By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.
George Eliot
New technology is often disruptive, and social technologies make no exception. Today, quite everyone agrees on the necessity to focus on cultural change to help embracing the new behaviors they enable, and there is quite a consensus on the levers which might make the shift happen. Pilots, either as small scale projects or as fox-in-the-henhouse tools, are common practice, and integration into the flow of work is this year’s new black. Those are, in no doubt, pragmatic catalysts for change. But… are we really focusing on the RIGHT change?
And the pocket calculator hit the school system
Pocket calculators were banned from examinations for a long time after being allowed in the classroom. Then, gradually, they made their first official appearance as digital replacement for arithmetical and other mathematical tables. In accordance to Moore’s law, the power of calculators grew rapidly, and the school system began to foresee much larger applications for these devices.
In France, an official document officialized the use of any type of pocket calculator -even programmable ones- in 1986. Furthermore, their use was largely encouraged during mathematical classes. But the interesting part isn’t the fact that teachers recognized the benefits of the technology and further promoted them (‘adoption’ and ‘empowerment’ might sound familiar to you), it is what these benefits were intended to be. A new version of the document, still applicable today, was published in 1999, explicitly setting the purpose of calculators’ use. Translating from French:
Mastering the use of calculators use represents an important goal in every student’s training, as it constitutes an effective tool to be used in their education and during their professional, economic and social life. For these reasons, their use is planned in many teaching programs and should be widely accepted during examinations and competitive exams.
In other words, calculators’ mastery is now required because of the way they allow faster and more sophisticated calculation, and are a good introduction to man-to-machine language. Wow… Where we could free students from tedious tasks to focus on higher level concepts, leading to a different mathematical culture, what we got is mathematics-as-usual on steroids, and a focus on technology.
Redefining organizations
For more than a century, our economies has been based on a paradigm where profit derived from production of goods and accumulation of assets, and where offer-and-demand markets where the only measure of customers’ satisfaction. Today’s globalization has displaced production toward less costly countries, and it won’t be long before intellectual production follows manufacturing of goods. What can be replicated, it can be outsourced. Markets reveal the internal complexity of interactions between capital, capabilities and irrational considerations. Uncertainty has replaced growth, and there is a growing and unsustainable chasm between the civil society and big corporations pursuing their own goals.
In this context, unleashing the power of horizontal networking inside and across organizations represents a promising answer to some of the toughest challenges our companies, and, beyond them, our society, are facing today. Businesses must repurpose themselves, and adapting to these challenges means acknowledging that work, as a set of activities, is changing nature, and that organizations must redefine themselves.
This shift is already happening on the public web: Clay Shirky, and others, have shown how social technologies foster resilience and creativity, and allow the connective tissue of our societies to take back their central role in human life. Alas, on enterprise side, what we are seeing is mostly the use of these technologies to enforce work as usual, the change we are calling for is too often a desperate chase to more productivity and efficiency. As history tends to repeat itself, social technologies are the new pocket calculator.
Sandboxes, not pilots
What is the purpose of an Enterprise 2.0 pilot project? The no thrill answer is obvious: they are set up to facilitate the diffusion of Enterprise 2.0 practices into the organizational culture, and to demonstrate business value. They allow, often through trial-and-error iterations, to blend the impact of social technologies into the operational structure of a company. They are not meant to help redefining the nature of work by fostering new behaviors, they are instead meant to leverage these behaviors to enhance the way work is presently done. The numerous experts talking about implementing social technologies “in the flow” don’t say anything different.
Social technologies DO HAVE business value, indeed, and that value is far more important than the transitory productivity gains that many tend to highlight. Most of the problems businesses tackle today are way too complex to be addressed the way companies are run today. Networked communities are better armed to deal with wicked problems than any leader, no matter how insightful or visionary he could be. In that sense, Steve Job’s resignation from Apple is highly symbolic: it somehow marks the end of an era, the one of lonesome visionary leaders.
Rather than thinking in terms of pilots, it is time to open sandboxes throughout organizations. Time to allow open, free-willing individuals to gather around real business problems, whether they are financial, strategic or organizational, and to let them probe and discuss how they could solve them. Here lies the real power of social technologies. Empowering employees is not about giving them more tools or putting higher performance expectations on them. It is about opening up what really matters, and giving them the power to influence the destiny of the company they are working in.
