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By Thierry de Baillon
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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.
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.
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.
Terminology, as language itself, always had a huge impact on our thinking. Considering the pervasive place social media has taken into our online lives, from mundane Facebook conversations to companies-wide collaborative platforms, including strategies as diverse as Youtube-based marketing campaigns, Social CRM initiatives or open innovation frameworks, it appeared to me interesting to look a bit closely at the words themselves: ‘social media’.
Conversely to Web 2.0, or Enterprise 2.0 (or anything 2.0, as far as it seems), the term ‘social media’ doesn’t have a clear origin to trace back. Despite that, it appears that everyone knows about it and has a more or less clear (even if not expressible) idea of what it is. Isn’t ‘social’ about conversation, and ‘media’ about the channels (technologies) that support it? Yes, of course, but meanings are obstinate, so let us listen to what the words themselves have to say.
Social by nature
When writing “Du contrat social” in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, after John Locke, theorizing and popularizing the meaning of ‘social’ being the fact of pertaining to a human society as an organized (and beneficial) structure. In this sense, all of our interactions are social. Work, by nature, is social, since implying active interactions inside an organized system.
Symptomatically enough, ‘social’, as in ‘social media’ and most related concepts and tools, seems to relate more legitimately to the ‘outside’ world, where individuals discuss and interact ad libitum, than to enterprise’s world, where its use is even perceived as controversial. It looks like, in executive’s language, the word’s side connotations (of friendliness or of welfare handling) had taken over the deep political and economical implications of the word and of its use. Social CRM, for example, relates to interactions with customers, not to an internal collaborative evolution of CRMs.
Does that really make sense? ‘Social’ is at the heart of our organizations. It isn’t about Facebook. It is about how people interact with each other, how they exchange knowledge, and about the patterns emerging from these knowledge flows. It is the way we manage capabilities, hierarchies, practices, and collaboration. It is the way we drive business and profit. The necessity to deal with the shift needed to cope with a hyper-connected economy, with customers and workers new needs and expectations, cannot be avoided forever, and ‘social’ kept out of the work realm for long.
From media to mediation
Similarly as we underestimate the ‘social’ dimension of ‘social media’, we routinely overestimate its ‘media’ dimension. ‘Media’, as a singular noun, first appeared in 1923, the very same year the first commercial appeared on radio. Since then, its definition shifted from “a means of conveying something” (the original definition of medium) to “a channel broadcasting information”. Media is not about conversation (a two-way exchange of information), but about one-way diffusion of information. Or even, as McLuhan explained in “Understanding media”, about one-way influence this channel holds on our cognition.
Bill Ives, in his last post, pointed me to Douglas Coupland’s book about McLuhan, and to David Carr’s review. Carr quotes McLuhan: “The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations … When people get close together, they get more and more savage.” But is this vision, while striking if we look at individuals as a myriad of broadcasters, still relevant if we stop thinking in terms of pushing information through multi-fragmented channels and instead immerse ourselves in a global conversation?
It is no wonder brands began to think of ‘social media’ as new conveyors for push marketing information the same way they broadcast advertising in most other channels –and many still do-; the ‘media’ word is a testimony to that immature interpretation. But this is a reductionist view of what is really happening online: ‘social media’ have become true multiway channels to mediate exchange of knowledge.
It might be time to consider ‘social media’ (or should we say ‘social channels’) from a true ‘social’ point of view: a disruptive environment where knowledge flows freely, and sets the base for a new economical and political ‘social contract’.
I would love to hear your view about that and, oh yes I am late, I wish you a very very very happy New Year.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
“Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.” This definition, taken from Wikipedia, and quoted by Andrew McAfee in his 2006 definition of Enterprise 2.0, summaries pretty well most present ‘social’ approaches. Or misconceptions, should I say… ‘enables’, really?
The innovation literature is full of controversies between technology-first and customers-first invention, but there is very few evidences of preeminence of technology in emergence of new human behaviors. As Steven Shapin stated it:
The tendency to exaggerate the impact of technological innovation follows from an artifact of historical consciousness
Use transforms technology, and gives it its meaning and usefulness. Enterprise 2.0 makes no exception; wikis, for example, are a more than 15 years old technology, and some companies have developed a true collaborative, adaptive and customer-centric structure without the help of any 2.0 or social technology.
Vendors pitch ahead
… co-workers come together to swarm on problems, seize opportunities, and make the important outcomes happen. They easily share what they are learning and doing in real time, to keep the wheels of innovation turning.
