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By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Since the dawn of mankind, human beings have structured their social identity from their affiliation to one or more territories. This belonging, whether geographic, social or symbolic, has allowed the birth and growth of collective structures with tangible, concrete boundaries, which turned into more and more complex systems (cities, companies,… ) which in turn developed their own identity (internally) and structured themselves through exchanges and markets (externally).
During the course of the XXth century, these systems have ossified, their boundaries have stratified themselves, up to sometimes giving up their essence for race for survival. At the same time, digital technology has facilitated the creation of new, virtual territories, whose boundaries continuously evolve, boundaries between private and professional life, between trusted and distrusted circles.
Loss of identity
Today, interpenetration of virtual and real, superposition of the territories there defined, have rendered identification with one -or several- territories nearly impossible. Customers are now active stakeholders of the companies they rent services from. Our relationships with the city we inhabit are becoming more and more abstract, cutting ourselves off from geographical, or even political, considerations. The sense of belonging to an enterprise, to share values, is vanishing. The systems of exchanges, symbolic or commercial, which had built the links between territories, are more and more dematerialized and spread into pieces as our territories no longer define us.
An increasing tendency toward more control and more planning has shown up inside these territories, whether organizations or urban entities, leading to less and less convincing results. Beyond the structural dysfunction of management models inherited from the urban and industrial revolution of the XIXth century, our inability to enjoy again a sustainable growth finds its roots in the vain attempts to manage these territories as closed systems. The more complex they become, the more resources are needed to try to hold entropy back (risk and security management, requirements management, process-based operations, urban planning,…), and the less effective and efficient they appear.
We behave as if organizations were closed exoskeletons and focus instead on the markets which link them together, granting them a life of their own (of the total of economic exchanges taking place nowadays, more than 96% are financial, and do not involve any product or service).
Maps and territories
For organizations as well as for urban entities, this loss of identity goes on pair with dilution of value. Their development, even their survival, is facing new challenges. Strategies of rules’ optimization become more and more irrelevant as we no longer master the boundaries of these territories, and we need instead to try to understand the logic of their inner dynamics. Our primary concern, when dams cannot contain the flow anymore, should be first to learn swimming.
How can we create value when value doesn’t have the same meaning for all stakeholders (customers, shareholders, managers, workers, or citizens, as social responsibility weights more and more in our minds)? How can we grasp the influence the territories we belong to, as customers, as citizens, are workers, exerts on us? The one they exert on each other?
Many of the frameworks and methodologies we are using to help organizations are now obsolete, as complexity trumps any attempt to globally understand them, as well as to address unique situations with out-of-the-box solutions. We need instead to favor experimentation, patterns matching, scenario testing, and resilient thinking, in order to get a grasp of the dynamics involved in the ever changing interactions inside and between the territories we belong to. In other words, we need maps.
Of course, the map isn’t the territory, as Alfred Korzybski said. But maps potentially replicate the territory’s structure, which allows us to re-appropriate its dimensions, symbolic as well as operational. Successive iterations will unfold the flows of exchanges at work at different scales in a fractal way, allowing us to keep a holistic vision of a territory while guiding all stakeholders on the road to follow. Value networks analysis, customer journey mapping, service blueprint, are some of the tools at our disposal to explore and help understanding the terra incognita that our organizations, our customers, and our cities have become. To paraphrase Paula Thornton, we don’t need to drive adoption, we need to help people understand how things are designed. We don’t need to manage change, as it is happening anywhere, at anytime; we need to guide them in embracing it. Consulting must now to step in a brand new territory.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Organizations are facing today the most challenging conditions of their history. Turbulent times in economy, geopolitical threats, environmental and societal issues, are setting the stage for what might be the biggest changes since the industrial revolution in the early XIXth century.
At the same time, the rabid evolution of technology allows everyone to connect to everyone and to share information and knowledge with no other limit than the speed of light, creating a full spectrum of new opportunities (as well as, let’s face it, threats) for businesses.
State of the art
But the collaborative enterprise, as an organizational model as well as an operational framework, is still in its infancy. Many of the tools we will use in ten years from now and that will shape our behaviors, in the workplace as well as in our personal life, still do not exist. In this context, trends & buzzwords are over saturating the infosphere. It is often hard to know which trend is authentic, has a potential for business and if it is actionable or not.
It might be time to ask ourselves whether all the noise about Enterprise 2.0, collaboration, social business and so forth were true business opportunities for a company leveraging the different aspects of heralded approaches, or if they were an empty shell resulting from the literature published by the prolific minds of so-called gurus and agile marketers (consulting firms and platform vendors are becoming incredibly clever into packaging their offer) looking for new markets on which to sell both software and methodologies. In other words: Is the collaborative enterprise real or just a concept to justify massive investments in various business fields & applications?
The project
To try better envisioning what will come next, and to better understand the challenges and opportunities rose by the disruptive changes involved today, Frédéric Gilbert and myself are launching the Future of the Collaborative Enterprise project, task which kept me away from blogging for some time.
While surveys and white papers usually depict the state of the art in a domain, what we want to do is sketching possible (probable?) scenarios about what the future of work will look like. What could it look like? How can a company embrace the potential of collaboration? And what are the different challenges that we are facing to make it effective on large scale? Can it work for everyone and how? Asking these questions we think will allow acting, anticipating & using the potentials of collaborative initiatives.
To get actionable clues, we are interviewing experts and thought leaders from many disciplines around the world, asking them to react on a set of ten questions framing the main aspects of collaboration: organizational structure, change, technology, and information While many more are on the go, you can see who we already interviewed on the project’s website.
