Library clips :: complexity

October 4, 2010

Interview : My thoughts on enterprise 2.0

Filed under: km, conversation, network, community, emergence, collaboration, communication, complexity, decisionmaking, leadership

I was interviewed by Cathrin Gill on the Enterprise 2.0 Open blog as part of their E2.0 Expert Profiles.

The Enterprise2Open blog was initiated for the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT.

It’s not easy summarizing over 5 years of my thought blogging and reading…this was something I needed to do. I have learnt about many things by reading bloggers, commenting and blogging myself…nothing better than DIY interactive education…I thank Cathrin for giving me motivation to do that…

Here’s the main bits below. I hope it’s OK that I’m re-posting…I don’t want to lose this summary

What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

A new operating system based on different ideals, designs and structures
For people to be engaged at work, rather than be seen as assets
A focus on engagement rather than sharing…through design and facilitation you have better conditions to achieve your goal… sharing and heightened awareness will happen by default
A somewhat role-based network organisational structure where people connect and are aware, have diverse input, acknowledge and action emergent outcomes, find suitable tasks and people…basically to exploit the collective knowledge to make better decisions and have an innovative edge
A focus on complexity theory based on experimenting, manipulating for favourable conditions, monitoring and feeding back, rather than an addiction to plans and outcomes, targets and rewards. Being more transparent, adaptive, agile, and resilient

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

As Euan Semple says these new social platforms can finally legitimise informal networks. Closing the gap between the c-level and the frontline (”we” rather than “us” and “them”), a more transparent, two-way communication, feedback and bypassing the levels of hierarchy. Preventing blockage of information and re-interpretations, welcoming and capitalising on feedback.
This is a new approach and leveling, and can be amplified by the use of social tools. Two things come to my mind: Improve awareness and the seminal lack of communication syndrome, and co-create change so it’s relevant to the frontline.
It also means working socially productive in silos and bridging silos using visible and open group tools, and connecting silos via enterprise-wide networks.
E 2.0 provides workers with tools to communicate and share their exceptions to processes…let’s face it procedures are not clairvoyant, every context brings up unique aspects to current processes.
E 2.0 leads to social productivity and activities like crowdsourcing are now achievable by connecting and conversing in public by default, rather than private by default (like the current email way). This is a move from PC (Personal computing) to SC (Social computing).
But I’m not too sure how decision making being done in a social way will pan out; if we really want to talk about democracy that is…maybe a committee. It just depends on who owns the firm really.
And since these interactions happen in the open, everyone learns for free on a daily basis, a pull system where workers pick up signals with their radar.
Referencing Jim McGee: New social tools reprise the concept of observable work that we lost with the coming of the digital era. We now have the potential to tap into the “know-how” and “know-why”, rather than just the “know-what” we get in deliverables and documents. We are interested in the conversations and brainwork. When reading a deliverable we wonder why things are they way they are, what were the many micro-decisions and now we can go back to those fragments if we worked using social tools - this is the real corporate memory. The beauty of it is these fragments can be assembled together (re-mixed) for different contexts. Then the output of that work can be traced back to the artifacts (the workings out) and re-hashed, and so on. The whole idea is not re-use but re-mix…malleable objects that live in a flux…basically fragments as springboards to continuous knowledge creation.
Ahhh, just read Oscar Berg’s post on social tools being our coping mechanism

6.) What are the main challenges, threats and issues of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Control…simple as that!
Bottom-up is not enough, we need a new organisational design, a top-down shift in ideals. At the moment we have worker 2.0 and group 2.0, but we need management 2.0 to make enterprise 2.0 happen.

My top 10

We share with people we trust, and share when we are engaged, rather than incentives and rewards, and now we have new social tools that appeal to intrinsic motivations
Some managers may feel dis-intermediated, especially those who rely on their status in controlling information flow, whereas managers who slant to the more leadership side of things welcome it. People worked a long time for their authority, and now comes along a way (eg blogs) to be influential by reputation
Transparency, two-way communication, and co-creation are key to engaged workers
We currently get rewarded for individual action, not collaboration or group output…or how much we help others on tasks we are not on…or how well we source the right people to help you on your task.
Different units compete for resources
Politics and power
This one can be slowly overcome, and that’s changing routines and habits from email to new tools (as long as the new tool is designed for ease of use)
A culture that is OK with sharing and learning from failure
Psychological safety (it’s OK to be wrong or to speak up)
In the past we only shared finished products in the open, and all the working out and know-why happens in closed email. There is now a change to “work-in-progress / status updates” happening in the open. With this we get more awareness, diverse feedback, reputation building, relationship building, learning… We can look back at a record of how things came to be…peripheral information, the conversations behind decisions. A report doesn’t compare as a raw record vs emails, phone, meetings…but all these things are behind closed doors.

Learnings since the interview

Here’s some snippets about the "real enterprise 2.0"…

Real enterprise 2.0 is about “service”

"Because service is a person-to-person commitment rather than a goal-to-people one, it engages employees more, make the whole organization more responsive and make them less reluctant about caring about issues that are not directly theirs.

Collaboration is something one do with someone else to achieve something. Service is quite different.

Service is not something one do with another but something one do for another. The final purpose is, of course, to achieve something, but the immediate purpose is to help someone. And that changes everything.

Fostering stronger relationships within the organization has few impact on collaboration because collaboration often commits people to a goal and not to other people. In a collaboration context, people don’t feel they help one another but rather that they’re on the same boat rowing to reach an island they don’t care about.

In a service context, one is directly commited to help the other solve his problem and, then, relationships are more easily leveraged."

- Bertrand Duperrin

Social Media goals are derived goals

"I repeat. Your company does not need a social media strategy. What your company does need to do however, is to incorporate social media into almost every other strategy or plan that it has. This means that social media needs to be a part of your marketing strategy, public relations strategy, HR strategy, customer service strategy and maybe even your finance strategy. Maybe you do need someone to coordinate your company wide social media efforts, but that is not the same creating a social media strategy."

