Forget about Enterprise 2.0, think brands

By Thierry de Baillon

Fostering collaboration means blurring boundaries. Internally, it involves letting knowledge flow across organizational silos, capitalizing on informal knowledge to reshape work according to more efficient and human-centric patterns. Externally, it assumes nurturing new relationships with customers to better help them in their day-to-day lives, providing a better service and learning from their interactions.

I am of course over-simplifying here the scope and complexity of Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM fields, in order to make this simple and obvious statement: blurring internal (among stakeholders) and external (with customers) boundaries won’t be a sustainable evolution unless it is considered as a step toward a more radical change. The traditional (industrial) dyadic model of company-customers must also evolve to adapt to our new hyper-connected environment. But where do we go from here?

Avoiding decomposition

Sadly enough, most discussions around Enterprise 2.0 only scratch the surface of the consequences of evolving toward connected ecosystems on business. Socializing business processes merely keeps the fundamental nature and operational aspects of organizations unchanged. Internal collaborative problem solving, as well as social learning applied to in-work training, is often no more than a chase for efficiency, while staying stuck in present paradigm.

In large corporations, the main (if not only) reason of existence for many roles, and even departments, is to ‘keep things together’: insuring coherent vertical integration, bridging across silos, reducing internal friction… Diffusion of collaborative behaviors will at some point dismiss the necessity to maintain them. Nevertheless, effectiveness cannot be left to autopoiesis. On the other side, the more the companies have to reach out customers on multiple contact points, the more internal departments are involved in the walk, without necessarily speaking the same language. Retailers won’t take the same approach than wholesalers, who might be contradicted by customer service…

Enterprise 2.0 thinkers have put a strong emphasis on leadership, on the necessary role of leaders in employees’ empowerment. Leaders have indeed the necessary skills to fuel the collaborative engine. But how many leaders can a single, unified, organization afford? It takes some kind of personal vision to lead, and chances are good that coexistence of several leaders, or even some kind of distributed leadership, might induce more chaos than convergence. In our complex multi-relational world, maintaining a single, corporate, voice is no more an option. To blur internal boundaries while avoiding decomposition, companies need to experiment with new organizational models.

Brands as strange attractors

At the other side of the spectrum, do customers discuss together, gather into communities, they are wishful to improve their own personal life, they are ready to suggest improvements in products or services. But they don’t bother about an organization’s hierarchy, corporate culture, or… yikes, processes. They buy propositions made on behalf of brands. Whoever being at some point in contact with customers must meet the expectations raised by those brands, sharing a defined set of values, delivering a defined level, and nature, of service.

Brands are mainly considered as intermediaries between companies and customers. They convey factual, as well as emotional, information upon products, reinforcing both consumers’ confidence in their buying choices (through information accumulated in brand’s offering history) and their self-esteem (through symbolic exchanges channeled by brands values and personality). This linear approach (information against emotion) leads to companies hiding their internal structure and mechanism behind brands. This is perfectly on line with the traditional value-in-transaction model, but is clearly unsuitable with connected ecosystems, where companies and customers share an ever growing number of contact points.

Rather than transactional amplifiers, brands have another important role to play for connected organizations; they have to be considered as the strange attractors of the complex systems formed by companies, their stakeholders and customers.

A step toward a more sustainable model

A more and more important part of the value associated with a brand comes from interaction between the company and customers This either directly, both shaping the brand’s personality by transferring emotional values and sentiment generated (as in the case of brands communities), or indirectly, accumulated along cradle-to-grave customer’s journey with the brand.

All these interactions are the expression of forces at work between individuals during the whole brand’s lifecycle: companies’ internal mechanisms, customers’ relations circles and communities, customer service, empowerment and influence (which Michael Wu recently insightfully described ), open innovation, crowdsourcing… where the brand itself is no more an intermediary, but a representative symbol.

Customers and marketers have been accustomed to such transfer of value, value in expectation, for instance, being directly linked to the brand associated value. But organizations themselves should care much more about brands, as they offer a new model to maintain, and reinforce in a meaningful way, the collaborative enterprise. Let us envision networked specialized entities or departments, gathered around shared brands’ values and directly linked to customers. This model, as it works for Zappos and a few others, might prove itself an alternative, more sustainable, model for today’s rigid and bloated organizations.