Get involved and help us make it happen
Next step is, through design thinking and future thinking methods, to extract patterns and build plausible future scenarios from the gathered material, and then to further challenge thought leaders on societal, cultural and organizational topics in their knowledge and foresight.
Frederic and I, think that it takes more than words & methods to make things happen, and we emphasize on the importance of people and of the authentic will required to make the workplace a better place to be in order to bring this positive energy to our homes.
Harnessing the collective intelligence is an intrinsic part of the Future of Collaborative Enterprise project. All interviews will be published on the project’s Youtube channel and website as they are conducted and transcript, and all material will be published under a Creative Commons license. We have published the very same set of questions we asked all interviewees onto Quora, and will watch this space for the most insightful answers. You can add your vision there, or send short videos of your answers through the Future of Collaborative Enterprise website’s contact page.
We have also created a Facebook page dedicated to the project, to help you follow its developments, additions and conversations. The more material we will get, the more we will be able to set up the grounds for a truly collaborative enterprise, and to build up an actionable framework to help businesses which want to undergo the path to more value co-creation.
Whether you are consultant, software vendor, business leader, academic researcher or simply want to add your voice to our project, we’re looking forward to understanding the Future of Collaborative Enterprise with you!
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.
George Eliot
New technology is often disruptive, and social technologies make no exception. Today, quite everyone agrees on the necessity to focus on cultural change to help embracing the new behaviors they enable, and there is quite a consensus on the levers which might make the shift happen. Pilots, either as small scale projects or as fox-in-the-henhouse tools, are common practice, and integration into the flow of work is this year’s new black. Those are, in no doubt, pragmatic catalysts for change. But… are we really focusing on the RIGHT change?
And the pocket calculator hit the school system
Pocket calculators were banned from examinations for a long time after being allowed in the classroom. Then, gradually, they made their first official appearance as digital replacement for arithmetical and other mathematical tables. In accordance to Moore’s law, the power of calculators grew rapidly, and the school system began to foresee much larger applications for these devices.
In France, an official document officialized the use of any type of pocket calculator -even programmable ones- in 1986. Furthermore, their use was largely encouraged during mathematical classes. But the interesting part isn’t the fact that teachers recognized the benefits of the technology and further promoted them (‘adoption’ and ‘empowerment’ might sound familiar to you), it is what these benefits were intended to be. A new version of the document, still applicable today, was published in 1999, explicitly setting the purpose of calculators’ use. Translating from French:
Mastering the use of calculators use represents an important goal in every student’s training, as it constitutes an effective tool to be used in their education and during their professional, economic and social life. For these reasons, their use is planned in many teaching programs and should be widely accepted during examinations and competitive exams.
In other words, calculators’ mastery is now required because of the way they allow faster and more sophisticated calculation, and are a good introduction to man-to-machine language. Wow… Where we could free students from tedious tasks to focus on higher level concepts, leading to a different mathematical culture, what we got is mathematics-as-usual on steroids, and a focus on technology.
Redefining organizations
For more than a century, our economies has been based on a paradigm where profit derived from production of goods and accumulation of assets, and where offer-and-demand markets where the only measure of customers’ satisfaction. Today’s globalization has displaced production toward less costly countries, and it won’t be long before intellectual production follows manufacturing of goods. What can be replicated, it can be outsourced. Markets reveal the internal complexity of interactions between capital, capabilities and irrational considerations. Uncertainty has replaced growth, and there is a growing and unsustainable chasm between the civil society and big corporations pursuing their own goals.
In this context, unleashing the power of horizontal networking inside and across organizations represents a promising answer to some of the toughest challenges our companies, and, beyond them, our society, are facing today. Businesses must repurpose themselves, and adapting to these challenges means acknowledging that work, as a set of activities, is changing nature, and that organizations must redefine themselves.
This shift is already happening on the public web: Clay Shirky, and others, have shown how social technologies foster resilience and creativity, and allow the connective tissue of our societies to take back their central role in human life. Alas, on enterprise side, what we are seeing is mostly the use of these technologies to enforce work as usual, the change we are calling for is too often a desperate chase to more productivity and efficiency. As history tends to repeat itself, social technologies are the new pocket calculator.
Sandboxes, not pilots
What is the purpose of an Enterprise 2.0 pilot project? The no thrill answer is obvious: they are set up to facilitate the diffusion of Enterprise 2.0 practices into the organizational culture, and to demonstrate business value. They allow, often through trial-and-error iterations, to blend the impact of social technologies into the operational structure of a company. They are not meant to help redefining the nature of work by fostering new behaviors, they are instead meant to leverage these behaviors to enhance the way work is presently done. The numerous experts talking about implementing social technologies “in the flow” don’t say anything different.
Social technologies DO HAVE business value, indeed, and that value is far more important than the transitory productivity gains that many tend to highlight. Most of the problems businesses tackle today are way too complex to be addressed the way companies are run today. Networked communities are better armed to deal with wicked problems than any leader, no matter how insightful or visionary he could be. In that sense, Steve Job’s resignation from Apple is highly symbolic: it somehow marks the end of an era, the one of lonesome visionary leaders.
Rather than thinking in terms of pilots, it is time to open sandboxes throughout organizations. Time to allow open, free-willing individuals to gather around real business problems, whether they are financial, strategic or organizational, and to let them probe and discuss how they could solve them. Here lies the real power of social technologies. Empowering employees is not about giving them more tools or putting higher performance expectations on them. It is about opening up what really matters, and giving them the power to influence the destiny of the company they are working in.
With big data comes big challenges
Integration is another social business buzzword on these days. Integration into work, integration into our systems’ architecture. This is, of course, a view suitable to a finite world, where most of business activities and outcomes can be stored into a system of record, and correspond to our process-based neo-industrial organizations. Here too, social technologies suffer from the pocket calculator syndrome. But companies can no longer ignore the outside world, and the necessity to take account of your customers in core business practices will radically change the nature of work and our reliance on today’s IT architectures.
