Library clips

Mark Gould has a great post which has picked up on a thread in one of the LinkedIn forums on the "Pulling" and "Pushing" of information. Mark’s post also covers some blog discussion on the difference between sharing and communication, which I may add to in another post.

Nick Milton says in a blog post:

"…there is no point in creating a culture of sharing, if you have no culture of re-use. Pull is a far more powerful driver for Knowledge Management than Push, and I would always look to create a culture of knowledge seeking before creating a culture of knowledge sharing."

Firstly, we don’t create a knowledge sharing culture, we help create conditions so this happens!

I agree that the organisation needs to be open to helping others. Our best kind of Communities of Practice at work are the "Support" type. People ask questions, and others respond, discussion ensues, and usually the person who asked the question can take something away and move on…great sense-making via people to get things done at work. Plus everyone else on the thread got to learn for free.

In the future our CoPs at work will be complemented by a social network, which amplifies sense-making even more.

This perspective also reminds me of Nancy Dixon’s article "Does your organisation have an asking problem"

But I don’t entirely agree with Nicks statement, as it’s too black and white.

Plus when someone shares something it may not result in a direct action for me, but it may make something more clear for me, or give me a better outlook on something…this is an implicit type of value (even though I’m not actioning what I have learnt into something explicit).

Both "Push" and "Pull" are important!

As I mentioned, "Pull" to respond and help is crucial for people to do their work, but also "Push" allows an organisation to share what they are doing, their experiences, process…so we can be smarter and more capable people, and so the organisation can be more adaptable, agile and resilient.

Yes, response to questions are great, but we also need "Push"…in the future I may not need to ask the question if it’s already been shared kindly elsewhere. This happens a lot in our tips and tricks blogs at work.

Or put another way, when I need to make a decision in the future, some of those past blog post/comment fragments may come together to aid me in my decision.

This may happen unconsiously…I have subscribed to those people that "Pushed" those blog posts, perhaps conversed with them to make sense of them personally, and now I have absorbed them, and they become building blocks that come together when I make decisions.

As for blogging…even though it’s "Push", it also creates "Pull"…as people ask questions in the comments, and converse via trackbacks.

When "Push" is done with socially interactive tools, you get knowledge creation that keeps going, you get a worthwhileness as people can actually probe and internalise this shared information into personal knowledge. Now that’s KM!

A company that doesn’t have continual dialogue is stale and will not innovate, or have an edge.

Supply as stockpile or flow

Nick says:

"…sharing (“push”) is done at the expense of seeking (“pull”). The risk is you create supply, with no demand."

I guess this is a way to look at it from a market point-of-view, where modern marketing was the answer to deal with over supply. In the context of this post, it’s about motivating people to seek available information.

This is true if sharing is based on conscription, or not within an ecosystem…this is the non-interactive document-centric warehousing approach.

But what about blogging experiences and asking questions in a social network…this has more of an equilibrium, or yin and yang of share and seek.

What has been shared, quickly induces dialogue and at that point does it’s job of KM. People connecting, re-contextualising, learning…this is "Pull", because of "Push".

Hmmm, "the risk is you create supply, with no demand."
Google doesn’t know what I’m gonna ask today, but when I do I am led to a place where there is an answer, or where I can connect and interact with others to put that information into my context.

Or better still, I’m not gonna ask today as I remember someone blogging about it in the past, so I know what to do.

So the question here is not whether "push" is efficient or not, it’s they way the information is pushed.

Conscription to a database lacks motivation, context, is static, etc…see my post on KM in context.

Whereas pushing via a blog may induce more knowledge creation, it’s not static at all. I blog about an experience:

• people learn about it as they are subscribed
• others leave comments
• a conversation ensues
• this enables people to clarify, probe, re-frame
• so this information object (the blog post), creates some type of personal knowledge for people as they have been able to sense-make via conversations

When you "Push" via a social tool people can interact with that information object so it may become personal knowledge to them.
The fact I push a blog post, has allowed opportunity for knowledge creation n-fold.

If we only shared in response to "Pull", then we would never be innovative or grow…we wouldn’t have an edge. In life there is stuff we don’t know about, and when we hear about this stuff it excites us and becomes usable (today or tomorrow), we like these gifts. Without this we hear a lot of “if only you had told me that when I was doing that task”…” we didn’t know you guys were using that method, that seems more efficient and effective”

Push is not a servant to Pull

Nick says:

"Knowledge Push is inefficient and wasteful if there is no Pull, whether the push is done through blogs…"

I really don’t understand this comment. It’s seems too perfect and engineered, if not impossible.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to control "Push" in order for people to just push what’s needed…for how do we know what we need…we are living in times where we need to adapt and be resilient to a fast paced constantly changing environment.

We can’t control what business topics and experiences people blog about, they blog on their own terms, we are lucky that they share at all…so we have to be happy.
We cannot conscript people to blog only when it’s 100% usable now and will be re-used immediately…we are dealing with people here, not robots…people don’t like the big brother feel…people blog because there is an intrinsic motivation, not because they are told to.

Otherwise this is going back to old KM conscripting methods, but only with new tools…it’s useless anyway as it goes against the ethos of these new tools.

It’s about engagement, not knowledge sharing

People blog because connecting and dialogue is what we are about, we are social creatures…it fills this need.

Blogs smash silos, nurture transparency and flatter organisational conversations. People can be heard and have impact….your bosses boss, or a boss in another team can hear what you have to say…see my post, we are more than our job title describes. Blogs are great for talent retention, and being recognised…these are all intrinsic motivators.

Therefore it’s more than just knowledge sharing, it’s about people connecting and being fulfilled at work…therefore you cannot control the "Push".

When people "Push", we are always learning, and building capacity…next time when we are in a decision-making situation we may draw on those blog posts that floated past our radar.
The more "Push" the more smarter we become, and the more capable and quicker the organisation is able to respond to change.

Andrew Gent’s post on learning and capacity seems to fit in here:

"So just as the goal of college is to teach capabilities, not specific skills; the goal of KM is to facilitate knowledge development and transfer, not solely to apply knowledge to the product pipeline."

"Push" is good, but mostly when it’s social pushing like blogging.

Clarification on blogging as Just-in-Case

In the LinkedIn thread I refered to blogging as Just-in-Time, rather than Just-in-Case, and Nick picked me up on this saying that it was Just-in-Case/Storing/Push. He also acknowledges that it’s different to past KM sharing methods, alluding to its inbuilt intrinsic motivation, and that it can be interacted with (a dynamic, living, manifesting object).