- Asia Digital Map.com

Is this an aspect of capitalism 2.0?

"Management in the 20th Century was about achieving a finite goal: delivering goods and services, to make money.

Management in the 21st Century is about the infinite goal of delighting customers; the firm makes money, yes, but as a consequence of the delight that it creates for customers, not as the goal."

- Steve Denning

Now this is the real enterprise 2.0

"The finite goal of delivering goods and services, in order to make money, was utterly boring and dispiriting…Because that goal dispirits those doing the work and often frustrates those for whom the work is done, it is inherently unsustainable.

The infinite goal of delighting customers is inherently inspiring: helping other people is the essence of moral thinking. It is inherently uplifting for those doing the work, and invigorating to those for whom the work is done. Hence the goal is inherently sustainable.

The new goal of delighting customers is a radical shift in the difficulty of what a firm is undertaking. The goal of a firm is no longer simple and linear and finite. Now the goal of the firm is difficult and complex and infinite. Now continuous innovation becomes a requirement, rather than a distraction and a de-stabilizer. Now we are in a world of continuous experimentation, to find out what works and what doesn’t, in terms of adding new value for clients. Now mistakes, instead of being elements that can be eliminated, are an essential element of the learning process. Now mistakes become crucial and welcome elements of the learning process. Instead of mistakes being punished, now mistakes are welcomed as essential opportunities for learning. Now everyone in the firm is focused on what can be done to add additional value to customers and clients.

The firm is no longer an end in itself. The firm is now “other directed”: it is focused on meeting the needs of the clients and stakeholders whom it is purporting to serve."

- Steve Denning

Real enterprise 2.0 is about letting go of “control”

"Companies have to come to terms with the fact that the traditional model of managerial resource allocation and coordination (mainly coerced through extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards and punishments, such as payments, promotions, demotions, etc.) has become outdated and no longer reflects the social fabric of today’s workforce

Commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands. Or, more precisely, as Charlene Li points out in her book Open Leadership, they have never really been in control – what they are actually forced to give up now is their need for control."

- Tim Leberecht

Influence is replacing authority

"If designers embrace the insight that influence is replacing authority as the new currency in the “pull economy” and that the best way to gain influence is to give up control…businesses can use “shaping strategies” to amplify and accelerate the inevitable loss of control in order to avoid employees and customers abandon them….levers of “access, attraction, and achievement” that provide the “creation spaces” and tools for employees and customers alike to design their own destiny, create their own meaning, and thus convert their very own skills and passions into productivity and loyalty"

- Tim Leberecht

The need for both process and people-centric systems

“A customer account manager receives a phone call from a client asking why an issue with their service has not been resolved and when it will be. The account manager can query a workflow-supported issue management system and learn that the issue has been assigned to a specific employee and that it has been assigned an “in-progress” status. However, that system does not tell the account manager what she really needs to know! She must turn to a communication system to ask the other employee what is the hold up and the current estimate of time to issue resolution. She emails, IM’s, phones, or maybe even tweets the employee to whom the issue has been assigned to get an answer she can give the customer.

The employee to whom the issue was assigned most likely cannot use the issue management system to actually resolve the problem either. He uses a collaboration system to find documented information and individuals possessing knowledge that can help him deal with the issue. Once the problem is solved, the employee submits the solution to the issue management system, which feeds it to a someone who can make the necessary changes for the customer and inform the customer account manager that the issue is resolved. Case closed”.

ad hoc communication and collaboration systems were the tools that drove actual results

Without the cludgy, structured issue management system, the customer account manager would not have known to whom the issue had been assigned and, thus, been unable to contact a specific individual to get better information about its status

- Larry Hawes

The mutation of capitalism

"Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can’t meet. When a majority of people want things that remain priced at a premium under the old institutional regime—a condition I call the “premium puzzle”—the ground becomes extremely fertile for wholly new classes of competitors that can fulfill the new demands at an affordable price. A premium puzzle existed in the auto industry before Henry Ford and the Model T and in the music industry before Steve Jobs and the iPod.

The consumption shift in Ford’s time was from the elite to the masses; today, we are moving from an era of mass consumption to one focused on the individual.

The leading edge of consumption is now moving from products and services to tools and relationships enabled by interactive technologies.

Innovations improve the framework in which enterprises produce and deliver goods and services. Mutations create new frameworks; they are not simply new technologies, though they do leverage technologies to do new things. Historically, mutations have superseded innovations when fundamental shifts in what people want require a new approach to enterprise: new purposes, new methods, new outcomes.

The Model T embodied a mutation we now call mass production. It solved the premium puzzle of its time, reducing the price of an automobile by 60 percent or more, and thrived in the emerging environment of mass consumption.

That potential for wealth creation remained invisible to those who clung to the 19th-century framework of small-factory, proprietary capitalism.

In the same way that mass production moved the locus of industry from small shops to huge factories, today’s mutations have the potential to shift us away from business models based on economies of scale, asset intensification, concentration, and central control"

- Shoshana Zuboff

The first wave of “distributed capitalism

"The true source of value, which had been invisible to the music industry, resided in Apple’s ability to reinvent the consumption experience from the viewpoint of the individual, at a fraction of the old cost
The iPod—and its successors, the iPhone and the iPad—are part of the first wave of what I call “distributed capitalism,”

Winning mutations—those that create value by offering consumers individualized goods and services at a radically reduced cost—express a convergence of technological capabilities and the values associated with individual self-determination.

Inversion
The old logic of wealth creation worked from the perspective of the organization and its requirements—for efficiency, cost reductions, revenues, growth, earnings per share (EPS), and returns on investment (ROI)—and pointed inward. The new logic starts with the individual end user. Instead of “What do we have and how can we sell it to you?” good business practices start by asking “Who are you?” “What do you need?” and “How can we help?” This inverted thinking makes it possible to identify the assets that represent real value for each individual. Cash flow and profitability are derived from those assets.

