Dave Pollard: Business Innovation

A Practical Guide to Implementing Web 2.0 (aka Social Networking Tools) in Your Organization

Sat, 30 May 2009 03:33:05 GMT

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.

Category: Social Networking

Awaiting the Sustainable Enterprise Revolution

Fri, 22 May 2009 15:52:55 GMT

BLOG Incubating Entrepreneurship

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.

(P.S. lots of twittering going on at #BALLE)

Category: Finding and Creating Meaningful Work

Ten Important Business Trends

Wed, 13 May 2009 02:45:45 GMT

BLOG Ten Important Business Trends

Cartoon by Robert Weber in The New Yorker

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 a growing 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.

Category: Business Innovation

The Trouble with Scenarios

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:14:52 GMT

BLOG The Trouble with Scenarios

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.

Category: Complexity and Discovery

What's Next After Knowledge Management? A Scenario

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:21:23 GMT

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.

Category: Knowledge Management

How to Save the World? Ask the Right Questions

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:57:20 GMT

BLOG How to Save the World? Ask the Right Questions

At a conference last year of some of the world's most renowned and experienced researchers, I asked the question: "What is the defining characteristic of great research?" The most impressive answer I heard had nothing to do with diligence, breadth or depth of work, or even analytical quality. It was:

"It asks important questions."

Note that it doesn't need to answer them. What makes a question important is that it is a gateway, a key, an avenue of exploration, a means of "just helping people get started". And that it is novel, not obvious (except perhaps in hindsight), provocative, and insightful.

That's a lot to ask of a question. But such questions are not only the key to great research, they are key to all sorts of doors that, in our world of imaginative poverty, would otherwise remain closed, unexamined. Doors such as:

How to heal someone who is suffering. Can you tell me about it, talk me through it so I understand? can be a great question for helping those in pain put it in perspective, name it, get it out from inside them, and that can be the start of healing. It's usually more important to seek to understand than to proffer solutions. Ask the person to tell you a story. Listen and ask questions until you understand. Chances are when you do, they'll feel better about it, just by this process.
How to get someone unstuck. What do you think is holding you back? and What does your heart (or what do your instincts) tell you? are great questions for moving people forward.
How to make time for important activities instead of just urgent ones. If you didn't do this (urgent) task, now or ever, in five year's time who would really care? is a great question for helping people learn to say 'no'.
How to create a great Natural Community. What is it about certain places that cause you to love them, seek them, be drawn in by them, get homesick when you're away from them? is a great community-creating question.
How to create a great Natural Enterprise. Who needs your gift now? and What's in your 'sweet spot'? and How could we make this easier, or more engaging? are great enterprise-creating questions.
How to create a great Natural Economy. Why do we need growth? and What would a world without the need for money look like? are great economy-creating questions.
How to create a great process for Natural Learning. What do people love doing so much they would do it for free? is a great learning process-creating question.
How to break through a really intractable, wicked problem. What would it look like if the people suffering from this problem had the capacity to solve it themselves? is a great intractable problem-busting question.

(Lots more possible applications, and lots more important questions you could pick, but you get the idea.)
Great questions are opening, not narrowing. They smash dichotomies rather than funneling people into them.

Great questions are an invitation to great conversation.

Many great questions start with "What if...?"

And, perhaps most important, great questions tap into things that people care about. Great questions + passion = a recipe for moving forward, energetically and enthusiastically.

So how do we learn how to identify and pose important questions? Here are some ways that have worked for me:

Give yourself time to reflect, think, decide. The number one problem business executives tell me they face today is that they don't have enough time to really stop and think about what they're doing, and other possibilities. The Obama Wall Street bailout gang are perfect examples of this.
Be fully present (intellectually, emotionally, sensually, physically) as you think about an issue or challenge. Give it your full attention. Trust your instincts. Then suppose.
Practice imagining possibilities.
Change your point of view: How might this be seen from a completely different perspective? How do others see it? Get outside yourself, and outside your head.
Create stories -- future state, other world, other time, other culture. Make it up. Questions will follow, and some of them will be important.
Play -- games, simulations, improvisations, "what if".
Have conversations and collaborations -- with imaginative, objective (but caring), thoughtful, informed (but not too lost in the details) people. Draw on the wisdom of crowds.
Suspend your disbelief. Sometimes 'impossible' questions are the most important ones.
Don't pay attention to the critics. Vexatious and negative people will drain you. They think all questions are foolish. Laugh them off, boot them out, do whatever it takes to keep their toxic attitude from preventing you from doing what they 'know' is impossible.
Practice thinking differently.

