Library clips

Thx to everyone for the retweets on my previous post about socialising processes, adhoc work, observable work and ACM.

If you are going to take something away let it be the concept of BRP (Barely Repeatable Processes) to enable adhoc, unpredictable work…and at the same time reclaiming observable work, and as always ambient awareness.

I’m sure the pioneers like Thingamy, Traction Software, Activities on Lotus Connections, ActionBase, Google Wave will be joined by many others.

And thanks to Paula Thornton, Jim McGee and Greg Lloyd for this wonderful exchange where we are riffing off each other, sometimes unknowingly, where various topics seem to blend into each other.

And let me give a shout out to Keith Swenson for his incredible blog on Adaptive Case Management (ACM)…empowering workers to deal with the unpredictable "practice" that is knowledge work.

Practice Execution

Like Paula Thornton tweeted:

"…heuristic structure rather than process. The means for work to flow"

Yes, and perhaps knowledge work is about practice execution, rather than pre-defined processes…but this is a tricky one as whether predictable or not, whether repeatable or not, it’s still a process, even if it only happens once in it’s life.

A long while ago I posted why KM failed in a nutshell, and it was about KM being a separate thing you need to do rather than embedded as a literacy. My post shared that magnificent gem by Ross Mayfield on what’s happening most of the time in this knowledge work era is that people are dealing with exceptions to processes and workarounds. And they do this using email and attachments which is messy, and not visible or amplifying.

Since then we have had social computing platforms as an alternative, and now we are starting to see this evolving where the tools are designed or allow the user to design them in the flow of the way we practice work.

Jim McGee warns of Enterprise 2.0 playing the game of enhancing processes as it’s much more than that. In my post I talked about that as just 1st gear to not only get adoption but because it’s also useful for knowledge work, but not to lose site that enterprise 2.0 is also about emergence, networks, connections, transparency, awareness, etc…

I not only talked about enhancing or socialising business processes, but also building your own processes using new tools. The thing is a "2.0" approach can be used almost anywhere, and existing processes need not be left out.

I won’t say too much as Jim had not read my post thoroughly at time of publishing his post.

OK now this brings me to an enlightening video clip with Patrice Livingstone and her passion for Traction Software as the poster child for the nemesis of email. H/T to Paula Thornton for the link.

Patrice talks very passionately about visibility and fragments, rather than closed and big buried documents.

And most importantly emerges the concept of "know-why".

It has come to the point that social computing is the way Patrice has been working for the last while, and she could not bare facing a new job where they use email and attachments. It seems a lack of social computing would be a show stopper for Patrice deciding on whether to take on a new job…and I second that! And so does Karen Lilla it seems: “@marciamarcia Our team at IBM can’t live without our social media tools. Anarchy would ensue if it was ever taken away! @geoffliving”

OK, I just read Paula’s latest post and what do you know she reviewed the same video, and we both describe Patrice’s diatribe as passionate…I have also borrowed some of Paula’s words for the title of this post.

Like I said before no matter what I talk about lately it seems to be intune with what my network is thinking…indeed feels like a collective intelligence.

What Patrice said on fragments and context

"I knew at an instinctive level that what we were doing — all the unstructured communication, all the relationship building and stuff that our team was doing — was much more valuable than the work we were doing in written reports and meetings and minutes, which is what consumed the body of our time."

She typifies the usual scenario of all the brainwork and conversations done in meetings and email and then distilled into massive document that get shelved into a filing cabinet.

Where has all that brainwork gone, there is no trace of it…the unstructured stuff (know-why) is missing as it happened in email.

This is reminiscent of Dave Snowden on fragmented vs summarised material in relation to context, recall, usability and attention scarcity:

"Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information."

Access the link above for related issues on summarising content or codification, like:

"We only know what we know when we need to know it" "The way we know things is not the way we report we know things" "We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down"

For more on human behaviour, refer to this list of cognitive biases. eg. Retrospective Coherence, Narrative Fallacy, Fundamental Attribution Error

And Dave again:

"We urgently need to shift from working with chunked documents that seek to summarise material, to increasing direct access to fine granularity raw data in the form of anecdotes, sound files, pictures etc. etc. The process of chunking, or abstraction involves loss of content which may well contain weak signals or subtle clues and more importantly involves making the material specific to the context of its creation in time and socio-cultural context."

And yet again:

"The more you structure material, the more you summarize…the more you make material specific to a context or time, the less utility that material has as things change. For years now I have asked this question at conferences around the world: Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories? So why for the last decade and more have we focused on chunking up best practice? Increasingly unstructured material, blended in unexpected ways, provides a richer source of knowledge.

Arthur Shelley on a comment on a past blog says:

"In many ways, documents are dead (or at the least in a coma) until brought to life through a conversation"

I take it Arthur alludes to documents being a summarised outcome of the end result (know-what), meaning you then need to find the "know-why" to understand parts of the document. And social tools are a way to do this as they are raw fragments of the conversation…they basically record the conversation.

Alister Grigg (Fastman Consulting and Solutions) via an email conversation encapsulates this:

"…the logic, the argument, the thought process can only really be captured through that conversation. Capture and contextualise that conversation and you have the why. Link that to the output / deliverable and you have the why."

Alister goes on to say:

"Well written reports will include the arguments but as an output and not a record, and often influenced…"

This is quite a pithy statement. A document like a report has an agenda, whereas blog posts are raw fragments. There may be lots of peripheral information in blog posts that people may find to re-mix and use elsewhere.

This concept of raw fragments over summarised content also paralleIs with our cognitive processes in how we apply knowledge, see my past post:

“I need to be able to flex my skill in assembling my know-how in applied and unexpected situations. Eg we have people over for dinner in an hour and I need to cook dinner with what I have…improvise. You need to know the fundamentals, this way you can assemble fragments in new ways. In this respect we can see personal knowledge fragments as ingredients, and when I’m faced with a situation I bring those ingredients together and assemble them into an outcome. The knowledge is in recalling ingredients for the context and assembling them (knowing how they work together and as a whole). In another context some of those ingredients will assemble with others, and also the assembly may be approached differently. To me, this is know-how!"

Alister’s quote echos a passage from Nassim Taleb’s brilliant book "The Black Swan" on raw fragments and context:

“The journal was purportedly written without…knowing what was going to happen next, when the information available…was not corrupted by the subsequent outcomes.” “While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context. Again, it is the purported method of description of the event, not its execution, that was important.”

Matthew Hodgson also says something similar:

"If we look back to the rich oral history of many of our cultures, blogging is a reflection of the need to story-tell, carrying with it important information not only on the what – the facts like the reports we typically store in our recordkeeping systems – but also the meaning behind the why and how."

This is also a cultural move to a work-in-progress culture, where we are sharing workings out in the open, rather than just the finished product…the workings out are always there, but is it visible…and of course if it is visible it can be enriched, and re-mixed into new contexts.

Think of it as Steam and Ice:

“Steam - The thoughts, ideas and concepts that rattle around in our heads. Ice - Books and polished documents that we reference from time to time.”

Sorry about the tangent, but now we see how raw fragments over codified material is easier to digest and find, it is raw so it can be blended or re-mixed into another context…but most of all it’s the visibility and accessibility of all those myriad of decisions that help you understand how the "know-what" ie. the document you are reading, came to be.