He is partially correct, maybe "Just-in-Time" wasn’t the correct word, but I don’t think "Just-in-Case" is either. I meant to refer to the immediacy of blogging…an event happens, or is happening and we can blog with great recall right now. Let’s worry later about whether this can be formalised or distilled into something more proper. What’s important right now is we can use blogs to capture something as it happens, then have some dialogue. Later on the result of all this can be woven back into good practice.

Thanks to Mark Gould for a pithy insight:

"I don’t blog here, nor do I encourage the same kind of activity at work because someone might find the content useful in the future. I do it, and encourage it, because the activity itself is useful in this moment. It is neither just-in-case nor just-in-time: it just is."

To refer back to an earlier part of this post, it’s the feeling of connection you have at work and with your peers, and the feeling of sense-making and expression. The effectiveness of the KM concept of "Push" and "Pull" comes second.

Mark also refers to Patrick Lambe where he alludes to sharing is bigger than itself, the more you participate, the more you are connected. To me this means whether all sharing is useful or not right now doesn’t matter as it’s the aggregation of sharing and participation that gets you connected. And being connected is everything:

"We do have an evolved mechanism for achieving such deep knowledge results: this is the performance you can expect from a well-networked person who can sustain relatively close relationships with friends, colleagues and peers, and can perform as well as request deep knowledge services of this kind."

Mark also differentiates the re-use aspect in reference to types of knowledge:

"My suspicion is that organisations that rely especially highly on personal, unique, knowledge (or intellectual capital) should be a lot more relaxed about this than Nick suggests. His view may be more relevant in organisations where repetitive processes generate much more value."
 

Nick makes a good point:

"The people who blog (and I include myself in this) are the ones who want to be heard, and that’s not always the same as “the ones who need to be heard”. Knowledge often resides in the quietest people."

I don’t know the answer to this other than facilitating conditions and guidance for quiet people to feel safe and comfortable. Knowledge sharing is a voluntary act, just as opening your mouth and speaking is.

KM in action

At work we have a Tips and Tricks blog for the Document Management team.

When I was working on that team I was trouble shooting a problem for someone, and as a result came up with a tip on how to browse the system via email.

I thought I’d better write this down somewhere so I don’t forget (memory management), and to also share it with others…so I blogged it.

This generated conversation, as to why this was the case.

The fact that I blogged it both offered a tip, and also initiated a discussion.

Subscribers to the blog were thankful of my post as they too had come across this issue.

Subscribers to this blog sometimes use tips straight away, and sometimes it’s good to know for the future, and sometimes it creates conversation that leads somewhere else.

Subscribers of the blog are happy to subscribe to these small fragments (blog posts).

If I were to give them a months worth of posts they would not have the time to read them, but they have time to digest fragments as they happen.

In this scenario I’m pushing a blog post as it happened, as it turned out it was of great help to others, and created new discussion paths.

Forget "Push or "Pull", connecting is key

I cannot predict if my "Push" will be "Pulled", that’s just how it is.

And this is what I think Mark Gould referred to when he wrote:

"The key thing in all of this, for me, is that whether we talk of knowledge sharing, transfer, or management, it only has value if it can result in action: new knowledge generation; new products; ideas; thoughts. But I think that action is more likely if we are open-minded about where it might arise. If we try and  predict where it may be, and from which interactions it might come, I think it  is most probable that no useful action and value will result in the long term."

As quoted by Patrick Lambe earlier, this is only the half of it. The more you share the more you are connecting and building relationships and trust, and this is mighty important. And the third element is that I’m a satisfied and engaged knowledge worker in a connected and networked environment.

Jack Vinson has also picked up on this conversation. I like the comment by Jamie Hatch:

"…making sure that knowledge is not just ‘captured’ but that we do something with it"

I think there is more chance of this happening when the capturing is not considered capturing, but rather people sense-making and sharing/communicating…and when this is done with the right tools, that are within a networked environment. To me "Push and Pull" are more relationship based than isolated concepts, I can’t approach one without the other creeping in.

Jack points to a great post from Ross Dawson, who reviews another post by Nick Bilton which gives a nice tone to the focus of this post.

It refers to serendipity and network filtering…as I do my work, since you are subscribed to me, I’m filtering information for you, and vice versa. Everyone is getting mutual benefit from everyone else. We all become more capable and smarter people.

Ross Dawson uses some terms that used to seem futuristic, but are becoming more common place: collective intelligence, global brain.

Forget "Push or "Pull", context is key

David Weinberger, Valis Krebs, Patrick Lambe and Steve Barth talk about not "Push" (sharing) or "Pull" (seeking), but more about making the infomation make sense at a personal level:

David Weinberger says:

"But the real problem with the information being provided to us in our businesses is that, for all the facts and ideas, we still have no idea what we’re talking about. We don’t understand what’s going on in our business, our market, and our world.

In fact, it’d be right to say that we already *know* way too much. KM isn’t about helping us to know more. It’s about helping us to understand. Knowledge without understanding is like, well, information.”

So, how do we understand things? From the first accidental wiener roast on a prehistoric savannah, we’ve understood things by telling stories. It’s through stories that we understand how the world works"

Valdis Krebs says:

"The new advantage is context — how internal and external content is interpreted, combined, made sense of, and converted to end product. Creating competitive context requires social capital, the ability to find, utilize and combine the skills, knowledge and experience of others."

Patrick Lambe says:

“the internalisation problem is how the represented knowledge can be re-contextualised so that it makes sense within the recipients own world view”

Steve Barth talks about indigenous knowledge, and focusing on relationships and context rather then knowledge commodification:

"…more focus on studying the connections between elements of the natural environment and the human community than on discrete things themselves. As such, the focus on relationships rather than reification is more in line with complexity and systems theories than taxonomical or hierarchical approaches of traditional science. It’s a direct contrast, too, to the (fictional) objectivity of scientific observation and experimentation."

"Incorporating indigenous knowledge into development efforts leverages a number of its strengths. It demonstrates respect for those involved by focusing on their needs, resources, responsibilities and experience; it facilitates local adaptation of technologies and techniques instead of forcing untailored adoption; it supplements—rather than supplants—local theory and practice; and it improves the collective awareness and sense-making necessary to make adjustments as a project proceeds."