With big data comes big challenges
Integration is another social business buzzword on these days. Integration into work, integration into our systems’ architecture. This is, of course, a view suitable to a finite world, where most of business activities and outcomes can be stored into a system of record, and correspond to our process-based neo-industrial organizations. Here too, social technologies suffer from the pocket calculator syndrome. But companies can no longer ignore the outside world, and the necessity to take account of your customers in core business practices will radically change the nature of work and our reliance on today’s IT architectures.
We are only seeing the beginning of an era where data, and the way it flows freely in real time, relegate systems of records into the dark age. Social CRM is setting the basis for a future where interpreting and inferring patterns from customers’ interactions will become an important part of work. Handling and interpreting big data meaningfully will come with more uncertainty and complexity than today’s IT architecture can cope with, and will require changing most of today’s assumptions about how we deal with technology.
As an example, consider the evolution of weather forecasting. The more powerful the models are, the less precise they become. Among the characteristics of complex systems is that their evolution can only be predicted if the original set of conditions is known. The more parameters we introduce, the more precise we have to be in order to get coherent results.
A lesson from history
Pocket calculators, in France at least, changed the way mathematics are taught, but not in the right way, and didn’t change the essence what is taught in courses. Social technologies have a similar power to seed and sustain an inevitable change in work requirements and organizational redefinition. Let us just be sure that history won’t repeat itself.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Our world is changing, so is the way we are thinking about it. The rise of online networks has not only modified our possibilities to connect and exchange knowledge with other people, but also has it given anyone with internet access a new, almost (not yet totally, but for how long?) unalienable, power. From charities to tyrannies, from companies to markets, a lot of this power is shifting to citizens and customers. Paradoxically, the more people gain access to it, the less we can think in terms of mass. Individuals, their diversity, their relationships, their interactions, matter more than the standardized bulk dynamics prevailing in the industrial logic.
To adapt to this change, organizations have to reinvent most of the ways they operate. Customers are no more passive buyers to target. Companies are no more fierce industrial strongholds aimed at infinite growth and bracing their back against long-term competitive advantages. Work is no more a clearly designed set of tasks, defined by roles and rewarded by career paths. Trees grow no more to the sky. Previous equilibrium between production, sales and profit is broken, and a new one is required, which embraces the evolving complexity of relationships between customers, companies and workers.
SD-logic and co-creation of value
Service-dominant logic draws a framework in the quest for such an equilibrium. By switching from a transaction-based model of organizational justification (I sell therefore I am) to an interactive model of value creation, it provides us with critical insights on the necessary mutation economic actors must undergo to survive in an ever more challenging environment. I already wrote about service-dominant logic (and you can learn a lot more here -and on the SD-logic website if operational again-), but, at the risk to oversimplify the works of Steve Vargo and Robert Lusch, let me recall some basic principles of their theory: companies do not market products for customers to buy; they make proposals (of products, of services) which customers hire (thus on a momentary, but not instantaneous, basis) to help them get their job (the real-world activity they want to use the product or service for) done. Value is co-created by company and customers during the whole length of time the customer uses the product / service.
For companies, beyond profit and other measurable benefits (reputation and loyalty for instance), value means knowledge about their customers’ needs, expectations and uses, which drives further development of better products and services, and better engagement. For customers, value also means knowledge about how to better fit their needs. Through value co-creation, both parts evolve.
Furthermore, value is neither created in the void, nor in a simple dual firm-customers relationship. People talk, compare, their own networks influence the overall value creation. Companies, too, are part of networked ecosystems composed of suppliers, subcontractors and many other stakeholders. As more and more people share knowledge through their online networks, as more and more companies get in the use to listen and engage with them, they will get more and more involved into customer-driven innovation, and will co-evolve.
The dynamics of co-evolution: competition
Co-evolution dynamics are originally related to natural ecosystems and living species, but are more and more considered in organizational and societal theories, as an inherent part of complex systems behavior. Co-evolution happens when a system and its environment, or different subsystems, are influencing each other to change.
