By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Business processes has recently became quite a buzzword among the Enterprise 2.0 community, notably since June’s Boston conference. It suddenly seems that the whole discourse has changed from a leadership-fueled point of view to a down-to-the-ground (and to the balanced scorecard) vendor’s one. Pragmatism? I rather think that this approach is severely flawed, in three places at least: core processes concepts, knowledge handling and customers’ consideration.
When cats are called dogs
I recently wrote about SAP StreamWork and the fact that, despite their claim, this new tool is not a collaborative decision-making solution, but allows for better collaborative problem analysis, which is not, and by far, the same. Mistaking the mean for the goal is a clever tactic: this allows for frictionless adoption of an otherwise useful tool into existing processes, with the added hype of 2.0 technologies.
In a much more subtler register, Bertrand Duperrin made a common mistake in one of his last posts ‘Community management and processes by the example’. What he calls “process” is in fact a resource lifecycle, describing who is involved, when, in relationship to whom, where a process is a matter of chained actions allowing to progress through this lifecycle. Substituting communities for individual along the flow is of course an improvement of the entire lifecycle, but has de facto no impact on the process design or execution. The difference is important, since processes were developed to minimize variability and risks, specifically facilitating and streamlining execution when different silos, different business logics, are working in parallel through complicated operations and/or organizations. Moreover, there are designed to be as people independent as possible. They are typically built to avoid “reinventing the wheel”; but what would happen if tapping into the networks comes out with a solution which doesn’t require a wheel at all? Predictability is processes’ mainspring and, unless breaking them into much smaller, adaptive, parts, which contradicts their efficiency chasing goal, socializing resources lifecycles won’t have any positive impact on existing processes, besides giving the opportunity to integrate 2.0 technologies into workflows. This clearly is a dead-end for anybody believing that Enterprise 2.0 is more than technology.
Processes are Taylorist knowledge
Cecil Dijoux recalled Michael Grives’ interesting distinction between processes and practices. Unfortunately, practices, built upon people’s behavior, and not upon the least variable output available, still fall short from giving us a way to harness collaborative work. When it comes to knowledge, they behave quite the same, fossilizing thinking into formal procedures.
Fostering the use of tacit knowledge, which represents 80% of available knowledge in an organization, requires a much more flexible framework than those given by processes and practices. Knowledge is variable, unfocused, complex, and messy. By building automatic workflow rules, by assuming that today’s conditions are the same as yesterday’s ones, processes segment knowledge into bits of repeatable information and decision making guidance, exerting a division of knowledge similar as the division of labour envisioned by Adam Smith. Socializing business processes won’t take advantage of collaborative work, but of specialized cooperative knowledge. The only feature of processes which might benefit from social integration is their ownership.
The customer-centric Enterprise
Besides owners, processes have customers. Dealing with internal customers is usually a matter of connecting dots, which often means offering predictable output through connected, repeatable, actions. This could be fine, regardless of the two precedent points, as far as external customers are not involved. But the social web is transforming the way customers act and react in a radical way, and maintaining our business processes to engage and interact with customers is nonsense. If capturing internal tacit knowledge in a non obfuscating way is a challenge, ignoring customers knowledge about your products and services will soon become a deadly attitude. Business processes, with their inability to deal with uncertain, irreproducible knowledge, are the least suitable tools to establish and maintain any kind of relationship with your customers.
Wait, we need processes
Yes, we need business processes. Not as we know them today, driving our organizations from end to end, but we need them as an infrastructure, to free knowledge workers from complicated tasks, even collective ones. But they must now be considered as tools at our disposal, not as our organizations’ backbones. Besides that, not any company is destined to become a social business, not any product or service is meant to be discussed about on the social web. The future of business is both brands and commodities, and that will be the subject of my next post.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
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.
By Thierry de Baillon
La version française de ce billet est, une fois n’est pas coutume, sur le blog de Seth Simonds.
Is, in France, cause marketing soluble in social media? This is the question I asked myself when Seth proposed me to write this post, question which quickly turned into: “is cause marketing soluble in French culture?” as we must agree on the fact that, in Descartes and Pascal homeland, money, fine feelings, companies and charities maintain complex relationships.
Whether it be individuals or organizations, French people give, and give more and more. They are also ready to engage into causes they find ethical: 47% of them now claim having changed their consumption habits towards more sustainable products. This is not the lack of motivation or creativity, which occasions the charitable discretion of French companies, “discretion” which is particularly remarkable on the social web, but rather a mix of cultural and social factors unique to France.
