagues who used IM and Skype exclusively for instant, free
knowledge sharing, advice, and quick lookups of useful research
materials. He was blocked from using Vyew, so instead of being able to
call people outside the office for quick, free conferences with
screen-sharing, he had to use the company's expensive pay-per-use audio
conferencing system (and everyone on the call had to be
pre-authorized), and send a huge deck of screen captures by e-mail to
participants in advance. He wasn't permitted to work from home. When we
worked on weekends from home, his web access to his work e-mail didn't
work properly, and because his co-workers didn't use it, he was told it
would be months before they would start trying to fix the problems with
it. After a long delay, he was approved for VPN, but only on his work
computer, so he began lugging it home every day, only to discover that
it degraded performance so much that even accesses e-mail with it was
agonizingly slow.
His boss dropped into Jon's cubicle about six weeks after he had
started work, and found Jon working away happily. But to the boss'
surprise, Jon had two computers sitting side-by-side on his desk. Jon
explained that his work computer was connected to the organization's
network, and he used it only to access messages and documents behind
the firewall, which Jon would immediately forward to his personal
e-mail account, or (using a USB drive) quickly transfer over to his own
machine. All work was done on Jon's own machine, which was connected to
the Internet (and all Jon's contacts, subscriptions and documents) by a
wireless connection that Jon paid for personally. Because all Jon's
outgoing e-mails came from his own machine, 90% of the e-mail he was
receiving from fellow employees was now being sent to his personal
e-mail address (most people didn't notice or care that Jon's 'reply to'
e-mail address on his messages wasn't his company e-mail address). Ten
of his co-workers at the company had followed his two-computer example,
and were using IM rather than e-mail for their communications. The boss
asked whether it didn't take a lot of time to transfer between the two
machines, and Jon replied "Less and less all the time". Jon's boss left
the office unsure whether to praise Jon for his innovative workaround,
or report him to IT to make sure Jon wasn't exposing the company to
security risks.
This is a composite of a number of real cases of young people working
around dysfunctional information systems I have witnessed in the last
two years. I expect it's going to become more and more common.
Let's suppose that, in twenty years, Jon's information behaviour
becomes the norm. Eventually organizations will have to face the
problem, and end the guerilla war that is brewing between the IT
security people and Gen Y in a growing number of companies and
institutions. I think it is unlikely that most will be able to resolve
the perceived security threats in such a way that they could allow the
Jons of the world to do what they want inside the firewall. What is
more likely is that, just like the calculator and telephone, the laptop
(soon to become even
smaller and more powerful) will
evolve to be a ubiquitous personal device that people will carry with
them everywhere. At that point having redundant computers (and phones)
on everyone's desk will become absurd, and IT security can start to
focus on protecting confidential data from being accessed,
rather than trying to lock down employees' appliances. At that point,
the role of the rest of IT, and KM, will have to change completely.
Here's a scenario of how I think it might look:
Major
information flows in organizations, c. 2025?
In 2025, every individual in every organization uses their own personal
computer for both personal and work applications. Almost all
information is Web-based, with organizations' proprietary information
only accessible through authorization software. E-mail has disappeared,
replaced by a virtual presence application that includes instant
messaging, screensharing, voice/videoconferencing, filesharing,
calendaring, tasklists. Employees maintain a Company Sector on
their machines in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7
by other employees. Most people also maintain a Public Sector on their
machines in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 or
subscribed to by anyone in the world (this has replaced blogs and
applications like Facebook), and Community Sectors in which they put
information that can be accessed 24/7 by other members of that
Community. The aggregation of the Company Sectors of all employees of
an organization replaces the corporate Intranet of past generations; it
can be viewed by anyone in that organization. The aggregation of the
Community Sectors of all members of a particular community replaces the
community tools (forums, wikis etc.) of past generations; it can be
viewed by anyone in that community.
The IT department is still responsible for maintaining security around
the organization's proprietary information, but very little content is
left in this category. IT also checks that the information in
employees' machines' Company Sectors is appropriate for sharing, and
auto-replicating properly.
The KM department still manages the purchase of external information,
though almost all information in 2025 is free; information producers
have realized that their business model is to apply that information to
specific customers' business environment, in consulting assignments,
rather than trying to sell publications. Most of the mainstream media
were nationalized after they went bankrupt using their traditional
business models, and now operate as public services.
Most of what the KM department does now is trying to facilitate more
effective conversations among people within the organization and with
people outside the organization, including customers. They facilitate
many meetings that use the virtual presence application, especially
those that involve more than five people. That facilitation includes
organizing the meeting, distributing advance materials, facilitating
the discussion (conflict resolution, staying on schedule etc.), and
even recording, editing and publishing the meeting as appropriate. They
run courses in effective conversation, meeting and presentation skills.
In addition, the KM department conducts environmental scans and
conducts research in areas the organization wants to focus on, and
publishes and runs short video presentations on the results. They also
browse the content of the aggregate of the Company Sectors of all
employees of the organization, notifying managers and employees of
content that may be worthy of follow-up, and they assist employees to
manage their subscriptions to people's Public Sector content. And, when
the organization holds sessions and conferences on strategy, risk,
innovation or customer relationships, the KM department is on hand to
do advance and just-in-time research.
. . .
. .
If you're in KM, or in a business that has a KM function, I'd be
interested in your thoughts on this. I've been known to be a bit ahead
of my time in thinking about the future of business and technology, but
I think this scenario is quite feasible. The organizers of this fall's
KM World conference are looking for some thought leadership in this
area, and I plan to use this article to provoke some ideas from those
who have been working in this area as long as I have. So tell me what
you think.
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY People
who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months.
For my full blogroll/online reference library, see
here. [* indicates
people I connect with in real time, f2f, via IM, Skype or SL chat.]
- original research,surveys etc.
- original,well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources,blogs,essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
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Blog writers
want to see more:
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- 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs
A
couple of years ago (Dec. 7, 2006), I wrote a 
My book is available to US buyers
from the 
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