This glorious sentence was picked on Jive Software’s website. I have nothing against Jive, I instead think they are developing one of the most innovative and interesting platform of its kind. But this sentence is typical of a discourse indistinctly mixing important behavioral concepts with marketing babble, typical of a trend toward technology-driven transformation.
Examples abound. BlueKiwi allows you to “engage with your influencers”, although influence is for now such a vague and loose notion than nobody can precisely define what an influencer might be. IBM’s Lotus Connections call Communities what should in fact be called Groups, blurring further the concept of workplace collaboration. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 tackles trust as it “provides trusted access to the right information to the right people at the right time”. And I could go on endlessly…
An unavoidable wreck
Technology moves fast. Really fast. Reframing for the social enterprise takes a lot of time convincing, mentoring, changing people mindset to foster interaction and build trusted relationships among people who mostly don’t trust each other as I wrote in my last post. The fast pace of technological innovation doesn’t leave vendors enough time to align their solutions with organizational problems. Considering that new behaviors are enabled by technology will lead to an unavoidable wreck between vendors’ promises and actual companies needs. Today, as IT companies and departments take over the place, there is no more room for pilots, cultural change and bottom line uncertainty in Enterprise 2.0’s bandwagon…
Let us stop believing (and saying) that technology enables collaborative and innovative behaviors, and focus instead on the fact that it can at best support them.
Integration into existing hierarchies and systems, spontaneous customer adhesion and socialization of business-as-usual are a smoke screen, which hides both the difficult rise of new and emergent ways to drive business and the richness of human mind’s resources. We don’t need more social platforms, we need more human companies.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Let us face it; we, as humans, are selfish, individualists, and undoubtedly clinging to any privileges associated with power. Goodwill and sharing among peers follow Nielsen’s principle, and most of us wouldn’t even imagine acting differently unless obliged to. The social Web is opening a path to new ways of fostering knowledge flows inside and outside our organizations, but the need for collaborative behaviors to unlock models of work suitable to the new hyperlinked economy taking shape nowadays is only fulfilled (or even reachable) by few.
Communities and trust: a reality check
In this context, the pillars of efficient and creative collaboration, connected communities and trust, might be far more difficult to leverage than heralded by Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts. Developing and nurturing communities is a hot topic, but which reality does it uncover? Communities are about passion, and passion is first about learning from your peers. No real community is ever thinkable without that. Thousands of Facebook pages are created every day on the mostly false promise to build communities. Coca-Cola’s page has almost fifteen millions fans but is there a reason to call this gathering a “community”? Is there any in-depth interaction or, let’s say it, collaboration, involved?
The internal version doesn’t behave better. At organizational level, most collaborative work is, in fact, teamwork, where cooperation is aligned along tasks in a linear and predictable way. Communities of practice, which develop truly collaborative and adaptive behaviors along time, rely much more on passion, patience and involvement than on 2.0 technologies to grow and operate. They usually perform well online because they already do offline. Beyond that, many “successful” Enterprise 2.0 case studies do not offer any reality check apart from the number of connections recorded and number of “communities” created. Socialwashing is the new rule of thumb.
Besides nurturing a favorable collective environment, true collaboration requires trust. The problem here is that trust is an endangered quality. Brands cannot ignore that customers are less and less confident every year, and that erosion of trust shows up everywhere, social media space included. Trust inside organizations scores even lower. Micro-management, continuous performance-based evaluation measured against predefined work conditions, hierarchical and economical pressure, have impaired trust among employees in many companies. In a vast majority of circumstances, collaboration is a crock.
Adoption is not diffusion
However, there is no doubt a truly collaborative enterprise is the best-suited organizational model to tackle the increasing complexity of our economical environments, to leverage the power of companies’ ecosystems toward sustainable competitive advantages. More than ever, organizations need a shift. Knowledge workers need to continually have new resources at their disposal, while work and learning must now blend in a continuous stream. But since so few are mature enough to embrace this complexity and allow for redefining work as a fluid, collaborative flow, how can we help and coach the others?
Bertrand Duperrin proposes to introduce social routines in employees’ daily workflows. Such a framework facilitates adoption of collaborative practices, but neither does it question the actual relationships existing among members of a company and the underlying lack of trust, not does it address one of the main shortcomings of business processes: socializing them helps dealing with fuzzy operations, an approach somehow similar to Thingamy’s Barely Repeatable Processes, but does not perform well with uncertain outcomes. Processes need predictable outcomes, which are less and less available.
