‘Communities’ and ‘Networks’: A Conceptual and Linguistic 2.0 Mess

By Thierry de Baillon

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.

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.

The New Laws of Attraction: Management as Transformation of Value

By Thierry de Baillon

It is quite striking to see how much the mass production era still shapes a lot of our behaviors, whether in our relationships to brands or in Enterprise world. From a customer point of view, while conversing more and more with brands around what I consider as a symbolic transaction, we are still mostly considering companies as products and services manufacturers and distributors.

In parallel, “work as value” is still a dominant paradigm in a lot of companies, which, at same time, are trying to implement 2.0, socio-collaborative, tools and platforms to foster knowledge emergence and capitalization. This is strikingly strong in countries like France, where our President said “travailler plus pour gagner plus” (working more to earn more) less than two years ago. Let’s face this, every effort to facilitate Enterprise 2.0 adoption has to take into account, not only structural resistance, but cultural artifacts from a past era.

Most employees have quite effortlessly switched paradigm, from “work as value” to “work as creation of value”, as it relates both to their day-to-day experience as customers and to their expectations in Enterprise world, but managers are facing a bigger challenge, as they are less and less connected with a traditional (pre knowledge economy era) role of managing teams, and expected to consider management as transformation of value. As obvious as this might be, seem from our Enterprise 2.0 heralds’ seats, we have to keep in mind that organizational and behavioral gap: from gatekeepers of business processes, managers must now dynamically harness existing knowledge to transform it into competitive advantages for their company; a tough challenge for most.

Furthermore, while bringing more agility, adoption of collaborative tools and platforms, whether used in the existing framework of business processes or not, allows for a new type of leadership, combining knowledge fostering with social connections facilitation. Managers will now have to catalyze groups and communities activity, involve them in decision-making as well as in maintaining their inner state of equilibrium, acting as the strange attractors of a complex internal ecosystem.

From their real adoption of what is clearly a totally new role, a role which requires more qualities than ever, will depend success or failure of many companies in this new socio-collaborative economy.

Salesforce Chatter: Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise 2″0?

By Thierry de Baillon

Twitter was bruising yesterday about Salesforce announcement of its new application, Chatter. With a product introduced as a “Facebook for the Enterprise” by a representative of the company, Salesforce just confirmed what is becoming an important trend in Enterprise platforms:  real-time collaboration.

For a long time, the only asynchronous tool used by companies was email, and one of the challenges of Enterprise 2.0 adoption was in helping people getting used of new asynchronous tools like wikis, blogs, bookmarking or tagging platforms, placing them in conditions to deal with knowledge exchange and serendipity values. In parallel, generalization of the Blackberry is putting email back into pseudo-synchronous mode, instant messaging applications penetration rate in companies is about 40%, according to Gartner, and Google Wave is pointing another real-time head into the game. The point, of course, is no more about discussing whether synchronous tools will be part or not of our new toolboxes. They will, for sure, but are they worth the hype?

The Facebook analogy used by Salesforce is indeed indicative of the direction main platform vendors are today heading to; something like “hey, Facebook works as hell, wouldn’t you like to be able to have your employees sharing, interacting, poking each other on business matters? 230 milliions users cannot be wrong”. But is really the Social Web a similar playground as Enterprise? Definitely not. Bertrand Duperrin recently insightfully sketched the differences between managing communities and managing business. While both worlds aim to drive flawlessly working communities, companies need a lot more.

Furthermore, these new tools will put emphasis on time as a critical material, weighting in most process-based tasks. While searching increased productivity along these processes, with the help of real-time facilitators, executives will put further pressure on actual organizations, avoiding to face the necessary cultural shift which has yet to happen. Platform vendors’ “real-time” pitch is with no doubt good for (their) business, as executives will certainly jump in the bandwagon, not for Enterprise 2.0.

This new trend will oblige us to be even more cautious when implementing social tools, as we now must deploy two different layers of interaction, and that, along with leadership, decision-making, knowledge and information, time is the new dimension we have to deal with.

