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.

The New Laws of Attraction: Brands Dematerialization

By Thierry de Baillon

Considering that brands are in fact shaped by their customers is anything but new. In 1954, Peter Drucker already wrote:

[Marketing] is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view.

The recent frenzy of social media marketing doesn’t say anything but the same, enjoining companies to listen and engage with customers, providing us with a too often over-simplified view of business, where brands and customers seem to be the only players in town. While Enterprise 2.0 is a careful field of many approaches and thoughtful adoption and roll out frameworks, in a number of cases Marketing 2.0 doesn’t appear much more than Advertising 2.0, or Sales 2.0 at its best. Co-creation itself is often reduced at the mass customization level, mitigating customers’ creativity with small scaled processes.

But today’s brands trump any simplistic vision of marketing.  They are part of an ecosystem which encompasses both enterprise and customers; they have to deal with complex multi-channel creation and distribution systems where each actor has a capital influence on their perception. François Gossieaux recently wrote an interesting article about the difficulties inherent to brand positioning in our Connected Age.

The disappearing product

One of the most striking aspects of today’s brands is a complete change of an element which was, until recently, at the center of all attentions: the product. Not to tell that the finality of marketing is no more about selling products, and that offering your customers the best ever products is not of uttermost importance; but what we are experiencing today is a shift from products as personification of brands to products as symbol of value exchanged between brands and customers. As customers’ experience take more and more importance in today’s marketing, brands dematerialize themselves.

Typically, two facets of the classical Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism are now merging,  Physical (product based) aspect getting interweaved with the brand’s Personality, as the brand perception is focused, not on static aspects, but on dynamic exchanges between a brand and its customers.

Brands attractors

As brand perception evolves from positional (physical and “moral” aspects of the product) to transactional, the simplistic view of branding as a brand-to-customer relationship seems understandable, but hides in fact an increasing complexity. The “customer-centric” brand is in reality mostly the more or less conscious result of several traction points. Suppliers, partners, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, delivery, internal and external services, from design to customer support, are all part of the end user experience. Understanding where your brand’s main attractors are, fully preconditions your understanding of the brand perception. Neither it is a matter of controlling the whole chain, nor is it about simple interaction. Branding in a complex world requires a full awareness of positive and negative traction points, as a simple change in any of them might destroy a fragile equilibrium. Changing a supplier might have a tremendous impact on the final product, therefore on your customers experience; staff turnover in a retail point might turn them away…   Your brand relies on several traction points. Get to know them. You might not have any possible action on them, but you will at least be able to prevent any negative impact from a change of conditions.

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.

The Zen of Co-creation

By Thierry de Baillon

Co-creation is to enterprise 2.0 what “mass customization” is to marketing 2.0: not the Holy Grail, since it is definitely not a delegation of responsibilities, but a breakthrough approach to enterprise governance. Think about it as a way to inject a company or brand’s ecosystem’s output inside their internal processes, resulting in a Moebius band like value chain, each iteration providing value by itself, independently of the process involved.

More than with any other 2.0 internal initiatives, setting up the scene for co-creation needs a cultural shift to happen; fostering the right behavior challenges a lot of corporate attitudes, focusing on continuous innovation and persistent interaction.

Co-creation is not about control, but about persistence of a vision

Co-creation is neither crowd sourcing, nor focus groups. Involving partners, suppliers or clients into co-creation, means that you will have to accept losing control on some of your assets to trigger innovation or improvement. On the other side, you will need to share a consistent vision of what you want to achieve and provide a clear framework to your goals. Do not change the rules of the game in the middle of the road; if you intend to reward the best contributions with money, tell it from the beginning. Since co-creation won’t fit into your existing business processes, you have to integrate its output into a larger sketch.

Expect the unexpected

Zen focuses on the gesture rather than on the goal. You will need to perfect your platform and the way you interact, without trying to drive the output of your initiative. True innovation is disruptive per nature; you won’t be able to seize it if you pave the way before proceeding. Embrace the unexpected as the best way to trigger new solutions to known problems.

Forget your strengths, expose your weaknesses

Fear of competitors is a fierce brake put on your co-creation efforts, as you are here to make up for your weaknesses. A co-creation platform is the less adequate place to pitch your competitive advantages. Humility is key.