Obviously both can co-exist, but as long as when when are reading a deliverable or report we can point back to the visible observable work, the tracemarks, the raw fragments, the conversations, whatever you want to call it, as this is where the "know-why" lives.

What Patrice said on "know-why"

Patrice mentions that we can’t reduce our brain work, you still have to work, but we can choose to re-purpose the tools we are currently using. She says with absolute clarity that an email is a blank page, an MS Word document is a blank page, a wiki is blank page, etc…which one are you going to choose when you do your work…a social and visible team space or email and attachments.

A social space has more value added down the road (tags, comments, links, visible, tracemarks…basically findable). Patrice shares a story of a task she was working on, and how a search in the Traction social platform revealed that her task had already been worked on or attempted before by another party:

"Along comes me, I’m here. I would not ever know about either Person A or B or that they had a conversation, but I can exhume a dialog that took place two years ago between these two individuals that lays out the problem and the solution. I can say…the following technology is now available. Problem solved."

Patrice also echoes something I posted about in getting up to speed with the help of accessing past conversations in online group spaces:

"…being placed in new situations, new organisations, and needed to get up to speed quickly - there was no luxury of time"

A quote in the Wikinomics book tells this same thing, in that the conversation once existed as it’s findable in a visible place (as opposed to closed email silos, which are a poor excuse for corporate memory). Now we can say, yeah this happened 2 years ago, not based on hear-say, but check out these links:

"When new problems and exceptions arise, people in organisations will swarm around that exception to try and resolve it […] this dencentralised approach to problem solving might be worked out in the lunchroom, while leaning over a colleague’s cubicle, over a pint after work, or increasingly through a long thread of emails The problem is that this causal approach to problem solving leaves no organisational memory of the event, with the risk that only people involved in creating the solution walk away with any new insights. Problems can persist like a bad cold, and solutions will be reinvented everytime the problem occurs. Social Software provides companies with a way to document and leverage those moments of innovation with relative ease, providing a living, breathing repository of easily accessible knowledge that grows along with the organisation. Companies can continually harness their local insights and adaptations to new problems by capturing and using those insights to drive organisational change and renewal."

The above quote is in relation to the context of "problems", but to me working visibly could be the norm in all group work, whether it’s a problem, task, coordinating something…anything.

And this echo’s Ross Mayfield’s quote about practice execution in that practice is used to fill the void, practice is used to fix things, but doing it in an invisible way using closed tools means we don’t leave any tracemarks behind, therefore no corporate memory.

And then Paula really brings home my notion of know-why and what the real corporate memory is:

"And yet, in most storage mechanism the work products themselves are stripped of the reality in which they were created. All the context as to why certain decisions were made at that time are all missing from the painfully-scrubbed collections of results and conclusions.The painful truth is, knowledge work products are not accurate representations of the work. The real work is on the cutting room floor and/or still in the minds of (or faded from) those that did the work and who may be gone. While there will always be ‘waste’ in any process, might the cuts from one project be relevant for another? Work products by themselves are often meaningless as they reflect what made it through the cuts. They lack the context of the work itself. When time and resources have past, how does one reconstruct the context for which the work product was created and you can no longer ask the workers questions about their work?"

And now let’s go back to Patrice in how she gives the details of Paula’s brilliant insight via a simple example of the invisible knowledge work that goes into a document review. It’s all too common that the person reading the document is missing the know-why in how to interpret the document. If all that know-why, all the workings-out that happened in creating/reviewing the document were visible, then it can easily be retrieved as the document can link to these raw fragments (conversations). These raw fragments, the knowledgework, can be consulted without having to track down the author (if they are still around), which we would then have to try and track down some emails, minutes, whiteboard, print-outs…

The key here is a document comment stream…which can inform the know-why or comments that hyperlink to other areas that have the know-why

Patrice’s know-why tragedy

"…100 page document get written, they’re beautiful, there’s a lot of work, lot of meetings, lot of brainpower, bright minds on difficult problems…and all this stuff…gets filed into Sharepoint [Document Managenent System]…nobody knows it’s in there…they don’t know how to find it, and if they could, they don’t know what they’re reading, why should they read it, there’s no context…because it’s been stripped now out of its environment…"

Patrice then talks about an order by the General (manager) to go back and re-work the document, and goes on vacation:

"…we work on pages 18 - 25…we do a lot of work - we cross out lines we explain why, we put in an appendix - and we put it back in Sharepoint…" "…unstructured conversation…our emails back and forth in generating that product which are now removed from the document itself…if we were blogging…it all would of been captured"

The lieutenant is asked to retrieve the document for the General, who wants to see the revised document…they are pointed to the new version of the file in the document management system:

"…change comparison…100 page document now an 87 page document [pages don’t match up anymore due to re-working it]…[the General and Lieutenant]… read this but…don’t know what they are doing. On page 20 there’s this whole paragraph about A and B and C…why did they do this…"

So they have to track down the authors of the document and get them back from the vacation:

"Now we are doing the work twice because we spent 3 weeks…doing this work and delivering it…all the value add is gone…yes we got a product, we still need a product…but this product is useless, because the knowledge work and the thinking, and the exchange, and the brainstorming, and the whiteboarding, and all that is gone…what good is it" "I will never use Sharepoint again because you’ve divorced me from my work" "Care and feeding of knowledge work requires relationships…people want high performance, but they forget about high touch…relationships are everything" "We did a lot of work…it got turned into some flat 80 page document that some General needed to have, and he got the document but he couldn’t understand the whys and wherefores" "He wouldn’t have…had the meeting to make the lieutenant retrieve the document, sit down with him and interpret the document [had he been able to access the visible unstructured conversations related to the document…whether in a blog or document comment stream, or whatever]

Sounds all too common. I bet you would hear hundreds of examples of this same story if you started asking around or eavesdropping in your workplace. I listen all the time at work and hear pains and pangs about communication and decisions being echoed around near where I sit.

Know-why is missing in action

Not long ago I was talking with Alister Grigg (who I linked to above) and he told me a story of a bridge built over a freeway. What the documentation didn’t tell them is why was it decided that the bridge was built to cover a 6 lane freeway when the freeway is only 4 lanes…where is this conversation that led to this decision?

Summary

Up until now the corporate memory has been in email silos, this is the know-how and know-why….the workings out, decisions, and conversations that led to deliverables. Just having end products (the know-what) is not good enough, we need to share the talent of the work that goes into this output…a move to a thinking-out-loud / work-in-progress culture.

Email silos are not discoverable and accessible, and people often will not share stuff in email that they would in blogs and forums. And now all the knowledge and decisions about documents can easily and intuitively be accessible via fragments whether they are micro-blogs, forums, blogs, wiki, document comment streams, etc…

Convergence of Themes

Emergence

Fragments

Visibility

Barely Repeatable Processes

Observable Work

Work-in-Progress

Thinking-out-Loud

Ambient Awareness

Stocks and Flows

Ad-hoc

Context

Craft

Next

In the next post I’ll explain my idea of conversational metadata. A way this "observable work" concept can be adopted (and take some email market share) as it’s designed into the process flow. This can happen various ways, but I’ll explain how it can happen against the backdrop of a Document Management System.

OK, I know we don’t "do" enterprise 2.0, but I thought it was a catchy title.

