Later this week, the Management Lab is convening a group of academics and practitioners to "to define the “Grand Challenges” for 21st century management, and imagine possible solutions to them." The list of attendees is very impressive; I’m flattered to have been asked to participate and anticipate learning a lot.
As part of the preparation for the conference we were asked to "Briefly describe a “design flaw” or “impediment” that undermines the capacity of organizations to adapt, innovate, or fully engage the talents of their members." We were then asked to "Briefly describe a “radical remedy” that might help to counter or avoid the impediment or design flaw described above."
I wanted to share my two responses here (they probably won’t surprise regular readers of this blog.). I’d love to hear your thoughts; does what’s below capture a real problem? If so, does the solution address it? Do you agree that "it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet?" Did I leave anything really important out? What other comments or thoughts do you have? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
Impediment or design flaw: People and Information are Deeply Mismatched in Most Organizations
Within most organizations at present, the great majority of consultable digital information is either highly structured (customer order records stored in a database), a reflection of the viewpoints and priorities of the formal hierarchy (newsletters), and/or static (document repositories). As a result, this consultable information does not show the current state of the organization as perceived by its members, nor does it accurately represent their views, skills, judgments, experiences, activities, etc.
In fact, it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet, especially when compared with their abilities to do the same on the Internet. Since so many organizations describe people as their most important assets, it is puzzling why these opportunities are so constrained.
These constraints have an important consequence: while most organizations are drowning in many kinds of data they are simultaneously starved for vitally important information — information that comes over time from ‘wetware,’ or the minds of involved people. Lack of access to this information leads to sluggishness, redundancy, inferior decisions, and missed opportunities.
Radical Remedy: Create an Emergent, Social Enterprise Information Environment
An organization should deploy a universal digital environment that lets members contribute and modify content in a ‘freeform’ manner — with a minimum of imposed structure in the form of workflows, decision right allocations, interdependencies, and data formats specified ex ante. This environment should contain mechanisms to let structure emerge over time; such mechanisms include linking, tagging, voting, rating, and trading, as well as algorithms that generate recommendations, assess relative popularity, etc.
Managers’ roles in this environment are to set expectations, guide the development of healthy norms, indicate appropriate uses, and lead by example. A managers most fundamental role here, however, is to ‘get out of the way’ — to stop using technology to impose constraints and culture on people and their work, and to instead encourage the appearance of an emergent structure.
This remedy does not necessarily include the transfer of any decision rights beyond those related to content creation. In other words, this remedy does not advocate that decisions related to the running of the organization be turned over to any emergent collective. It simply entails the creation of a novel information environment. Decision makers will hopefully consult this environment, but the environment does not become the decision maker.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
While this idea is not a surprise for your “regulars,” it is still an idea that is often overlooked. As you mentioned, the paramount concern of most managers is a loss of control. Imagine if you had worked your entire professional life, slowly crawling up the ladder and now must face the harsh reality that in the information age, ideas and opinions are not necessarily assigned value solely by the position of the speaker. There is also value in the cumulative strength of many small voices.
As an example, Google allows employees to spend a set period every month (or every so often…) working on something they think is important to the company that may fall outside their daily duties. This leverages the intelligence and creativity of an dangerously smart group of people, allowing them the freedom and responsibility to make improvements, and most importantly making them feel valued which is one of the most important attributes of a successful workplace.
With each successive generation of workers more and more comfortable participating in online communities, the opportunity for managers to harness this pool of collective intelligence and improve the efficiency, responsiveness and flexibility of their organization increases many fold.
Andrew,
I think you are spot on. The only comment I would add is people need the opportunity to create information that is consumable by the entire group “as they work.” Expecting people to take extra time (away from their day-to-day job) to create content and publish it doesn’t work in my experience. It needs to be supported by management and not something extra for them. In other words, they should be “actively” encouraged by management and not just get out of the way. Hope this helps.
Jason
Cisco Kid touched on an idea you’ve expressed before–”leadership is emergent.”
As enterprises flatten, users can self-select horizontally and vertically, which dents the idea that all knowledge exists in the vertical (chain of command) and must be filtered as such. Knowledge does exist in the vertical but great knowledge also exists in the horizontal often coming from people you could not have anticipated up front and are outside your “chain.”
There is a flip side to this coin. For example, “little” users can appear “large” in mediums enabled by social tools. I’ll be at a conference with Dr. McAfee this Sunday June 1, 2008. It’s for C-level executives only. I could not come to heard myself speak if rank was factored in. Moreover, there is a member on my panel that is confirmed by the Senate. IÂ’m just a social tools user that has posted some good ideas/content/conversations.
If I had to go through traditional systems of management and hierarchical knowledge flows, itÂ’s unlikely I would be speaking at such events. Social tools are great levelers.