We are only seeing the beginning of an era where data, and the way it flows freely in real time, relegate systems of records into the dark age. Social CRM is setting the basis for a future where interpreting and inferring patterns from customers’ interactions will become an important part of work. Handling and interpreting big data meaningfully will come with more uncertainty and complexity than today’s IT architecture can cope with, and will require changing most of today’s assumptions about how we deal with technology.
As an example, consider the evolution of weather forecasting. The more powerful the models are, the less precise they become. Among the characteristics of complex systems is that their evolution can only be predicted if the original set of conditions is known. The more parameters we introduce, the more precise we have to be in order to get coherent results.
A lesson from history
Pocket calculators, in France at least, changed the way mathematics are taught, but not in the right way, and didn’t change the essence what is taught in courses. Social technologies have a similar power to seed and sustain an inevitable change in work requirements and organizational redefinition. Let us just be sure that history won’t repeat itself.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
This post is the second of a two-parts article on design thinking co-written with Ralph-Christian Ohr (@ralph_ohr). You can read first part here.
The world we live in becomes increasingly complex. Complex systems in different areas of our life, such as business, environment, economy etc. involve ever larger numbers of interacting elements. Particularly human interactions are non-linear and result in a basically unpredictable system behavior. One major consequence of complexity is the fact that we have to deal with rising problem wickedness. Ted Cadsby remarks in an interesting post:
“The hallmark of a wicked problem is that it cannot be reduced to a single-cause explanation. Complexity arises from the interconnections between things – how parts within a system interact via intricate feedback mechanisms. The information signals we need to make sense of complex things are buried in a lot of noise, and we, unfortunately, are not adept at digging for cues. We have been conditioned by thousands of years of evolution, as well as our daily routines, to draw speedy conclusions by picking out simple, linear, cause-effect connections. This approach works well with straightforward problems like securing food, shelter and sex, or crossing a busy street. But we are now living in a world where multivariate and non-linear causal connections hide below the surface of our immediate perceptions, and diverge to different possible interpretations.”
Wicked problems are termed as “divergent” as opposed to “convergent” problems. For a so-called ‘tame’ problem, the problem definition is – though it might be very complicated – well understood and promises a solution. The more it is studied, the more various answers sooner or later converge. A divergent problem isn’t well defined and does not promise a solution. The more it is studied, the more people inevitably come to different solutions and interpretations. The process to tackle tame problems is assumed to be fundamentally linear, comprising a sequence of steps leading to a desired outcome / solution. In a complex environment not even a shared problem understanding can be taken for granted. We don’t know what we don’t know.
The question arises how wicked problems, emerging from complex systems, can be properly addressed. We’d like to suggest three ‘pillars’ that seem to be crucial in this context:
Experimentation
Complex contexts and wicked problems require an experimental approach. Because outcomes are unpredictable, decision makers need to focus on an environment from which good things can emerge, rather than trying to bring about predetermined results. This comes along with a tolerance of failure and the ability to refrain from imposing order. It’s essential to let patterns emerge and to determine which ones are convenient. Every experiment exposes new aspects of the problem, leading to further adjustments of the following solution proposal. In place of finding ‘the right solution’, problem understanding and solution must be woven together from beginning to end through explorative iterations.
Diversity and collective intelligence
Wicked problems solving naturally involve a diversity of stakeholders with different perspectives and interpretations. Given that many people care about or have something at stake in how the problem has to be / could be resolved, the process of solving a wicked problem is fundamentally social, and solving a wicked problem is fundamentally a social process. Shared understanding turns out to be a prerequisite for tackling wicked problems. It requires that stakeholders understand each other’s positions to have fruitful exchange about their different viewpoints of the problem – and to leverage collective, holistic, rather than fragmented or individual intelligence, to solve it.
Interpretive approach
A wicked problem usually implies a radical uncertainty, i.e. not simply an inability to predict which of several options will turn out to be the preferred one. No shared problem understanding exists and the context appears so complex that not even the possible outcomes are known. And in the absence of a specified solution, no analytical problem solving can be applied by breaking the problem up into a set of separable parts that can be assigned to different specialists. According to Lester and Piore (“Innovation – The Missing Dimension”), an interpretive approach is indicated in this case. This approach doesn’t target at solving problems or negotiating between contending interests, but at initiating and guiding conversations among individuals and groups. Involved people work through ambiguity and construct shared meaning. Through that process the participants come to understand each other – and themselves – better than before. It’s an open-ended process allowing insights and novelty to emerge.
The distinction between analytical and interpretive approach determines two different ways of understanding teams:
- Analytical perspective: teams are formed and re-formed of different members with particular competencies required,
- Interpretive perspective: teams can be organic groups that develop their own language and understanding over time and become greater than the sum of their competencies.
These ‘pillars’ get back to the constituting elements of a complex adaptive Design Thinking framework, outlined in the first part of this post.
Complexity doesn’t nullify present business models and processes, but it taints more and more of their effectiveness and relevance. In order to be prepared to face increased wickedness and complexity, organizations need to make sure to implement those pillars. Leadership is required to set directions, rather than goals, and to facilitate a culture where experimentation, ambiguity and uncertainty tolerance are valued.
This ambiguity should be reflected in the organizational design itself, as wicked problems often arise “on the edge”. Even if disconnected to main business operations, dedicated spaces need to be created for collaboration, empathy and conversation. Those spaces allow for transformation of diverse, subjective perspectives into collective insight and understanding. Furthermore, it’s mandatory to educate and hire appropriate people, being capable of following this approach and of unfolding their potential in such a collaborative environment.