In case you haven’t scrolled down yet, this is a gigantic post even for my standards. It started off reviewing an evolving theme of enterprise 2.0 moving to process-based solutions, and on the way I stumbled across another perspective on the world of "knowledge work" and "processes" called "Adaptive Process Management".

I was going to break this post into parts, but I had already written it in a woven whole piece, so bad luck you are just going to have to read it bit by bit yourself.

Michael Idinopulos from the Transparent Office blog is on the money continuously…he has a very realistic take on enterprise 2.0. In his latest post he takes the enterprise 2.0 movement full circle…it’s not about tools, it’s not about culture, it’s about processes. Don’t I know it, I mentioned this a while ago, and I recently wrote a massive post not long ago on ad-hoc work. It’s actually about all these things, "design" needs to be sweet, people need to be willing to give it a go, but they will do this moreso if you make the tools irresistible and in-the-flow…kind of like you can’t do without a remote control for your TV.

And we do this my embedding the tools into existing processes, and also assembling these tools for adhoc work in a more solidfied way.

I’ll just note here, as I do at the end of this post, that socialising business processes is closing the current circle of the state of the enterprise. Next is leaping to another circle where there is a shift in organisational structure from a process to network based organisation.

Anyway back to the stepping stone, which is the focus of this post…

This is how Michael puts it:

"Process, rather than culture, is increasingly seen as the key enabler of social software in the enterprise. Rather than wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth about how to change organizational culture, we’re looking at how to insert social tools into the existing business process. Conversely, we’re also starting to look at how business processes can be redesigned and optimized now that these social tools are available."

Some similar words from Gautam Ghosh:

"The challenge is that the technology needs to become embedded in the business processes. If ERP was all about business processes, Enterprise 2.0 has to do with business relationships. There are currently lots of tools for managing the relationships within the enterprise and also for building relations with customers. There are CRM systems and e-mails. These systems are not giving anybody any pain. Nonetheless, they are frustrating at times in the etiquettes they employ and the way they are structured. Also, the vendors have not been able to showcase how these things will be able to ease some pain that currently the business relationships have."

This is poignant as it brings up the notion of these tools to help with existing business issues that current tools and processes are failing at, and it also brings up the human behavioural obstacle of the risk averse "endowment effect."

More of the same from Ajay Gopidran, but he also throws in "shifting context" into the mix, and conversations about general topics while neglecting conversations within the nitty-gritty of a business process.

"Most of us are aware of the huge benefits that E20 delivers, but what we fail to understand is, at work most of the work-related conversations are triggered within various business applications that users/employees use for Project Management, CRM, SCM, ERP, HRMS, etc… So if we blindly build enterprise collaboration networks and tools that are independent of these business applications then these E20 tools & network will be mostly used for conversations around generic topics, limiting the value they bring to the organization. For the business user, he/she will have to switch from the ’context’ of the business application to Email to conduct business conversations. Switching ’context’ is such a waste of productive time and the ’knowledge’ which should have resided within the business app, for others to benefit, is now buried deep within someone’s inbox, with the risk of this ‘knowledge’ walking out the door with a departing employee. I believe Enterprise 2.0 tools will find a quicker adoption in organizations if they are: > Simple tools that integrate with common business applications, rather than creating additional silos of information that requires maintenance > Designed to increase business-related conversations, with sharing as a natural part of working"

Ajay again:

"“When enterprise social networks work independent of other business applications, e-mail continues to be the choice for conversations. The conversations on the social network is then limited to generic topics. For social networking to succeed in the enterprise, it must have business content. If my business applications can socialize around business events, then there is a definite business value…"

Ajay is the founder of Qontext, and this app looks like it’s right on the money as per the focus of this post:

"Applications that support our business process and manage data do not have built-in tools to support conversations among co-workers. Lack of tools on an application page, say a new HR policy page on the portal that may provide context for a conversation, forces us to switch to email. This results in loss of work continuity and even productivity. Though such conversations grow and become invaluable over time, emails get buried deep in the inbox and are delinked from the context that started them. Qontext (pronounced ‘context’) offers simple, yet powerful toolset for communicating, sharing, and collaborating from inside common business applications."

Hatch Carpenter also picked up on this meme over 6 months ago (pleasantly surprised to see I left a comment). Hutch calls this Social Software 2.0 (Addressing Existing Enterprise Workflows):

"The integration of collaboration, increased findability, social networking and crowdsourcing into core enterprise activities requiring defined workflows, specific user sign-offs, results measurement and role-based access."

He has also picked up on Nenshad Bardoliwalla post, as has Dennis Howlett, on how social computing can be integratred into existing business proceses.

Hutch talks about the participation obstacle of shifting context:

"In Social Software 1.0, that’s a standalone wiki. I’m a fan of the notion that collaboration needs to occur in-the-flow of work. And having a separate wiki for collaborating on a customer quotation analysis makes it tougher to get usage. In Social Software 2.0, that’s a collaborative space integrated into a sales force automation application. The customer quotation analysis occurs right where all the “action” occurs in the effort to win new business."

He then lists scenarios of current business processes that could be socialised, like proposals (see Zapproved), procurement, product management (feature requests)

…this social software movement has happened in reverse….

Let’s change gears

First we had KM mandating people to share what they know, without any engagement..

One of these tools were Communties of Practice (CoPs), but yet no-one could find like people to be able to share their interest with in a CoP space. This environment is not mandated, but rather facilitated, and the level of engagement is based on trust and reciprocity.

In order to find each other to collaborate and create CoPs we then had expert locators, and now we have social networks (from subject matter experts to subject matter networks)

We wanted people to go out of their way and volunteer their know-how (and try to attack this resistance via culture change).

Even if we have engagement, it’s still open social silos or social islands.

But now enterprise-wide networks are connecting the organisation as a whole. People can share and ask questions in the open, they can find each other, they can then spin off into collaborations and CoPs.

But even so, this is not going to touch everyone in the organisation. The part that will touch the most is the profile feature of the social network as a look up tool, but not everybody will want to post updates, but that’s OK.

Socialise processes

So how do we get social tools to touch everyone?

And if we find a way to do this, we then hope people will become used to the technology and it’s use, and expect that people will have another look at social network microblogging and CoPs and collaboration groups.

But first we need to get them hooked by offering them a way to do their everyday routines and tasks better.

Now we have finally got there, what we want to do is not just offer something new, but also offer something that attacks current pain points (not a solution looking for a problem), now we are thinking about getting people to work socially within current processes.

Social tools need to be features of existing products, they need to be designed into our flow and processes. This way they are not seen as social or a timewaster, they are seen as productivity and process improvement…so in the end they are just the newest way to do something better, a better way to execute our tasks, so why wouldn’t you want it.

As Michael says this of course makes ROI easier (see Dennis Howlett), as you measure the process improvement and effectiveness doing it the new or enhanced way. And adoption is easier as it’s not about volunteering know-how, it’s not about "what’s in it for me", it’s simply about doing your same processes but in an enhanced way…I don’t get up to change the channel, I now use a remote.

But when I say doing it a new way, I don’t mean shifting contexts during a process ie. leave my process tool, and hop over to an isolated forum, then come back to my process tool…when things aren’t designed into the flow of working, they won’t be used. Sure going over to that forum may be more effective than closed email, but it’s not convenient, if it takes more than 7 seconds to access (and then there is the time to write the content) it just won’t cut it.