Hi Andrew,
I believe you are right to the point! Businesses need to shift their focus from storing information to sharing information. The “Social Enterprise Information Environment” that you suggest will help to bring information that is actually usable for people to the surface. To me it is really about a shift from managing and protecting both information and people to leveraging assets and empowering people.
br,
Oscar
I fully agree with the problem and solution you propose, but as Cisco Kid points out, the problem is not just technical. There are organisational and human issues that need to be resolved before the technology can have an effect. This maybe one of the things that separates the great from the good over the next decade, their ability to break the organisational hierarchies and resistance to truly democratize ideas and information.
Last week, in the French Journal Les Echos, there was a multi-page article targeted for senior management on what Web 2.0 is and the challenges that companies are facing in adopting them inside the enterprise. It was almost shocking to read because it basically did a very poor job of describing what Web 2.0 is and the benefits it can bring, and focused almost exclusively on (i) the security risks it brings and (ii) how it will create very painful organisational challenges as it bypasses the holy hierarchy. If I were an uniformed senior director of a company and I read that article, I would formally prohibit bringing these technologies inside the company.
What we need are some widely discussed success stories of companies that have broken the traditional hierarchy and improved their performance. The Google example is nice, but they were never a traditional company. Procter & Gamble, GE, IBM, etc. are better examples.
I agree strongly with your statement of the problem; and while I see the motivation for your dolution, I have to say that as a longtime government observer and participant it falls to some degree in the “elegant but impractical” category. Here’s why: it fails to take account of arguably the strongest force in civilization- fundamental human nature. “Freeform content” = uncontrolled chaos – at least in terms of actionable intelligence. Put a bunch of coworkers in a room, say, 20 people. A skilled facilitator can organize the group so that it produces useful output under most circumstances, but a leaderless discussion will usually end up as a “Bitch session” Everybody vents about what’s wrong, but most participants will leave without seeing anything of practical value emerge. A repository is just a container for stuff, could be good, could be bad. If the leader of an enlightened organization wanted to put the information in it to good use, it would be a fulltime job just to weed out the chaff, and explain to the contributors of the chaff why their input was ignored. Eventually a few will come to dominate the space and everyone else will fall silent. The fact that decision rights are maintained by the management means only that the informal authority structure that emerges right there in the environment has to do its work underground, further contributing to the potential for betrayal and end-running. Tagging, voting, and otherwise building an informal hierarchy simply replaces the official organizational structure with a de facto one. Don’t misunderstand- such an environment could work wonderfully for a brand new organization without an established culture. The danger comes in creating such an environment where a culture already exists. Within 6 months it would be abandoned to the lawyers who would have to go through every posting it to evaluate the legal risk to the organization.
However, let me go back to my agreement with the statement of the problem. The “deep disconnect” between people and information is real and debilitating. The solution is the development of better leaders, supported by better information channels. Automation had brought us much more information, but not better or more useful information. Technologists tell us that by deploying this information system or that one, we will be better managers. Not so. The best information systems are qualitative improvements over what went before. Most information systems are, at best, quantitative increases and not necessarily improvements. So instead of a new system, why not a boss that LISTENS? Instead of a repository for freeform content, why not a management structure that is designed to fit the mission, and to encourage the broad distribution of needed information? If the human part of an organization is working properly, the technology part is an easy fit. Otherwise it is just another great new system.
As I read over this, it sounds a bit like an anti-technology rant. It’s not. It’s more like a crie d’ coeur. I’m an IT person. I love technologies of all kinds. But I agree with the old saw, “You ca’t fix bad management with a great system”
If a social enterprise information environment is put in place, decision rights of management will be reduced.
Decisions need to appear to be based on unbiased information and rational analysis. However, many managers make decisions, then look for information and analysis to support the decision. But, if the information and analysis is coming from the crowd, and is difficult to influence, then the post decision analysis exercise is far more difficult. Therefore, the decisions need to be based on the information, and cannot be made prior to analysis.
In this way decision rights are taken away from management – or more precisely – the rights to make a decision without good information is curtailed because of the wealth of good information available.
Andrew,
I think you’re right as far as you go. And, I basically agree with your suggestions. However, they do have a bit of a utopian whiff.
The Web/Enterprise 2.0 hype reminds me a bit of the “information for free” buzz that surrounded books like Kauffman’s “Origins of Order” in the mid-90′s. It’s a nice dream, but I think less likely than we might wish.
Enterprises have goals that require individuals to act in a coherent fashion. To achieve those goals, they must Execute certain activities in a reliable fashion (e.g., core processes). At the same time, they need to Explore new opportunities that emerge from a shifting technological, memetic, economic, etc. landscape. Exploration work incrementally improves Execution capabilities and potentially modifies the organizations goals by uncovering disruptive opportunities.
Web/Enterprise 2.0 holds the promise of a quantum leap forward in an organization’s capability to Explore/Innovate. The key is to integrate Exploration with Execution in a way that increases agility & adaptability without sacrificing the coherence required to maintain the organization’s health (e.g., profitability). As others have mentioned, the primary challenge is probably at the DNA level of the organization (identity, values, narrative fragments, mental models, etc.) I suspect that much of the DNA-level change will be largely an emergent phenomena, and Web/Enterprise 2.0 has a key role to play in catalyzing that change.