Takeaway:
Increased complexity requires a transformation in the way we approach problems. While conventional problem solving is highly analytical, resolving wicked problems can be tackled by a design-oriented approach. Through combining experimentation, diversity and interpretive collaboration, subjectivity of individual stakeholders can be transformed into shared insight. Design Thinking based on these elements has true potential to be leveraged as social framework to utilize collective intelligence.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
This post is the first of a two-parts article on design thinking co-written with Ralph-Christian Ohr (@ralph_ohr). As businesses are more and more challenged by the wicked nature of the problems they face, whether in strategic or operational context, we need to integrate more divergent and resilient reasoning in our decision-making practices. Cleared from all the fuss which so often surrounds it, design thinking could provide the ongoing transformation of businesses toward “social” with an actionable framework to leverage the true potential of collaboration.
Design Thinking is quite a strange animal. Attempts to define this discipline, in fact as old as creativity, framed by Tim Brown, IDEO’s CEO, in his HBR article published in 2008, are as numerous as practical evidence of design thinking in action are. Trying to broaden the scope of design thinking from the design field to the one of complex business and societal problems had raised the need for a much more formalized approach. Practical reasons abound: how could you sell services based on a methodology which only defines and unfolds itself during execution? How could you convince executives that pattern matching and sense-making are as much relevant than proven tracks of expertise in a given domain?
Connecting design thinking with the broader context of problem solving has lead to the growth of two equally harmful myths: the guru designer and practice as a process, emphasizing on subjectivity or linearity where empathy, empowerment and divergent thinking are needed. Design thinking isn’t saving the world or revolutionizing business, for sure, mostly because of these two illusory paths. But before throwing the baby out with the bath water, and stating, with Bruce Nussbaum, that “Design Thinking is a Failed Experiment“, it is worth considering what is turning wrong. Speaking of creativity, learning from failure (if any) is usually a much more fruitful attitude than shooting the messenger.
A process is a process is a process
To allow design thinking to tackle business problems beyond design, it was assimilated to a process. One can easily understand that design thinking doesn’t fit the usual focus on linearity and convergence, so important in the conventional culture for efficiency most organizations emphasize on, and suitable for most traditional innovation approaches. This is an important issue, don’t misunderstand me, but do you really think that companies which give so much credit to Six Sigma or CMMI would welcome design thinking as a serious problem solving discipline? My bet is no. Of course, framing it as such a kind of process was, from the beginning, deemed to failure. There is a problem with “design thinking as a process”, but where does it really lie?
Contrary to expectations, “process”, in the business universe, has no straightforward definition. Processes do not necessarily rely on linearity and certainty might sometimes be fuzzy (think Adaptive Case Management), or divergent. Nevertheless, every flavor of business processes shares a common feature: an intrinsic independence from the people operating them. In this context, even when confronted with the most innovative organizational culture, “design thinking as a process” cannot fit. Not because of the mess and fuzziness associated with creativity, but because of the subjectivity involved: design thinking is highly interpretive and subjective, and most of its outcomes are dependent from the designer’s capabilities. Here lies the catch: this subjectivity is the disease which prevents design thinking from living up to its promise. Here lies also a paradox: subjectivity is as much a problem as it is a necessity. Without it, we fall into the dry world of business processes, unable to sparkle creativity. With too much of it, the ugly head of the guru designer shows up, enforcing a vision which fits more the designer’s ego and reputation than true business needs.
A complex adaptive framework
Most of the problems design thinking intends to solve have no unique formulation, no single solution. Despite the many definitions given, framing design thinking itself is a challenge. For many reasons, it can be considered as a complex adaptive framework aimed at addressing other complex dimensions of business. I view the whole design thinking approach as navigation through a fitness landscape: the problem occupies the base plane, while the third dimension symbolizes the “validity” of possible solutions. Framing the problem means picking up a starting point on the problem plane, then the whole approach consists in climbing up the hills in several directions, through iterative methods, until maxima are reached.
The choice of a starting point is highly subjective, and relies on designers’ personal background, experience, empathy and intuition. There is nothing wrong here, except that complex systems behave according to initial conditions, and this behavior cannot be mastered unless all parameters are known. Little changes might lead to vastly different outcomes, and further actions might well end up in dead-end local maxima, far from optimal solutions. It takes a leap of faith for businesses to follow such tracks. Who will decide which starting point is better, if both satisfy the context? How could the degree of “fitness” of any chosen direction be measured, unless pursuing them all up to the end?
Fractal behavior is another characteristic of complex adaptive systems which closely relates to design thinking. As prototyping and testing takes place, design thinkers progressively gets into details from feedbacks, those details belonging to the same initial formulation of the problem at different scales (global design, ergonomy or touchpoints, realization capabilities,etc), each scale being as important as the initial approach in the overall solution taking shape. A problem is that, at some point, one scale might not fit the solution at all, and little overlooked changes might produce huge changes in the overall system. You might, for example, tumble into a feature which might disrupt the manufacturing capabilities of the company you are working with. At that time, what can be done? It is usually a matter of jettisoning the work made at larger scales and jumping back into a different part of the problem space, switching to a vastly different solution because of a tiny, but critical, detail. Such a disruptive move means creative destruction, and isn’t an easy decision to make, as it involves highly subjective dimensions. Design thinking is about decision making – instead of boiling down a problem to one large decision, designers make lots of little decisions, learnings as they go. Therefore, navigating complex problems and ambiguity through small, iterative trials is highly determined by a subjective and continuously challenged assessment of the context.