Reconfiguration
Once individuals have the assets they want, they must be able to reconfigure those assets according to their own values, interests, convenience, and pleasure. A teenager, for instance, may use her iPod Touch and an application called Pandora to assemble an entire personalized “radio station” while at the same time learning Mandarin Chinese at the kitchen table on Sunday afternoon through an online classroom based thousands of miles from her home.

Support
The emerging logic of distributed capitalism rewards enterprises that realign their practices with the interests of the end consumer and punishes enterprises that try to impose their own internal requirements or, worse yet, maximize their own benefit at the expense of the individual end user"

- Shoshana Zuboff

Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise (NGCE)

"Collaboration encourages clusters of experts with diverse skills to make decisions quickly. The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise allows experts at any level to propose, create and execute without hierarchical or geographical constraints.

Priorities are set by clusters of experts that make decisions. Decisions are communicated real-time through social media applications…Individuals are able to apply themselves to the work based on their skills and availability, regardless of their geographic location…Funding is directed based on milestones. Direct accountability is embedded into the social network. Finally, organizational functions become less relevant and ‘Re-orgs’ become obsolete. Leadership is defined as the ability to influence, envision and execute ― rather than the authority to command and control."

- Padmasree Warrior

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April 27, 2010

“I am knowledge worker”, says the Janitor

Filed under: km, conversation, complexity, process, decisionmaking, leadership

On a post from a while back Andrew Gent spoke about the different types of knowledge workers: generators, brokers, consumers. And for the KM strategy to reflect these groups, rather than one-size-fits all. Peer-to Peer-tools for knowledge generators and the assumption of best practices for consumers…Andrew says:

"The outsourcing of support is an example of the latter, where the assumption is that the knowledge pre-exists and anyone — even someone for whom English is a second language — can be taught to give the right answers. Here documenting the "right" answers is the primary focus."

Where’s there to go next when you have squeezed all the efficiencies you can out of a process…all that’s left is to be able to sell these skill-based processes as a commodity.

Thus KM being about best practices, rather than supporting knowledge generators.

Andrew highlights the problem here:

"But strategy does not equal reality. What happens in the field often does not match the suppositions of headquarters. And unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on your point of view — knowledge management has to deal both with goals and realities if it is to succeed […] management closest to the field demands support for what is and those at a global level demand support for what is desired."

And then gives an example:

"…there is a significant gap between what can be documented and what happens "on the street"…the case of Xerox technicians who were bombarded with printed information (i.e. "answers") but struggled to solve customers’ problems until they were connected through a community so they could exchange tricks of the trade learned through experience. Almost an exact replica of today’s managers pushing "best practices" to the exclusion of other KM activities."

NOTE: Another example is the knowledge economy of the World of Warcraft.

In this black and white view KM supports strategy (and for any social content to be aligned to strategy), rather than the needs of employees…then you wonder why no-one is motivated to share anything.

Andrew warns to not fall for the lure of strategic alignment:

"KM must stick to KM — actually managing knowledge — not falling for the lure of "strategic alignment". By laying the proper foundation of technical support for collaboration, goals and incentives for individuals, and KM policies and procedures that align with business processes rather than specific, short-term business targets…"

I’m not going to get into "best practices" in this post, but I really like how Andrew puts KM into two camps, the new camp being about support, sense-making (also innovation and learning). This is the place where sharing happens due to enabling intrinsic motivation, and a focus on social capital…basically a distributed way for people to source help and connect with others…making the workers life more empowering, less frustrated…and more engaging.

Bas Reus ponders this:

"It can be the manager that tries to make others only work harder instead of really making them really more responsible for what they do, or it can be the employee that feels like not having enough resources or information he or she needs, or to feel more involved."

Emergent practices

And speaking of emergent practices, lessons applied and the importance of context and conversation, have a read of Nancy Dixon’s post on the eradication of small pox.

Agents in the field applying what they learn daily to what needs to be contextually practiced rather than the top-down generic practice, is a great example of perpetually evolving practice. We need to be able to adapt to the complexities of our situation. If this was done today, the agents could report their experiences in the field using blog posts and comments, and the perpetually changing practice can be updated in the wiki…very agile.

The knowledge worker and routine jobs

A while back the Anecdote blog mentioned that we could do without the term knowledge worker, as even routine jobs require some element of dealing with context.

I agree. Yes a brain surgeon may have to improvise a whole lot more, and use their head a whole lot more, and possess lots of knowledge, way more than a janitor…but this doesn’t mean the janitor is a robot.

This thread has picked up again. A post by Joe McKendrick headed me over to a post on the Big Shift blog, called Are All Employees Knowledge Workers?

The authors are saying something similar to the Anecdote blog post on the false dichotomy that the term knowledge worker creates:

“We increasingly group the people in our firms into two classes: those who have knowledge and talent and, by implication, those who do not. This segmentation is misleading and damaging to firms in the long run.”

The authors say that routine jobs still require thinking:

"When executives focus on "knowledge workers", they lose sight of the fact that even highly routinized jobs require improvisation and the use of judgment in ambiguous situations, especially if the goal is to drive performance to new levels. Many of these improvisations require interactions with one’s fellow humans. Consider the company receptionist. When people walk in the door, or "dial 0 to reach an operator," the receptionist has to engage in a delicate and sophisticated "improvisational choreography," one in which professional competence has to come across through "interactional proficiency.""

We are all knowledge workers…we think and improvise, use heuristics, rules of thumb, and workarounds to get things done…humans are great at self-organising themselves around exceptions to processes, and improvising where processes don’t exist.

The example of the Janitor

Even a janitor’s routine work needs some improvising, see the article Turning a Janitor into a Knowledge Worker.

This article is about micro-managing vs autonomy and leadership…giving the worker some decision-making responsibility as they know their context and local conditions best in order to make an effective and timely decision. Not only does it make for a more agile and responsive organisation, but the worker is more engaged as they have impact on how things are done…they are not just a robot.