The distrust paradox
It is a commonplace to say that consumers less and less trust brands’ and businesses’ communication. More thought provoking is that they consider the same businesses’ engagement toward populations as largely inefficient (CSA study – October 2009). This is a highly paradoxical situation: for a company, getting committed to a cause allows giving credibility to its willingness to act ethically, but communicating about this commitment discredits it at the same time. For example, Kinder France initiative with the Secours Populaire, is barely promoted outside the limits of its website, echoing neither on Kinder Facebook page, nor of the Secours Populaire one. Many such initiatives are not highlighted beyond the company’s corporate website (Innocent) or beyond the point-of-sale (Pyrex).
Commitment and empathy, friendly rivalry
Unlike the Anglo-Saxons, who give sense to an initiative through action, the French generally put discussion at the heart of their approach. This behavior encourages my compatriots, when mixing feelings and discussion, to completely dissociate empathy (the charitable claim) from commitment (the gift and its assertion). It is good practice to stay (and look) restrained when we give, and to not too explicitly call for action when talking about a cause. French do not mix money with feelings.
Considering this, it is hardly surprising that the only NGOs leveraging the viral and empathic power of social media are “activist” associations like Greenpeace or Aids. They consider action and feelings as intimately related, and part of a global approach. Most others only timidly step outside of traditional media channels, even preferring to leave this initiative to internet users, without giving any active support. The page devoted to “webbénévoles” on the French Red Cross website delivers a clear message: make us your donations, relay our cause, but please do not ask us to engage ourselves. In such a paradoxical context, it is not surprising to notice how much associations are reluctant to associate themselves too openly to businesses, those symbols of profit and wealth.
Ethical = sincere
From “consume more” to “consume better”, marketing has recently undertaken a change of focus which, if often driving businesses to more commitment, is still largely prisoner of our cultural reflexes. But is this so bad? Are global, mainly American, brands which previously partnered with (RED), so well-intentioned? Don’t they seek, through their highlighted commitment, to restore an undermined trust, where French brands, for the same reasons, keep themselves understated? Social media do offer real opportunities to cause marketing, but require something today missing from so many initiatives: sincerity.
Photo Filtran
By Thierry de Baillon
This is a guest post written by my online friend Ralph-Christian Ohr.
Version française ici.
About one year ago, I started engaging in discussions on ‘innovation’ via Twitter. As a physicist, used to work in product/innovation management for technology-based companies, my understanding of innovation was: creating value for the customer by leveraging technology development. As innovation is accomplished by people for people – companies are eventually run by people- I had a suspicion, though, that human nature is likely to play an important role in the innovation process. Through valuable exchange and discussions, I have come to the conclusion, that there is another dimension on the rise for innovation: MEANING.
Some time ago, I came across an interesting article named “A new era of meaning” by Tim Leberecht. It outlines that “Consumption-driven wealth and status are being replaced by identity, belonging, and a strong desire to contribute and do something “meaningful” rather than just acquire things.” A couple of related articles, from authors, such as Umair Haque and Roberto Verganti, are listed to support this trend. Verganti suggests to consider technology and meaning as two independent dimensions for innovation. Innovation of meaning can be achieved through a design-driven approach. He writes:
“The second finding is that people do not buy products but meanings. People use things for profound emotional, psychological, and socio-cultural reasons as well as utilitarian ones. Analysts have shown that every product and service in consumer as well as industrial markets has a meaning. Firms should therefore look beyond features, functions, and performance and understand the real meanings users give to things.”
After giving this some thoughts, it rang completely true to me: The approach to consider both technology and meaning as subjects of innovation basically reflects the human (psychological) structure. We aren’t just rational, determined by functional/utilitarian needs or jobs to be done, usually addressed by technological solutions and product features. It’s emotions that build our intense experiences, representing entrenched and subconscious needs/beliefs that drive our behaviour and significantly rule our decision making process. If that, what we do, is in accordance with these needs and beliefs, our experience is meaningful – it makes sense for us. We cannot exclude emotions from business because they are inherently human. But they can be used as a point of difference in products and services with emotional relevance.
But what exactly is meaning? I found a valuable definition in an older Business Week article “Understanding why people buy” by Darrel Rhea:
“Meaning is what humans create to construct a sense of reality. We are meaning-making machines. We constantly try to make sense of our life by forming a picture or story about reality. The stories we create internally provide the background or context for our lives and are often not articulated externally. Yes, that’s right, reality is something that we actively construct, and each of us generates a slightly different version.