What's holding you back from doing what you want to do, intend to do, love doing? What important question could you ask yourself about that challenge that might change everything?

Want to save the world, and yourself? Start by asking the right, smart, creative, provocative, important questions.

Category: The Innovation Process

Shouldn't Unanswered E-mail, To Dos, and Calendar Entries Be a Single 'Application'?

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:19:24 GMT

BLOG Shouldn't Unanswered E-mail, To Dos, and Calendar Entries Be a Single 'Application'?

I gave up on Getting Things Done methodologies when I realized that, by saying no to urgent but ultimately unimportant tasks, I could keep all my "to dos" in my head.

Or so I thought. I've discovered that I have a lot more "to do" lists than I realized. Here are some of them:

My work "to do" list, which I keep in a Lotus Notes task list because it replicates to my Blackberry (though it often seems to be out of sync). Each item in this list has a clipped-together set of papers supporting it, which I carry around in my computer back-pack.
My personal "to do" list, which I keep in various formats, including scraps of paper and the new Google task list which integrates with GMail.
My blog "to do" list, which I keep in a separate GMail e-mail folder, because most of these "to dos" originate from e-mails (e.g. updates to blogroll and e-mail address book).
My GMail personal e-mail inbox, which consists of (a) e-mails to which I have yet to respond and (b) e-mails which are actually "to dos", and which should probably be with list 3, except that they are more urgent so I want to keep them in front of me.
My "books to buy" list (handwritten, for when I'm in the bookstore).
My "music to buy or download" list (handwritten, for when I'm in a CD store).
My work Lotus Notes e-mail inbox, which consists of (a) e-mails to which I have yet to respond and (b) e-mails which are actually "to dos", and which should probably be with list 1, except that the e-mail provides a lot of detail on what needs to be done, so I can't be bothered to transcribe it to a "to do" list).
My work Lotus Notes Calendar, which consists of both (a) scheduled work and (b) personal appointments (I gave up keeping two separate calendars, even though people at work now know when I'm playing poker and where I go on vacation), and occasionally (c) times I've "blocked out" for certain urgent or time-consuming "to dos".
Gmark Google Bookmark "to dos"consisting of (a) links to include in my next Links of Week, (b) links to pages I intend to read "when I have time" (i.e. never get around to these), (c) links to pages to add to my blogroll (actually belongs in list 3), and (d-e) links to books to buy and music to download (actually belong to lists 5 & 6).
My blog post ideas "to do" list, which I usually keep in (a) Nvu (html) files with notes for future articles, but which sometimes I also keep in (b) a GMail e-mail folder if there's an essential link or notes from a reader that provoked the idea.
My "to read" hard copy piles, which consist of (a) one pile of articles and magazines in my computer backback (which I take to work), and (b) one stack of books and personal papers by my bed.
My voice mail "inboxes", for my work and home numbers.

Because my Lotus Notes stuff is behind the corporate firewall (and because this stuff replicates to my Blackberry, which my employer pays for), I continue to use Lotus Notes applications stuff (lists 1, 7 and 8) separate from my Gmail applications stuff (lists 2, 3, 4, 9 and 10b). I could manually forward all my Lotus Notes e-mails to my Gmail account (my employer won't allow this automatically, for security reasons), and copy everything in my Lotus Notes Calendar to a Google Calendar that everyone could see, but this would probably take more time than it would save.

Looking at these 12 "to do" lists, they fall into five main content categories: messages to process (list 3, 4ab, 7ab, 10b, 12), tasks (list 1, 2, 5, 6, 8c, 9cde), appointments (list 8ab), drafts to write (list 9a, 10a), and readings (list 9b, 11). Is there some way to combine these into a single list where everything is visible in one place at one glance? Is this more trouble than it's worth? What is/are the best application(s) to use to achieve this?