In this fictional example the routine work of the janitor is not adapting to mess that is being generated of late due to some new work that is being carried out in different frequencies and parts of the building. The CEO tells the supervisor to cut cost costs and improve quality…the building is too dirty.

The supervisor does a clever thing and gives the janitor some decision-making responsibility…to basically give priority to dirty areas on any given day. As a result the CEO is happy because there are less complaints, and it’s due to the janitor following his own practice.

The supervisor also included the janitor in meetings with sales reps. Where the janitor communicated some issues like wax build up in corners and long waits for the floor to dry between cleaning and waxing, which the sales rep could remedy with different products.

In this story we see that top-down rules and micro-managing are just not adaptive enough, and that localised decision-making and improvisation not only improve agility, but also engagement.

The Janitor and social interactions

Barry Schwartz in his TED presentation refers to Hospital Janitors. It really is a brilliant talk.

Below are some of my transcripts, some bits are verbatim:

Janitors job duties involves no social interaction

Yet when a psychologists interviewed Janitors, they were surprised to hear these contrasting anecdotes:

Mike stopped mopping the floor as Mr Jones was out of his bed getting exercise, building strength walking up and down the hall
Charlene ignored supervisor orders and didn’t vacuum the visitor lounge due to family members taking a nap
Luke washed the floor in a comatose young mans room twice because the mans father who had been keeping a vigil for 6 months didn’t see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry

The discretion and autonomy of local decision-making of the janitors role improves the quality of patient care.

These janitors think these human interactions (kindness, care, empathy) are an essential part of the job, yet their job description does not reflect practice (reality).

These janitors have the moral will to do right by others, and moral skill to figure out what doing right means.

A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule…janitors knew when to ignore their job duties in the service of others.

Janitors say is takes lots of experience to learn the human interaction part of their job. Experience and time spent with people is important, learning to improvise, try new things, occasionally fail and learn.

"Real word problems are often ambiguous and ill defined, and the context is always changing. A wise person is like a jazz musician, using the notes on a page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand."

I’m going to revisit this presentation on a future post about excessive rules, best practices and incentives which decrease the quality of moral skill.

More

Michelle Martin reviews Matthew Crawford’s book, which poses whether white collar works get to be creative and think as much as they think they do:

"Ultimately, Crawford maintains, we are blinded by the idea that freedom to make small decisions–deciding which letter to send to a disgruntled customer or which medication to prescribe after following the decision-tree–is somehow real "thinking," when in fact these merely give us the illusion of problem-solving and independent decision-making. In reality, many knowledge workers are as bound by quotas, rules, policies and procedures as any factory worker. True creativity, innovation and problem-solving has been leeched out of many of these jobs. At best, creativity for most knowledge workers occurs on the edges."

Mark Gould also posts about Matthew Crawford’s work, which gets into the difference between manuals and practice. The context of situations call for hunches, heuristics rather than rules.

This post was meant to be about knowledge workers, but as you can see it gets into territories such as leadership, autonomy, decision-making, engagement, best practice, context…

Mark Gould’s perspective that I’m sure we all agree with:

"Perhaps knowledge work is actually too easy for people to engage with it properly. By documenting processes in excruciating detail, organisations have simultaneously suppressed creativity and innovation, and created the conditions for inadvertent (but inevitable) error and failure."

Let’s finish off with this quote by Marshall Goldsmith that perhaps encapsulates this whole thing:

"Knowledge workers can be defined as people who know more about what they are doing than their managers do."

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March 31, 2010

Sharing and Change in the Corporate Plot

Filed under: km, conversation, facilitate, complexity

My post on Just-in-Time KM finished on a note that needed to be expanded. It was a post about knowledge asymmetries and secrecy in relation to the corporate plot. It’s focus was on sharing, but the same concept applies to change and outcomes based management.

It’s not enough to have a vision or a plan (The Corporate Plot). People and teams/departments have their own agendas, your message gets interpreted and acted upon according to how relevant or in tune it is to that persons job. The goal is not changing people to comply with your vision, as people are not robots. Instead the goal is to get involved at ground zero in conversations. The idea is to make the individuals job easier to do, and you can only find out by involving them in the decision making.

This is essentially leading down the road of what some people call management 2.0, leadership, complexity, etc…so I am being careful in this post as it could potentially touch on many aspects and go on forever…I do have to restrain myself with my usual long blog posts.

Organisational politics; power-play, resource/budget scarcity, information hoarding, rewards, motivations, agendas is inevitable…and they are the reason why we are not self-organising like ants, biological systems, etc…it’s a fact of human nature, and therefore organisations. All we have is to the capacity to influence the constraints…and think about a more inclusive and holistic model.

Patrick Lambe on the Corporate Plot

"We assume, naïvely, that only the corporate plot and its aspiration towards triumph matters when it comes to knowledge asymmetries, and that everybody will share knowledge willingly once they understand what the corporate plot is. We forget that individuals and small groups also have smaller plots, smaller tragedies and triumphs, and their own unique aspirations. And they will also use knowledge asymmetries to drive themselves towards success, regardless of what the bigger, more impersonal plots of our superiors dictate."
- Patrick Lambe

Peter Anthony-Glick on the Corporate Plot

"The ‘we only share knowledge within our team since everyone else is potential competition’ syndrome."
- Peter Anthony-Glick

Stephen Billing on the Corporate Plot

"As the plans of the top managers are set in motion, they interweave with the plans of other individuals in the organisation, who reinterpret the change initiative in the light of their own issues, background and concerns. Power relations inevitably are a part of this, and an understanding of complexity, human beings and social interaction will assist those seeking to change their organisations. Here is something very important. ‘We need to move away from reifying change as something done to and placed on individuals, and instead acknowledge the role that change recipients play in creating and shaping change outcomes,’ as Balogun says in her interesting 2006 article"
- Stephen Billing (quote link)

