My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

By Thierry de Baillon

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I find quite ironic that, while emphasizing the transformations needed / involved on the road to Enterprise 2.0, most case studies and literature on the subject, specifically when it comes to ‘adoption’, focus on the steps, and so rarely on the whole journey. Although collaboration is claimed to (hopefully) become our global way of working, much accent is put on technologies, practices, pilots, behaviors, management,… introducing tools and recipes without considering the constraints and mutations stressing the whole system: Enterprise itself. This sometimes makes me think of physicians talking about organs, topical cures and diseases without ever mentioning, or taking into account, the whole human body.

The vocabulary used is itself indicative of this state of mind. ‘Enterprise 2.0 adoption’ sounds like a technology-inclined, more process- that people-centric, one at a time methodology. Don’t misunderstand me; I am not saying that we should skip pilots, onboard anyone with a gentle smile and shout “we got the tools, we are 2.0 now”. Very few have tried, and even fewer are succeeding. Number of connections on a social platform doesn’t mean anything beyond brainless propaganda and top-down socialwashing. We will need to keep on coaching, evangelizing and scouting emergent practices for quite a long time. Seeding, then nurturing, is the correct attitude. Taking a broader view on Enterprise 2.0 diffusion dynamics in organizations might help leading the transformation at systemic scale.

Corporate culture, individual empowerment and management model are the three main assets any organizational change has to deal with. Let us see how a collaborative paradigm could fit an organization, given different corporate backgrounds and agents of change, and consider three main different approaches.

Holistic diffusion

Convergence between corporate culture and a leader’s vision offers, indeed, an ideal loam, not only to nurture a collaborative environment, but to leverage a whole social business ecosystem around the customer. Transforming such a business is only a matter of time and good communication, as the right practices get weaved into each company’s department. This might sound like an ideal world, but we all know the examples of Zappos and Cisco…

Empathic diffusion

Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration. Fostering its diffusion throughout the organization requires undertaking the usual steps we, practitioners, all know about: finding the right champions, targeting business departments already prone to work in a collaborative way, communicate about successes, and iteratively extend the experience. Enthusiasts will become ambassadors, and initiatives will spread to other parts of the business. Michael Idinopulos described this approach pretty well on his blog. Chances are good that this may help compensating for an unfavorable internal culture, with good support from the management. No wonder that most present case studies are following a similar approach: empathy, which Michael calls enthusiasm, is the glue of human relationships.

Fractal diffusion

One of the most discussed aspects of Enterprise 2.0 diffusion strategies is the necessity and the difficulty to involve the middle management. Our businesses hierarchical structure put a heavy pressure on managers, and their role is key to most business processes. Asking them to change to embrace collaboration and its inherent complexity is often perceived like asking them to dig their own grave. In this case, empathy won’t work, and even best evangelizers will fail along the way.

Modern businesses are inherently fractal, composed of nested routines, structures and know-how which deeply influence the behavior of the whole company, even without explicitly noticing it. The real backbone, the DNA of a company is sometimes hidden, buried behind processes or Excel dashboards. Identifying the core competencies of a business, whether it be in teams, departments or divisions, and leveraging collaboration in those places, will produce patterns which are reproducible throughout the whole organization. New practices, new managing routines will emerge, which can then be injected into other teams, departments and divisions. This, of course, will challenge managers. Some will adapt, some won’t. But new leaders will emerge, paving the road for a more empathic or holistic approach.

A Small Attempt to Model Organizational Evolution

By Thierry de Baillon

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Last few months were, for me, pretty insightful. I tried to spread and nurture some ideas about organizations, collaboration and complexity, met people, chatted online with others, read, assisted or talked at events…  The last pebbles of wisdom came for The Age of Paradox, from Charles Handy, whose S-curve metaphor quasi magically fitted my intuitions. Little by little, I have now built a somehow practical model of organizational maturity which drastically shows the need for enterprise to step into the 2.0 world.

This is what I wanted to share with you today.