Design thinking = critical thinking + design doing
In the hope to be better accepted in the business world, design thinking has given up the subjectivity associated with experimentation, and without which creativity simply doesn’t exist. Similarly, in its search for a better way to find solutions, it has forgotten that problems cannot always be framed without ambiguity.
Back in the eighties, I remember attending a meeting in a Japanese fabric company. The meeting’s goal was to agree on next season’s trends to start the manufacturing of new fabrics. Attendees, which included designers, product and sales managers, discussed about colors and textures for several hours, often taking little thread samples in their hand and rolling them together to get a concrete view of how it would look like. At the end of the meeting, no decision was made. Attendees didn’t agree on anything but general color trends, but kept some of the hand-made thread samples for further exploration and technical feasibility, ready to produce fabric samples for testing.
This was an enlightening experience for me, and still is thirty years later. It superbly illustrates how design thinking could thrive at resolving complex business problems. Critical thinking among stakeholders is a much better way to seed creativity than relying on individual designers. Early parallel and conflicting exploration holds more promise than relying on individual bias. The activity out of which something innovative emerges, is social and highly interpretive. It involves guiding connected conversations among individuals and groups to determine the range of alternatives from which convergent choices are made.
Subjectivity is a key component of design thinking which, to be accepted and profitable for businesses, should be tightly tied to organizational context. This requires a novel, and more resilient, approach to design thinking: we need designers who have a sound understanding of all the parameters involved, leaning on networks and groups of stakeholders, harnessing critical thinking, and linking outcomes to their own range of experience and expertise, through design methods. Let us call that parallelogram-shaped designers (strong specific business understanding linked to strong design expertise) in a collaborative enterprise. I sense this might also be a good definition for management 2.0.
Read Part Two
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
From knowledge management to social business, nearly every framework or practical initiative tackling the human dimensions of organizational efficiency emphasizes on knowledge sharing. Most of social tools and features’ justification is grounded in the simple assumption that openly and transparently sharing knowledge is the best way to help workers achieving their tasks. So far so good, unless knowledge doesn’t want to be shared.
Most of the tasks we are trying to achieve in our daily job are either complex or complicated. They involve multiple steps, human-to-human or human-to-machine interactions, use of different tools, all of which require following procedures, navigating through -and sometime despite- hierarchical requirements and validations, mobilizing resources whose availability isn’t aligned to your needs, producing some outcome for clients, either internal or external, whose logic isn’t yours, all of that in a reduced time frame. Whether we run a home-based business, are a public sector clerk or a Fortune 100 executive doesn’t make much difference here.
In my last post, I wrote about how people often develop “grey behaviors” in order to compensate for the lack of appropriateness between most business applications and the way the work is really done. Moreover, interactions between people is ridden with uncertainty, inappropriateness and fuzziness, even in a business context. We are human, after all. While modern organizations have developed enough processes, procedures and control structures to avoid black swans and mitigate unproductive mist, one of the main driver of efficiency remains the ticking clock.
To keep the flow running
Have you ever looked at a torrent? Water always follows the least resistance path, but this path often winds in unintuitive ways down the mountain. Local slopes can trump the global direction of the flow, even if this proves ineffective, and would a rock slip or a change occur to the torrent’s banks, the water will eventually create an alternate path without discarding the old one, unless it gets highly inefficient.
The same prevails in the workplace. In order to keep the workflow running as fast as possible and get their job done, people learn a huge amount of small tricks and tweaks, and don’t give up on using them unless a really more proved-to-be-efficient procedure is pointed out to them.
Of course, everybody wants to work smarter and faster, but what everybody wants overall is to ease the pain caused by lenghty or known to be ineffective organizational bottlenecks. Whether it be by directly calling out someone who may influence a decision in order to bypass a manager or by removing a security shield from an industrial saw to avoid sawdust accumulation, we all have gathered such knowledge.
Getting “social” from talk to walk
While one of social software’s goal is to harness freeform communication to facilitate knowledge sharing, this kind of tacit knowledge, mostly learned by doing or exchanged nearly in secret between peers, is quite never shared. In a short exchange with Harold Jarche in the Social Learning Community created by Jane Hart (you should join it if you haven’t yet and are interested in the use of social media for working and learning ), I called it Renegade Knowledge, as it clearly subverts organizational behavior. Paradoxically, it is also the kind of knowledge which makes up for processes and procedures shortcoming and helps things keeping running.
Never documented, quite never openly shared, renegade knowledge is yet an important part of organizations’ assets. It is fully actionable, as it directly relates to people’s expertise, and has the power to help companies improve the way they operate. Nevertheless, it takes a really high level of trust and resilience to allow it to flow and be made explicit. Unleashing the hidden power of renegade knowledge is removing the ultimate barrier between believing how an organization works and knowing how things really get done. Until we get there, the truly collaborative enterprise will be mostly talk and little walk.
I would love to hear about your experiences, if any, and thoughts in dealing with renegade knowledge.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
However we want to call it, Enterprise 2.0, social business or collaborative whatsitsname, what we are watching now is a vendors-claimed increasing evolution toward maturity of leading platforms. During its last symposium, the Gartner Group held a session entitled “Managing Social Software Maturity: Supporting Pioneers and Settlers“, and is predicting a near-billion figure for the social software market in 2011.
If you haven’t yet jumped the shark, it is about time to buy one of these full-featured collaborative platforms, read the installation manual, hire some consultants, like me, to help driving the necessary internal change, and begin witnessing the benefits of fluid communication, contextual knowledge sharing and overall collaboration. Every serious vendor will provide you with distinctive stickers white papers claiming “Increased Productivity”, “ROI Warranted” or “Easy Adoption Curve” along with the software. Does this seem ironic to you? Yes it is, of course, but that’s what maturity usually means. And that’s seriously flawed.
