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Last week I had the good fortune to conduct a one-day seminar on Enterprise 2.0 for the Finance Industry in Zurich. I attended Somesso 09 as an instructor with Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 University. Somesso is an Enterprise 2.0 / business social media firm based in Switzerland. They host information-packed conferences directed at specific verticals. Whereas this conference focused on finance, Somesso brought in a range of highly relevant trend setters and trusted names in the industry.
While I went armed with a well-stocked arsenal of slides describing every nuance of E20, my primary goal was to ensure attendees - a healthy mix of curious novices and experienced practitioners - left not only with a clear understanding of techniques and technologies, but also having had the opportunity to learn from the collected wisdom in the room.
The first half of the seminar focused on covering the nuts and bolts of E20 as quickly as possible. To be sure this is a challenge, given that E20 can be employed in nearly every aspect of a business to include business intelligence, customer support, production, advertising...the list goes on.
With the groundwork firmly established, the afternoon shifted towards conversation and workshopping. I was blessed to have people like Marilyn Pratt (SAP’s community evangelist), Anu Elmer (Swiss Re’s internal community manager) and David Terrar (CEO of Wordframe) in the group. Having them share their experience and expertise with the room meant that exploration could then be handled by means of a lively discussion – rather than by merely having just another question and answer exchange.
Through the course of the afternoon the conversation centered around two main issues: rewards and hosting communities.
Rewards: The group expressed interest in how to attract participation to internal or external E2 communities. Why would people participate? Why would they help manage?
We discussed how most communities are gameable systems, and the construction of the community (its rules, attributions, and rewards) would guide how people used the system. In most active communities "super-users" often appear, helping to manage the community and (as it often works out) provide much of the content. Business management software provider SAP refers to these individuals as "ambassadors." Superusers tend to share copious amounts of information, proving to be invaluable resources subsequently gaining prestige and expanding their network. The larger one's network, the more opportunities result.
Hosting Communities: During our discussions, the power of communities for business became clear. When other organizations recognized Swiss Re and SAP's success in hosting their own communities, they wanted to host them too. This led to a lengthy discussion about the financial and opportunity costs of hosting a community, the staff it would necessitate, and the finesse that becomes indispensable when managing an open community.
Most interesting was seeing the realization that an organization didn’t necessarily need to "own" the community to derive value from it. From a marketing standpoint, the company's natural inclination was to "own" the community, to make it an extension of its brand. However, as our discussion of community progressed, some came to the realization that they may actually be better served working with existing communities elsewhere rather than trying to host their own. Some communities were already active elsewhere, and some felt that their customers were more comfortable being in an environment not specifically focused on their money.
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Somesso hosted a lovely event at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue. The location overlooking Lake Zurich and the Alps was perfect for eliciting contemplation and provoking thoughtful conversation. My thanks to Arjen Stryker and Judith Koch for bringing me in to work with such fantastic people.
Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes
Years ago, I was sitting in a very posh restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District with a friend of mine. He was a very wealthy programmer, working for an incredibly prestigious financial company. We were talking, eating, laughing and having a wonderful evening overall.
He looked up at me and told me he was going to go back on drugs. About 7 years previous, he had kicked heroin. He’d gone from shooting up in dirty houses to having a comfortable townhome in Noe Valley. He’d built a lot in a very short period of time.
While giving me his reasoned rationale for wanting to go back onto heavy drugs he said, “I’m just not happy now. With everything I’ve achieved I’m just never happy. When I was using, I was happy for very short periods of time. I want to be happy again.” By the time I left him that night and went back to my hotel, he’d already scored and started his slide back to his previous life. Within a few months, he lost everything he’d worked for.
Happiness is elusive. We chase it, we want it. Life seemingly conspires against it. We mask our need for it by watching sitcoms that make us smile for very short periods of time – the over-the-counter version of heroin.
Over the last few years, I’ve met a long string of people who have gone through the 80s and 90s and now almost all of the aughts and have come up empty. Whether they have money or not, whether the recession is felt by them or not, there is a measurable exodus from lifestyles that fundamentally work at cross-purposes to happiness.
Thankfully, very few of them see drugs as an acceptable solution.
This isn’t drop-out happiness people are seeking. No communes, no great-american-novels, no buy-a-wineries (well, okay, two people bought wineries)…. This movement to happiness is pragmatic. People understand that they are better family members, they are healthier, they can help others more, they are more productive team members, etc. when they are happy.