Phase #1: the simple enterprise

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering their skills on an idea. Decision making, tasks assignment and direct interaction with clients and all stakeholders are straightforward.  As every entrepreneur knows, initial company’s growth is often a synonym for efficiency drop and P&L decrease, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on its early development.

Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation sparks, knowledge capitalization is eased by a common vision on business, and further growth usually stands for sustainable efficiency and market shares increase.

Phase #2: the complicated enterprise

As organizations grow in size, original simplicity gets harder and harder to maintain. In The Pursuit of Wow, Tom Peters considers the ideal size of organizations to be around 150. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible (think about the Dunbar number, which has the same value), and intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop. Beyond this phase, whether they want it or not, to go on growing, most companies enter the complication realm.

Most today’s big companies and groups are complicated. To afford growth and efficiency increase, more and more processes are setup to ensure reliable operations and risk mitigation, thus relegating the core competencies of decision making and innovation to the periphery. The vision, if any, is now supported at board level, no more at individual level. New layers of control and supervision appear, silos are created and knowledge acquisition is formalized as an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization.

As big companies get bigger, unless sustained by a never-ending expanding market, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to keep on steadily growing. As a matter of fact, at some stage of complication, companies do not create jobs anymore. In France, a study from INSEE showed that big organizations and groups rather destroy internal jobs; they transfer them to subsidiaries, contractors and subcontractors, and, even this way, only very barely participate in job creation. Similar studies, conducted in other countries, showed the same results. Knowledge, and acquisition of new knowledge, are still a key factor for innovation and efficiency. To compensate for the fact that it cannot be brought in by external stakeholders anymore, the complicated enterprise shifts to another organizational paradigm, and becomes a learning enterprise, putting an overall important effort into training.

Threats to the complicated enterprise

What we are witnessing today in most business sectors is the inability for big companies and groups to reinvent themselves fast enough to cope with the threats they are now facing. Optimization of business processes and costs reduction only marginally affect organizations’ efficiency and growth. Faster evolving markets challenge organizations’ ability to react to customers’ demand, and to reorganize internally accordingly. Decision making is more and more paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of control, thus affecting companies’ agility.

Furthermore, organizations now have to face important internal challenges. Baby boomers, once the lifeblood of business, are now retiring at increasing rate, depriving companies of crucial knowledge and expertise. At the other end of the population pyramid, Generation Yers are today experiencing a totally new experience in the way they communicate and interact. This isn’t about tools, about technologies and the way they use them. The internet is radically changing their and our lives, enabling a radically different perception of ourselves, transforming the very nature of information, challenging hierarchies, management and workflows.

Without a shift, complicated organizations will soon enter a delusional phase, leading to increased efficiency loss.

Phase #3: the complex enterprise

To answer these threats, organizations need now to embrace complexity, instead of persisting into increased complication. I already wrote about the necessary shift they need to undergo to harness the power of networked collaboration, to step from hierarchy to wirearchy, as Jon Husband defines it. This paradigm’s shift comes at a cost; while present organizational strategies still show efficiency improvements, the challenge of adopting Enterprise 2.0 concepts and practices will necessarily see it dropping for some time. Coexistence of both structures will not ease things out, until companies get a clearer view of the new induced competitive advantages.

Here is an attempt to summarize some key organizational changes involved during the journey from simplicity to complexity:

Future doesn’t belong to complication, and simplicity is far behind most companies. Pioneering Enterprise 2.0 is a bold, but soon to be unavoidable, step into business redesign.

The End of Marketing as We Know It?

By Thierry de Baillon

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Beside an enormous amount of media rants and raves, the recent launch of Apple’s tablet teaches us a lot of things about design, innovation and marketing in the era of the real-time Web.

Don’t Ask What They Want, Ask Yourself What They Do

In a recent article, Roberto Vergana suggested that, when creating new products, Apple mainly proposed a vision, staying away from focus groups and user-centered innovation. But is it really the case? In a not-so-far past, Henry Ford said that “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse”, but this statement applied in an era of mass consumption, when large scale breakthrough innovation acceptance was mainly a matter of one-way marketing.