It’s also important that the words blog, forum, microblog, blog are no longer foreign terms as they are embedded into your turf…

eg. 1

An ideal IT Support database would have a feature that when you’re stuck on a call, you can blast a message to your colleagues. Blast a message is a much more comfortable word than blog, microblog or forum. At the moment you either email or IM people you know, or perhaps hop over to the IT CoP to post a forum question. This is not in the flow of my existing process, this is clunky, it needs to augment the existing process in a smooth and unconscious way.

eg. 2

When the support call is closed it may perhaps automatically post an update in the activity stream. Currently you wouldn’t alert people that you just closed a call, it’s instead recorded in some backend database that is reported on each month. But with activity feeds, this is a move from "need to know" to "need to share", even better that the system shares it on your behalf (implicitly).

eg. 3

A Project management tool where you post a progress update in a field, and that blasts a message out. If someone said you are blogging, you would say what do you mean, I’m just updating a field that broadcasts a message.

Currently we need to go to our CoP/Team space and use a blog…not gonna happen, instead it needs to be designed into the process…it has to be unconscious.

eg. 4

Good design means we can leave inline comments at points in the Project Management Gnatt Chart, similar to inline comments on the timeline of a music track in Soundcloud (see What is a timed comment and how is it different to a regular comment?). Again, this is designed in-the-flow, rather than shift context over to your Team space and use a microblog, blog or forum. It’s convenient and it just seems normal, it doesn’t feel like your publishing…which can be a dirty word.

From 1st into 2nd gear

So far we have got out of reverse and into 1st gear by socialising existing business processes, now we can shift to second gear for that Above-the-Flow sharing that we were trying to do at the start, but people just weren’t ready for.

Now that people are used to the tools and are enhancing existing processes; engaged, trust them, and don’t want to do without them (like a tradesperson’s toolbox) ie. they are the new email and attachments on the block…now we might have a chance of people going over to some social silos and sharing know-how.

So yes social tools are about "tacit knowledge" if you want to call it that, they are about people sharing experiences, people connecting to others, asking questions to the crowd, collaborating…but they are also about process improvement.

And not clunky process improvement as I described in eg 1 above.

Here’s another example

We used to review a document in email, but then we moved to a forum thread…yes open, unlike email, but still separated from the document, and clunky in my processes…it’s not unconscious. The new way is the document itself having a comments thread. I’m just commenting on a document, yet it’s very similar to using a forum to discuss a document review. But yet a forum is scary to some, it’s a new technology, whereas the document commenting feels normal, and it’s right there in my flow, rather than somehow looking for a link on the document that points to a forum thread.

Forums and Blogs are still essential as standalone places for groups to share and help each other eg. CoPs. Networks are still essential for people to connect, discover, converse, crowdsource. But these are both 2nd gear. What we have to get right is get out of reverse from standalone tool spaces, and shift into 1st gear to In-the-Flow of processes, and with this comes in-the-flow design…then as already mentioned we can shift into 2nd when we are ready for it.

I’m not saying that 2nd gear (Above-the-Flow) is not working now; there are plenty succesful examples of crowdsourcing and enterprise use of social tools, but I just think we need to stay in 1st gear for longer so social tools become the norm…so people don’t even realise that what they are doing is blogging or asking questions in a microblog, etc…

I guess we had Lean and Six Sigma for process improvement, and now we have social computing for knowledge work (which encompasses process improvement). The difference is social computing is not only about process improvement and efficiency, it’s also about effectiveness, connecting, opportunities, emergence, adapting to change, agility. Social computing basically can effect anything, it’s a literacy, a way of being.

Anyway, at last we have realised we have been doing everything in reverse.

Real examples

Sameer Patel has shared some real examples of how social computing can be embedded into existing business processes that help deal with current pain points that keep executives awake at night.

The unique offerings that social computing enable such as networking and emergence are great, but to get a foot in the executive’s door we need to demonstrate how social computing can remedy existing issues by socialising process tools like CRM and ERM.

Sameer says:

"The problem is that, in the context of E2.0, there’s little discussion around performance objectives where social computing constructs and technologies can move the needle on discrete but large scale business solutions. Equally bad is that there’s little thought and discussion around the optimal solutions architecture and combination of process + social that can solve large scale problems that keeps the c-suite awake at night." "…we ran a 3 hour workshop on how to get executives to understand the business value of social computing in the context of performance goals that keep them up at night. Following that we ran sessions that addressed delivering tangible value in the context of known functions and processes in the enterprise: purpose driven collaboration, reducing customer support costs via social concepts and improving product innovation via social concepts. No tools, no features and frankly no adoption. Just performance acceleration via strategic process and performance alignment"

Sameer shares an example of social + process improving business performance:

"R Ray Wang’s estimate that social computing concepts, when injected into process, actually reduces costs 2 to 4 X times over those very ERP-esq call center/CRM technology driven programs…Contrast that with the fact that traditional CRM systems on their own are often nothing more than glorified reporting systems that sales reps are mandated to use, in exchange for their commission check."

The result:

"…data, and intelligence normally buried in closed process centric activity and systems were pushed into people centric social realms for improvement, only then to be put back into process systems in their newer highly optimized forms.

The current poster child for social computing in bed with process is Chatter by Salesforce…Sameer’s review:

"Where unstructured and, really, knowledge access and sharing was conducted directly in email, via Chatterbox, now accountants and finance professionals can now tap into the larger community for expertise and critical customer knowledge to understand exceptions in a process (say, an overdue invoice from an otherwise timely customer)."

Sameer re-iterates:

"…unless we see a social + process in context, Enterprise 2.0 won’t realize its full potential. Whilst tools certainly won’t provide the solution alone, Chatter has the capability of being the first integrated showcase where social concepts are unleashed to enrichen discrete processes (in this case, closing and keeping customers) towards established performance goals."

This is also in line with a solution to Oscar Berg’s post with a need to marry "social + process" for sales reps. The company he talks of have different divisions of sales reps each offering different services. The key is to cross-pollinate sales across divisions ie. capitalise on opportunity. Oscar mentions the importance of trust and reciprocity for a sales person to take the time to refer, and a need to build rapport to enhance this…but sales within the same area only do a formal meet-up once a year, and meet-ups across divisions don’t happen formally. Standalone social computing isn’t a solution as there really isn’t intrinsic motivation and it isn’t tied to work processes, but socialising current process tools like the CRM may be the answer, as they already use it and trust it. Basically it’s a tool they use to do work, so rather than shifting context to include a social dimension, instead embed social features into the work tool itself:

"They do have a great CRM system that everybody uses and likes. The CRM system makes it possible for them to be aware of any sales activities relating to their customers, including those performed by sales people from other divisions. But it does not connect sales people and make them talk, get to know each other and share leads back and forth. Like most CRM systems, it primarily focuses on planning and keeping track of sales activities, not connecting the individuals in the sales force directly with each other."

Sameer alludes to the shift to social objects, where conversations happen around an object, which I call "conversational metadata".

"…the ability to collaborate around an object ( a lead, a competitor, a customer, a topic) brings process + social closer than ever before."

Which is basically the same as what I mentioned before where my work will soon test a microblogging product within the backdrop of a Document Management System (DMS). A microblogging product at our work embedded into the DMS has much more contextual use and value rather than a standalone platform. Now we have the opportunity to do document review in the document’s comments stream, which feeds into the microblogging companion stream (the activity stream).
Basically we can socialise current processes from a closed and isolated email environment to an open and social object environment. This is solving a current pain point.