"…neo-indigenistas" (his term for those who would save indigenous knowledge by removing it from the wild) are being hypocritical when they advocate for gathering it into civilized central repositories. Disconnecting knowledge from its source, in terms of people and places, will remove from that knowledge the very context which infuses it with life. Because indigenous knowledge is continuously generated and renewed in the living practices of people, archiving in isolation from practice removes its ongoing relevance…."

KM made simple

Finishing off. I’m a real fan of the simple KM perspective by Gia Lyons, Richard Dennison. They allude to "Push and Pull" as part of the same symbiotic strategy.

Gia Lyons says:

"The whole point of social software, from the perspective of retaining corporate wisdom, is to make a wisdom holder’s surface knowledge available to a general population, so that other people can do the following:

Be aware that this knowledge exists in the organization, and who has it. This is a huge pre-cursor to effective collaboration – knowing people exist, and knowing what they know. In social network science terms, the goal is to increase your organizational network’s density, which means more awareness / connections between more people, and to reduce distance, which means fewer network “nodes” between two people, based on trusted relationships – you can’t call Kevin Bacon directly, for example, until you ask a guy you know who knows his agent to get you an appointment.

Determine with whom they should collaborate, if they even need to. The irony of social software is that many may never need to collaborate with you if you share your surface knowledge. And an added benefit is that if you ever do need to collaborate with that person, you’ve accelerated that effort beyond the “dumb question” stage. You can get to the really good stuff faster.

Begin a trusted relationship with someone. This is done by “talking” to them in a forum, a blog, commenting on their document, etc., in hopes that in the future, you can boldly call them and ask for their tacit wisdom."

Richard Dennison says:

"If we could achieve three things, I think we will have made more progress in the field of KM than we’ve ever managed before. Those things are:

• expose in the network who people are and what they are interested in/working on/thinking about …
• provide a way to search through the above and then offer a simple mechanism to connect like-minded people together in networks a
• automatically expose the activities of individuals to those in their networks through activity streams.
  
  That’s it … simples!

Well … possibly not as simple as it sounds … but achievable at least."

In the end I partially agree with Nick saying that "Pull" is important otherwise what’s the use of sharing. But like conversation you just don’t know what’s gonna happen, what’s important is that you are having it, the opportunities, and the chance to probe for clarity…and that you feel connected and engaged. Within a networked environment the Pushing and Pulling of raw fragments as they happen, as opposed to a database full of static documents, is synergised. I think of it more as conversation, and conversation is work and knowledge creation.

A little while ago I posted on how Communities of Practice (CoPs) can act as a sense-making model for KM. Here’s a direct link to the model.

NOTE: I used CoPs as a model as that’s what we are doing at work, but obviously this is a similar concept when dealing with social networks.

Also note the premise is that we can mimic and amplify online, what we do offline, and that’s network with people to get things done. Which means the contents of this post is more focused on the online element of KM. But it is to be said that offline knowledge sharing techniques are not to be neglected eg. Openspace, AI, AAR, Peer Assist, AAR, World cafe, etc…

The big difference here to past KM efforts is that it’s focus is on interactions, conversations and context (Just-in-time), rather than codifying and warehousing objects and then people seeking those objects (Just-in-case).

It may come across that asking and answering questions is the only component of the Just-in-time model. But I would also include people sharing news, reviews, status, experiences in blogs in this model.

That is, unlike the codification model (Just-in-case), I am sharing raw experiences. I’m not trying to codify according to an agenda, rather I’m just sharing a fragment of experience as it happens. Quickly get it down before it’s forgotten or loses relevancy (who cares if it’s unpolished). 
I do it because I have an intrinsic motivation, and audience…it’s engaging. Others can leave comment feedback and we have a conversation, and all of a sudden this has led us to another place, perhaps not even related to the original blog post.. Participation and visibility is everything. Who knows where, what you say, will take you…this is the beauty of conversation and life…unexpected, emergence, novel, etc…

When this grows to a network of bloggers, the give and take scenario increases the engagement.

To re-iterate, this is not the same as codification…the act of blogging does more than document…it builds relationships, spurs conversations, creates opportunities, emergence, etc…all this feeds back into a natural model of knowledge sharing.

The more people are blogging, the more it becomes known who to go to for information, or who you can be refered to, or who can point you to where information lives. And then be able to re-frame into your context via conversation. This is true sense-making…we are no longer alone with "search".

And thanks to email and RSS you can subscribe to these digestable fragments as they happen.

Why do I use the term digestable?

I’m not going to spend time reading a manual or a long report that often if I don’t have to; due to attention scarcity, or I don’t have time to scan lots of stuff to find the good bits. But if someone blogs daily fragments from, or about, that report, then I will read it…and I will do the same with something else.
So by posting and networking we share the load and get to know or filter more information. Clay Shirky is often quoted that information overload is looking at the glass half empty, and that it’s more about filter failure, which is the glass half full, as we can do something about it.

Further to this, it’s a learning model. When questions are asked and answered, when experiences are shared, when we have conversations; we are all learning. We learn lots more than just the original document/post, we learn from the comments and conversations (the document/post has spurred this indirectly, all you have to do in life is say or act, and then will follow reactions…who knows where this leads).

This relates to a quote from Andrew Gent:

"If you see the goal of college being to get a job (your ROI), then there really is no need for English, history, languages, or even science — depending upon your target profession. However, if you see the goal of college as expanding your knowledge and broadening your character, not only will it have a strong indirect impact on your employability, but your opportunities will be far more flexible and adaptive to the business environment when you graduate.

So just as the goal of college is to teach capabilities, not specific skills; the goal of KM is to facilitate knowledge development and transfer, not solely to apply knowledge to the product pipeline."
 

Anyway…

This post is an extension of my former post. The former post had only 2 slides (the model). In this new slide set I have added some more slides which explain or describe the model and why it is the way it is. This is done not in a direct way, but more by sharing some understanding of some concepts, so the reader can then use that as a lens to look at the model. Even better, most of the concepts are explained by quotes from people I admire.

What comes across in the aggregation of quotes in this slide set is that "context" is a heavy part of KM. In fact it’s the crucial factor, as it makes what is shared usable.

In the future I’m going to extend this slide set once more to encompass my take of KM in general, and the present and future.

Here’s the slidedeck.

 

This post is a follow on from some loosely tied posts

• Is knowledge hoarding all about your pay cheque
• We are more than our job title describes, so let’s get social!…
• Sensemaking KM and CoPs (Just-in-time vs Just-in-case), engaging and embedded KM, and a competitive vs collaborative culture
• I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!!
• Work group fatigue : level of effort vs funded, or transform the organisation!