Since then, marketers have learned to listen to consumers, through focus groups and panels, as we evolved into an age where building on the existing was their main concern, and leveraged incremental innovation to gain (and retain) competitive advantages. Present opportunities to directly and instantaneously engage with customers through social media is often no more than a speedier way to achieve the same goal, when it should be used even more than to gain insights, to exchange knowledge.

I saw so many products launches relying on insanely great “love this” feedback which were absolute failures, as nobody bought them in the end. Marketing is about knowledge, not about well wishes. Knowledge about what people do, not what they want. And that is exactly what Apple does with its products. Everybody wants phones and computers with removable batteries, but how many people are ACTUALLY changing a product’s battery? A lot of people are ranting about the iPad’s lack of camera or multitasking support, but who would have used them anyway, apart from computer geeks? Apple products are disruptive, not because they fill people’s wishes, but because they bring new dimensions to what people use.

The Whole Is Better Than the Sum of the Parts

Those dimensions are usually more cultural than technological. Apple quite never focused on real cutting-edge technology in its products. They never used the fastest graphic cards, the hypest webcams, the most powerful camera, and when they did (remember the water cooling system on G4 computers), they often failed. Microsoft has probably developed the most innovative multi touch technology, but what did they do with it? A table, where Apple put its own technology into a tablet. Tables are great for airport lounges and night-club entertainment, for sure, while tablets are built to be taken everywhere. Apple builds on our ways to use things to disrupt what we wish, coming up with products which bring and mean much more than an aggregation of technologies usually could.

Disruptive and Emergent Marketing

In a world where marketers have a duty to teach brands that they won’t survive unless they actively engage their customers through social media, Apple is not only disruptive in the insights they capture from customers, but in their whole marketing. While they have no Twitter account, no official Facebook page, they have the most ardent fans basis ever seen. And they don’t even treat them better than everyone else. No bloggers give-away, no ambassadors program, no nothing. I am not even sure they will keep on relying on traditional advertising channels to boost sales. They even treat their customers the worst they can: sky-high prices, backordered products, uneven customer support… This is marketing as the edge of chaos.

There is, of course, no way to generalize this marketing approach. But in our complex, non linear world, traditional marketing funnels are dead ends, and Apple’s unique strategy to leverage customers’ experience to new heights teaches us an important thing: our globally real-time networked world allows (maybe impose) us to find new creative, emergent, way to design and market products. Twitter’s monetization problem, for instance, as Venessa Miemis recently pinpointed on her blog, Emergent by Design, is a perfect example of this upcoming questioning.

What are you thinking about this?

‘Communities’ and ‘Networks’: A Conceptual and Linguistic 2.0 Mess

By Thierry de Baillon

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Among the most overheard and misused buzzwords in companies are, you guessed it, ‘communities’ and ‘networks’.  One of the side effects of Marketing 2.0 is, besides embodying new relationships between brands and customers, raising awareness among top managers about the potentials of collaborative work.

Of course companies, particularly the biggest ones, are dealing with internal communities for a few years now, often without truly understanding how to energize and leverage their power, but goofy expressions such as “Facebook for Enterprise” are now making their way into executives wish lists and discourses. Social platforms vendors aren’t helping either. Socialtext’s claim is ‘Social Networking with Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration’; Jive Software presents its SBS software as “robust social networking software for employee communities”. An awful 2.0 mess…

Technology itself, introducing more and more real-time capabilities into platforms, contributes further in blurring the lines between communities and networks.

Both concepts have their place in the connected Enterprise. Not only is the understanding of what differentiates them is key to successfully implement socio-collaborative initiatives, but harnessing their complementarity also provides us with a valuable framework of building blocks to leverage the internal ecosystem of Enterprise 2.0.