So .. why not be happy?
The Infrastructure of Happiness
Happiness is a construct and a really ethereal one at that. It is often confused with states it is very similar to like gratification, placation, contentment, etc. Happiness can be self-serving or it can be effacing and humble.
As managers or business owners or team members, we ignore happiness at our peril.
Why? Because there appears to be a tacit assumption that work and happiness don’t go together. Happiness comes later. When I retire, when I can take vacation, when I’m … not .. at …work.
In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the tension between our individual drives and social pressures:
Submission to genetic programming can become quite dangerous because it leaves us helpless. A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. ….
A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for – rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires. He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires.
Professional fulfillment is part of happiness. It has to be. We all know it.
So, if we’re setting up a team for a project, why not have happiness be a primary goal of the team’s infrastructure? Maybe even THE goal. Product second, remuneration third. Happiness first.
After reading about our endless quest for happiness by neuroscientists, orchestra conductors, Buddhist monks, psychologists, philosophers, humorists, management theorists, and everyone in-between, I’ve come to one conclusion.
People are happy when they know what they’re doing and aren’t offended by it.
There are very few reasons why we would ever do something we were offended by or without cause. At work, people feel obligated to do what their employer requests – even if they find it offensive, demeaning or perplexing. Depending on their situations, they may feel that they have no choice but to do as requested – with even quitting being out of the question.
Unenlightened employers may feel this is a position of power and rejoice in the entrapment of such people. However, if your goal is to have a business that grows and innovates – this mindset is not going to help you.
Business cultures that strike a balance between business and personal health should engender a happier workforce. People worry a great deal about what happens at the office. They take that stress home with them. That stress can negatively impact home life. This creates more stress, which is in turn brought back to the office.
In 2001, the Seattle Mariners won 116 games, tying the all time record for wins in a single season. They were mostly the same team they were the year before and the next year when their records were nowhere close to 116. In 2008, the Tampa Bay Rays went to the World Series after being dead last in 2007. Again, with roughly the same line up.
There is an attitude of winning that can float or sink a team. If your team is committed to being happy first, its chances of winning will be bolstered. True commitment to a healthy culture creates momentum.
In The Art of Power, Thich Nhat Hanh describes this momentum in his monkly style:
In your professional life, there may be other people you have to be in touch with and work with. You may be working as a team to make a film, design a produce, or complete another kind of project. Each person on your team has his own difficulties , his own suffering. but because you are open, happy, fresh, and concentrated, you can help all of them touch their freshness. you don’t care only about their work performance, because the quality of their work depends on the peace and well-being inside each of them. You come to the business as a friend, helping everyone transform, bringing peace, harmony and well-being into their lives at home and at work.
Yes, Master Hahn is a bit beyond what HR might be comfortable with. The point, however, is that teams made up of happy and psychologically healthy individuals understand that they are working with other human beings. We are working with people who have lives outside of work and that they are living inside work too.
We are still alive while we’re at work. We aren’t purchased work-robots who have deferred our dreams to times of not-work.
We have goals and, more often than not, those goals are good for the company. We want to complete projects. We want to understand the flow of work. We want to do what we can.
In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi’s description of what makes people feel happiness is very much in-line with understanding your company’s value-stream. While there’s deeper issues at play, from a work perspective the value stream is vital. Understanding the flow of work through your organization satisfies some basic needs to making your workforce happy.
Creating a lucid value stream and expressing people’s places in it gives workers a lot of power. They can optimize their place in the value stream based on their current skills or skills they wish to acquire. They can optimize the value stream itself by pointing out areas of improvement. In short, the clarity provided by understanding what the heck is going on is instantly gratifying.
What is also interesting is, happiness as described by most of these authors is not a static state. Happiness is, rather, an aesthetic or an amalgam.
In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert starts a long chapter about what happiness may or may not be with this point:
The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness and judgmental happiness.
When all these authors get down to it, they end up describing self-rewarding systems that seem to result in rolling series of Maslovian peak experiences.
A-ha!
Business then, which is loathe to really get into matters of personal mental health, can actually do a few things here.
1. Make business explicit to those doing the work.
The value stream, the fiscal health of the company, people’s roles in the organization, corporate ethics and goals – should all be made explicit so workers can choose to improve, innovate, and participate.