"Power is not an absolute. Even the most powerful and feared of managers cannot “decree” that all problems will be fixed. It is how people respond to these decrees (or intentions of the manager) that determines how effective these intentions (instructions) will be. This means managers have to take the time to negotiate with their people, what their intentions mean. I have seen a number of examples this year where managers have not spent time discussing genuinely with their people how the desired changes will impact on them. There is a tendency for the power of the position to lead the manager to say “here’s what needs to happen” and then expect their people to adapt. Doing this, the managers dissociate themselves from any potentially unsavoury consequences of these actions. For example, it is much easier to say to a team leader that they should change the schedules of their team than it is to listen carefully to the team manager and help them to work out how to change the schedules without upsetting everyone. After all, what if the manager cannot work out how to do it?"
- Stephen Billing (quote link)

"…as a manager of change you need to be paying attention to the daily translations of meaning that are going on in your organisation on a moment by moment basis – your key messages are not being passed on from one person to another, they are being translated and revitalised. So you need to track what meaning they are taking on as this translation process takes place. Your organisational change is not a relay race where you can pass the baton on to others and watch them bring it on home to the finish line."
- Stephen Billing (quote link)

Nilofer Merchant on the Corporate Plot

"Many management gurus claim “people matter,” but still relegate strategy to an elite set of executives who focus on frameworks, long presentations, and hierarchical approaches. Business strategy typically has been planned by corporate chiefs and then dictated to managers to carry out. The New How turns that notion on its head. “Too often business executives, managers and strategists talk down to or ignore the very people who can help achieve results and positively impact the bottom line,” Nilofer explains. “Yet, organizations collaborate best when rewards are based on organizational success and less on individual accomplishments."
- Nilofer Merchant (quote link)

Dave Snowden on the Corporate Plot

"Habits in humans determine action, not mission statements, organisational values and outcome focused targets."
- Dave Snowden (quote link)

"In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the ‘learning organization’. Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered."
- Dave Snowden (quote link)

Going off on a tangent…

John Bordeaux encapsulates this nicely, like Snowden he talks about anticipatory awareness, rather than prediction. The title of his post says it all, "Don’t connect the dots, watch the noise"

Ron Ashkenas has a great post on controls for future events based on past events.

Related Quotes

"Transparency makes decisions and actions visible. By seeing what goes on in a business, we get a chance to discover and act on issues or problems before they get catastrophic proportions (we also get a chance to discover and act on opportunities!)”
“Transparency builds trust and trust is essential for people to help each other, to join forces and to decide to collaborate towards a shared purpose or common goal. Transparency makes work visible, which is essential if you are to coordinate people and their actions and to make the right decisions and actions in time. By making work visible, you have much greater possibilities avoid sub-optimization, duplication of work, unnecessary waste of time and resources, over-administration, bad decisions due to lack of the right information, lost ideas and blocked creativity, failure to make use of internal skills and resources in an optimal way…the list can go on and on forever."
- Oscar Berg (quote link)

"Having a chance to change or personalize a process to fit themselves seems to be a critical success factor for a team to adopt a process. It’s the act of creation that seems to bind teams to ‘their own’ process."
- Alistair Cockburn (quote link)

"…people don’t resist change, they resist being changed"
- Peter Bregman

"Resistance to change is situation specific, not an attribute of an individual or group"
- Nancy Dixon

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May 5, 2009

Birthing and midwives : stories, facilitation and decision-making

Filed under: facilitate, complexity, decisionmaking, narrative

It’s funny, I just finished reading a book that has nothing to do with my usual interests, but yet it relates so much. This put a smile on my face as what I’m learning is not confined to a bubble, I’m learning the essence of things that transfer, relate and apply to anything in life. Which suits me fine as parenting is just around the corner

Men at Birth, Edited by David Vernon

“I read the standard birth texts…they told me about the physiology of birth. They told me how things should work and a bit of why things worked they way they did. They told me about ‘normal’ labours, ‘normal’ pelvis sizes, normal ‘contractions’ and ‘normal’ women. Unfortunately the texts use the term ‘normal’, when they mean the mathematical term ‘mean’, ‘median’ or even ‘mode’. But I found all the talk about ‘average’ births to be unhelpful because I knew from friends and family that every birth is an individual experience.”

“Interestingly, I found it was the birth stories that really gave me a handle on birth. They told me the practical things from an individual’s point of view and they told me how it felt for a woman to give birth. They told me about real experiences. There were no ‘normals’ here. Amd the stories told me how things did work, and sometimes differed from the textbook statement on how things should work.”

“These stories were not attempting to meet the rigours required of a textbook. The stories left it up to the reader to decide what the ‘take home message’ was from each story. For me, the stories made our upcoming birth all the more real, all the more exciting and something that we really looked forward to.”

What I got out of it is that midwifes are facilitators in uncertain situations.

No two births are alike, and nearly all births don’t fall on the planned date.

Every “mother to be” is different and the midwives both have to deal with people and their situation. They don’t know what to expect as they have not seen the “mother to be” going through a birth, either has the “mother to be” if it’s their first (even if it was the second or third baby, not every birth is the same anyway, so not even the “mother to be” knows how she will react to new circumstances, especially in different environments).

The “mother to be” can tell them their plan, but they don’t even know themselves what’s coming.
The midwife also has to deal with the surrounding environment, and the actual birth itself. When all this comes together, it’s a very unique situation, so the job of the midwife is to go with the flow and facilitate.

No best practice method or text book is going to teach a midwife these subtleties, but the multitude of stories and of course actual experience are, as they deliver the uniqueness of experiences.

Reading a hundred stories, and attending a hundred births is going to do wonders to their ability.

Not only because these stories are the antithesis to “normal” or “average” or “best”, in that they cover so many different contexts and situations, but also because stories leave more of a memorable imprint in our minds (something to do with visual, narrative and emotion).

This post is about facilitation, pattern-recognition, decision-making, sense-making, context, uncertainty, narrative, adaptive behaviours in relation to birthing and midwives.