And hey, if people want to shift into 2nd gear and use the microblogging tool to do the usual status updates, sharing links, ask questions, looking up profiles, then that’s what we want as well.

Here’s a paper and slidedeck on Sameer’s perspective of social computing, which is much more palatable at an entry level when dealing with current business process issues, as opposed to offering via the 2nd gear angle of better collaboration, networking and awareness.

Andy McAfee’s post on What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work? is not so much about process, but is still related to this post as it’s about designing features in your flow of using existing products. His suggestion is why not embed a search box from your social computing platform into the Intranet. The bulk of the organisation may forget about the social computing platform (yet another site to visit), so embedding it where they live just seems the right thing to do.

Observable Work

All this is a take back to "observable work", in which Jim McGee explains we lost with the digital age. I won’t expand on this here, read my comment on Jim’s post. The premise of Jim’s post being that all the knowledge work is now hidden by default, and not visible as we work digitally…but now social computing is here to take us back.

Jim says:

"As a knowledge worker, much of what I get paid for happens inside my own head. Before the advent of a more or less ubiquitous digital environmesful examples of crowdsourcing used to generate a variety of markers and visible manifestations. That visibility was important in several ways that weren’t evident until they disappeared: Seeing work in progress in front of me made it possible to gauge my progress and make connections between disparate elements of my work. Different physical representations helped to quickly establish how baked a particular idea was. Physically shared work spaces supported rich social interactions that enriched the final deliverables and contributed to the learning of multiple individuals connected to the effort. For all the productivity gains that accrue to the digitization of knowledge work, one unintended consequence has been to make the execution of knowledge work essentially invisible, making it harder to manage and improve such work. The benefits of visibility are now something that we need to seek mindfully instead of getting them for free from the work environment” "Junior members of the team could see how the process unfolded and the product evolved […] Knowledge sharing was a free and valuable side effect of processes that were naturally visible."

Jim has a follow-up post.

Emergineering

Up until now I have spoken about socialising processes as a type of Social BPM, and perhaps these interactions auto-posting into activity feeds (a kind of business intelligence and awareness…see Socialtext Connect), where conversations can further happen around these events.

But as Michael says in the start of this post; it’s also about re-designing processes…I keep linking to Thingamy when I talk about this.

In Thingamy language; socialising ERP (Easily Repeatable Processes) and building BRP (Barely Repeatable Processes).

So far in this post I have been talking about socialising ERP, equally important is what Thingamy deals with and that’s a business modelling tool (as is a spreadsheet) in building BRP.

Here’s an example:

"A desperate call from a chap in the field when a supplier does not show up, a router that goes whirr-kaplunk, or the back and forth of mails prior to getting that big project up on rails. All run and supported by Monday morning meetings, boss meddling, e-mail, faxes, phone calls and to-do lists. The business processes that’s not even called Business Process. The process orphans. The nuisance. The stuff that actually take most of our time. What I’d call Business Practices. I wonder what the gain would be if the Practices could be as efficiently handled as the proper Processes? A lot? A whooping gigantic leap!"

Here’s a related link.

This is related to my post on ad-hoc processes, and to what Jordan Frank says about the uniqueness of social tools in that they help you improvise to get your work done when things go wrong or circumstances change…we currently use email and attachement as our survival tool.

Let’s not leave out both Google Wave and Activities on Lotus Connections, which also focus on ad-hoc work, and the idea of Activity templates and checklists is a natural step, saving people to entirely think about the whole process eg. if you organise a conference using "Activities" you can not only share your activity for others to see, but also create a template based on your experience, that others may use as good practice and re-frame to their context.

Another tool that I failed to mention in the "Real Examples" section is SAP Streamwork:

"More often than not, collaboration and decision-making is a hodge-podge of emails, one-on-one phone calls, conference calls, in-person meetings, and informal desk visits. It’s rare that a group ends up with a unified view of how a decision was reached - or a complete record of next steps and task owners. In short, it’s meant to help orchestrate ad hoc work that would otherwise lack a structured process flow. It’s a place where outcomes are recorded for future reference."

Sig from Thingamy sets things straight in saying that SAP’s tool is not a process engine. Thingamy is more than just doing ad-hoc work in an enabling open and social way, it’s actually a DIY flow tool…you assemble the tool to your context or should I say to your Barely Repeatable Process.

Like my coverage of Rex Lee’s post on social engineering, Jordan Frank (from Traction Software) has a follow-up post on the same meme, based on structuring for emergence; he has coined it "Emergineering".

Jordan talks about using unstructured tools to reinvent current business processes, I like a quote in his post:

"E2.0 (doing architecture for people) vs. E1.0 (doing architecture to people)."

Jordan said somewhere (I can’t remember where) that these adhoc processes leave behind artefacts, not just content but also how the adhoc process was structured on the fly…he often talks about the effectiveness of tags as a key aspect to using social tools in a process. I agree adhoc collaboration can leave behind tracemarks of how you did your workaround, these tracemarks can later be re-used in a looseway, like templates that you can mould to your context, kind of a skeleton process that you can base your process on…like Jordan’s work partner Greg Lloyd calls "lightweight coordination".

I really think it’s great that Jordan and Greg can stretch their tool to work for social processes, and this and general social computing is their niche. Thingamy doesn’t do this, but it does something unique which puts it into an extreme niche of it’s own…it’s not really about social computing but more about noticing the tracemarks from past practices (BRP) and assembling a DIY process which can be dismantled or renovated by it’s owner at any time…design is perpetual and the power of design is with the buyer.

Jim McGee cautions turning judgement calls into rule-based aspects of a process…but this is the key to Jordan and Greg’s (as well as Sig’s thinking) in that you can sculpture the process, so it’s not rigid. We live in a world where things are now being done "post" by the user, rather than "pre" by the software designer eg. user tags, rather than just librarian categories.

Jim also says some real things about culture saying you cannot manipulate it, it moreso emerges from new behaviours. Which means we need to create conditions for engagement, where everything else cascades.

Which also reminds me of something Victor Newman says that

"…culture is a by-product of a technology stabilization process"

BPR to SPR redux

Jordan Frank clears up the difference between BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) and SPR (Social Process Re-engineering).

SPR is more people-centric with unknown outcomes, it’s about understanding how things are practiced and structuring for emergence, and can complement BPR which is more predictable, about optimisation, and is outcome driven.

Gee this sounds like the difference in how KM has been managed in the past and how social computing is influencing a new way for it to be managed, moreso facilitated.

Are BPR and BPM the same thing? Sandy Kemsley calls Business Process Management:

"A management discipline for improving cross-functional business processes"

Mike Gotta relates BPR tools to a form-follows-function design:

"Systems designed to support functional requirements do provide ways for workers to contribute, however the contributions are part of their explicit work actions and generally known ahead of time. Such systems cannot effectively support contribution scenarios not captured as part of the design process. Those involved in the application design process often place little effort on requirements that address the social and emergent aspects of communication, information sharing and collaboration. Workers resort to e-mail to solve such contribution gaps - a key reason why e-mail remains the most popular tool used by workers to express themselves. E-mail is one of the few universal tools workers have access to that allows contributions in a free-form manner."