Rather than fighting each other, communities and networks may, while serving different purposes, raise quality of connected work inside enterprise. Being fluid and highly interactive, networks can address specific issues out of the scope of a single community. They can be setup on demand, self-arrange to solve problems, then dismantled or put at sleep once the issue resolved. Networks act as powerful ad hoc task forces, their power amplified by real-time tools. Lot has been written about the need or not to embed community-based outcome into existing business processes.  I do believe than working in a connected environment will ultimately lead to replace our actual processes by some new adaptive individually empowered mechanisms, and we can already put this vision at work: correctly driven (and understood, which means they must not been implemented as a substitute for communities but built ASIDE them), social networks have the tremendous power to deliver.

A Fractal Perspective on Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

By Thierry de Baillon

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Whichever definition and/or paradigm we are trying to wrap Enterprise 2.0 in, whichever framework we are tempted to fit it in when boarding key departments from enterprise, one of the main challenges we, practitioners, are facing every day, is to find relevant patterns and routines to foster change and facilitate adoption among employees.

Involving marketing people is usually a matter of one-to-one education, accompanying them in the journey from “listening” to “adding value to your customers’ experience”. Implementing large scale collaborative tools require a different approach, usually a mix between selective evangelization and viral facilitation. But, how far does virality live up to its promises?

The downside of virality

Basically, virality relies on two pre-requisites: a propitious ground, whether it be a shared comprehension of the objectives or a strong sense of community, and a well-defined adoption program. If (and only if, remember that you cannot plan virality, you can at best sustain it) adoption takes off, most people will build their collaborative behavior from observation of a few early adopters or evangelists, triggering a lot of mimesis among participants. Paradoxally, successful viral adoption may lead to misuse of tools or misbehavior.

Early adopters and evangelists have to be carefully chosen to trigger the right behaviors among other people. Alas, the qualities involved in community activity are usually not the very same needed to drive adoption. Moreover, mimesis is often a blindfold, and, in most cases, people will not be able to discriminate a correct behavior, in accordance to their role, from the one induced by early adopters, before the late stage of adoption.

Not to say that virality is a useless factor in Enterprise 2.0 adoption, but in such a closed system, the expected exponential results of virality take the typical S-shape of an innovation adoption curve; the individuals able to induce a different behaviors to community members and to align community roles with business objectives might well be among late adopters, thus leaving a flock of users clueless about real value of Enterprise 2.0.

A fractal perspective

Businesses are complex, dynamic and non-linear systems. Interweaving social tools into such systems require much more than virality. Aligning collaborative practices with business objectives require new social processes to foster decision taking and emergence of consensus in non-deterministic way. At pilot or department level, 2.0 initiatives usually succeed due to the impulsion of a few individuals, but this kind of approach usually doesn’t scale well. Among factors to take into account are corporate culture, meaningful organizational patterns, interactions between every stage of the value chain,… and the need to provide individuals with empowering micro-processes.

From many points, Enterprise 2.0 structure might be helpfully viewed as a fractal structure: recognizable, scalable interaction patterns, instable equilibrium state, complex and quite unpredictable output. In this perspective, how could fractals help us facilitate adoption and maximize value?

• Fractal patterns are scale-independent. Better than relying on early adopters and evangelists, we should try to enroll key actors (managers, facilitators, support functions…) as soon as possible, letting other employees arrange and model their interaction according to these pre-existing business patterns. “Setting clear objectives” is nothing else but implementing otherwise successful patterns into 2.0 initiatives.
• This same scale invariance could help dealing with difficulties inherent to organizational change. Enterprise 2.0 adoption is not only taking what works at some level to evangelize broader initiatives. It is about implementing these same successful features at different level.
• At individual level, the need for micro-processes, or social routines, is easily understood as requested by scale invariance. People should get, inside communities, the very same capabilities and roles the department they belong to has inside the company’s value chain.
• Fractal systems are also characterized by existence of strange attractors, which maintain global equilibrium. Changing little parameters may lead to a totally different state. This is an interesting analogy with the management of internal communities. Raising the necessary consensus is not a role-based process, but rather a practice-based one, which positively accounts for more instability, thus more innovation.

Looking at Enterprise 2.0 adoption and value from a complex system perspective gives us interesting insights on the necessary culture shift to undertake and might provide us with a roadmap to successfully implement and scale initiatives while maximizing a company’s competitive advantages.