This individual sense of reality is what we base our values, goals, and aspirations on, and, in turn, those drive our preferences. In short, our own sense of meaning defines who we are as people and the things we value.”
…
“In a developed, affluent world, a large percentage of purchase decisions are made to reinforce or express a sense of meaning. Put another way, we seek experiences that give our lives meaning or coherence.”
I think that’s what Simon Sinek intends to share with his message “Starting with Why” – you should definitely watch his talk in case you haven’t done yet. He mentions that particularly innovators and early adopters in the innovation diffusion cycle are attracted when novel offers meet their understanding of meaning. These early buying groups in turn determine whether an innovation can spread to the mass market and thus be finally successful. By stressing how “Nike turned $2.50 of raw materials into something that stands for efficacy and power and liberation”, Guy Kawasaki claims: “Make meaning, not money” – money may very well follow if the offering means something beyond the sum of its components.
All this indicates that business and companies are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of acting “social”. What’s the consumer’s role in this game then? I think we all should start trying to live meaningfully – according to our individual values and beliefs – and pay attention to our emotions as best as we can. “The Betterness Manifesto” by Umair Haque may serve as a great suggestion how to approach this. If awareness for emotions and meaning on the part of companies coincides with consumers’ authenticity, empathy can flow and pull processes, e.g. for innovation may occur. In this sense, every single consumer may contribute to more economical and social prosperity in the future by showing a self-aware behaviour – to a more meaningful prosperity.
All of us can contribute to a more meaningful prosperity
What do you think?
Ralph-Christian Ohr, PhD in physics, extensive experience in product/innovation management for international technology-based companies. Personal credo: “Innovation is key to keep up with time – for companies and individuals.”
Follow Ralph-Christian on Twitter
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
How do we take decisions in a networked, community-based, environment? Yet crucial to one of the core competencies of business, this very question is quite never addressed in the fast growing literature about Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business.
In order to mitigate risk and insure operation’s reproducibility, business processes have relegated decision making at the fringe of most workers’ tasks, and have somehow left its responsibility to the higher levels of hierarchy. To compensate for the fact that problems to be solved are more and more complex, organizations evolved from pyramidal to matrix based, partly to allow for greater expertise in decision making. With no real convincing improvement in fact. As companies face an always faster changing and more competitive environment, and as networked collaborative work appears as a more and more obvious solution to cope with complexity and with the required level of innovation, we still have very few clues about how to deal efficiently with decision making.
Esteban Kolsky recently left me a great comment, which he developed in an article, about the future of social business. Sooner or later, brands will have to include customers in their business decisions. But how will that be? Who will be in charge of taking the structuring decisions? Of course, we are still have plenty of time before most companies open their internal silos to customers’ voice. But going there, and even further, as Esteban suggests, will require a clear understanding of what’s going on on the decision making’s side.
Up to now, despite their highly heralded collaborative nature, present initiatives and case studies in the Enterprise 2.0 field give no insight. If you closely look at the departments they affect, you will find out that no real decision takes place inside the collaborative garden. Marketing? Most decisions are taken upstream, and social media integration is more tactical than strategic. R&D? Decisions are taken downstream, and collaborative work is either used for intelligence or for strictly processed innovation. Knowledge Management? There is no decision to be seen there too.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that those are of no value, I am just noting that successful Enterprise 2.0 implementations do not tackle the collaborative decision making issue. Not yet. Not until some organizations are brave enough to build sandboxes (not pilots, these have to be on purpose, fast paced, experimental initiatives) to tackle this challenge, we are left to speculate…
On Management and Leadership
The easiest way to address decision making is to keep it away from collaborative spaces. Does this look like an heresy? It is, but this is exactly what a new breed of so-called ‘collaborative’ tools, such as SAP StreamWork, does. Despite their claim, they facilitate collaborative problem analysis, NOT decision making, delegating the real responsibility to the traditional command-and-control management chain, where each manager takes his share of decision, according to his place in the hierarchy.To step out this broken model and truly leverage the power of collaborative networks, decisions definitely need to take place inside communities and networks, not outside, which means releasing control and leveraging emergence. This is not your typical managerial task. Today’s management has to deal with a dual burden: escaping from a rigid hierarchical model, inherited from the industrial age, which doesn’t allow for much freedom in decision making, and building enough trust to encourage other workers to escape from his own hierarchical imprint. In that sense, despite the fact that involving management in Enterprise 2.0 adoption and Social Business design is an imperative, there are no more dubious candidates than managers to cope with community-based decision making. Even worse, hybrid communities, involving both employees and customers, cannot be managed.Building trust, encouraging sharing and enthusiasm is more a leader’s job than the one of a manager. Leaders are more likely to drive adoption and to foster collaboration. But what about decision making? There is no single and simple definition of what a leader is or should be, but from the most authoritarian to the most libertarian one, they all share two common points: influence and a vision, which both weight negatively on the group in a decision context. it is likely that leaders might more than often raise consensus around their own perspective.