SBPR as middleground

Is SBPR (Social Business Process Re-engineering) the middle ground ie social features on existing BPR tools, like I mentioned earlier about the Support database that has a message feature, rather than having to hop over to a forum that lives elsewhere…and like the social CRM tools Sameer has posted about.

And further to this, which I mention further down, being able to build features/connectors into existing BPR tools…or maybe that’s for OpenSource…but let’s not forget Qontext.

Adaptive Case Management (ACM)

Now is this similar to Jordan’s "re-emergineering" concept" of SPR?

Keith Swenson has authored a book on ACM called "Mastering the unpredictable"..and what’s interesting is that it seems ACM is very similar to KM in that it talks about non-routine, unpredictable work…what we call knowledge work. Another way of looking at it is when not to use BPM.

He describes ACM (with examples) in relation to knowledge work and in contrast to BPM:

"Process technologies such as workflow and BPM have delivered well-proven ROI when the process is predictable and repeatable. In contrast, knowledge work involves processes where goals and certain tasks are well established, yet the exact sequences of these varies from with each case. These processes are not nearly predictable as those found with traditional applications of BPM and workflow, but the need for achieving productivity in knowledge work has never been greater. For example, the course of treatments for a patient are not predictable at the time of admission to a hospital, but testing and treatment has to begin without a fixed plan. The course of court case is not predictable, but it is still very important that everything is prosecuted correctly. Negotiations as specialized as the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or as common as the merger of two companies, all are examples of goal-driven processes where the specific paths to completeness are not predictable at any detailed level. A promising solution for achieving productivity in the goal-driven processes of knowledge work can be found in new approach called “Adaptive Case Management” which is a combination of traditional Case Management, with strong Process and Analytics capabilities."

And more:

"When a process is not predictable, as is the case with knowledge work in general, then putting a lot of work into an elaborate diagram is not worth while. Because the process is emergent, you have to model the process using something that people can read, add to, and manipulate readily while they are doing other things. With knowledge work, it is not the case that you have a dedicated business analyst to work and get the process model just right; instead the actual case worker needs to do it on the fly. …with case management, where a process is modified and adapted to each individual situation, this extra effort is not justified. The people modifying this process are not trained experts in process, but instead are more worried about their job done. The case owner is responsible for process, and need the freedom to customize the process for the specific case"

And just to be clear:

"Case Management is a technique that is useful when processes are not repeatable. A case represents a situation without necessarily requiring a process. Case management can be used for one-off situations for which the process can not be predicted in advance. A practitioner of case management needs a different kind of support: instead of tools to aid in the elaborate design and optimization of a process up front, a case manager need a way to communicate goals and intent. In short, case management is useful when the process is unpredictable, or at least not repeatable enough to warrant the up front investment in perfecting the process."

ACM is data-centric, rather than process-centric

Like Sameer, Hutch and Sig (mentioned earlier in this post), and in addition to the examples above, Keith goes into more detail on an example of knowledge work, which is moreso based on data, tools and connection rather than defined processes:

"…case management is data centric. This is correct, because when the process is not predictable, how can you use the process as the organizing principle? Since you can’t, what else is there: data. The example: a patient, and this is a good example; in a case management system you organize all the actions around the patient and the patient record, which *must* exist in advance, and through the entire treatment of the patient. Can you imagine Dr. House sitting down and drawing a BPMN diagram at that point? Can you imagine Dr. Cuddy drawing that diagram? Of course not. The event would be gone before the diagram was drawn. The “real-time” events that occur in these situations are not predictable, and would need to be handled without process modeling"

Exactly, tell that to a windmill repairman. I’m sure there are repeatable processes, but when they encounter something they have not seen before and you are 60 feet up, access to microblogging on your phone in order to ask a question and connect as it happens is knowledge work in action. Oh no, hang on a second I will visit the best practice database from way up here…NOT!

More examples of knowledge work:

"…doctor’s job of diagnosing a rare disease; the negotiation of a treaty or a corporate merger; the investigation of a crime; or the prosecution of a court case. These are jobs that can not predicted at the time the job is started. It is not simply that we have not gone to the trouble of mapping the process, but the process is not knowable, because the details that effect the course are not yet discovered."

Jacob Ukelson explains where after planning; in the execution stage is where ad-hoc work proliferates:

"…there are many excellent tools out there to help plan projects and keep them on track, but in most cases for project execution, tracking and management everyone falls back on the tried and true methods of email and documents. There is a project owner who defines specific project related goals and checklists, but that is it - everything else is managed on the fly by the participants themsleves and guided by the project owner. …at a Board of Directors meeting any number of decisions are made that require a follow-on process…that request quite often turns into a full-fledged, ad-hoc process that can involve quite a few people and needs to be managed. Again the tools of preference for executing these processes are email and documents. No one would even consider modeling the process, especially since it probably isn’t completely understood until it starts executing…"

Design by doing

Keith Swenson talks about social process designers, rather than just users of socialised BPM tools that have been designed by the vendor:

"Ask yourself: who is it that does BPM? The developers (process analysts, programmers) are the ones doing BPM. We are not talking about the end-user doing BPM. The end user does business, not BPM. The BPM supports the user in doing this business, but those users are not doing BPM when they use a fully developed process application. "The proper use of social software in the business will eliminate the need for process designers. Everyone will be a designer, in the way that everyone is a writer in the blogosphere."

Keith points to Jun Sinur on the difference between designing upfront, or desiging as it happens:

Doing by Design is the pre-planned definition of a predictable, routine process as traditional BPM suggests. It involves a life-cycle that starts with process discovery, process definition, application development, simulation, testing, and ultimately deploying it. This works if the process is predictable. Design by Doing is an approach that works when the process is not predictable, and can not be written down ahead of time. Since you can not predict it, you have to elaborate it as you go along. You design it, as you are doing it. There is no development life-cycle. This works on unpredictable emergent process."

To be more succinct:

Max Pucher - "Endusers do not just influence the design, they actually create the process on the fly.“ Keith Swenson - "This is really key: adaptive processes are not pre-defined as processes, but only really become processes when the components are assembled at run time by the user."

More on ACM or Social BPM, or whatever…lots of links here…and a comparison of definitions

BTW - In my last post on ad-hoc processes I posted about Jacob Ukelson’s (from ActionBase) concept of "Human Process Management", which is now considered ACM. Jacob has a really good presentation on ACM and knowledge work, and I also like how Jacob talks about an equilibrium of both structured and unstructured work.

Anyway, does ACM sound very similar to adhoc work and exception handling that we evangelise social computing can enhance? I think so. This is the next move that Hutch Carpenter talks about where we are moving on from social apps as a place to talk about things in general (which has its place) to putting these to work as features of existing processes, and ACM is a good convergence.

Summary

Maybe I should have called this post BPM 2.0, but not really because the knowledge work we are talking about is not pre-planned into a process flow…BPM 2.0 and ACM are different in the fundamentals, but I expect we will hear these words interchanged.

BPM 2.0 (SBPR or SBPM) would be more about socialising certain aspects of the pre-planned process, and perhaps even be able to do some ad-hoc work, whereas ACM (SPR) is adhoc and uncertain from the outset.

This Social BPM webcast covers the aspects nicely…but it misses out the "SPR, emergineering, ACM" constructs about adhoc work from the word "go", rather than just socialising existing BPM tools.