The broken Project Framework
The way most of today’s business applications are conceived and integrated still inherit from the design-build-run model. Agile methods and iterative methodologies has added speed and flexibility to it, rapid prototyping allows for a better understanding and consideration of users needs, but the original Project Framework still prevails; once users’ needs are supposed to be understood, tools are designed and built, then users are left on their own to invent a way to get their job done.
I recently met my financial advisor to open a new savings account. For a few years now, French laws require banks to only propose products for which the client fully understands operation and risks involved. So, as we agreed on one of the accounts the advisor proposed me, she asked me a few questions about financial operations to allow the software to build my investor profile. But at the end, the application didn’t offer me the type of account we agreed on earlier. I am moderately risk-taking, so while there was clearly no problem with my choice, it was nevertheless blocked by the machine. Thus the advisor took a pencil and a notebook, and wrote down the details of the account for me, since she would have to tweak my answers to force my choice into the software.
People do this kind of things everyday in their job, as they have to tweak business processes to get the desired outcome. They develop a whole set of “grey behaviors” just to get their tasks done. While evidences of the flaws of the Project Framework constantly show up, it gets even worse when dealing with human interaction and collaboration, which involve some of the messiest dimensions of the human mind. As Paula Thornton wrote, requirements need not apply, in Enterprise 2.0 realm even less than elsewhere.
A growing chasm
Social business software is actually attempting, while adding more security, reliability and focus, to mimic some of the tools available on the internet. There is only one meaningful difference between both spheres, but it is crucial. Internet tools are constantly and organically reshaped and recreated by users, in continuous interactions. Product development is not driven by customers’ needs (or by what one thinks customers’ needs are) but by customers’ behaviors, in resonance with their own culture.
Of course, the strongest vendors have customers too, and listen to them. But how many customers? 50? 100? 500? Is this number big enough to ensure that their software will meet new customers’ culture? IBM asserts that their products are shaped by the 500 000 IBMers using them internally on a daily basis. That’s a bunch of people of course, but this mainly says that IBM’s platforms have evolved organically to fit their internal culture and work behaviors. But does this give us a clue about how they fit different organizational cultures? How many companies have an internal culture similar to IBM’s one? The more “mature” the social platforms get, the closer they get to the Broken Process Framework, constraining people to adapt their behaviors to predefined schemas, digging a chasm between the way they need to behave internally and habits they grow on social networks.
The “Like” button lesson
The cultural dimension of social platforms gets even deeper. The genius of Mark Zuckerberg, when launching the “Like” Facebook button, was that, through a simple word, he cut through all layers of meanings to directly appeal to emotion. Of course, “I like” means what it means, but it more than often rather means “I follow” or “I subscribe”. Involving emotion was clearly a winning strategy, as it has the same universal value, and makes people click without thinking first about what their action could lead to.
In the workplace, emotion has a much less obvious place, and most online actions are left to thinking, which is largely dependent on national and organizational culture. The simple button which accompanies the microblogging activity stream in most social software platforms can make a whole difference in the way the platform is used, according to its label; writing “share”, “publish”, “tell” or “post” is anything but innocent in any given company’s culture. User experience deserves more than being left to any external choice, and people won’t harness the full potential of social software unless it is tailored to the way they work and the culture they are immersed in.
A call to vendors
Because they are dealing with human behaviors and trying to leverage the collaborative potential of people, social platforms shouldn’t follow the broken path of most ERPs and business applications. Don’t make them customizable, but re-thinkable. Don’t design and build them for companies to run, time is right to sit down together around a table and to share experiences and insights, to fully grab the diversity of collaborative behaviors. I know that there is a struggle for profit and dominance going on, but please walk the talk of your white papers: collaboration, or call it coopetition, is the future of business. Even for social platform vendors.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Every time I hear or read the word “brand” associated with “social”, I wince. Not because of the ballooned hype surrounding this kind of association, but because most of this hype reveals an outdated – and often damageable – vision of what “marketing” and “brand” mean in our highly networked context. I won’t hold forth about marketing, as Greg Statell (@Digitaltonto) recently thoughtfully and thoroughly nailed this coffin, but ‘brands’ have a story to tell, nevertheless quite different from what ‘social media marketers’ (sigh) are trying to teach us.
The evolution of branding
Even if brands existed long before, ‘modern’ branding is a typical emergence from industrial era and mass consumption. Mass consumption went de pair with mass production, and at that time, brands were a necessary differentiating feature for otherwise quite similar products competing with each other in crowded categories. While already meant to leverage customers’ loyalty, brands were tools directly linked to the products they were apposed to and to their (sometimes supposed) tangible qualities. In other terms, brands were the intermediary layer through which companies pushed products, and communication, toward customers: know me better, and you will buy me more.
Brands’ meaning, and our comprehension of their signification, changed over time, from company-created (consciously conveying facts and values attached to products) to customer-owned (constructed in customers’ mind along their experience with products, according to their perception of the values conveyed through interaction with the company). A great reading about this evolution is the analysis made by Steve Vargo, Yi He and Michael Merz in “The evolving brand logic: a service-dominant logic perspective“.
People, not brands
Employees and communities of customers are also considered as integral actors in brands’ value creation. Brands acquired new dimensions through human resources and societal responsibility. Nevertheless, the same paradigm still prevails: brands as a filter through which companies, customers and their respective ecosystems and networks communicate and create value. As interactions and conversations now matter more than individual behaviors, and as we begin to understand how and how much they influence them, this conception is no more relevant.