Corporate Culture Is Infrastructure – My Twitter Interview With Cindy King

By Thierry de Baillon

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I had yesterday the privilege to be interviewed by Cindy King, on Twitter and on her blog, about cross-cultural communication. My answer to one of her questions (“Culture is…” in one word) raised a few interesting comments, and leaded me to further thinking. Culture is infrastructure.

From the fast growing literature about Enterprise 2.0, I only read few things about interaction between corporate culture and the necessary changes induced by embracing social tools behind the firewall. The relationship between governance, managerial routines and corporate culture is nevertheless far from easy to unveil, and has important implications in driving 2.0 initiatives.

Every company has a corporate culture

Even if not clearly communicated or formalized, relationships between employees, working habits and managerial style always define a set of embedded hard-to-move rules. Understanding these rules is a crucial step in determining which initiatives will or won’t be successful.

It is not always what you think it is

While CEOs and founders usually imprint their own vision as a corporate culture, reality is often a bit different, as day-to-day work usually follows its own path, independently from formal business processes. Micro-interactions are here much more important than macro-statements in determining the collaborative ability of a company.

Not all corporate cultures are suitable for E2.0

Apple is of course an obvious example of a company which successfully stays away from social media. A strong and meaningful corporate culture has by itself as much power as today’s most evolved social platforms.

Changing corporate culture is the hardest task to undertake

Changing an operating system takes time and commitment, but switching infrastructure is a radical move. Collaborative routines can easily be introduced in the most top-down company, as long as the wish to collaborate exists. Here too, look at micro-interactions between people to get a clue about potential success.

As usual, it is all about people

The fact that networks and communities must be driven by clear business goals shouldn’t obscure the key role of the Human Resources department.  The larger the initiative, the stronger the HR commitment and support might be.

Will Enterprise Avoid the Worst Scenarios Ever?

By Thierry de Baillon

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Michael Idinopulos recently published an article encouraging companies to “skip the pilot” and adopt social media at company-wide scale. While I agree with him saying that providing a global environment for social initiatives inside Enterprise is the right way for companies to embrace the real power of the tools (provided they can afford the sometimes hefty price tag), launching E2.0 tools at company scale raise crucial issues about strategic management and governance which cannot be easily solved in most companies.

To highlight some of these issues, let us imagine a firm where collaborative and social software has been implemented everywhere, and look at different scenarios:

Off-process freedom

In most of our objectives-driven companies, social initiatives will be kept out from business processes outcome, and although employees might be encouraged to participate in several ways (from requirement to incentives), they will have to do it apart from their day-to-day tasks. Results are easy to figure out: collaboration and positive sentiment will decrease with time, leading to failure. Expecting to leverage collaboration and interaction without implementing them directly into business processes and allocating work time accordingly is a mere utopia.

The regalian enterprise

Implementing social behavior into business processes is not sufficient. I wrote about the need to enable consensus rise directly into networks, as it is directly related to enterprise governance.  Separating collaboration from decision taking is of course an easier path to follow, especially when dealing with large scale initiatives.  This, of course, flattens the whole hierarchy, as control steps and feedback loops can easily be rationalized and simplified in processes. But far from being an evolution, such a governance model is a regression from present structures, reinforcing a small group of decision takers and isolating it from the base. This somehow reminds the paternalist model from XIXth century industrial era or, in the worst cases, the monarchic model.

Lethal paralysis

Failing in implementing decision taking in a strategic way at the right level, and on the right time, may also lead to a less obvious, but equally devastating situation. The output from networked-based processes, if not correctly monitored and channeled, quickly leads to information overload, thus to a lack of necessary agility, and ultimately to paralysis. The wider the scale, the more overwhelming the effects. Frustrations, loss of company’s culture, lack of competitive advantages, inability to innovate, are among the most probable results from letting this situation taking over.

Avoiding these pitfalls, and adopting the right model for 2.0 governance, are a true challenge, but never forget that tools are only tools, and that only people have the power to successfully embrace today’s business evolution.