Embed ad hoc collaboration into your structured processes and gain a unified view of enterprise information-across business functions-for effective and efficient decision-making Reach out to an expanded network for expert input in resolving exceptions in business workflows Add social feedback loops to your enterprise applications and continuously improve business processes

The difference is in the modelling:

"…a doctor will design the treatment plan for a patient while the patient is being treated. A judge will design the course of action for a case while presiding over a court. An executive will design the action plan while running the board meeting. At a very abstract level, you could say that these are process modeling activities - but in reality these are done in a starkly different way that bears no resemblance to anything we know of as process modeling in BPM …the practice of case management is not just BPM “done on the fly”. A case manager is not primarily concerned with modeling, automating, executing, controlling, measuring, and optimizing the flow of business activities. A case manager, instead, wants to get things done. Case management is concerned with representations of goals…while in BPM the goals drive the design of the process, but are not made explicit. In in the practice of BPM, you want to perfect the processes to be repeatable thousands of times, but case management is not about mass production, but about making a one-off custom solution for this one situation that will probably never happen again, so extra effort to make the case repeatable is wasted. "

Betrand Duperrin who is always ahead of the curve pretty much summarizes my whole post in the context of enterprise 2.0. In his post he quotes Martin Koser on:

"…the dichotomy between orderly processes (read BPM) and the fuzzy world of Social Software (read Enterprise 2.0) How do we prevent that social software works out to be just another “silo” (”build a wiki, and they will come”)? How can we integrate social software into existing domains, usage arenas and task specific systems? What are the best ways to start with social software in the enterprise? How do we ensure that social software implementations turn out to be “complementary and integrative”? Is it a good idea to marry up SNS functionality with BPM software"

Bertrand talks about three business activities:

1. Serendipity (connecting)
2. BPR
3. Adhoc processes (where BPR isn’t suitable, and where we currently use email and attachments)

• Social computing has mainly been focused on point 1
• And then moved onto point 3 (but we still haven’t got this right, it’s not quite yet pervasive or specific…Thingamy is a stand out, and in a different way so is Activities on Lotus Connections and perhaps ActionBase)
• And now we are tackling to socialise point 2

With all three we can connect, be aware, surface opportunties; we can deal with uncertainties and collaborate; and we can optimise stable patterns for predictable outcomes (BPR) but in a way that they can be flexible to deal with the unknown that comes fleeting towards us.

• Social BPR is about product designers socialising their products eg. Chatter
  • What about being able to renovate existing BPR tools yourself, kind of like how 3rd parties make Twitter extensible (an emergence of architecture), is Qontext this tool I imagine
  • What we want is BPR to have flavours of Point 1 and 3…allowing room or capability to reach out (connect to people) and less rigid, and room to improvise (flex the structure to cater for ad-hoc contexts, without having to leave to use another tool).
• A tool like Thingamy is like building the product yourself
• ActionBase is a new task based version of email (in the same league as Google Wave and Activites on Lotus Connections)

Further on in Martin’s post he lists what Enterprise 2.0 means to organisational departments. The one we are familiar with is KM and Learning, where the focus is sharing, collective intelligence, emergence, sense-making. A lot of the time this is what we think Enterprise 2.0 is, but this is more KM 2.0. What about the other departments, they too want to fix their pain points, they want to have better and looser processes, see Sameer Patel’s post where he mentions that it’s not all about emergence and bottom-up use, it’s also about explicitly designing social ways into existing business processes.

Conclusion

Socialising processes is more of a sure bet in getting social computing adopted (the new way of doing things eg. conversing in the open, observable work, socialised workarounds).

But when we talk of real enterprise 2.0, or a transformation of the enterprise, it’s a shift from process to network based organisations, which I will post about soon.

In considering this, I still think socialising business processes is the first stepping stone in both a cultural and productive point of view…getting people prepared.

For now the key is that we are no longer to be limited by design, and using a leadership metaphor we can now be the conductor!

Actually a good metaphor for this whole post is for organisations to be less rigid and more jazz-like where we can improvise and come together at check points. Stephen Shapiro says:

"Most businesses are run like classical symphonies - long, with elaborate compositions (detailed workflows) that leave little room for interpretation. Employees are expected to follow these compositions rote. Unfortunately, by the time they learn the score, the music would have to be changed. This organizational symphony no longer works in today’s age of change. Instead we need jazz-like organizations. Innovation is not random. In fact, it emerges best when there is a structure to nurture it, much like jazz in the world of music. Jazz is heavy on innovation (’improvisation’ in musical terms). Just as innovation is not random, neither is improvisation. Jazz has a simple structure, like 12-bar, B-flat blues. It has a rhythm, chord progression, and tempo. Businesses need much the same to succeed: Simple structures that allow innovation to emerge, in the moment, when it is needed most."

In the previous post I reviewed a video interview with the talented Jordan Frank from Traction Software, which was on social tools and ad-hoc processes. This video got me inquiring further into what others have said about this over the past couple of years. So I headed to my bookmark collection, and this post is what resulted.

But first I’ll repeat a few highlights from Jordan’s interview:

• Workflow systems are great until they fail…a need to have a collaboration safety net.
• Collaboration is not necessarily about making the things that are planned go right, it’s about dealing with the things that are unplanned that go wrong
• It’s hard to troubleshoot when what happened till now is not easily accessible or not recorded in a raw fashion
• You can’t anticipate a workflow for fixing a problem (with social tools like Teampage) you can model informal processes on the fly
• Make sure when business conditions change your business processes don’t get left behind

I also linked to one of Traction whitepaper’s that demonstrates the bottom-up enabling tools we now have to better cope with getting things done, and by default achieving the original aims of KM and being an agile organisation.

Emergence by default

Social computing is about many things: discovery, connection, conversation, emergence, crowdsourcing, transparency, engagement, innovation, collaboration, findability, diversity, sharing, learning, helping, sense-making…

Helping and sense-making have an immediate impact eg. stuck on an issue, asking a question, getting an answer and moving on…whilst this happened others got to learn for free.

In a way emergence happens anyway as a result of sense-making ie. emergence that surfaces from "In-the-flow" working, which is in contrast to "Above-the-flow" emergence (crowdsourcing, sharing your experience, etc). Either way we have emergence because people are visible and their interactions are documented, all made possible via bottom-up enabling tools.

Another immediate sense-making aspect is dealing with exceptions to processes. Email is our survival tool to not only improvise, but to plain and simply do work. Same goes with MS Word and Excel…then put them together as email and attachments.

James Dellow pins this down:

"Like cockroaches, spreadsheets have continued to thrive despite the growing (perceived) sophistication of modern enterprise information system. They record data, drive barely repeatable processes, they are spread around by email systems and people use them to address problems that other systems fail to solve."

Process vs Practice

I will refer later to "barely repeatable processes", but for now let’s looks at processes and how we need flexibility.

Jack Vinson quotes Mike Gotta on Process vs Practice:

"Process is "how work should be done." And Practice is "how work is actually done." When process fails (exceptions), people use practice to fix things. When process doesn’t exist, practice fills the void. While people don’t realize it when they engage in practice, they actually are tapping into community — an informal social network within or beyond the enterprise to discover expertise and get things done. The problem is that we haven’t had the tools to support good practice."