This is not a post about the overall ROI on social computing effectiveness, but more on the supposed expense of workers spending time away from their immediate tasks, even if it’s about helping others for the greater benefit of the organisation.

It’s something we have to think about when we move from PC to SC (Personal Computing to Social Computing).

In these previous posts the theme is that for a collaborative, sharing, transparent, engaging and aware organisation we need more than bottom-up emergence. We also need a top-down shift and seriousness into this new way of working; with role-models, and a change to the performance appraisal model. Departments like HR, Talent and KM need to work together. This is a holisitic approach.

If what I know gets me more money, and if spending my time helping others doesn’t contribute to my performance, then why would I do it!

Well we do it to an extent with people we trust, "I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine"…this barter-type organisation is how real work gets done. But from a high-level we don’t try and leverage or harness the effectiveness of the barter-based organisation. Look no more than Verna Allee on intangibles as the real value of organisations.

My past posts have been about a change from a competitive workforce to a collaborative one, and also a more role-based network blended with hierarchy.

A current post by Hutch Carpenter shares a quote from an MIT Sloan working paper, about the knowledge hoarding attitude between competitive innovation communities:

"The likelihood of giving away innovation related information may be affected by the level of rivalry within the community. If an innovator believes that revealing innovation-related information will allow a rival to outperform him, the likelihood that the innovator will reveal this information will decrease unconditionally. This hypothesis is clearly confirmed in the communities studied here: assistance is given less often in more competitive settings."

NOTE: In the context of innovation, ideas, brainstorming; competition may be relevant as a starting block (personally I don’t think we should force a process, just let them co-exist) to avoid "group think", but then we move on to collaboration.

If we do have a networked and collaborative workforce, then how do we measure performance?

Olivier Amprimo has a pithy take:

"Work is about team work, not individual performance" "Over the last year HR has put a lot of attention on evaluating people on their individualistic performance while creating the notions of ‘competency’ and personal objectives. ‘A lot of attention’ often means too much attention ie to a point where participation to collective works was not evaluated. This creates inefficiencies as it favours individualistic strategies that can be adverse to organisational performance."

I mentioned that measuring performance of a group rather than an individual means that each group member ensures that each other are doing a good job, and you get this by collaborating.

But what about measuring non-group work or ad-hoc requests like helping other people out on tasks you are not involved in, etc…?

But what about measuring how well you sourced quality people and networked to get to help you on your task?

As Bertrand Duperrin ponders:

"…businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used…businesses don’t understand free across its departments."

The "talk" is easy to say, "we need to be a more knowledge sharing organisation".

But when it comes to the "walk", the current design of business is counter to these intentions.

How do we cater for a networked organisation where you help, respond and spend time on other people’s tasks, without the cost centre you are working in not gettting ripped off ie. while they are paying you, you are spending time helping others out, and at the same time not spending time on your work.

Either we move to a freelance, role-based, self-managed organisation; or we somehow find a way to measure our time spent collaborating and networking…or a bit of both.

Managers need to understand what they lose, they gain in other ways. If one of their workers spends time helping others, in good turn others will help them when in need. In the long term, nothing is lost, in fact effectiveness is gained.

Again and again this takes me to Boyd’s law which I think defines the theme of a new enterprise, OK, enterprise 2.0:

“Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity. Perhaps more importantly, the willingness to assist others leads to closer social connections, and increases the likelihood of reciprocal behaviour, where an obsession with personal productivity does not. On a work basis, businesses today want it (or think they want it) both ways. They want their employees to be personally productive, making the classic logical error that if everyone is highly productive personally then the company will be. Nope.“

Measuring time and value of the group

Like others I proposed that we can measure groups rather than individuals, which works OK for group work, but not so much for social networking.

I’ll explain…

Applying a basic value on time well spent in a collaboration group, can be based on the output. And we are not even measuring; learning, helping others out, sense-making…so the value is much greater, but we know management like hard things to measure.

You could say: employees time spent in the collaboration group is worthwhile based on the group output (group ROI).
If there are 10 collaboration groups, and 10 people in each you can do an ROI on 100 people, by just looking at the output of 10 collaboration groups.

Some might say this is not fair as some individuals may not pull their weight, but rather than the manager pointing this out, the group itself will make this known to the person as it’s in their good interest.

I don’t think the same approach to group measurement can be used for Communities of Practice (CoP).

Why?

A collaboration group is more interdependent, and participation is often more equal, every player contributes to the final output, otherwise why would you be in the group.

Whereas in a Community of Practice participation is voluntary and we have a power law of participation 90-9-1. Which means the majority of the contributions are made by a very tiny percentage of the members.

In light of this it would be unfair to measure the group as a whole, as some people would be free riding on the kudos, whilst the fierce contributors feel they need to be more recognised…it’s only natural.

But yet it’s a hard one, because someone that contributed just a little may have made a big difference to the quality of the output. Or they didn’t score the goal, but having them in the group was essential in the conversations that led to great ideas.

Measure the effectiveness of using your network to get things done

If the firm has 1,000 or 10,000 people how are you going to do the ROI on each person for time spent doing work in a social networking way.

Whether collaboration groups, communities or networks, the new organisational design has to work out a way beyond incorporating group measurement, but as Bertrand said earlier a way for workers to transcend teams without the obstacle of local costs getting in the way.

As mentioned, value is just not about output, but the learning that happens along the way, and sense-making so we can make better decision and produce more optimal work.

It’s ultimately about how we build capabilities and skills from each other, by hanging out with each other…no training course can beat that! Plus we can measure value with anecdotes.

Gia Lyons post, Individual measurements in a social world – adoption obstacle?, has been the inspiration for this post.

This takes us back to earlier points made in this post…Gia says:

► Will how well I use my network to tap into talent to produce that report be recognised, compared to just using my team resources?

"…how do we measure a person’s prowess at making their individual contributions better because they knew who knew what, and had a relationship with them such that they could tap their expertise (there’s another blech phrase), whether directly or through their social contributions, at a moment’s notice?"

► Will sourcing my networks for help (collaboration), reduce the measure of assets I produce, if so I will produce something of less value on my own, at least I get all the credit and a bag of carrots?

In this comment Gia explains what prompted her post. She was contemplating whether to go the social route on a task or to keep it to herself, as she isn’t measured on how well she uses her network, she says:

“…there is a direct correlation between the number of assets I create in a quarter, and my quarterly bonus…”.