Gil Yehuda just proposed another framework, asserting that collaborative dynamics could (and should) take place aside traditional management models, hierarchy- and incentives-based forces. He has strong points here, but I believe that enabling collaborative mechanisms would deeply modify the organizational structure, and that their coexistence isn’t sustainable the way he exposes it. What we need is not forcing adoption in conservative structures, but facilitating diffusion, by the use and modification of some existing, but latent, mechanisms, to allow emergence of new ones.
Redefining the internal customer
I recently wrote about the way companies can (and have to) build new relationships with their customers and non-customers. These relationships are not transaction-based, but rely on the value companies can create on helping customers solve their daily problems by making better products and services proposals. The social web facilitates this service-dominant logic, allowing getting better insight from people’s interactions (this is what SocialCRM is about). Establishing this kind of relationships is a necessary prequel to collaboration, which ultimate goal is the co-creation of value. I am not talking about communication or funky social media marketing here, but about a shift in economic and marketing fundamentals. Lack of trust, and the inconsistence of so-called “brand communities” is not an issue in this context. Why couldn’t we apply the same framework into enterprise?
“Customers” always had an internal reality. But companies always work on an outdated definition, most internal interactions being oriented toward selling services or pushing decisions from management to teams. Rather than helping their customers getting their job done through continuous interaction, many support functions put them at the end of process-based funnels. For example, the IT department hopelessly formalizes its relationships with internal customers through requirements, despite their inability to address real-world problems in real-time. Redefining the internal customer according to a service-dominant logic would set up the organizational scene for collaboration. Most departments would benefit from it; HR, for instance, would leverage true career development, beyond roles and job descriptions.
At individual level, the same definition of “customer” (those who are impacted by our acting and proposals) and the very same behaviors would enable a new kind of relationships, and foster a shift toward a collaborative mindset. What if managers consider their teams as customers? Facilitating subordinates’ tasks and listening to the way they deal with them… As Olivier Blanchard pointed out to me, this sounds like good leadership practice. Sure, but while we know how to deal with customers, who knows what a leader exactly is?
I believe that applying internally what we are learning to do with external customers provides a real-life solution to help preparing the shift toward a collaborative enterprise, for the vast majority of organizations in which collaboration is a crock. There is no framework here, just a practical call to action. To facilitate the rise of collaboration, let us redefine the internal customer, and deal with him the same way we now have to deal with our brands’ customers.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Michael Wu, Scientist of Analytics at Lithium, has posted a great article upon the different components defining the strength of a Relationship.
The notion of tie strength was first introduced in 1973 by Prof. Mark Granovetter in his seminal work: The Strength of Weak Ties. He identified four different components of tie strength.
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Time: amount of time spent together
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Intensity: emotional intensity and the sense of closeness
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Trust: intimacy or mutual confiding
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Reciprocity: amount of reciprocal services
In his post, he details how companies can leverage their relationships with customers through the analysis of these four components. Nevertheless, there is in my opinion another component, which underlies any relationship, which shouldn’t be ignored in this framework: its direction. Like magnets attract or repel each other, relationships are either positive or negative, and this has a deep impact on other components as well.
This isn’t a matter of love and hate, since those both sentiments, when applied to an individual, share in fact a lot of similarities, and we can find more than a few case studies explaining how brands’ more virulent detractors might be turned into ambassadors. (Group hatred obeys to different mechanisms, but here too, these mechanisms are quite close to those driving empathy in groups). Both can be considered as “positive” relationships.
“Negative” relationships, on the other side, are driven by sentiments like disgust, fear, or conscious avoidance. Typically, people maintaining this kind of relationships with brands are to be found among non-customers. Non-customers who might have been customers before, or who might never have been but have built a distorted image of brands, this for a lot of reasons.
I remember my father who, when wanting to choose and buy some household appliance, systematically dismissed products from one famous brands. Some of his justifications were, of course, highly irrational, but he also had some very good points. So good, in fact, that, if the brand had heard about, this could have lead to real products improvements.
Listening to your non-customers is not an easy task. They don’t speak about you, they don’t interact with you, but they don’t ignore you; they are just staying away from any of your attempts to meet their expectations. They don’t eventually gather into communities. They have low, if any, expectations for your brand. But these non-customers are the ones who might give you the more clues about how to serve them better.