The first kind of co-evolution is competitive: a system evolves to gain advantage onto another, in a typical predator/prey relationship. As more companies turn to customers and other parts of their ecosystem for added value, they will compete for what best serves their needs in a particular category, which involves several risks.
The first risk of a purely competitive co-evolution is relativism: competition involves getting advantage, but a subcontractor may work for several competitors (as Vargo and Lusch acknowledged), or customers may give insight in reference to competing products (imagine I own both a Kindle and an iPad). Companies may end up trapped in a kind of Zeno’s paradox, a zero-value sum, driving just enough innovation to get closer to their competitors’ best proposal.
The second risk is called the Red Queen’s dynamics, and is a hypothesis formulated by the American biologist Van Valen in 1973, stating that co-evolution in tightly related species doesn’t preclude any of them from extinction, whatever the number of precedent evolutions might be, and more and more considered in economic research. In our business context, it means that companies might be obliged to dedicate more and more resources to value co-creation, thus to evolve, not to thrive, but just to stay in the competition. Following the Red Queen’s hypothesis, engaging in that sort of arms race would equal, for companies which aren’t deeply involved in design-driven innovation, an overwhelming takeover by customers.
The dynamics of co-evolution: cooperation
While a truly cooperative economy might be seen as a mere utopia, cooperation, whether between firms or with customers, is a business reality. Whereas collaboration’s dynamics, requiring aligned goals, resources and outcomes, are mostly endogenous and pertain to a shared system’s level, cooperation takes its power from diversity, empowering each actor through shared information and behaviors. Meaningful sustainability initiatives assume active cooperation between whole business ecosystems and customers. Coopetition, which combines cooperation and competition, is gaining acceptance as a powerful business strategy in our networked economy.
Still an emergent domain of research, cooperative co-evolution doesn’t suffer from the same flaws as its competitive counterpart. Furthermore, it provides to value co-creation an interesting analogy with the cognitive learning process; all actors gain and create knowledge from information available, according to his own needs, expectations and personal background. Could we therefore use the different types of cognitive learning to provide a practical frame to the promises of the service-dominant logic? That’s a great perspective I would love to discuss with you. Online networks are transforming the way we behave, chances are good they will transform the way business is done. For better.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
I am often puzzled by the way organizations and agencies tackle social media, as if conversational marketing and Enterprise 2.0 were living in separate worlds, addressing totally different issues, pursuing irreconcilable goals. Do they?
Of course, when considering the ‘media’ part of Social Media, open Innovation, co-creation, social CRM, have very few to deal with Facebook campaigns or multi-millions views viral videos. But the ‘social’ part, a word which deeply unsettles more than a few from my Enterprise 2.0 colleagues, tells us a completely different story, made up of conversations, insights, and exchange of knowledge. More than ever, I see a whole continuum taking place in the Social Territory, setting the customer’s experience at the center of business and harnessing all those conversations to get things done in a better way and gain decisive competitive advantages. Social Learning, which involves leveraging knowledge gained through informal networked flows, appears to be the necessary link between Social Media and Social Business.
More on that in the presentation below:
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
As time goes by, I see more and more surveys and positive case studies about Enterprise 2.0 adoption. This is good, but not so much. Most of the time, use of technologies such as instant messaging or web conferencing is viewed as concrete steps toward Enterprise 2.0 adoption. But is there any behavioral difference between meeting up face to face with someone and talking via IP networks? Barely any; this helps saving fossil fuels for our planet’s health and sets up a hypothetical technological ground for some later adoption. Not that much to jump for joy about.
Monitoring Enterprise 2.0 adoption should instead focus on communities, networks, and flows of knowledge, These are the real bricks on which to measure change, with a lot of precautions nevertheless.
Communities of practice exist for some time now in big organizations. They gather people with similar or related roles in a company, and are built around practical cases sharing, knowledge emergence and collaborative problem solving. While this is a great move toward new modes of collaboration and new, tacit, knowledge capture, these communities are often heavily structured and managed, just to insure that they “work”. Regular fixed-date gatherings, mandatory outcome, fixed agenda and assigned roles are among common practices. In other words, keeping control on the internal working of communities of practice allow organizations to fit roles, responsibilities and (collaborative) productivity all together.