► I mentioned previously that you need time to spend using social tools to get to know people so you can use them properly

"To network, one must be social, must participate in online communities as well as offline, must spend time getting to know others and letting others know them. So really, we are asking people to spend precious time to do something for which they are not measured. Fix this, and you will have removed a major obstacle to the inside-the-firewall business adoption of social networking and productivity behavior."

Again we come to the space where bottom-up tools are not enough, workers need to be allowed time to become more effective and sense-make…and I’m not asking for Google 20% time.

Employee Performance Review based on ratings and reputation (peer review)

Rawn pondered this a while ago:

"During the Industrial Age, we achieved similar goals for manufacturing output. Now that we are in the Information Age, we are stumped, because rather than a physical unit output, it is more of a mental qualitative output, and that seems to us a very subjective element." "…there is at least one way to measure the quality of knowledge. It’s been done for centuries: the Peer Review process."

Andy McAfee posted about utilising ratings in social software as part of individual performance in six areas:

• Authoring
• Editing
• Interacting
• Tagging
• Pointers/Uploads
• Positive feedback

Andy’s subsequent post showcases a few comments that allude to this type of measurement as killing the quality of participation, and people gaming the system. I don’t quite think it’s the same as rewards, but it could have the same effect. Andy also has a follow up post.

Hutch Carpenter riffs off Andy’s post; social software like Spigit can monitor participation and generate ratings/reputation. He says:

"The feedback is in real-time, not annually. The views of colleagues throughout the organization can be captured, providing greater diversity in feedback. Ratings come from all levels of the organization, making them true 360 degree reviews. Obviously, great care must be exercised in introducing this concept. Early on, the social software ratings can be advisory in nature. As they prove themselves out, they can supplement the performance review process."

I agree that this only supplements, as there are other places that people participate that may go unrecognised eg. face-to-face, email, IM, on the phone…

Rex Lee also warns of such a rating systems being the only means of measuring the effectiveness of an E2.0 program, and the value of a contributor. He posts about the "false assumption" of measuring activity levels:

"Without any ratings, how would you know whether to trust the content? Rating a contributor based on activity levels is intended to provide participants with a gauge to the "quality" or "accuracy" of the content. This is a dangerous and false assumption. Just because someone may post a lot, or interact a lot, doesn’t mean that their content is necessarily of high quality. As an analogy, I spend a long time doing house repairs, not because I am good at but for the exact opposite reason!"

Rex alludes to a holistic approach in relation to motivation (which I’m going to have to post about separately):

"There is sometimes a desire to use ratings as a means to motivate employees to contribute. If you focus on "quantity" you are incenting the wrong behaviour, focus instead on "value"."

Rex also warns to not confuse quantity with value:

"A heavy focus on individual ratings will also diminish the real value of tapping into the long-tail." "The question isn’t about how much input you provide. Even if you provide only one single piece of contribution, what if that contribution turns out to be a major breakthrough?"

 Clay Shirky’s book, "Here Comes Everybody", describes this as the 80/20 optimisation:

“…because of transaction costs, organisations cannot afford to hire employees who only make one important contribution-they need to hire people who have good ideas day after day.” “the institutional response to this imbalance is to ignore the people with only one good contribution; the dictates of 80/20 optimisation forces a firm to maximise its output by ignoring casual participants. As a result, many good ideas are simply inaccessible in an institutional framework, because most of the time most institutions have to choose ‘steady performer’ over ‘brilliant but erratic’.” “It’s not that organisations wouldn’t like to take advantage of the idea of the occasional participant-it’s they can’t. Transaction costs make it too expensive”

Another social tool called Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with a peer-based review.

As usual Bertrand Duperrin has excellent perspective on what’s measured, and the difference between measuring a final result and the contributions that made the result possible.

Further to this is how measurement itself can be counter-productive, if you are measuring the wrong thing. Be careful what you measure, as this will effect performance.

He alludes to the game of basketball measuring the performance of the team rather than the individual:

"…at the end of the game, if you only focus on points you’d think that some players are useless because their specality is to help others score. Fortunately, statistics take “assists” (ie passes that help another player to score) into account for players and teams evaluations and they’re as important as points to measure player’s performance. It’s logical : the player who gives the ball makes his partners succeed and without him no point would have been score. More, a pass becomes an assist when and only when points are scored so it force people to make the right choices and not only pass the ball hoping others will do some positive things with. So basket ball knows how to evaluate the people who make other’s succeed. If this wasn’t measured I’m sure many players would focus on their own points without paying any attention the the team’s points. When such behaviors happen, you often have a team with two main players (according to the points they score) but that lost all of its games. How are people evaluated at work ? The answer will surely help you to understand why effective collaboration seldom happen."

 As for traditional performance review in general Peter Bregman sums it up :

"Traditional management systems encourage mediocrity in everything and excellence in nothing. Most performance review systems set an ideal picture of how we want everyone to act (standards, competencies, etc.) and then assesses how closely people match that ideal, nudging them to improve their weaknesses so they "meet or exceed expectations" in every area."

This is also typical of traditional KM and all outcomes based management. The new enterprise is more about emergence, diversity, facilitation, the unexpected…rather than an addiction to pre-define how people should perform.

Peter also posts about performance review in relation to the big picture of traditional management and the running of business and how it relates to culture change

"Performance reviews and training programs define the firm’s expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what’s important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don’t — emphasize the firm’s priorities."

Bill Bradford and Sue Traynor continue on this train of thought about out-dated performance review methods, and talk about it as a process, not an event. They also write about how this relates to competency:

"If an organization sees its appraisal process as the primary vehicle for performance management, it is in trouble. Performance management is a daily activity and supervisors and managers need to be highly trained in the coaching and counselling skills to deal with a wide range of issues on a daily basis.  Without the confidence that only comes with acquired skill and practice, they tend to swing between the extremes of avoidance and emotional reaction.  Acquiring the confidence to address poor performance and the emotional intelligence to know when to encourage, when to teach, when to reward, when to challenge and when to praise is fundamentally important."

An article in the Wall Street Journal says the performance review kills teamwork, but they don’t come from the angle I’ve been talking about lately in relation to knowledge hoarding. 

The Invisible hand

Not sure I agree with a post on the Social Glass blog from back in 2007, where Jeremy Thomas comes up with a model where participation in fueled by competition.