Is Enterprise 2.0 About “Socializing Business Processes”? Let’s get serious

By Thierry de Baillon

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.

My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

By Thierry de Baillon

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.

Social Business, Decision Making and the Future of Management

By Thierry de Baillon

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?

A Small Attempt to Model Organizational Evolution

By Thierry de Baillon

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

This is what I wanted to share with you today.

Phase #1: the simple enterprise

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

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

Phase #2: the complicated enterprise

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

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

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

Threats to the complicated enterprise

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

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

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

Phase #3: the complex enterprise

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

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

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

We All Need a Shift

By Thierry de Baillon

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.

The End of Marketing as We Know It?

By Thierry de Baillon

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

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

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

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

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

The Whole Is Better Than the Sum of the Parts

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

Disruptive and Emergent Marketing

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

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

What are you thinking about this?

Adressing time issues in Enterprise 2.0 approaches

By Thierry de Baillon

Albeit time is a critical dimension in today’s every business, it is curiously absent from most discussion around Enterprise 2.0. Adoption time scale is an issue we will eventually empirically solve as more and more successful case studies are publicized. Just don’t put too much expectation on this data beyond “fail fast and often”, as Dion Hinchcliffe stated it, since adoption can merely be measured on an individual basis, and each case is unique. But beyond that, even more cruelly absent from the debates going on are operational time scales.

It’s all in the process. Really?

Reducing time consumption in complicated tasks’ chains is one of the main objectives of the sophisticated processes which drive our organizations. (Repeatability and industrialization of production is the other one) To achieve productivity and efficiency improvements, they release the burden of “reinventing the wheel” by minimizing the number, and complexity, of decision which have to take place along the chain.

Recent technologies, like SAP’s Gravity or Thingamy, suggest that BPM can be efficiently improved through collaborative work, which opens a new path to Enterprise 2.0 (I won’t discuss here my personal view on the discrepancy between collaborative enterprise and process based organizations). But even if considered from an integrated-to-the-workflow angle, this approach doesn’t take into account the time factor: how long will it take to optimize a process in a collaborative way? To what extend is “how long” acceptable? When is the result of collaborative work stated satisfactory enough to be considered as an outcome?

Thinking of Enterprise 2.0 from a process perspective doesn’t free us from the major shortcoming of all E2.0 frameworks so far: making decisions is one of the main tasks of organizations. This takes time, and we lack methods to understand, leverage and quantify collaborative decision making’s time scales.

Complexity at work

Processes helped shaping big, complicated organizations from the industrial era, but cannot encompass the complexity of our hyperlinked economy. Industrialization has reached a tipping point beyond which traditional productivity funnels must be rethought. Of course, admitting that organizations are complex adaptive systems brings new, and sometimes overwhelming, challenges, but it also highlights some aspects diretcly relevant to the time issue.

Complex adaptive systems  (CAS) are self-similar and embedded, which means that communities and collaborative teams are CAS themselves, and their time scale is independent from the global time scale (of the process, of the company…).

CAS are, well, adaptive, which means that the definition of an absolute time scale is out of reach. Time in execution depends on initial factors, so setting fixed time rules for a collaborative work to provide an outcome seems irrelevant. Timeframes are relative to the environment in which they are measured.

CAS are non-linear, which trumps any attempt to measure time and set it as a process variable in a ‘traditional’ way. Statements like ‘you have two days to come to a consensus and find an answer’ are irrelevant.  Instead, several time states, several thinking processes, can cohabit in a collaborative initiative.

Time-relative processes

We need to think differently here.  Complexity and quantum theories allow us to encompass time, not as an absolute forward mechanism, but as a probabilistic one. While we cannot quantify the time needed to take a decision, we can measure the percentage of consensual adoption of a collaborative decision. Setting thresholds to this percentage would allow for triggering the next task or process, without compromising the global performance of enterprise.

Instead of being dependent on fixed task-based rules, and to be able to address the operational time scales concern Enterprise 2.0 is facing, my bet is that we will see the emergence of new relative time-based processes, to harness the true power of networked teams and communities. I hope you will add your view on this crucial issue.

A Fractal Perspective on Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

By Thierry de Baillon

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

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

The downside of virality

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

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

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

A fractal perspective

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

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

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

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