But communities are inherently dynamic and have fuzzy boundaries. Networks, which may both encompass or be nested inside them, are often unpredictable, uncontrollable, activate and dissolve on purpose, instill passion and disruption into communities. In networks relies the real power of communities. Without purposely enabling them and fully fostering their capabilities, which means giving up control and deeply changing the way we think about work, online communities are, and ever will, only be technology assisted para-hierarchical structures. Communities are the bodies, while networks are the souls of the collaborative enterprise. Without a real cultural change, ‘change toward Enterprise 2.0 adoption’ merely means creating Zombies 2.0. Is your company into ‘socialwashing’?
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
This post was cross-posted on ecollab carnival blog, as part of a collaborative thinking about the future of the training department.
Productivity: The amount of output per unit of input (labor, equipment, and capital).
Enterprise has for long understood, and applied, that training and education are an important part of its hunt for competitive advantages. At operational level, first, training allows for better adequacy between employees, their role, and the hierarchy- and process-based ‘mechanics’ of Enterprise. At competitive level, then, acquisition of new knowledge is for companies both a way to keep best talents in house and a way to setup an innovation friendly ecosystem. In both cases, education and learning have taken a privileged position in professional environments, and is now openly recognized as an important productivity source.
It is quite striking to see how much this concept, rationalized, statutory, acquisition of formal and explicit knowledge in order to maximize individual productivity, is now spread across our whole society, bridging more and more closely business and education worlds, notably with generalization of internship requirements. This concept, however, ceases today to be legitimate.
While apparently justified by security and… productivity concerns, present trend of blocking access to main social networks rather looks like a desperate attempt in denying actual cultural and societal evolution. How could we otherwise explain such practices, as more than 40% of employees will use a mobile terminal to priority access the internet in two years from now? Whether they want it or not, companies will soon face a real organizational dilemma: to witness a drastic individual productivity dropout, for letting employees freely access the social web, or to provide them internally with an environment as much attractive as the one they can find outside. As the ideal enterprise will stay, for long, an almost unreachable ideal, other solutions have to be considered for a vast majority of companies. Finding the most relevant one? This seems quite an evidence for most of us: we have to recognize the importance of knowledge informal acquisition, and to include this activity in the general framework of individual listening and self-training task.
The growing importance of informal knowledge, and its necessary integration into professional education, doesn’t limit itself to external influence. Whether they wish it or not, companies are today involved into collaborative initiatives which question the very foundations of individual productivity. It will have to be more and more transferred to the community, one of its natural functions being training through implicit knowledge sharing.
From being considered today as a source for productivity, in our hierarchy and process-based structures, training will very logically and quickly become one of its critical components. This will ultimately modify existing relations between knowledge, innovation and production. Concretely, and naturally, social learning will pave the way for Enterprise 2.0.
By Thierry de Baillon
English version here.
Ce billet est cross-publié sur le blog carnival ecollab dans le cadre d’une réflexion collective sur l’avenir de la formation en entreprise.
Productivité : rapport entre la production d’un bien ou d’un service et l’ensemble des intrants nécessaires à sa production (travail, équipement et capitaux).
L’entreprise a depuis longtemps compris, et intégré, l’importance de la formation dans sa recherche permanente d’avantages compétitifs. Dans sa dimension opérationnelle, tout d’abord, l’apprentissage permettant une meilleure adéquation entre les employés, le rôle qu’ils occupent, et la « mécanique » hiérarchique et procédurale de l’entreprise. Dans sa dimension compétitive, ensuite, l’acquisition de nouveaux savoirs étant pour l’entreprise à la fois un moyen de retenir les talents et celui de mettre en place un écosystème propice à l’innovation. Dans les deux cas, l’apprentissage a acquis une place privilégiée dans l’univers professionnel, et est ouvertement reconnue comme source importante de productivité.
Il est d’ailleurs frappant de voir à quel point cette notion, celle de l’acquisition raisonnée d’un savoir explicite et formalisé, statufié, en vue de maximiser la productivité individuelle, trouve un écho dans la société toute entière, établissant des passerelles de plus en plus étroites avec le monde de l’éducation, notamment à travers la pratique généralisée des stages. Une notion qui, pourtant, cesse aujourd’hui d’être légitime.