He likens workers in organisations to a free-market, whereas the whole notion for this post and others I’ve linked to is to change the free-market competitive organisation into a collaborative one…where the motivators are not exclusively about "self gain".

Charles Darwin says:

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change"

Well what about "Survival of the Kindest" which is a feeling that I get from an online system like Twitter. I’m often reading tweets and then replying back with links to similar research, etc… There is no self-gain for me, but as it turns out I get rewarded as people do the same for me. If anything it allows conversation, and who knows where conversation is going to lead, and the unexpected benefits we get from this dance.

The Invisible hand is a game where everyone can pursue self interest which promotes the greater good for the market (cooperation without coercion). Basically consumers are free to buy and producers are free to sell what they want as well production methods. This results in a beneficial distribution and price for all, due to ‘greed’ ie efficient production increases profit, and competition leads to low prices.

Jeremy relates this to knowledge workers:

"A knowledge worker “…intends only his own gain”, he seeks recognition which can ultimately lead to promotion and increased salary. A knowledge worker “…intends only his own gain”, he seeks recognition which can ultimately lead to promotion and increased salary." "Enterprise 2.0 is not based on utopian ideals. It is instead based on the very principles that drive all free-market economies. Organisations that adopt enterprise 2.0 will do so for auto-preservation and corporate gain - to help their bottom line. Period."

This is what needs to change as it’s all a "game" of competition, rather than collaboration, and it’s totally the antitheseis to Boyd’s Law mentioned at the start of this post. To re-iterate the last bit "…making the classic logical error that if everyone is highly productive personally then the company will be. Nope."

Jeremy then moves to the point of this paper which sticks to the market concept called the, Enterprise Knowledge Market:

"…is an information discovery system designed to valuate and promote knowledge assets. It serves as the platform from which knowledge workers receive recognition for knowledge assets they produce in both "legacy" and Enterprise 2.0 environments. Within the EKM the enterprise collectively adjusts the calculated value index of a given knowledge asset. Over time the value index of an asset reflects its true value relative to other knowledge assets. This process acts as an efficient way to promote valuable over less valuable knowledge." "…the Enterprise Knowledge Market efficiently discovers and exposes enterprise information assets in an effort to recognize the knowledge workers who author them. The most valuable information assets are given the most visibility. Visibility leads to recognition, which knowledge workers compete for. Competition fuels participation, and participation increases the number of quality knowledge assets at the enterprise’s disposal. This raises the likelihood that innovative ideas will be discovered, and innovation helps the enterprise remain competitive."

I don’t mind the EKM concept too much in that the valuation is based on peer activity, but I do have a concern with knowledge referred to as a commodity, and the whole concept of popularity as the main driver. It’s a middle space concept I must say, as usually competition promotes knowledge hoarding, but in this case people are competing out in the open, which means knowledge sharing. Again this is only one aspect or way to measure quality and performance.

Employee productivity 

A more engaged and connected worker is more productive. Let’s revisit whether Boyd’s law is true…I think so!

Hutch Carpenter’s post the revenue impact of enterprise 2.0 cites a study, where he shares that:

“The author’s looked at the connections people had built on their own, and those who had the best, most diverse networks outperformed everyone else. What Enterprise 2.0 does is take these characteristics of the top performers and exposes them for everyone else in the organization.”

Then I came across Matthew Hodgson’s post about a study, called the ROI of being social at work, and a follow-up piece; the more connected you are, the more productive and effectively you can operate…the social interaction and group effort is an interdependency factor to achieving tasks and goals.

Ross Dawson also has a post reviewing a study where connections and patterns at work correlate with higher revenue production.

Jack Vinson’s post extends this discussion as he states that just because you can be more productive, it doesn’t mean the time saved will be spent productively. He says:

"Activity does not equate with utility."

But again the issue is no longer about believing the effectiveness or worthwhileness of collaboration and sharing, it’s about taking action and structuring an organisation to harness this fact. And not just by saying it, but re-designing the business so it enables or is conducive to this new way of working.

Middle Management

In an earlier post I mentioned management approval to use enterprise 2.0 tools, which I think goes against the whole ethos. I said, "Chuck mentions that some people were not sure if they could participate unless they had approval by their manager."

Time well spent learning, helping other, and making new contacts doesn’t have to have an immediate efficiency impact on your job, sure you can productively collaborate, ask questions for immediate benefit, but the unique part is that we can become more capable and skillful (effectiveness).
There is a stage where we have to develop our network, follow those people we are interested in, and also create our own brand by participating in blogs, etc…we also comment and answer questions, as we know this is a reciprocated relationship.

Perhaps the paradox is senior management want people to share know-how (be effective), but middle management need you to be efficient, because they are pressured from senior management about the bottom line. So in the end senior management may claim they believe in KM or enterprise 2.0 effectiveness, but they force middle management to go against this grain.

But middle management may not need any encouragement to not like social computing, as they may feel dis-intermediated…more on this in another post.

More

I’m also going to have to follow-up with a post on motivation/reward/engagement.

 

[ADDED 11/01/10 Jack Vinson - Individual measurement in team efforts]

“Successful projects depend on the entire group working well together…individual measures work against group cohesiveness. I’ve written more lines. I’ve answered more phone calls. I’ve put out more fires. Therefore I must be better. Has the fact that an individual shines done anything for the success of the overall project? Has the entire group been given new skills or capabilities with which to meet the next challenge?”

NOTE: I’m not a futurist or organisational anthropologist, but it seems that my interest in knowledge and networks has led me into thinking about such matters as fundamental as the future of organisational structure.

A while ago I posted on how organisations can become more agile. People can connect horizontally…the silos blinders can be removed. What this means is talent is revealed and self-organisation (which we already do regardless) can really shine. Work groups can form that attract the right people in a decentralised way, and then disbanden. My past post I’m refering to is called, We are more than our job title describes, so let’s get social!…get into it, as this is a big aspect of the state of enterprise 2.0 that we will eventually reach.

As I mentioned in a few previous posts, it’s fine that we can use bottom-up tools to connect the enterprise in a network fashion, but this has to be accepted from top-down.

Jack Vinson says it pithy in a response to my post:

“…business doesn’t reward collaboration. It rewards individual action.”

And then Bertrand Duperrin equally said it simply and effective in another way in a tweet to me:

“Tell me how you’re measured & I’ll tell you how you work”

My posts in question I’m talking about are:

I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!!