McDonald’s France : Does Branding Allow Of Faking History?

By Thierry de Baillon

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McDonald’s is presently celebrating its 30^th year of presence in France. But when I came back in Paris in 1978, I remember having eaten in some of the half a dozen McDonald’s restaurants opened at that time. So what happened?

The first McDonald’s in France was opened in 1972 in Créteil, near Paris, by Raymond Dayan, who had acquired the franchise from the American company. Nevertheless, in 1982, following an epic legal battle, Raymond Dayan was forced to give up McDonald’s name, while keeping his restaurants open under his own O’Kitch brand. The reason invoked by MacDonald’s company was a failure to respect corporate hygiene requirements, and McDonald’s France re-opened its first restaurant in Paris in 1988, while “officially” settled in France since 1979…

Most have forgotten (not everyone), but to justify such an incredible mess, McDonald’s France has adopted an incredibly rigid branding strategy: the company celebrates this year the opening of the first restaurant of McDonald’s France, NOT the first McDonald’s restaurant IN France. Is this sustainable? Definitely not.

Rigidity is no more an available branding strategy
Even if you are still in control of your brand, you cannot deliberately ignore anymore your customers. Branding has became a matter of interaction between them and you, products are not elements you may hide behind. Be prepared to move and to meet your customers wherever they are, the way they need it.

Transparency as a rule of thumb
Of course, brand transparency is an illusion, as understanding all the internal mechanics and implications of maintaining a brand and manufacturing products require some literacy not anybody has. But marketing transparency is a requirement. Whichever action or communication you plan, don’t allow for misunderstanding or bad communication. Our world moves at fast pace, and you would suffer backfire before even noticing.

Be prepared to fail
The importance of experimenting new ways to engage with your customers has already been underlined, largely enough. Experimentation might lead to failure. You must be prepared to fail, of course, but even more importantly, you must be prepared to answer to failure. As the web is fast to crucify a brand for unsuccessful initiatives, your marketing plan must integrate the possibility of failing and the way you will publicly acknowledge it. Today, every communication is potentially crisis communication.

The rules of branding have changed, and while adopting a rigid branding strategy and somehow faking history, McDonald’s France failed in following any of them. In France, the company has an incredibly long way to go before being more than a commodity.

What Enterprise Could Learn From AI Research History

By Thierry de Baillon

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This might look like quite an academic title, but heaven knows how little academic I am! I was for a long time interested in AI as a way to use computers to something else than deterministically crunching data, and, as I worked on my last post, was struck by important analogies between key turn points in Artificial Intelligence history and our attempts to define and set up the early stages of the intelligent organization: the so-called Enterprise 2.0.

From processes to networks

Once the first dreams and myths vanished, AI research began to focus on two different subjects: manipulation of abstract symbols and contextual understanding (notably vision and natural language comprehension), and resolution of practical problems. That is, dealing with knowledge and information to take decisions, and ultimately act accordingly. During the late seventies, this field of research took off with the development of expert systems, which computed given information into a large set of rules (the expert knowledge) to trigger practical decisions. The main problem expert systems encountered were the necessity to deal with ever growing massive knowledge databases, and the difficulty to maintain this knowledge current. This approach reminds me a lot the way decisions are taken in our process-driven companies.

To address the enormous amount of necessary computation, researchers began to introduce computational shortcuts such as heuristics to bypass some portions of those huge knowledge trees. It is more than interesting to compare this with our attempts to introduce web 2.0 tools and practices inside business processes to give them more flexibility and efficiency.

Publication, in 1982, of Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities, by John Hopfield, was a breakthrough. The physicist proved that a certain form of networks was able to achieve the same results than rules-based systems. Instead of using databases, Hopfield nets stored it into weighted connections as they learned new patterns of distributed knowledge, and inferred decisions based on the output of the network.