They learn to respond and adapt to uncertainty and rapidly changing situation (real rapid, by the minute).

These stories and experiences imprint a pattern in their mind and attach an emotion which has great impact for recall, and to also be able to take fragments from different stories and blend them to the situation at hand.

Stories have know-how woven in pattern form which is in tune with how our brain best functions.

They are more aware of the thousands of different things that may happen at a birth - what fails, what surprises, what’s available at hand (eg having to think on the spot to facilitate a birth in a toilet) - a text book ain’t gonna cover this.

David Snowden refers to this, and I have posted about this concept:

“…we live in a world subject to constant change, and it’s better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs. We are moving from attempting to anticipate the future to creating an attitude and capability of anticipatory awareness.”

David Snowden from the same article:

“…we have demonstrated that narrative assessment of a battlefield picks up more weak signals (those things that after the event you wished you had paid attention to) than analytical structured thinking.”

This applies to Gary Klein’s work on decision-making via Erich Nehrlich:

“The situation is evolving constantly, and an expert will know which elements are important to follow, and which are not. The expert has been in a situation enough times before that they can mentally simulate what should be happening, and recognize when things are deviating from their expectancies, which is a sign of danger. Another good example: a fire commander goes into a building for what he thinks is a regular kitchen fire. As he’s scouting around, he realizes that it’s not behaving like a normal fire. It’s too quiet, and too hot. He doesn’t like it, and pulls his team out of the house. A few moments later, the floor of the house collapses - the fire was actually in the basement. He had no idea that there was even a basement, but his experience let him know that something was wrong, and that he needed to figure out why the situation diverged from his expectations before he continued.”

“…how experts “see the invisible” (because they know what signs to look for), generate a course of action, mentally simulate the results of that action, and then carry it out”

Mark Gould has more on decision making and how it relates to KM:

“…what impact does KM have on people? Exactly how will they be better at decision-making as a result of our work?

My instinctive answer is that I want them to become experts (and therefore able to act swiftly and correctly in an emergency) in whatever field they work in. That means that we should always return our focus to the people in our organisations, and respond to their needs (taking into account the organisation’s direction and focus), rather than thinking solely about building organisational edifices. The more time that is spent on repositories, processes, structures, or documentation, the less is available for working with people. In becoming experts in our own field, we also need to be more instinctive.”

Brad Hinton on Dave Snowden’s pattern recognition:

“Snowden explained how human decision-making is based on pattern recognition. Our brain sees multiple fragmented patterns assembled to fit our needs in particular contexts. In decison-making, our brain makes a first-fit pattern from which we act.”

Steve Barth on decision-making and intuition:

“Even at the level of the expert or the executive, the human brain is capable of reaching conclusions and finding solutions to difficult problems by using and trusting “gut” feelings. When these decisions are based on deep background knowledge and experience, intuition can be just as effective a tool as analysis—and considerably faster.”

Erich Nehrlich on stories and memories:

“Stories are how we structure our memories. If you ask me about what I was doing on June 25, 1994, I’d say, “Um, what?” But, when you prompt me that that was the day that my friends Brian and Jen got married, I’d be able to tell you all sorts of details about that day. Our memories are not filed like a computer’s, with dates and times. Our memories are filed like del.icio.us, with tags on various memories that are associatively linked in a spaghetti-like fashion.”

David Weinberger on the knowledge creative:

“Implicit knowledge isn’t explicit knowledge that we’re not currently thinking about. Implicit knowledge isn’t there the way ore is buried. It’s “there” only in the sense that we can generate it when required. Most simply: That we can come up with an answer doesn’t mean that the answer was lying dormant in us all along. Answering questions is a creative act.”

David Snowden also refers to this:

“Critically fragmented material can combine and recombine in novel and different ways, a form of conceptual blending”

Text books will have a plan and the writing will be focused on achieving that goal. But stories don’t have an outcome to achieve, rather they are in the moment, they are raw, you hear lots of peripheral information and many other things that would not be included in a text book as those things may seem unnecessary or excluded as they are tangents or just the fact that they don’t belong in the narrow focus of the outcome. But it is infact these nuances that all come together to paint the holistic picture…just ask a detective

In contrast

What did I learn from the stories about hospitals and obstetricians?

They abide by procedures and processes that do not cater for the individual person. The “mother to be” is just a number, she is the average person, she is homogeneous. The system runs like a factory, it runs on control and risk management.

They are certainly not a facilitator, they are dominantly in control. They treat the mother as if she were the “fictional average person”, use medical interventions where not necessary, and need her out of the baby factory as quick as possible eg. inducing, episiotomy, epidural, vacuum, forceps, caesarian…

There is also something called the “cascade of interventions”, which refers to an intervention to fix a problem the previous intervention caused, and so on.

Whereas the midwife has continuity of care - she has a relationship with the “mother to be” from start to even after the baby is born. The midwife facilitates the situation, she interferes as least as possible, it’s seen best to let a natural approach arise as much as possible. This approach is more in tune with human behaviour and the natural dealings of the world, they are there to re-tune the situation where needed so it realigns itself and does it’s thing naturally, rather than take the force of control, overriding nature.

I guess they surf the biodiversity of the situation rather than try control the biodiversity itself, which is an oxymoron.

When you think of it, this approach is empowering for the “mother to be” as the midwife is facilitating her to reach her human potential, rather than taking over.

Of course all this translates into the workplace with leadership and a more self organising role based organisation.

Listening, respect, trust and sharing

This leadership role and knowledge worker empowerment are great conditions for knowledge sharing and transfer…especially listening skills.

Years ago, part of my wife’s Counseling diploma included some work experience, so I decided to tag along with her and did telephone counseling for 6 months (every Saturday). Our role was to tie people over and support them till they could get their usual help. The first thing we learnt is that we don’t give advice, instead we listen and support, just being there spoke volumes.