Sensemaking KM and CoPs (Just-in-time vs Just-in-case), engaging and embedded KM, and a competitive vs collaborative culture

This seems to be the meme of late, as I just read Venessa Miemis say:

“It’s becoming more accepted that collaboration, not competition, is a more effective avenue towards producing emergent, innovative results. Now that millions of people participate in online social networks, it seems high time to develop a system of matching people’s skill sets with common values and goals in order to bring about positive change.

Social networks have the advantage of being able to connect globally distributed individuals, who can then operate with flexibility within a bottom-up, non-hierarchical framework. But, just having access to each other is not always enough to make things serendipitously happen.”

She echos this in another post (which I just couldn’t help putting in bold):

“It’s becoming clear that to constrict a person’s capabilities into rigid, set roles that limit creativity and innovation just doesn’t make sense. Diving talent into silos is an outdated paradigm. Rather, we should be encouraging the facilitation of diverse groups of people working together on common problems.”

Here’s a link to that quote if you want to point someone directly to it, as I think it encapsulates enterprise 2.0 without having to talk about social computing.

And to re-quote from an earlier post, Margaret Schweer says:

“Many of us are transitioning away from job to roles based on work for some portion of our organization. This is an important paradigm shift for leaders – ownership for talent is shared. Talent needs to be flexibly deployed against the areas of highest value for the organization.”

Venessa says above that access is not enough, and when I re-read Bertrand’s post he had something else to say which is an obstacle:

“Unlike the general public web, businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used. In brief, businesses don’t understand free across its departments. Rather, their internal policies don’t make that possible.”

This got me to reflect on my own organisation

We do not yet have a social network, but we have CoPs as a start which is good, because already we see people discovering others, connecting and collaborating…this is a distributed way to optimise talent and work.

Even without CoPs of course people are networked, but it’s harder…usually management are good at this as they know more people than the regular worker.

Anyway my point is that I agree with the points Bertrand and Venessa allude to in that; access, networking and connecting is only the first step.

At my work, our culture is OK with workers being borrowed by others to work in tasks where their talent is needed.

But we reach two obstacles.

I can only stretch so much of my time

I have my regular job, but then I’m in a handful of extra activities like voluntary work groups. And most of these are from my own doing as I’ve shown an interest and want to have some input (I really like how our organisation is open to this).

But like I said I don’t have enough hours in the day, and in the end I’m measured on my main job by the manager I work for. I don’t get measured on these other activities that I work on…in school you would get extra points for participating in extra activities

…anyway

The other thing is that I can’t charge my time to these extra activities, my boss is paying for my time spent elsewhere…but since this is our cultural attitude, in that it’s for the greater good, my boss is OK with it.

OK, so I’m not getting kudo’s for extra work, or it’s not part of performance measurement, which doesn’t personally worry me too much because I have passion for these work groups…but it would be good if it was measured, as it is work tasks, in contrast to sharing and learning in CoPs.

NOTE: CoPs are about sense-making and being better at your tasks, but they are not the task itself, which is more an attribute of a team (but I do understand that the world is not so black and white).

And as I said, I don’t have enough time to devote to these work groups.

Even if I could charge my time to these work groups and had to contribute to deliverables I still wouldn’t have time…actually this would make me very stressed.

So the question is…

How can I roam around the enterprise as a free agent, like a freelancer, getting my own tasks?

NOTE: a by product is that I become multi-skilled, exposed to diverse sides of the business, work with different people and operations.

I compare this to a cinematographer who gets their own gigs, jumping from one film to the next.

Only thing is I would still want security from the organisation, in that they will slot me somewhere if I don’t network well enough…or when there are down times they will find me something to do.

The enterprise would still have managers setting tasks, but the workers would gravitate to these tasks, or be invited…basically you have to find your own projects to work on.

Would this be hard? In a networked enterprise jobs would come to you, via your interest feeds, and those who you are connected to…and people who know about you would give you leads and offers.

So even though managers are setting tasks, they are not so much managing you, but more responsible for the coordination of the project.

You manage yourself, it’s in your own interest to do a good job otherwise people won’t want you on other tasks. This point kind of reminds me of the self regulated nature of eBay. Since buyers rate sellers, it’s in the sellers interest to be honest, which keeps eBay from falling over in a distributed way.

But an enterprise would not only rely on workers managing themselves as operational reliability…coupled with this managers would be 50% managing and 50% leading. Managers need to spend more time on mentoring human performance, bringing out the best in people, so workers can better manage themselves.

This kind of means you don’t have a boss? You only work for the manager of the task you are on, and when you disbanden your on your own again, looking for another task which will be managed by someone else.

I said there were two obstacles, the other one is…

Backing money vs level of effort

As I mentioned earlier it’s great my work has an open culture where people’s time can be lent out by a manager to work on extra activities.

When I say extra activities, I mean cross-functional work groups, or even improvement tasks within the one team.

Some examples of these are:

- I’m not on the Intranet team, but there is an Intranet redesign project that I’m happy and glad to participate in
- Within my own team I’m part of a focus group on “internal communication”.
etc…

So what’s the problem?

Because these work groups don’t have deliverables or timelines, they wane.

But even if they did have deliverables, and I could charge my time, us borrowed participants would not be able to spread our time, as we have our main jobs.

Again the solution to this seems to be a freelanced networked type of organisation I was pondering earlier…but what is the seriousness or repercussions of this…come on organisational theorists, cultural critics, futurists…let me know what you think!!

I don’t think this aspect of enterprise 2.0 is talked about enough, where do we see a networked enterprise heading to…

From what I remember in complexity theory, what manifests from the interactions can change the system itself, the very system that has been the platform for these interactions to happen.

So when we talk about enterprise 2.0 it’s been about how we do work and sensemake, and also transparency, crowdsourcing before making a decision…and we have tools and an approach to do this. This is where we are at now, but what’s the inevitable transformative result of this?

Will it be a blended enterprise of hierarchy and networks where talent roams around slotting into tasks?

I digressed a little, back to it…

I said if we could charge our time to the work group, but this isn’t so at the moment…why?

Because most of these special work groups are nice to have ideas, actually they have gone beyond ideas, they actually get started, but fizzle.

At our work if you can get sponsorship, and a level of effort from borrowed resources, which I have explained is the culture at my work, then we see these work groups take off.

But they get to a stage where they manifest into something but then need proper backing to keep going…ie they need funds.

It’s good in a way as we don’t need to show ROI, as it’s based on level of effort, but we do reach a wall.