Interactions are a human-to-human matter, they involve people, not brands. Whether it be a customer service rep, a sales person, a community manager, another customer, a relative, conversations and engagement are always about exchanging knowledge between different human beings. Period. Nobody, unless irremediably harebrained, has ever conversed with a brand. In that context, talking about brand engagement or online presence is pure nonsense.
From filters to attractors
Brands have no more reason to stay in the way between people. I previously envisioned brands as strange attractors in the complex system formed by companies, customers and their relative ecosystems, and this is something I want to further explore here.
Brand value creation happens through knowledge sharing and use: knowledge about how a product or service fits into customers’ job-to-be-done (value created through experience in use), knowledge about collected customers’ insights, knowledge created and collected through all available kinds of human interactions (at company-customers touchpoints, between different stakeholders,…). The factual, informative part of shared knowledge is directly related to these interactions, but as brands are no more a screen between people, is it still relevant to consider it as part of their value? Beyond information and context, emotional intent is a capital factor of knowledge, since no sharing would ever take place without this intent. This emotional dimension is, in fact, what constitutes today the value of brands.
The emotional dimension of knowledge sharing
Differentiating emotion from information and context is, of course, not an easy task. But viewing brands from such a prism provides us with thoughtful insights in understanding how value is co-created and how brands could help in maximizing this value, both for customers and companies. Valeria Maltoni (@ConversationAge) wrote sometime ago a thought provoking post entitled “Why Customer Service in Social is not Fair“. She made some great points in it, but let us consider the case under our new prism:
- Company-customer interaction
Complaining online provides the company with knowledge about an existing issue. This is directly actionable knowledge, which can be used to fix some broken process, for the benefit of all customers. Whether the company chooses to use it or not is another story, but not using it might prove to be expensive, as Valeria wrote.
On exchange of this knowledge, the company rewards the customer with direct resolution of his issue. Is that unfair? I don’t think so.
- Brand value
On an emotional point of view, this interaction modifies the customer’s perception of the brand. It raises his level of satisfaction, and potentially turns him into a brand’s advocate. It is a win-win situation.
Emotional intent is intrinsic to knowledge sharing. Brands, as emotional attractors, facilitate and foster further communication between companies and customers, and their value is created on the go, through customers’ expectations and level of satisfaction, through companies’ commitment to provide better customer experience, through day-to-day experience of every internal or external conversation. Communities are glued by shared emotional values, and brands are the signals which allow further, actionable, conversations to take place in them.
Awareness, influence, advocacy, trust and loyalty are powerful dynamics of emotion which shape brands value. Analytics, crowdsourcing, interaction, are some of the levers which companies should use to enhance business through the social web, and which build more brand value along the way. Talking about “brand presence on social media”, thinking “brand” instead of “company” is a serious error, as well as Social CRM is neither a fans counter nor a social media listening tool, but an extension to CRM. Clay Shirky qualified as “Cognitive Surplus” the spare part of human creativity which can be used to help in building a better life. Similarly, I see brands as “Emotional Surplus”: the emotional dimension of knowledge sharing which can be used to help in providing better user experience.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Co-evolution has always played an important role in the history of humankind, specially when it comes to the complex relationships existing between technology and social behaviors. The social tools sweeping over the web and entering at increasing pace into our organizations are no exception. But evolution is neither linear, nor always a positive-sum game. Social business, in its present acceptation of defining a new way to get work done, might actually have reached a crossroad.
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” This famous quote from Archimedes illustrates the dual nature of technological evolution: while giving a theoretical and scientific framework to the lever, he invented pulley systems allowing the handling of up to then unbelievable weight, but also the catapult, one of the first mass destruction weapons. From invention of fire to nuclear fission, whether it be through disruptive progress or through incremental adaptation, technological innovation has always been a curse as well as a blessing.
Every light comes with a shade
2.0 technologies are no exception. Each day comes with its load of dithyrambic articles about how the social web is transforming our reality, driving empathy, making the world and organizations better places. How cool. How wrong. Social technologies have the potential to transform our world for better, but also for worse. Empathy might turn into hate in a snap, or be actively used in psychological manipulation of crowds and individuals. Every light comes with a shade. I am not talking here about reputation crisis or so-called social media disasters, which repeatedly sustain the content of so many “marketing” blogs, and usually result from unsustainable product positioning or from some employees’ childish behavior, but about a stronger, deeper threat to the social web potential: a call to the dark side of the human mind.
Time to walk the talk
Failing to taking this threat into account, while keeping on focusing on social media blunders to claim that social technologies are transforming the world is not only stupid, but harmful, when the very same attitude enters the business realm.
Tangible evolution of the nature of work, and actual transformation of organizational structure, mostly exist for now in marketing hot air. Things change slowly, and by far require more of a culture switch than simple tools’ adoption. As Mark Tamis judiciously pinned out (in French), Social Business (as now defined by IBM) is in fact much closer to the original definition of Enterprise 2.0 than it is to the collaborative enterprise described by Esteban Kolsky, or to the Wirerarchy envisioned by Jon Husband. Changing the terminology doesn’t make the smoke screen any thinner.
‘Taskization’ of the conversation
Furthermore, tools, like Salesforce Chatter, or more recently Tibbr, are appearing which allow for direct integration of business applications outcomes into social platforms. I am convinced that socialization of business processes is not a meaningful track toward social business, but the real treat stands elsewhere. Tibbr allows people to choose which information they want to receive, and when they want it delivered in the middle of their conversation stream. Although this might (for some) look like a great idea, how de you think such a feature would be used in the vast majority of companies, for which ‘becoming a social business‘ (to quote IBM’s words) merely means throwing tools to employees without relinquishing their traditional command-and-control structure? What would it mean to those businesses focusing on process-based productivity, workforce optimization and costs reduction?