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.

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.

Corporate Culture Is Infrastructure – My Twitter Interview With Cindy King

By Thierry de Baillon

I had yesterday the privilege to be interviewed by Cindy King, on Twitter and on her blog, about cross-cultural communication. My answer to one of her questions (“Culture is…” in one word) raised a few interesting comments, and leaded me to further thinking. Culture is infrastructure.

From the fast growing literature about Enterprise 2.0, I only read few things about interaction between corporate culture and the necessary changes induced by embracing social tools behind the firewall. The relationship between governance, managerial routines and corporate culture is nevertheless far from easy to unveil, and has important implications in driving 2.0 initiatives.

Every company has a corporate culture

Even if not clearly communicated or formalized, relationships between employees, working habits and managerial style always define a set of embedded hard-to-move rules. Understanding these rules is a crucial step in determining which initiatives will or won’t be successful.

It is not always what you think it is

While CEOs and founders usually imprint their own vision as a corporate culture, reality is often a bit different, as day-to-day work usually follows its own path, independently from formal business processes. Micro-interactions are here much more important than macro-statements in determining the collaborative ability of a company.

Not all corporate cultures are suitable for E2.0

Apple is of course an obvious example of a company which successfully stays away from social media. A strong and meaningful corporate culture has by itself as much power as today’s most evolved social platforms.

Changing corporate culture is the hardest task to undertake

Changing an operating system takes time and commitment, but switching infrastructure is a radical move. Collaborative routines can easily be introduced in the most top-down company, as long as the wish to collaborate exists. Here too, look at micro-interactions between people to get a clue about potential success.

As usual, it is all about people

The fact that networks and communities must be driven by clear business goals shouldn’t obscure the key role of the Human Resources department.  The larger the initiative, the stronger the HR commitment and support might be.

Will Enterprise Avoid the Worst Scenarios Ever?

By Thierry de Baillon

Michael Idinopulos recently published an article encouraging companies to “skip the pilot” and adopt social media at company-wide scale. While I agree with him saying that providing a global environment for social initiatives inside Enterprise is the right way for companies to embrace the real power of the tools (provided they can afford the sometimes hefty price tag), launching E2.0 tools at company scale raise crucial issues about strategic management and governance which cannot be easily solved in most companies.

To highlight some of these issues, let us imagine a firm where collaborative and social software has been implemented everywhere, and look at different scenarios:

Off-process freedom

In most of our objectives-driven companies, social initiatives will be kept out from business processes outcome, and although employees might be encouraged to participate in several ways (from requirement to incentives), they will have to do it apart from their day-to-day tasks. Results are easy to figure out: collaboration and positive sentiment will decrease with time, leading to failure. Expecting to leverage collaboration and interaction without implementing them directly into business processes and allocating work time accordingly is a mere utopia.

The regalian enterprise

Implementing social behavior into business processes is not sufficient. I wrote about the need to enable consensus rise directly into networks, as it is directly related to enterprise governance.  Separating collaboration from decision taking is of course an easier path to follow, especially when dealing with large scale initiatives.  This, of course, flattens the whole hierarchy, as control steps and feedback loops can easily be rationalized and simplified in processes. But far from being an evolution, such a governance model is a regression from present structures, reinforcing a small group of decision takers and isolating it from the base. This somehow reminds the paternalist model from XIXth century industrial era or, in the worst cases, the monarchic model.

Lethal paralysis

Failing in implementing decision taking in a strategic way at the right level, and on the right time, may also lead to a less obvious, but equally devastating situation. The output from networked-based processes, if not correctly monitored and channeled, quickly leads to information overload, thus to a lack of necessary agility, and ultimately to paralysis. The wider the scale, the more overwhelming the effects. Frustrations, loss of company’s culture, lack of competitive advantages, inability to innovate, are among the most probable results from letting this situation taking over.

Avoiding these pitfalls, and adopting the right model for 2.0 governance, are a true challenge, but never forget that tools are only tools, and that only people have the power to successfully embrace today’s business evolution.