En s’appuyant en apparence sur des raisons de sécurité et… de productivité, la tendance actuelle des entreprises à bloquer l’accès aux grands réseaux sociaux apparaît davantage comme une tentative désespérée de nier les changements sociétaux en cours. Alors que 40% des employés accèderont prioritairement à l’internet via un terminal mobile d’ici deux ans, comment expliquer autrement des mesures aussi dérisoires ? Qu’elles le veuillent ou non, les entreprises devront faire face à un véritable dilemme organisationnel : laisser s’effondrer la productivité individuelle, en autorisant leurs employés à accéder librement au web social, ou leur offrir en interne un environnement de travail aussi attractif que ce qu’ils trouvent à l’extérieur. Cette entreprise parfaite restant, et ce pour de longues années encore, un idéal difficilement accessible, d’autres solutions doivent être envisagées pour la majorité des entreprises. La plus pertinente ? Elle va de soi pour bon nombre d’entre nous : il s’agit de reconnaître l’importance de l’acquisition informelle du savoir, et d’inclure cette activité dans le cadre d’un travail de veille et d’auto-formation de l’individu.
L’importance croissante du savoir implicite, et sa nécessaire intégration à l’apprentissage, ne s’arrête pas à l’influence extérieure. Qu’elles le souhaitent ou non, les entreprises sont aujourd’hui entraînées dans une démarche collaborative qui remet en question les fondements même de la productivité individuelle. Celle-ci devra, de plus en plus, être déléguée à la communauté, dont l’une des fonctions naturelles est l’apprentissage par le biais du partage de savoir implicite.
Aujourd’hui considéré, dans nos structures hiérarchiques à base de processus, comme source de productivité, l’apprentissage va très logiquement et rapidement en devenir une des composantes essentielles, modifiant ainsi les rapports aujourd’hui en place entre savoir, innovation et production. De façon concrète et naturelle, le social learning ouvrira de fait la voie à l’Entreprise 2.0.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici. R8WDSZFCZWAY
Among the most overheard and misused buzzwords in companies are, you guessed it, ‘communities’ and ‘networks’. One of the side effects of Marketing 2.0 is, besides embodying new relationships between brands and customers, raising awareness among top managers about the potentials of collaborative work.
Of course companies, particularly the biggest ones, are dealing with internal communities for a few years now, often without truly understanding how to energize and leverage their power, but goofy expressions such as “Facebook for Enterprise” are now making their way into executives wish lists and discourses. Social platforms vendors aren’t helping either. Socialtext’s claim is ‘Social Networking with Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration’; Jive Software presents its SBS software as “robust social networking software for employee communities”. An awful 2.0 mess…
Technology itself, introducing more and more real-time capabilities into platforms, contributes further in blurring the lines between communities and networks.
Both concepts have their place in the connected Enterprise. Not only is the understanding of what differentiates them is key to successfully implement socio-collaborative initiatives, but harnessing their complementarity also provides us with a valuable framework of building blocks to leverage the internal ecosystem of Enterprise 2.0.
|
Communities
|
Networks
|
| Structure |
Stable |
Self-arranging and complex |
| Scope |
Adaptive – Defined perimeter |
Disruptive – Global perimeter |
| Goals |
Collaboration over time |
Specific |
| Governance |
Managed leadership |
Organic leadership |
| Level of integration into existing flows |
Department / Role |
Project / Task |
| Interaction mode |
Mostly asynchronous |
Real time |
| Adoption |
Gradual, built on purpose |
Affinity based, spontaneous |
Rather than fighting each other, communities and networks may, while serving different purposes, raise quality of connected work inside enterprise. Being fluid and highly interactive, networks can address specific issues out of the scope of a single community. They can be setup on demand, self-arrange to solve problems, then dismantled or put at sleep once the issue resolved. Networks act as powerful ad hoc task forces, their power amplified by real-time tools. Lot has been written about the need or not to embed community-based outcome into existing business processes. I do believe than working in a connected environment will ultimately lead to replace our actual processes by some new adaptive individually empowered mechanisms, and we can already put this vision at work: correctly driven (and understood, which means they must not been implemented as a substitute for communities but built ASIDE them), social networks have the tremendous power to deliver.