You will get as much as you give

The more you give, the more you will get. This looks like obvious, but think about the need for dismiss control; how many businesses are today ready to publicly expose so-called “sensitive” data or jealously crafted processes? Procter & Gamble now famous Connect + Develop website is a perfect example of a successful open innovation platform which leverages reciprocity. Giving is not giving, anyway. As Marcel Mauss exposed in “The Gift”, exchange of goods always has a symbolic dimension which goes far beyond the simple act of freely giving up a property. While giving, the deep ownership of gifts remains property of the owner, and cannot be redeemed unless a counter-gift is made. The behavioral nature of exchanges without market is an inherent part of co-creation initiatives. You are not creating a marketplace, even if you reward the submissions; you are in fact creating a value process.

Avoid destruction

The nature of co-creation could easily lead to destruction of value, either by entering too deeply into the exchange process (internal destruction), or by ignoring creative inputs apparently too far away from your expectations. A consistent vision should avoid you the first possibility. Keep in mind that disruption is not destruction, but another angle to consider known assets. Always consider positively any input, no matter how destructive it might look at first glance; just consider it from a different angle.

Keep the shortest path from ear to mouth

As a last bit of advice, report as frequently as you can. Inform the whole company about your initiative progresses, as internal resources are also part of the co-creation process. Engage and inform your external stakeholders, as they are now part of your business processes.

Management 2.0: What Enterprise Could Learn From Social Media Rock Stars

By Thierry de Baillon

Trying to reconcile marketing social media success stories with an Enterprise 2.0 vision looks apparently like a daunting task, but, behind all the bells and whistles, examining the mechanisms of successful customers service and marketing initiatives may give us important clues on the cultural change needed in most companies.

How trustful is trust?

Trust is a key feature of success. This has been underlined, written and proven so many times that it seems obvious. Engaging with customers, leveraging positive sentiment and leveraging conversations inside a community is based on trust. Free trust, the one marketers have to earn through interaction and authenticity.

Most companies and managers consider trust as acquired between coworkers. But this doesn’t take into account the fact that trust is mainly a cultural construct. The pressure of hierarchy, the balance between power and autonomy, all play a different role in different countries. Bertand Duperrin recently published an interesting post about national (notably French) specificities regarding to working behaviors. Seeing trust as a priori given might lead to misunderstanding the complex relationships existing inside a working team, from Japanese giri to Indian deep sense of hierarchy. In most (maybe all) countries, Enterprise is a world of constrained trust.

In that context, “unboxing” the necessary trust to power the right dynamics is a key issue in managing a community-driven company. Less than ever, management is not community management, as this must be accomplished, not only at team or practice level, but at any dimension involved along the hierarchical path.

Instability management

Successful marketing campaigns involve much more than empowering a community of good willing customers. Getting out of a brand’s comfort zone, turning bad sentiment into positive, pushing the envelope to trigger creative outcome, are common features of good social media practices. On the other hand, in Enterprise world, business processes and the need for raising a consensus often hide the heterogeneous aspects of collaboration. There is no wonder that innovation and co-creation, although the most promising outcomes from Enterprise 2.0, are so difficult to reach.

While being a challenge for most managers, introducing disturbance in communities’ behavior is a necessary step toward value creation. “Instability management” will become a crucial task for middle managers, as the levels of complexity and reactivity of the community-based enterprise will increase.

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

By Thierry de Baillon

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

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

A 25 years old misunderstanding

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

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

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

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

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

Where should we go from now?

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

Why There Might be Nothing Better than the Worst

By Thierry de Baillon

Every day, I read numerous papers and blogs posts about how brands and companies engage customers or internal communities through social media, and, from crowdsourced innovation to customers services, most, if not all, stories feature positive sentiment and best ideas sharing. The global feeling is one of an utterly optimistic networked world, somehow reminiscent of the hippie utopia, with a marketing bias: share a smile, and we’ll sell you better products while you work in better enterprises…

But is really spreading “the best” the way to go? What about encouraging people to share their worst?

Worst experiences help leveraging customer service

Encouraging people to share their worst experience is the best way for a brand to correct bad sentiment and to help build a stronger community. Those whose concerns are addressed in a satisfactory way will be your best brand’s advocates.

Best ideas are consensual, but innovation is never consensual.

Best ideas federate people, and such so are more prone to be rated or tagged. But are they innovative? Communities tend to favor ideas and initiatives they mentally master. On the other side, disruptive innovation often takes people by storm, jumping aside what they think as “best”. Unless you animate a community of innovators, “best” is just not good enough. A contrario, “worst” could highlight more unfamiliar, unusual angles to work on.

This might be my worst post ever, but I am sure there are plenty of other fields in the social media space where “worst” is much more insightful than “best”. What do you think?