2. Decisions are free
Free your managers and you from top down decision making. Give people the freedom to do their jobs.
3. Information Hoarding Will Not Be Tolerated
The fastest way to threaten anyone is to withhold information from them. Want to kill productivity? Keep secrets.
4. Make Work a Healthy Game
The goal of work is to create things. Rewarding people for creating things is a healthy game. Avoid zero-sum games like promotions or winner-take-all prizes. Incentivize your value stream and not end-goals.
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Happiness is not fluff and it’s not a “nice to have”. It’s a central component to a functional team. Put a little thought into it and see what you come up with.
Blogged at my house in Seattle, WA
After the 10 Principles of Social Media for Business came out, people began to engage us on different real-world applications. One of these was the University of Lisbon who asked for a brief thought-exercise. They wanted us to think of ways the 10 Principles would apply to education.
We applied the 10 Principles to educations’ need to:
Modus Cooperandi’s Paper on Social Media for Higher Education for the University of Lisbon can be downloaded from the Modus Cooperandi site.
Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA
Will is power.
Aggregated will is aggregated power.
Networked will is networked power.
As individuals we want to achieve. As groups we can achieve.
Do our organizations reflect this?
Our relationships (professional or personal) should be designed to build networks of communication, respect, responsibility and value. In organizations, those who lead are responsible for setting vision and culture. This can be a group of two, where the two people involved understand their destination and are mutually working to get there. It can work in organizations the size of Microsoft or GE – as long as appropriate leadership happens in appropriate places.
When organizations focus primarily on intangibles (profit, market dominance, public perception), focus is necessarily removed from tangibles (what we do, how we do it, why we do it). As the focus becomes diffused, the individual is lost. She no longer has responsibility or a sense of belonging.
Productivity slips. Attitude descends.
People naturally work for some goal. If the goal isn’t to innovate or help the company achieve its mission, then their goal is personal. Income maximization, maximum free time, minimum effort, maximum career path. If these goals are made outside of the mission of the company, they probably happen at the expense of the company
The fortune cookie says “You never hesitate to tackle to most difficult problems.” Why isn’t this true for everyone? Because often we are told that our input is neither sought nor appreciated.
Organizational willpower comes from clarity of purpose and buy-in from those in the organization. The members of your organization require the elements of the 10 Principles of Social Media. They need to have an understanding of operations, a good feeling about their status, clarity of corporate governance, rewards for jobs well done, and access to the information and people they need to do their jobs and improve process.
When your org allows for these, your org may earn this fortune cookie. It too will never hesitate to tackle the most difficult problems.
Written at the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Wa.
Photo by Tonianne
In the first attempt to describe Findability is Power, I defined the principle thusly:
10. Findability is power – Unfindable information or people are irrelevant.
Ed Vielmetti left this comment:
I'll have to disagree, Jim.
There's lots of unfindable information that's terribly relevant - information (or at least data) that's available only if you know precisely how to ask for it of precisely the right human being with precisely the right words and maybe the right tone of voice or the right letterhead.
If an organization can tax your patience by making it difficult for you to figure something out, it can destroy your desire for it.
Ed is right. And I’m somewhat annoyed at myself for misstating my intentions.
This would be better stated as:
10. Findability is power – Unfindable assets are waste.
The previous post showed how context and other factors change how we relate to information. But I was remiss in not making the whole point.
For business: information, people, and objects are all assets. In order for assets to be worth holding, they need to be usable in some way that creates more value than their cost of storage, management and maintenance.
Jen Zug shows us through her (very timely) tweet that we as consumers now expect findability. We expect to go to KUOW and intuitively find assets.
When the customer does not find what she wants, she gets annoyed.
Annoy me once, shame on you. Annoy me twice, I’m tweeting about it!
Ed’s comment speaks to waste from information not being immediately findable. Whether I’m looking for something at KUOW or within my own company – if I have to fight to find relevant information my patience will wear thin. My push to find the important and relevant information will end when my internal opportunity cost calculator in my brain says, “This is now too much trouble.”
On the flip side, when information is readily accessible, its value is astronomically higher. When I Google something and get the answer in less than a second, the cost of acquisition of the information is monstrously lower than its potential value when I use it for something or even if I discard it.