You know the answer: such tools will give managers new opportunities to control their teams’ workflow, in real time, new ways to tie workers to their tasks. In a world where not answering an email ten minutes after receiving it is considered as an error, there won’t be any more excuse not to check outputs from ERP every half an hour. Conversations will turn into more interruptive tasks, empowerment will turn into less self-organization opportunities. The dark side of business exists, it is alive and well.
Social business offers businesses a major opportunity for redefining the nature of work and the structure of companies, freeing knowledge workers from organizational-only pressure and defining a new social contract between customers, workers, firms and their ecosystem. On a dark side, it also gives companies novel ways to enforce business-as-usual and to further exploit the outdated legacy of our industrial era. People-centric or IT-centric, the use of social technologies for enterprise is at a crossroad, and it might be time to face it without self-indulgence.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Our world is changing, so is the way we are thinking about it. The rise of online networks has not only modified our possibilities to connect and exchange knowledge with other people, but also has it given anyone with internet access a new, almost (not yet totally, but for how long?) unalienable, power. From charities to tyrannies, from companies to markets, a lot of this power is shifting to citizens and customers. Paradoxically, the more people gain access to it, the less we can think in terms of mass. Individuals, their diversity, their relationships, their interactions, matter more than the standardized bulk dynamics prevailing in the industrial logic.
To adapt to this change, organizations have to reinvent most of the ways they operate. Customers are no more passive buyers to target. Companies are no more fierce industrial strongholds aimed at infinite growth and bracing their back against long-term competitive advantages. Work is no more a clearly designed set of tasks, defined by roles and rewarded by career paths. Trees grow no more to the sky. Previous equilibrium between production, sales and profit is broken, and a new one is required, which embraces the evolving complexity of relationships between customers, companies and workers.
SD-logic and co-creation of value
Service-dominant logic draws a framework in the quest for such an equilibrium. By switching from a transaction-based model of organizational justification (I sell therefore I am) to an interactive model of value creation, it provides us with critical insights on the necessary mutation economic actors must undergo to survive in an ever more challenging environment. I already wrote about service-dominant logic (and you can learn a lot more here -and on the SD-logic website if operational again-), but, at the risk to oversimplify the works of Steve Vargo and Robert Lusch, let me recall some basic principles of their theory: companies do not market products for customers to buy; they make proposals (of products, of services) which customers hire (thus on a momentary, but not instantaneous, basis) to help them get their job (the real-world activity they want to use the product or service for) done. Value is co-created by company and customers during the whole length of time the customer uses the product / service.
For companies, beyond profit and other measurable benefits (reputation and loyalty for instance), value means knowledge about their customers’ needs, expectations and uses, which drives further development of better products and services, and better engagement. For customers, value also means knowledge about how to better fit their needs. Through value co-creation, both parts evolve.
Furthermore, value is neither created in the void, nor in a simple dual firm-customers relationship. People talk, compare, their own networks influence the overall value creation. Companies, too, are part of networked ecosystems composed of suppliers, subcontractors and many other stakeholders. As more and more people share knowledge through their online networks, as more and more companies get in the use to listen and engage with them, they will get more and more involved into customer-driven innovation, and will co-evolve.
The dynamics of co-evolution: competition
Co-evolution dynamics are originally related to natural ecosystems and living species, but are more and more considered in organizational and societal theories, as an inherent part of complex systems behavior. Co-evolution happens when a system and its environment, or different subsystems, are influencing each other to change.
The first kind of co-evolution is competitive: a system evolves to gain advantage onto another, in a typical predator/prey relationship. As more companies turn to customers and other parts of their ecosystem for added value, they will compete for what best serves their needs in a particular category, which involves several risks.
The first risk of a purely competitive co-evolution is relativism: competition involves getting advantage, but a subcontractor may work for several competitors (as Vargo and Lusch acknowledged), or customers may give insight in reference to competing products (imagine I own both a Kindle and an iPad). Companies may end up trapped in a kind of Zeno’s paradox, a zero-value sum, driving just enough innovation to get closer to their competitors’ best proposal.
The second risk is called the Red Queen’s dynamics, and is a hypothesis formulated by the American biologist Van Valen in 1973, stating that co-evolution in tightly related species doesn’t preclude any of them from extinction, whatever the number of precedent evolutions might be, and more and more considered in economic research. In our business context, it means that companies might be obliged to dedicate more and more resources to value co-creation, thus to evolve, not to thrive, but just to stay in the competition. Following the Red Queen’s hypothesis, engaging in that sort of arms race would equal, for companies which aren’t deeply involved in design-driven innovation, an overwhelming takeover by customers.
The dynamics of co-evolution: cooperation
While a truly cooperative economy might be seen as a mere utopia, cooperation, whether between firms or with customers, is a business reality. Whereas collaboration’s dynamics, requiring aligned goals, resources and outcomes, are mostly endogenous and pertain to a shared system’s level, cooperation takes its power from diversity, empowering each actor through shared information and behaviors. Meaningful sustainability initiatives assume active cooperation between whole business ecosystems and customers. Coopetition, which combines cooperation and competition, is gaining acceptance as a powerful business strategy in our networked economy.
Still an emergent domain of research, cooperative co-evolution doesn’t suffer from the same flaws as its competitive counterpart. Furthermore, it provides to value co-creation an interesting analogy with the cognitive learning process; all actors gain and create knowledge from information available, according to his own needs, expectations and personal background. Could we therefore use the different types of cognitive learning to provide a practical frame to the promises of the service-dominant logic? That’s a great perspective I would love to discuss with you. Online networks are transforming the way we behave, chances are good they will transform the way business is done. For better.