Of course lots of people wanted advice and solutions to their issues, but we were there to support them, trying to create an environment so they could see their issue and solve it with some guidance (like probing, triggers, re-framing questions, seeing same issue from someone else’s perspective)…much more empowering, much more personal ownership.

And of course lots of people just like talking, it’s like I wasn’t even there, then at the end of the call they would thank me. I think “listening” is the greatest thing we can do (for me it’s sometimes hard to sit back and not offer advice), but offering little building blocks so people create their own answer (or co-create) is much more effective. They now have a skill and may use it to adapt to new situations, or riff off that skill.

The more you listen, the more you are respected as people like to feel heard. Further to this their transactions with you lead to them being empowered, so there is something about you that is improving their life. And I think this type of transaction or relationship leads to trust. When we trust and respect people we want to do things for them. Ultimately this leads to sharing, and a high chance of transfer in what is being shared since we have come to know each others way.

And then there were the suicide callers. Having a framework is helpful with these calls, it keeps you grounded, but you still freeze, and the only way you can best deal with them is hearing stories and experiencing them. There is no time to search for a best practice when the person on the other end of the line is fading away. You have to immediately react, and somehow fragments of memories all come together into a decision.

Why am I writing about this?

My wife is expecting our first child in a couple of months and we plan to have a home water birth. We believe hospitals are only for sick and injured people, and this my wife is not.
But, if during the birth my wife displays signs of risk to her health and the baby, that the midwife cannot deal with, then we will transfer to a hospital.

For some interesting points of view on “birthing” in Australia, here’s a link to an episode of an audience based TV program called Insight. You can watch the episode online, get a transcript, see the comments, and also view the Cover It Live post program chat. Or download it. They are also on Twitter.

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October 30, 2008

Post-KM : enterprise 2.0, facilitation and complexity

Filed under: km, emergence, learning, facilitate, complexity

Dean from the Infovark blog has a contemporary post, “Knowledge Management Renaissance?“, I guess the question mark is nicely put as it may indeed be considered a war for some.

Some people do not want to be affiliated with the failed KM crowd, and the existing KM crowd have been waiting for the day that the tools (along with the right approach) would come along to achieve their aims…and now these tools are here!

Some would say, what gives the right for KM to hijack Enterprise 2.0.

I’ve posted on the irony that employees became to be respected, that they were not just cogs in a machine, instead they were knowledge workers. They had talent beyond their job, and their ideas and what they learnt from their job or elsewhere could be fed back into the organisation. This is really important for the fast paced services industry, as exploiting know-how is how work gets done most effectively. So the irony was, to try and capitalise and augment the sharing and spread of this knowledge, we had KM use industrial techniques. Just as we were moving away from the industrial age, KM was still treating people as computers that log things and spit them out on demand.

Enterprise 2.0 is based on bottom-up tools that allows for connections and emergence to happen, ie. knowledge workers now have the tools to do work and distribute their talent without really needing a department telling them to do so.

Bottom-up vs Top-down management approach

Venkat’s post about the KM and SM War has merit, his example shows that some KM practioners are incorporating these new tools, but still in the old management style, ie. a planned recipe style approach. Venkat’s says:

“…he completely ignored new elements in the technology and forcefully presented the design pattern for his success as the design pattern for success”

“Where he advocated planning, I advocated ad-hoc experimentation. Where he advocated charters to declare expected value, I advocated a you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it approach to discovering value. Where he talked about convincing SMEs, I argued that you should just watch for opinion leaders to emerge.”

“…not only do Boomers not get complexity, they are suspicious of it, thanks to their early cultural training which deifies simplicity. The result of this difference is that Boomer management models rely too much on simplistic ideological-vision-driven ideas. Consider, for instance, the classic Boomer idea of creating “communities of practice” with defined “Charters” and devoted to identifying “Best Practices.” No Gen X’er or Millenial would dare to reduce the complexity of real-world social engineering to a fixed “charter” or presume to nominate any work process as “best.””

I agree, the new style is for workers to put the complexity into the software, let them sculpture it to their way of working and connecting. As Bill Ives says:

“The irony of enterprise 2.0 is that you actually get more control because the free form nature of the tools allow the business people to decide on where structure occurs, not the people who make the software.”

The main thing we have to teach is a little on how to use the tools, especially in their context of helping them get their work done more efficiently and effectively, and a little governance (boundaries).

It’s my hope that most existing KM practitioners understand that this new generation of KM has changed from a management role, to facilitating and flow…more about coordinating and guiding.

I do agree with Neil Olonoff’s comment that Venkat is generalising how people typically run KM. When you look at conferences from actKM you will see that these KM’ers have been ahead of the curve in this thinking for a long while.

Keith De La Rue concurs, saying: “Most KM practitioners (certainly most that I know and work with) view KM as being all about people, with the tools a secondary issue. Web 2.0 provides a fantastic new toolkit - one that is far more people-centric that the older tools - and is a great boon to real KM.”

The way I see it, we can’t tell or force seeds to propagate into a plant, it’s not always going to work out, but we can fertilise and water the soil, ie. create conditions for this to happen on it’s own.

Enterprise 2.0 is connecting and networks, emergence and autonomous behaviours result (sense-making), so this becomes closer to achieving the original aim of KM. Doing KM at the individual level becomes more invisible and embedded…practitioners become coordinators guiding people, cultivating and fertilising the soil (this is the KM 2.0 part).

You can also see this in the library industry, with Google and the web, librarian’s are increasingly becoming focused on the reference role of facilitators, guides, assistants in helping you with your approach to your task.

Venkat finishes by saying:

“And it won’t be just a victory of fashion. It will be a fundamental victory of the better idea. SM is an organic, protean, creative and energetic force. KM is a brittle, mechanical, anxiety and fear-ridden structure”

Again, with a bottom-up management approach KM doesn’t have to be this way, just like Marketing 2.0, Learning 2.0, etc…it’s all about a 2.0 approach.