The required end-value of a use of data needs to be very measurable to obtain it in a person-to-person system. If I need something, it needs to be worth my time, the person I’m bothering, and the annoyance penalty for taking us both away from other things. In a computerized, rapid access world – that same information takes less than a second to obtain and inconveniences no one.
This means that casual queries based on conversations that could prove fruitful in the future are possible. Multiple avenues of inquiry can quickly be attempted, analyzed and discarded with minimal impact on corporate resources. Discovery of unexpected and highly useful information is now much more likely.
I’ll finish up by bringing up Jen Zug again … she expects the information to be findable. So should she. Now, the organization of KUOW has gained her ire. What would Jen have done if she found that content? More than likely she would have tweeted it. She would have said, “Incredible story today on KUOW about Vegemite Soup” (or something) and given a link.
KUOW’s poor findability turned a viral promoter into a viral complainer.
Within a business, poor findability turns innovation into frustration.
Blogged in the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington
10. Findability is power – Unfindable information or people are irrelevant.
What is this picture? To some it may mean rescue at sea. To others it may be law enforcement coming to get them. To others it might be helicopters. Maybe piloting.
When we create information it is usually created under a given context. However, as we’ve discussed, Context is Fluid.
So an object created under a given context is not bound by that context.
Time spent searching for items we need to get our jobs done (people, expertise, information, how-to, etc.) is waste. In most businesses, a great deal of this information is tacit knowledge. To search for it, we wade through our professional networks at the office – we ask the people who sit around us who (might) be able to point us in the direction of someone else who (maybe) knows something.
This is wasted time which is often exacerbated by corporate structures, cultures, and rules which restrict access to knowledge by fiat or construct.
We can deal with this but making information more freely available. However, when business begins to open up and democratize the storage and distribution of information, the problem of searching and cataloging instantly becomes apparent.
The context under which information is created often dictates how it is stored. It’s storage then creates ease for searching under that context (e.g.: it’s filed under “Scuba Diving Disasters”) and not under other contexts (e.g.: I’m searching for “Worst underwater birthday parties ever”.).
This becomes even more complex when trying to build ad hoc teams made up of people with various reputations, skill sets, and locations.
In Social Media, tagging or folksonometric designations are given to objects of social value. A tag is a fluid designation given to an object.
Here we have a particularly sadistically delicious picture of a dessert at Jose Andres’ restaurant Zaytinya in Washington DC. When my friend Toni took this picture and put it on Flickr, she did not tag it. I added the tags, according to my context. They included Jose Andres, Food, Zaytinya, dessert and – because I wasn’t lucky enough to go myself – I added the tag “overwhelmingdesire”.
The final tag was clearly my context and not the photographers, the photographer ate the food – more than likely enjoyed it – and did not feel the overwhelming desire that I did.
While this is a rather glib example, the problem with contextual search is clear. Simply digitizing information or making it transparent does not necessarily make it findable. This principle calls on us to respect this dilemma and build systems that allow for objects to be found under a variety of contexts.
This is looked at from a second angle here. Principle Ten Take Two
An Bui’s take on this principle is here.
Photo courtesy of Tonianne.
"Lord save us!" cried the duck. "How does it make up its mind?" – The Story of Doctor Doolittle by Hugh Lofting
The Pushmi Pullyu
The Story of Doctor Dolittle tells us that the Pushmi Pullyu was an animal that is now extinct, which means it’s not around any more.
Its genetic structure lives on in many businesses and relationships, however. Note the Pushmi Pullyu’s main characteristics:
Hugh Lofting wrote The Story in 1920. At this point, stovepiping and arbitrary specialization was a new art. So, for Lofting, the best way to solve the inherent conflicts in a Pushmi Pullyu structure was … stovepiping and specialization in the service of organization and civilization.
“I notice," said the duck, "that you only talk with one of your mouths. Can't the other head talk as well?"
"Oh, yes," said the pushmi-pullyu. "But I keep the other mouth for eating--mostly. In that way I can talk while I am eating without being rude. Our people have always been very polite."
This might have satisfied us when we were 7 and reading Dolittle books, but now it raises all sorts of obvious questions.
And we begin to see some of the inherent difficulties in an entity or organization that designs itself with multiple heads and structurally opposing viewpoints.