Yes, managers and leaders are the necessary catalysts of Social Business adoption and setup. But when it comes to decision making, both might get as much as possible out of the way.
On Complexity and New Skills needed
On his blog, Bas Reus suggests that we stop predicting, and embrace emergence instead. But, to be fruitful, this supposes that emergence leads to convergence (to a common view, or, at least, to a common action plan), and that negative outcomes are quickly enough identified to allow for new orientations. It supposes that decision making takes place
somewhere. Absolute self-organization is not an option for organizations, and so is total failure. Workers need to be sufficiently individually empowered to be able to take their own decisions, according to their skills and competencies, without been entangled by a manager’s or a leader’s view, but they still need guidance. We can watch today the effects of such self-organization and independent decision making in the financial realm. While banks and trading companies pursue a quite clear strategy, traders are left alone in their tactical decisions making. Big profits, erratic losses, as, among others, in the exemplary Kerviel affair…
Empowering both customers and knowledge workers by providing all information needed for correct analysis, facilitating individual decision making according to one’s competencies and learning abilities, providing guidance across internal and hybrid clusters and communities, fostering autonomy, those are the new skills needed inside organizations to unleash the power of networked environments. To reach the next step, companies dipping their toes into Social Business will need people who combine HR skills with high analysis-synthesis competencies. Empowerers?
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
I was lucky enough to have in hands “Toward Enterprise 2.0″, a recent study of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, conducted by Cecile Demailly, from Early Strategies consulting agency. This survey unveils many interesting results about transformation strategies, and about the perception that actors of the change have.
This survey “was offered online from November 2009 to January 2010, and was answered by a primary set of people involved in Enterprise 2.0 deployment, and a secondary audience of well-informed users of Enterprise 2.0 applications and projects. The 50 respondents are mainly located in France (48%), the US (18%), the UK (12%) and the Netherlands (10%)”.
As no surprise, most of the themes emerging from this survey match commonly heralded attitudes and necessities. The report explicitly states that “organizations face a paradox that often happens with adoption of disruptive change (whether it is technology, work methods or management patterns): they have to cope with it, but cannot yet justify it nor master the transformation because it is too early, too little history and case studies to learn the lessons from others”. Despite the fact that most respondents see themselves as pioneers, one of the key findings of the study is that “there are good links between the organizational values and the transformation goals, ROI expected and success factors”, and that “this sense needs to exist at different levels. The most obvious being at the organizational level, the most enduring being at individual level, and the least recognized, probably, being at management level”.
I won’t detail the numerous results of this 37 pages report, which you can buy on the Early Strategies website. I want instead to highlight some quite disturbing findings which, in my opinion, highlight the shortcomings of present adoption approaches and expectations.
Although considered as an intangible ROI of E2.0 adoption, “better innovation” is cited by 70% of respondents; but when asked about the impact of the tools in their daily work, innovation is no more on the list of positive outcomes. What is happening here? Cecile suggested me that innovation is an organization-wide vision, while people think it only has a very limited impact in their own tasks. My opinion is a bit different, since innovation seems to be also absent from organization-wide usefulness results: albeit innovation is seen as a capital competitive advantage, present adoption frameworks of 2.0 technologies do not create the necessary organizational structures to foster it.
Another matter of concern relates to the learning programs and medium used by companies to accompany the change. Unstructured programs account for only 17% of the total learning efforts, and collaborative unstructured learning takes place in a small 14% of all the media used. Knowing that 80% of organizational knowledge is tacit, and that collaborative tools are, by far, the best medium to be used to set up informal learning, it looks like adoption guidance takes place without harnessing the inherent power of the tools themselves. We are trying to deal with a new paradigm with the methods and processes inherited from conventional “Enterprise 1.0″ thinking. What we need is a huge reappraisal of our change management methods.
I was also puzzled to read that the marketing department was not involved at all during adoption for all B2C respondents. The report states that “this might not be meaningful given the size of the panel”. What a relief… But as partial as they are, those results state that some companies ARE in fact trying to implement Enterprise 2.0 as a closed system, keeping the client view away from the change. This is quite frightening.