Note: Others (e.g., Tushman, Christensen, Hagel & Seely Brown) have drawn contrasts similar to what I’ve characterized as Execution-Exploration. After stumbling across the basic contrast about 1.5 years ago while analyzing technological change vs. organization change I found these writers (among others) had already discussed it. The fact that this contrast continues to appear in various flavors is perhaps one indicator that it is important.
I agree with your problem statement, however I think it could equally be described as ‘a fundamental disconnection between people and relevant current information’, which in no small part stems from the nature of information and communication systems organisations have implemented.
Also, where people feel they are sharing ideas, information and knowledge – whether during meetings, via email, messaging or otherwise – the lack of a ‘platform’ on which to do all of this may appear as more of a ‘nice to have’ than a constraint. In addition, many are reluctant to change their familiar (inefficient) living-out-of-the-inbox approach to work life, and struggle to conceptualise how social tools can help relevant information bubble to the surface, and almost find them! So, whilst some may recognise problems with information (and expertise) currency and findability, there is nevertheless a gap between that recognition and ideas as to how technology can best be used to remove the constraints you mentioned, help people work better and unlearn bad habits (in terms of their existing practices of information sharing).
I agree that creating an emergent, social, networked, open information environment is an imperative in today’s workplace. But, the creation of such an environment and the implementation of any tools in support thereof needs to be done in conjunction with careful user-centric analysis, focusing on integrating the tools into and supporting people’s daily work. Whilst each of the management behaviours you mentioned are useful, I don’t think it’s enough, or in some cases appropriate, to simply ‘get out of the way’. Considerable effort is often required but not invested in analysis, and ensuring the tools are well targeted and positioned in the organisation, to encourage people to capitalise on the opportunities available, and sometimes, show them how to do it.
Reg “universal digital environment”
What If
1) All my in and out emails can be seen by my manager, my managerÂ’s manager until the Chairman ?
2) Every email that I send and receive goes through a ticketing system i.e., if it is a new email – subject will be prefixed with a ticket number and/or the details added to a company-wide ticketing system.
At any time.. I should be able to
1) close the tickets
2) mark the ticket as public which should send email to all involved to agree to this status !
3) rank open tickets and even closed -> to let my colleagues know of my top pains and tips
Andrew, this absolutely gels with my view of these issues. I have been looking at trying to find these sorts of words to describe this so succintly for a some time now.
I have several Enterprise 2.0 talks coming up at Australian conferences and, with your okay, would love to use these descriptions in my talks.
Andrew, as Stephen say above you have done a great job succinctly summarising this topic. I think Penny’s comments hit the nail on the head. Essentially it is not about the technology but the cultural change that the technologies enable. This is ‘just’ a classic change management problem. By focusing on the cultural change required while minimising the technology learning curve we have had considerable success in getting teams to adopt a ‘web2.0/enterprise2.0′ culture. While this bottom-up approach is delivering at the ‘coalface’ the challenge remain how to propagate this upwards. Still when you see a team move out of the inbox though utilisation of a wiki in conjunction with RSS, social bookmarking and GTDware, etc it gives you the encouragement to continue.
Interestingly, I just read the following article (Cisco looks to globalize through ‘brainforming’) in which Cisco’s new CTO addresses the issue of technology innovation through “brainforming,” a fancy play on words that really just translate to an emergent environment. Does anyone else think Cisco is taking the idea of emergence seriously? or is this just jargon meant to boost investor confidence in their new hire?
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“In fact, it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet, especially when compared with their abilities to do the same on the Internet. Since so many organizations describe people as their most important assets, it is puzzling why these opportunities are so constrained.”
I have just watched a youtube video of W. Edwards Demming discussing how 'competition' is a source of weakness in comparison to 'co-operation' and I think that this parallels the reason for the issue you are asking about.
Somehow, in the West, we have developed unquestioning acceptance of the idea that competition improves the product / business / service etc. But a flaw I see in that argument is that if you are competing, you are necessarily on your own. This means that if several organisations are working on essentially the same idea, then there is duplication of effort. That is a waste of resources and in addition, working in isolation removes the chance of brainstorming for better ways and concepts.
Returning to 'why intranet offers little opportunity for idea exchange' perhaps the cause is (latent) competitiveness of the parties involved.
“In fact, it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet, especially when compared with their abilities to do the same on the Internet. Since so many organizations describe people as their most important assets, it is puzzling why these opportunities are so constrained.”
I have just watched a youtube video of W. Edwards Demming discussing how 'competition' is a source of weakness in comparison to 'co-operation' and I think that this parallels the reason for the issue you are asking about.
Somehow, in the West, we have developed unquestioning acceptance of the idea that competition improves the product / business / service etc. But a flaw I see in that argument is that if you are competing, you are necessarily on your own. This means that if several organisations are working on essentially the same idea, then there is duplication of effort. That is a waste of resources and in addition, working in isolation removes the chance of brainstorming for better ways and concepts.
Returning to 'why intranet offers little opportunity for idea exchange' perhaps the cause is (latent) competitiveness of the parties involved.