Opposing Heads
Stovepiped organizations are Pushmi Pullyu by nature. Cost centers that have opposing goals (funding, staffing, power, flexibility, subservience, etc.) create Pushmi Pullyu dynamics. Marketing squares off against Product Development. Manufacturing against sales.
Decisions are made not through collaboration of heads moving in the same direction – but are made by combat between groups that see themselves as the true “head” of the company and making no effort at alignment. Alignment would bring the other “head” in line with their “head” – thereby taking away their assumed importance.
The company calls itself "a company” but a little examination reveals that the company is a group of discrete adversarial units with no choice but to do business together.
One Very Firm Body
The Pushmi Pullyu’s physiology won’t even allow it to re-org into a forward facing unit. Its spine would snap.
Many companies, through years of policies, procedures and power moves, are hopelessly mired in Pushmi Pullyu architectures. We see policies:
The policies make organizations inflexible and destined for extinction - which means they soon won’t be around any more. Slight changes to the ecosystem of a rigid organization can yield exquisite damage.
Waste Elimination
The Pushmi Pullyu’s whimsical design is good for story telling and power hoarding, but it is not so good for sustainable management. The Pushmi Pullyu doesn’t even have the equipment to rid itself of waste.
Businesses are not immune from this seemingly impossible oversight. Many of the self-professed problems coming today from the big 3 auto makers are not dissimilar from those described in some of the companies in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great.
Scott Paper is one such case study of Collins’. The company was hopelessly mired in a Pushmi Pullyu dynamic. Product lines that were part of the company history but untenable in an overly commoditized marketplace. There was a lot of internal political capital in those existing products. Scott Paper’s leadership, however, knew that those products – while known and comfortable to the organization – were not an avenue for either stability or growth.
The waste eliminated here is massive. Political waste, policy waste, underperforming product line waste. That is Olympic medal winning waste elimination. The Big 3 Automakers, like Scott Paper before them, will need to not just re-org, but entirely re-invent their corporate physiology in order to survive.
To achieve this, goal alignment and transparency are paramount. Opposing heads cannot be part of the corporate architecture.
(This does not mean disagreement isn’t good, it does mean that institutionalized opposition will not be tolerated.)
Your So-Called Pushmi Pullyu Life
So, you are in a Pushmi Pullyu situation (or maybe more than one). What do you do?
The answer is simple. Subversion.
the act of subverting : the state of being subverted ; especially : a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system by persons working secretly from within
Nothing short of subversion will undo such deep structural divisions within a company. They were there before you and people don’t know enough to change them.
I vote for social subversion in the service of positive change.
Talk to people you’re not supposed to. Form alliances between you and “enemy” groups in the company. Work to create win-win funding opportunities for projects that involve both groups. Find ways to share staff. Increase intra-organizational involvement.
Find areas of obvious success, execute and be successful.
You will get flak for this.
Your alternatives: Acquiescence or Unemployment.
Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA
This post is eighth in a series of my Social Media Principles. The base post is 10 Social Media Principles.
“There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.”
Mahatma Gandhi
Principle #8. Immediacy in all things – Strike while the iron is hot. Eat when the food is fresh.
We’ve discussed in previous principles how information wants to be free, information should be findable and searchable and that people want to be good community members.
Have you ever been on a mission?
We consider ourselves on a mission when we have clear goals, we have an idea of how to satisfy those goals, and we are somewhat excited about achieving them. A mission differs from a task by our emotional investment.
Previous chapters have also discussed how people’s emotional investment in an activity or organization relies heavily on transparency and the availability of information.
Delays are insults to missions.
Any delay in a mission belies the importance of the mission. Delays say to the missionary: your important task is far less important to me than it is to you. This is invalidating and demotivating.
Immediacy therefore becomes crucial to maintaining motivation.
If people within an organization remain motivated, they work faster, they are more creative, and frankly, they give a damn. Demotivated team members simply do not perform as well.
When devising rules around information provision and flow in an organization, principle #8 should be kept in mind at all times. How important is this information when compared to slowing down the company? Is it more important to hide this information than to allow people the opportunity to use it for inspiration?
Note that here immediacy doesn’t necessarily mean speed – it means respect.
Photo via Morguefile and Shelly Kiser
Written at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA
Jim Benson is a collaborative management consultant. He is CEO of Modus Cooperandi, a consultancy which combines Lean, Agile Management and Social Media principles to develop sustainable teams.