I keep procrastinating on doing anything about this, because when I was sick and not working 2 1/2 years ago, the problem disappeared, so I figured that, when I retire (in the not too distant future) I won't have to worry about it as much. But I've decided that a bit of time management now could save me some anxiety and time in the future, so here are my thoughts on this so far:

Google now allows you to recharacterize an e-mail (list 3, 4ab, 10b) as a task (i.e. move it into list 2, with a link retained to the archived e-mail that you can refer to as necessary). GMail now also allows you to work offline (i.e. it keeps a sync'd copy of your last three months' messages, and your task list, on your 'home' computer), though this is still in beta. And I can, awkwardly, access my GTasks from my Blackberry. So theoretically I could close lists 1, 3, 4ab and 10b into list 2. But, alas, GTasks cannot be tagged like GMails -- all tasks show up in one huge unsortable, unindexable list. This isn't going to help. Yes, I know there are add-ons to Gmail and other Task apps (I've tried Remember the Milk) but they don't allow you to recharacterize an e-mail as a task, don't work offline and aren't accessible from my Blackberry.
I've considered using my Calendar as my all-in-one "to do" list, by slotting all my tasks, messages to process, drafts to write, and readings into open time slots on the Calendar. This has the additional advantage of actually forcing me to prioritize and set deadlines for these things. Unfortunately, as we all know, other (usually urgent unimportant) things come along that get done instead, so I would be spending hours rescheduling a lot of these "to dos" again and again. This already happens with my list 1 items, which have a scheduling option that appears on my Calendar and my Blackberry.
What I do right now is print out lists 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 and keep them in a stack on top of list 11a. Each morning I scan these lists and asterisk which ones I intend to do that day. List 4 is constantly front-and-centre when I'm online, day and night. Lists 3, 9bc, 10b, and 11b, to be honest, almost never get looked at. Lists 9a and 10a get attention in the evening when I work on my blog. List 12 generally gets merged into list 1 regularly.
So it seems to me that what I'm looking for is something that integrates task lists (lists 1, 2, 5, 6, 8c, 9cde) together into one robust list, enables (but doesn't mandate) calendaring of tasks, and allows messages (lists 3, 4ab, 7ab, 10b) to be recharacterized as tasks in this integrated list, with a link back to the pertinent message, which can then be removed from the inbox and archived. Tasks that are calendared (list 8c) would be highlighted in the task list. Net result -- an empty inbox at the end of each day, and one integrated task list that, alongside your calendar, shows everything you have to do.
Getting Things Done application developer Eric Mack has developed such a tool, called eproductivity, but only for the Lotus Notes environment. It's illustrated at the top of this post. Each message in your inbox can be moved to an existing project or action folder (task list entry) by dragging it to that folder in the right sidebar, or used to create a new project or action (task list entry) by dragging it to the appropriate icon in the left sidebar. Actions (one-off, or part of projects) in the task list that are assigned to specific dates and times are displayed in the Lotus Notes Calendar. Some of the eproductivity functionality is accessible on my Blackberry, though it's not clear which parts. I suppose I could redirect all my GMail to Lotus Notes Mail to use this, but it seems a rather convoluted solution.

So that's where I stand now. I'm going to try out eproductivity. And I'm going to keep looking for something equivalent that works in the GMail environment. I'm stuck with Lotus Notes at work and I like GMail (because I can access it from any computer, and because it works with GTalk IM and other applications that I find much more useful than e-mail), so I'm not inclined to look at any applications that don't build on one or the other. But I'm open-minded about it.

What works for you? Shouldn't unanswered e-mails, "to dos" and calendar entries all be handled the same way, with a single application? How do you 'work around' the fact that they aren't?

Category: Personal Knowledge Management

Friday Flashback: Ten Parameters for 21st Century Innovation

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:03:55 GMT

BLOG Friday Flashback: Ten New Parameters for Innovation

This is a repost of part of an article I published in the newsletter of the World Innovation Foundation, and later on my blog, two years ago.

Innovation has addressed basic human needs in past ages of our civilization, and is in the process of doing so to address the pressing human issues of today: chronic and epidemic disease, crime and terrorism, waste and pollution (including global warming), urban decay, famine, overpopulation, biodegradation and ecosystem exhaustion, unemployment, inequity, scarcity of critical resources, loss of biodiversity, economic overextension and unsustainability, chronic violence and war.

In each age of our civilization, however, the scale, complexity and interconnectedness of these issues have grown exponentially. Innovations and interventions that address one of these issues are increasingly inadequate as each new focused solution ignores or even exacerbates (by introducing new threats, vulnerabilities, wastes and opportunities for misuse) other and new problems.