It’s important that heavy weights like Tom Davenport recognise how enterprise 2.0 differs from KM, and how KM 2.0 is about guiding the emergence, and feeding back, making it adaptive as possible:

“…there are a few differences between classical KM and E2.0. The tools are largely different, for one. Perhaps the most important difference is the emphasis on emergence of content structures in E2.0, rather than specifying them in advance, as early knowledge managers had to. But I’ve always felt that most information environments require some mixture of structure and emergence. Andy’s comment that E2.0 requires “gardeners” suggests that he agrees.”

Complex Adaptive System

I have just started to read Steven Johnson’s book, Emergence, and from it I’m taking away the idea that enterprise 2.0 or emergence is not enough on its own, as there will always be a management framework, which serves the reason for being in business.

It’s known that enterprise 2.0 needs facilitation to get adoption and network effects compared to the open web, when there is emergence, the macro picture may show that workers are carving out their own work, which can be seen as adaptive (self-organising), but the question is…

Is it adaptive to the mission and objectives of the enterprise?

Steven gives an example of programmed billiard balls that alter their movement when interacting with other balls…he calls this complex behaviour, “a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rules and oblivious to any higher-level instructions”

“But it wouldn’t truly be considered emergent until those local interactions resulted in some kind of discernable macrobehaviour.” eg. the balls end up on either side of the table in clusters, even on one side and odd on the other.

“That would mark the beginnings of emergence, a high-level pattern arising out of parallel complex interactions between local agents…the balls aren’t programmed explicitly to cluser in two groups…yet out of those low-level routines, a coherent shape emerges.”

But he goes on to say that this is not adaptive, until it becomes useful.

eg. if it was in the interest of our pool hall to attract players, it would be adaptive behaviour for the balls to end up forming one cluster in a triangle shape with the white ball on the other end…as this is useful.

“The system would use local rules between interacting agents to create higher-level behaviour well suited to its environment. Emergent complexity without adaptation is like the intricate crystals formed by a snowflake: it’s a beautiful pattern, but it has no function”

He talks about emergent behavior becoming smarter over time and responding to environmental changes.

KM 2.0 is the adaptive guidance

This is why in my post on the KM Core sample I differentiated between social computing (an aspect of enterprise 2.0) and KM 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 can show plenty of emergence (eg. a wiki evolving or manifesting into a great thing from the input of many people, tagged blog posts in a blogosphere showing us what’s hot and what’s being talked about in a tag cloud…these are low level interactions, that in aggregate paint a picture or emerging pattern), but perhaps it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an adaptive system. Things could emerge into negative patterns, and an enterprise framework is only self-organising in the correct direction to an extent, as we still have a director or manager who has a goal, objective, etc…

So KM 2.0’s role is to harness these gifts of emergence that the manager couldn’t forsee upfront, and is respecting this gift and talent of the knowledge workers…having an enterprise 2.0 ecosystem shows respect already, as it shows that the manager is willing for transparency and people to direct themselves to an extent.
Another important aspect here is that KM is not always about adhering to strategy, in fact new strategy can emerge from listening to the enterprise 2.0 ecosystem.

But at the same time it’s the KM 2.0 practitioners role is to make sure all this emergence is adaptable to what the organisation is about, etc…I don’t yet know much about complexity, so I can’t give examples.

But my question to people like Dave Snowden is:

Is enterprise 2.0 without outside interference a complex adaptive system?

ie. is web 2.0 within an organisational framework, self-organising and emergent that is adapts to the organisational goals.

At this stage I don’t think so, as emergent patterns may conflict with existing goals, this could be for the better, resulting in altering the goals, but it could be for the worse, where the emerging patterns have to be pushed back or dampened.

But in another way I do think workers can become more autonomous, connecting to people carving out their own work projects.

Anyway, this to me is my current stance on the difference between KM 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

Practitioner

Some might say that people facilitating enterprise 2.0 do not have to have existing KM skills (which is what anyway?), so KM does not really have to be this role. But to me existing KM practitioners are the obvious choice to guide enterprise 2.0, just as long as they understand complex systems and facilitation. They require humanistic and interpersonal skills, rather than too much focusing on top-down plan and outcome, they need to understand emergence, to let just things happen and then capitalise on this, their is no golden recipe, every situation is contextually different.
They are usually the same person that facilitate or teach offline emergent techniques such as anecdote circles, knowledge cafes, etc…

Existing KM people in organisations naturally become the people responsible for enterprise 2.0, does this mean they change their job title. KM attempted to achieve better performance, sharing, productivity, etc…and this is what enterprise 2.0 also does, but without trying, it kind of just does it if you use it, it has no aim or intention. Enterprise 2.0 goes beyond the original concept of KM (knowledge sharing) to situational awareness and perpetual learning and building capabilities…rather than need-to-know, it “always on” learning.

Are we going to sack KM people and replace them with E2.0 people, or are KM people now going to have a change of job title?

This is really bigger than KM or enterprise 2.0, it’s about a new style of management.

It’s about letting enterprise 2.0 breathe and flow, and adapting to what emerges into decision making

In this post I asked:

“Imagine there was no such thing as knowledge management.
And all through the 1990’s there was only information management, and collaboration spaces, and then 10 years later social computing happened.

When you think about it like this, what actually is knowledge management?”

Generations

Venkat attributes this a generational war with Gen X as neutral (the swing vote), Boomers as idealistic and linear, Millenials understanding complexity and avoiding the big picture (having trust in how it all comes together.)

I agree to a degree, but I wouldn’t say it’s this black and white, I’m a Gen X’er and all my networks (facebook, blogs, twitter, friendfeed) are mostly Gen X and Boomers…in fact there are too many for me to network with…

I think we also need to see this in the perspective of Generation Virtual (Generation V)

Stephen Collins from AcidLabs alludes to not getting carried away by the the age divide:

“There’s solid research that suggests the generational divide is at least in part less about age and more about life situation. I agree that as a group taken in aggregate, Gen Y exhibits these traits. And, again as a group they will ultimately be the catalyst for change societally and in business (and I can hardly wait).”