It’s a real good approach, that enables us to experiment and fill needs, allowing self organising groups to form to serve the greater effectiveness of the organisation. So the ability to allow for this emergence is great, it’s an aspect of an agile organisation, but…once we can prove this momentum is worthwhile, then we need the funding for these work groups…and that’s the wall that causes them to wane over the long term.

If these work groups, or as Dave Snowden calls the “crews” were offered funding for their work, where would you find the people who have time…do you hire more people, that you only need for a short time…or does the organisation fully transform into a new enterprise where we move from CoPs and matrix organisations to social network stimulation and crews.

[ADDED 5/01/10: Crews - Slide 4]

• Key concepts of on tour
  and on watch.
• People are trained in role
  and expectation of role
• Delegation of authority
  without loss of status
• Rapid assembly of teams
  without team formation
• Work across silos and
  boundaries within &
  without the organisation

For more information on crews check out these posts

The Empire’s shadow

Are you on the Bully watch?

Aggregative or emergent identity? Rethinking Communities

Please don’t get workgroups and communities of practice confused. Workgroups are more like teams where deliverables need to be achieved.

Bertrand has more:

“Communities are places where practices, knowledge, informaiton are exchanged and has not to be confused with workgroups which are operational entities…Groups know that they have to do, to deliver, and that’s why they exist. Groups exist because they have operational purposes. Communities exchange to learn, groups exchange to execute (even if there a learning dimension in the background routine). The group is a manager’s reponsability, the manager being responsible for objective’s achievement. Communties can be handled by external people who is an expert, a skilled communicator while groups only react to hierarchical hierarchy (even if expertise matters in the background).”

At the end of my last post I mentioned that KM (even Talent Management) or social computing need a top-down approach, shift, or message when it comes to collaboration, sharing, and organisational effectiveness…or better put a balanced approach.

Why?

Sure you will get lots of success in sense-making and sharing by facilitating the use of grassroots tools that are bottom-up just like email (but better than email).

BUT, is the use of new tools enough to catapult into a new way of working…it will take a long time to hit that tipping point.

Even if we do all the right things like facilitate, understand human behaviour, create and nurture conditions for participation, have an enterprise-wide concept…I don’t think it’s enough.

We need a complementary top-down shift to a new culture of working, as I said in my last post, a move from a competitive to collaborative organisation.

NOTE: I’m referring to within the walls of an organisation. I’m yet to think about this concept industry-wide ie. companies collaborating, rather than competing…a new type of capitalism I guess…got many links on the natural enterprise, but no time to read them

What do I mean by top-down?

I mean how are we measured and rewarded for what we do…

If I’m rewarded just for my achieving my personal output, I don’t have an incentive to share as what I know gives me the edge, it’s not about the organisation, it’s all about me.

Workers are instilled to be efficient robots, which leads to…I don’t have time to help you out, or an interest, as that is less time that I spend on achieving my objectives, and helping you out doesn’t get me a reward anyway; my objectives are important as that’s what gets me a reward.

We are told to share, but how can we when the senior management strategy doesn’t walk the walk…yes they talk that it’s good to share, but then strategy goes against that ideal.

Can you believe a lot of organisations run this way…this is a strategy to amass an aggregate of personal efficiency ie an incentive to stack a pile of efficient people, at the expense of an effective organisation where the people share what they know with each other so the organisation can adapt, be resilient, innovate, etc…

Why would an organisation do this to itself?

ie. concentrate on cost reduction and efficiency alone by neglecting the big picture, and instead just focus on each worker by rewarding good outcomes. How are you gonna adapt to changes in the industry if you don’t have a connected organisation…sure, you can have lots of intelligent people, but if they are not connected, you will hear lots of “why didn’t we know about you, I didn’t know you were an expert in that, we could of used you to help with this issue”

Workers self organise their behaviour to sometimes ignore this strategy, as it’s being connected that helps you out. You don’t know everything, if you did, what’s the use of an organisation. We get by at work by give and take, you interrupt me today, I’ll interrupt you tomorrow…I’ll forgo some of my time to help you out, as I trust that this will be reciprocated. An organisation is a web of relationships, we all need contacts, to help us achieve our targets.

So yes it’s natural to share, as it’s a need, actually it’s survival…but this needs to be seriously recognised and harnessed as a strategy, and a smart strategy where it cooperates and is cohesive with other strategies. ie you can’t have a strategy about sharing is important, if you have another strategy that essentially says hoarding is important (this conflicting strategy I’m referring to is the essence of this post ie the strategy of what you know gets you ahead of others, it gives you the edge so sharing would be the wrong thing to do…and my objectives get me rewards, so why would I spend time with you).

Anyway, looking back at an old post of Rex Lee’s outstanding blog, I found something very relevant to this meme.

It’s on the negative impact that “well defined measurable objectives and tying them directly to compensation” has on knowledge sharing, and ultimately organisational effectiveness.

“It seems logical that if you do a good job, and it’s linked to your objectives then you should be compensated for this.

The difficulty lies in the individual nature. The first concern is around the competitive aspects of this kind of model. If your knowledge or expertise could really assist someone else but helping them had no relation to your objectives, would you help them? What if we took it one step further. What if your helping of someone else actually hurt your ability to meet your objectives? Perhaps it would take you away from completing your objectives or actually go counter to your objectives? What if the more important thing for the company was helping that other person?

Often a cascading objectives model (one in which, you get your objectives from your boss, and she gets them from her boss, etc..), leads to solio’d thinking. Opportunities that arise that cut across silo’s (and requiring collaboration) are simply never seen. It’s not that people want to be malicious, they simply don’t see the opportunity.

Is it possible to structure objectives, that allow for collaboration that still are well defined, measurable and linked to compensation? The answer depends in what “well defined” means. In theory, an objective about collaborating could resolve this. It’s worked for other organizations. If you go this route though, keep in mind the implications it has on organizational structure as well. Proceed with caution, you’re changing institutional models that may be as old as the organization itself.”

In the next post I want to look at the ROI of spending time helping others.

[ADDED 16/11/09 : Bertrand Duperrin]

“Unlike the general public web, businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used. In brief, businesses don’t understand free across its departments. Rather, their internal policies don’t make that possible.”

[ADDED 16/11/09 : Jack Vinson]

“the business doesn’t reward collaboration. It rewards individual action.”

[ADDED 6/01/10: Peter-Anthony Glick]

“3. Reward achievements of each individual based solely on personal objectives: the “you are judged on what you achieved, not on what others have achieved with your help” syndrome.”