Diving into complexity is for sure a bold move. But some of the results from the report suggest that the necessary change from a process-based organization toward a network-based ecosystem, collaborative, innovation and client-centric, is not taking place the way it should. The era of socialwashing seems now behind us, but are present Enterprise 2.0 adoption frameworks REALLY changing organizations, or are we just pushing further a square peg into a round hole, trying to fit a new paradigm into an obsolete one? I would love to read your view about it.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
A small conversation with Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder ) on Twitter left me with an interesting question: what drives us into the need and will to change long time cultural habits (the kind of paper we are writing on), if not fancying novelty? My take is that setting our mind in a different environment not only enables a different perception of our surrounding, even if this environment is as trivial as a sheet of paper, but also changes our very way of thinking, in this case helping us fostering new ideas. Typically, it means emergence.
Technology always has deeply influenced our lives and behaviors. The wheel had revolutionized our geographical influence, electricity allowed us to extend our physical abilities, all of this because some people shifted their thinking from the primary destination of these technologies to new uses, empowering their real potential. Innovation always has been a matter of shifting the way we look at current objects, behaviors, usages or processes, finding and leveraging new patterns from the existing.
2.0 technologies are already changing the way we are using the Web, the way we are connecting, conversing and interacting with each other. We discovered that these conversations are a totally new way to learn, to collaborate and to exchange knowledge, but most of our initiatives are still about harnessing these technologies into existing models. To go further, really unleash their potential and embrace the systemic changes they are allowing, we all need a shift.
One of the current trends in Enterprise 2.0 frameworks is the use of social tools to optimize business processes, to fit them into the existing, or to replace them when (and only when) they fall short. This, of course, will minimize failure cases, will speed up business efficiency and facilitate adoption in organizations. But…. where is the shift? Our process driven businesses are no more than thirty years old, and were born from a misunderstanding of Japanese heterarchic and consensual social culture. A process-oriented approach to Enterprise 2.0 won’t allow place for the most powerful aspects of what the Social Web emphasizes: self-organization, non deterministic outcome, unconstrained trust, informal knowledge capture, borderless ecosystems, etc.
We have no tangible, rational proof that the process driven organization is the best model for today businesses, apart from “it works better than before” statements. One of the main reasons why companies are not ready to shift to another, networked, model is risk avoidance. While sustainability, and the gain of new competitive advantages, are crucial for any business, risk avoidance is a management and delivery model which literally turns its back to the non-linear complex world we are living in, and are in fine unsustainable. The very nature of CAS makes them unsuitable for complicated rules and determinist mechanisms, and complexity must instead be embraced with simple, quickly reconfigurable rules.
Marketing, too, needs a shift to truly take into account and take advantage from new customers’ behaviors. A drastic change happened since Peter Drucker wrote that marketing and innovation are the two basic functions of enterprise; both are now tightly connected through direct unbiased interactions with customers. The rise of Social CRM tools allow marketers to get insights from consumers and exchange knowledge to build better customer experiences. This dive into the Social Web and into the conversations blooming everywhere is of course a gold mine for today’s marketing. But if the data those conversations convey is capital for sales or the customer relations department, the weak signals embedded into those interactions are even more important for innovation and for every core business activity. By allowing putting the customer’s voice at the center of organizations, Social CRMs are true design thinking tools. Here lies their real power. To harness it, marketers, from being an interface between businesses and customers, must shift to become real ‘trends amplifiers’, and get ready for a role convergence with innovators, leaving data crunching and mining to an evolving sales department.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
The Web, the engine of our hyper-connected world, is now real time, whether on our personal part or in Enterprise, and, wish it or not, there is no way back. Jeremiah Owyang recently stated that the trend toward immediacy will go even further, leaving place for the Intention Web, allowing “Businesses [to] provide a more contextualized experience for customers or prospects using Social CRM”.
But as convincing the examples he gives are, I don’t believe that time acceleration will give birth to a new predictive marketing. As Albert Einstein said, “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” Why should brands bother to bid on customers’ intent, when a huge untapped world of opportunities already exists? Welcome to the frightening Emotion Web.
There is no need to go as far as French philosopher Paul Virillio did a few months ago, stating that “immediacy is the opposite of information”, but it becomes obvious that immediacy (as induced by real time tools) doesn’t leave room for critical or deep thinking, and instead favors affective reactions. Examples of empathy-driven manifestations are numerous (the Iranian elections movement, mass reactions to accidents or striking events, notably on Twitter, where a lot of charities have already taken the Real Time Web into (positive) action.