Weights and convergence

The analogy itself between neural networks and a real community-based company is striking, and so are the similarities between the limitations of this approach and some Enterprise 2.0 concerns. Neural networks encountered two big problems: relevancy and convergence (they couldn’t ensure to converge onto the desired pattern, and sophisticated training techniques, such as back-propagation, were necessary to ensure convergence). Social media are facing the very same problems in the enterprise: how could we ensure that communities lead to the right consensus for applicable decisions to be taken? I evoked some possible trails in my last post, and this is a crucial point.

To push the analogy a bit further, the way connections were weighted inside neural networks might give us another path to follow: we might similarly “weight” conversations in social media to facilitate the rise of consensus. Such a system already exists on the Social Web, but is presently mostly a number game, people with more friends and followers are the most listened to, and the most influential. We cannot deal with the limitations of such a system in a professional context and need to look forward for better ways to weight authority and expertise there…

Further advances: micro-processes

The historical analogy stops there, as Artificial Intelligence kept on evolving from these paradigms. Most significantly, from explicit, the logical engines which process information went implicit, completed with a hybrid, “embodied”, approach, where physical captors capture perceptions from the environment: the intelligent agents.

Should, and will, the Enterprise 2.0 follow the same track as AI did? If so, next move would be to get rid of the big business processes we all know, and replace them with micro-processes applicable at individual scale. For instance, the way Japanese coworkers are able to make a consensus emerge from community-based workshops, one of the pre-requisite of Kaizen, rely on their heavy sense of “doing the right thing”. To set up such micro-processes is a radical move from where we are and where the most daring organizations try to go, and would only be possible with intensive education, and a strong commitment from HR and management. Whichever future we might predict to Enterprise 2.0, most underlying concepts are still in their infancy.

Enterprise 2.0: We Got it All Wrong – a Cross-Cultural Misunderstanding

By Thierry de Baillon

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While social media is slowly earning a place inside companies, they still have none or very little impact on the rigid business processes of the enterprise. A major cultural change, along with deep redesign of corporate governance and internal working, are needed. Ironically, the seeds which might nurture the organic development and integration of networks and social tools were present in the model Philip Crosby took when he wrote Quality is Free in 1979, setting the basis for most of present processes: the Japanese concept of Kaizen.

Back in the eighties, when the principles of a quality managed enterprise emerged, US companies were outperformed by Japanese ones, whether in creativity, innovation or quality. Learning from the Japanese approach to management seemed the best way to revamp Western companies, and the Total Quality Management system took every sector of the economy by storm. These revolutionary principles soon turned into processes and certifications, with the rise of the CMMI model, followed by ISO 9001 series of norms. The modern, predictive and productive enterprise was set up.

A 25 years old misunderstanding

While the principles of constant amelioration are at the heart of the Kaizen concept and philosophy, some crucial aspects were completely left over by occidental theorists, most of them inherent to the Japanese psychology.

Doing the right thing. Honesty and transparency matter, of course, but also the sense of being at the heart of processes and implicitly acting in the right direction. The human factor is what powers the enterprise, not the procedures.

Amelioration through participation, and constant innovation. First time I assisted a meeting in Japan, I was stroke by its apparent ineffectiveness. Everybody was discussing and questioning every point, going through the process again until a consensus emerge.  But, most surprising to me at that time (1981), it did emerge each time, or was induced by a manager.

Kaizen is part of Zen. Zen tells us not to focus on results, but on the act of doing. By improving the way you manage a task, you obtain better results.

Valeria Maltoni recently gave insightful advices for bloggers, based on Kaizen principles. Sadly enough, most of the barriers which prevent us to easily adopt Enterprise 2.0 concepts come from a misunderstanding.

Where should we go from now?

Take a look at the above illustrations. It is no rocket science to see they don’t fit. The first one is the picture of a typical business process workflow, while the second illustrates a small network activity.  To go any further, we now need to get back at the roots of the quality driven enterprise, and, one step at a time, redesign the processes with the help of social media. By looking back to the implications of Kaizen into enterprise, and how social media organically fits into it, we will correct a 25 years misunderstanding. Kaizen IS Enterprise 2.0.