Increasingly, too, the economic system that was designed to introduce and scale innovations has become antithetical to innovation: It is cheaper and less risky for a corporation to buy (or buy out and suppress) an innovation than to develop one itself. Many ‘innovative’ startups are conceived purely for an early sellout to a large corporation often disinclined to introduce it when it threatens its existing brand. Intellectual property laws in many countries allow and encourage the patenting of entire processes and the intimidation, by armies of lawyers, of entrepreneurs who encroach on any aspect of those processes. And corporations are rewarded for schemes that enable them to circumvent social and environmental laws to ‘competitive advantage’, and now arguably spend more energy trying to defeat regulations that were designed for the public good than they spend on initiatives that serve the public good.

So it seems to me that the innovation model that worked in the industrial era is no longer serving us in this new and more complex era, and a new model is needed. What might this new model look like? I believe it must have the following attributes:

It needs to start with achieving as deep an understanding of the current problems as is humanly possible. Things are the way they are for a reason, and many organizations put too little effort into understanding those reasons because it is easier and cheaper to use marketing to ‘manufacture’ the need and consent for a new product. We need to appreciate that uninformed, myopic attempts to grapple with complex problems cannot work. Before we can make it right, we need to understand what’s wrong. This isn’t completely possible in any complex system, but it’s essential to grapple with appreciating how things got to where they are, to optimize the probability that the innovations we come up with will help rather than making things worse. This is where scientists come in: We need a lot more of you, we need to give you more resources to do research, we need to help you collaborate across geographies and disciplines more effectively, and we need to enable you to focus on issues that are critical to our species’ survival, not issues that offer the greatest short-term ROI to some self-serving and indifferent corporation.

It needs to be holistic and multi-disciplinary. You can’t solve a complex problem with a merely complicated solution. We need to look at the implications of our ideas and innovations across all areas of our society and our world. Cross-disciplinary teams that share a sense of urgency and purpose are the best means to achieve this broader understanding and skill-set.

It needs to be substantially voluntary. That means it must be freed from the for-short-term-profit constraints of the current economic system. The economy in which such efforts naturally belong is the Gift Economy, an economy that is already healthy and flourishing, as exemplified by open source and peer production, by scientific exchanges, libraries, weblogs, wikis, file sharing and other free exchanges of information, by philanthropy without strings attached, and by mentoring done by parents and other volunteers. Innovators must have the time, energy, and passion to pursue ideas regardless of their profitability. To do this we need to recruit the right people. I believe Open Space methodology, and specifically its process of invitation, offers the best mechanism for attracting precisely the people needed to appreciate and address all of the different aspects of complex problems. I also suspect that our greatest opportunity in this regard is to tap those who are retired or close to retirement or working only part-time, who can afford to volunteer their time and who bring a lifetime of valuable experience to the task.

It needs to be self-organized, non-hierarchical and collaborative. Hierarchical systems are inherently bureaucratic and frequently dysfunctional. As nature teaches us, self-organized systems are more adaptable, more flexible, more resilient. We are mostly inexperienced at working in such social structures, so we need to (re-)learn to do so. We have much to learn from indigenous cultures who have been doing this for millennia.

It needs to be experimental and evolutionary. We learn from our mistakes, and the modern corporation has reached the point where promotion and production costs so much that failure is intolerable. Our new innovation model has to not only tolerate, but encourage mistakes. It must try a lot of different things, in parallel (for there is no time to waste) through experimentation and fast learning and then trying something a little different based on that learning, the way nature does. Our main product must be ‘working models’ – solutions that appear to work to solve some of our pressing global problems without exacerbating others. Then we must let them go, push them out of the nest. Some of these innovations may help us live better in the years before civilization’s collapse. Others may only be of use after that collapse, by the survivors who will know what didn’t work and will be urgently looking for alternative models that might, models that will make sense given the terrible knowledge they will then possess.

It needs to involve new ways of thinking. Einstein famously said “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” We need some radical, even crazy thinking. Innovation is not incremental change and it is not arrived at analytically. And we need not only radical innovations; we need radical ways of innovating, more holistic, more intuitive, more collaborative, more discontinuous, more imaginative, and more connected to the wisdom and understanding of all life on Earth.

We need to start now, with a sense of urgency and shared purpose, to invent the future, one that will reach beyond and outlive the collapse of our civilization.

Ronald Wright, in his book A Short History of Progress, summarizes our human destiny by saying “It's entirely up to us. If we fail -- if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us -- nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.”

Let’s show Mr. Wright that the apes still have a trick or two up their sleeves.