Empathy marketing is just a step away, allowing brands to raise sentiment through contextualized messages. A few years ago, Patrick Le Lay, former CEO of French TV channel TF1, said “he was selling minutes of available brain” when interviewed about TV advertising. I don’t think it will take long before businesses start to consider the Real Time Web as a real opportunity and find here a way to regain control about their brands.
It might be even more frightening than you think. Driving empathy through carefully chosen channels is a thing, but just consider what would happen if, instead of empathy, one would choose to raise hate… From Motrin to United, uses of social media to bash brands aren’t uncommon already… I don’t believe in the Intention Web, but am really concerned about the Emotion Web, and the way it might influence our lives, for better or for worse.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
It is quite striking to see how much the mass production era still shapes a lot of our behaviors, whether in our relationships to brands or in Enterprise world. From a customer point of view, while conversing more and more with brands around what I consider as a symbolic transaction, we are still mostly considering companies as products and services manufacturers and distributors.
In parallel, “work as value” is still a dominant paradigm in a lot of companies, which, at same time, are trying to implement 2.0, socio-collaborative, tools and platforms to foster knowledge emergence and capitalization. This is strikingly strong in countries like France, where our President said “travailler plus pour gagner plus” (working more to earn more) less than two years ago. Let’s face this, every effort to facilitate Enterprise 2.0 adoption has to take into account, not only structural resistance, but cultural artifacts from a past era.
Most employees have quite effortlessly switched paradigm, from “work as value” to “work as creation of value”, as it relates both to their day-to-day experience as customers and to their expectations in Enterprise world, but managers are facing a bigger challenge, as they are less and less connected with a traditional (pre knowledge economy era) role of managing teams, and expected to consider management as transformation of value. As obvious as this might be, seem from our Enterprise 2.0 heralds’ seats, we have to keep in mind that organizational and behavioral gap: from gatekeepers of business processes, managers must now dynamically harness existing knowledge to transform it into competitive advantages for their company; a tough challenge for most.
Furthermore, while bringing more agility, adoption of collaborative tools and platforms, whether used in the existing framework of business processes or not, allows for a new type of leadership, combining knowledge fostering with social connections facilitation. Managers will now have to catalyze groups and communities activity, involve them in decision-making as well as in maintaining their inner state of equilibrium, acting as the strange attractors of a complex internal ecosystem.
From their real adoption of what is clearly a totally new role, a role which requires more qualities than ever, will depend success or failure of many companies in this new socio-collaborative economy.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Twitter was bruising yesterday about Salesforce announcement of its new application, Chatter. With a product introduced as a “Facebook for the Enterprise” by a representative of the company, Salesforce just confirmed what is becoming an important trend in Enterprise platforms: real-time collaboration.
For a long time, the only asynchronous tool used by companies was email, and one of the challenges of Enterprise 2.0 adoption was in helping people getting used of new asynchronous tools like wikis, blogs, bookmarking or tagging platforms, placing them in conditions to deal with knowledge exchange and serendipity values. In parallel, generalization of the Blackberry is putting email back into pseudo-synchronous mode, instant messaging applications penetration rate in companies is about 40%, according to Gartner, and Google Wave is pointing another real-time head into the game. The point, of course, is no more about discussing whether synchronous tools will be part or not of our new toolboxes. They will, for sure, but are they worth the hype?
The Facebook analogy used by Salesforce is indeed indicative of the direction main platform vendors are today heading to; something like “hey, Facebook works as hell, wouldn’t you like to be able to have your employees sharing, interacting, poking each other on business matters? 230 milliions users cannot be wrong”. But is really the Social Web a similar playground as Enterprise? Definitely not. Bertrand Duperrin recently insightfully sketched the differences between managing communities and managing business. While both worlds aim to drive flawlessly working communities, companies need a lot more.
Furthermore, these new tools will put emphasis on time as a critical material, weighting in most process-based tasks. While searching increased productivity along these processes, with the help of real-time facilitators, executives will put further pressure on actual organizations, avoiding to face the necessary cultural shift which has yet to happen. Platform vendors’ “real-time” pitch is with no doubt good for (their) business, as executives will certainly jump in the bandwagon, not for Enterprise 2.0.
This new trend will oblige us to be even more cautious when implementing social tools, as we now must deploy two different layers of interaction, and that, along with leadership, decision-making, knowledge and information, time is the new dimension we have to deal with.