An interesting comment on Jacks post by Marnix:

"Process is the way work is being done, combining technology and practices. Culture is when this happens unconsciously; ’it is just the way we do things around here’"

Move from pre-defined structure to DIY

Bil Ives says the difference with new social tools is that the people (users) decide on the structure of the process:

"ERP provides infrastructure that often requires work processes to confound to the software structure. Enterprise 2.0 is often attempting to provide tools that will conform to your work practices. With ERP adoption is not the issue, except in the 9% of cases where parallel adoption is used, With ERP the issue is implementation, as people are generally required to use the system. The study stated than 83% of the ERP implementations studied were considered successful."

Bill also 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.”

Joe McKendrick gives BPM a new name:

"No matter how automated a workflow may get, there are always stages in which things need to stop for an exception, an approval or a quality check. The role of human interactions has always been a complicating factor in business processes. Introducing Enterprise 2.0 approaches may help shift the emphasis from business process re-engineering to business process re-energizing."

Jim McGee combines the concept of rigid processes and how it relates to emergence:

"In an accounting or ERP system, the system’s designers specify all aspects of workflow, database design, and information structure in advance. Users are expected to select from among pre-defined choices and enter only such data as the designers have provided for. In designing a system for emergence, the designers leave a number of these decisions open; waiting for users to fill in the blanks"

Paula Thornton comments on a past post of mine on this meme:

"Real knowledge work is about handling the exceptions. Everything else can be automated. Thinking about the frustrations you’ve had with anything you’ve tried to accomplish in getting work done (save your own shortcomings or those of others). A good majority of them are either due to over-automation (not allowing for exceptions) or underautomation (leaving you to manage mundane tasks). What IT methodology focuses on assessing for such balances? NONE!"

These are our tools to execute work. They are also the tools that come in especially handy when the process system we should be using is too rigid.

I know when I was doing document management support work the support database was merely used as managing the call, but the conversations happened in email. That is, email is our coping mechanism. I’ve posted on this before, and Larry Hawes has a post on the hybrid use of both process-centric and people-centric tools. The BPM type tool to locate issues, status, who’s on it, blended together with conversational tools where the troubleshooting actually happens. There is a place for both where they complement each other…the road ahead is integration 2.0.

This is when we say social computing isn’t really anything new, it’s just the next survival tool or coping mechanism which is more effective than email. Especially in circumstances where we need help, and ad-hoc collaboration to get through a process. We have phone, then email / IM and MS Office, now we have microblogging, blogs, forums…and wikis to stitch the process together.

Even a janitor is not absent from these non-routine and improvisational working conditions.

Unstructured and Barely Repeatable Processes

Sandy Kemsley notes that Gartner calls this unstructured processes:

“…work activities that are complex, nonroutine processes, predominantly executed by an individual or group highly dependent on the interpretation and judgment of the humans doing the work for their successful completion”and notes that most business processes are made up of both structured and unstructured processes. Unstructured processes are costing organizations a lot of money in lost productivity, lack of compliance and other factors, and you can’t afford to ignore them. Although most processes aimed to meet regulatory requirements are structured, unstructured processes provide a company’s unique identity and often its competitive differentiation, as well as supporting operational activities."

Sandy moves the conversation to Integration 2.0, where social tools are features of existing business process tools

"…the BPMS vendors are looking for ways to incorporate “barely repeatable processes” into their systems, allowing users to create their own ad hoc processes on the fly but still capturing the audit trail so that it’s not just happening over email or the phone in an unaudited fashion. The idea is not to pre-define all of these processes, but to provide tools that allow process participants to have a sufficiently unstructured environment to do what they need to do, and augment that process with their own call-out at that point."

I have posted before on Barely Repeatable Processes, and Exception Handling and am going to re-quote here from some of the pioneers in this movement.

Ross Dawson explains the need to complement an ERP - Easily Repeatable Process, with a BRP - Barely Repeatable Process (via Sigurd Rinde):

“Typically exceptions to the ERPs, anything that involves people in non-rigid flows through education, health, support, government, consulting or the daily unplanned issues that happens in every organisation. The activities that employees spend most of their time on every day. Processes that often starts with an e-mail or a call. A process volume, measured by time and resource spent at organisations, probably larger than for the Easily Repeatable Processes. These are mostly handled and organised - frameworked - by systems like paper based rules and policies, e-mail, meetings, calls and now in more modern organisations by wikis and other collaboration systems and methods. Known by extensive loss of information (e-mails residing on HDDs), little knowledge acquired and reused (typical research says 70% of problems solved before without being known) and most of all, untrustworthy processes (oops, forgot to send that mail). In other words not an iota (well almost) of business process thinking or methodology applied to this huge untapped area of business processes.”

Ross Mayfield on the same meme:

“The way organizations adapt, survive and be productive is through the social interaction that happens outside the lines that we draw by hierarchy, process and organizational structure. The first form of social software to really take off to facilitate these discussions was email. Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process. That’s what they’re doing in their [e-mail] inbox for four hours a day. Email has become the great exception handler.”

Bottom-up structuring of ad-hoc processes

Before I spoke of using social tools to sense-make (get help, get through a process), well the next step are apps created from the bottom-up (by the users), that have noticed how people use social tools in an ad-hoc way, and are offering a way to design or assemble this process into a more visible flow. Basically making your own process, which you can manipulate at any time to suit the situation.

A way to see it is a kind of semi-formal approach where you are agile enough to assemble an app to slightly structure ad-hoc work:

Dennis Howlet talks about Thingamy software:

"…‘barely repeatable processes’ - a good way to look at them - where you need a quickly built app that includes the process loops in order to solve the problem."

And Jacob Ukelson talks about ActionBase:

"One thing to be careful with is that you want to provide enough structure to the process to add value, but not so much as to strangle it. Given that most of these processes are executed today via documents and email, we built our tool as an extension to those standard office tools - allowing the same ad-hoc feel, but adding a layer of management, tracking and reporting. "For many of these processes an initial formal model is overkill (and at odds with the needs of most knowledge workers) - at most you want a guideline or best practice that gets modified as the work gets done. Then these emerging models can later be used to create a more formal model if needed (I’ve blogged on the topic of in-situ process discovery on our blog http://blog.actionbase.com/in-situ-process-discovery)."

When you think of Activities on IBM Lotus Connections they are practicing this in an organic way. Activities (and Google Wave), are a collaboration tool to work on a task, where everything is recorded, and lives on a URL. Common activities can be available as templates eg. if you have to organise an event, there’s no doubt many have done this before using "Activities", so why not start by re-using a template, and re-mix it to your context.

See a video called "The man who should have used Lotus Connections 5 - Innovate or Die"

Human Process Management

ActionBase call this Human Process Management (which is what people may refer to as BPM 2.0).

In the post, The ‘H’ Bomb in Business Process Management, they state how traditional BPM does not reflect the reality of work:

"Human work is: Dynamic Tacit Ad hoc Crossing boundaries and silos Saturated with peer to peer interaction If you want to manage a human workflow like fraud investigation or a product change request or any other, you need to accept the “chaos” and face the facts - structured, rigid process does not fit into this paradigm."

Following on, the post, What is a Human Process?, re-iterates what has already been reviewed in this post, ie. the co-existence of routine and tacit interactions:

"Human processes are business processes that generate a business outcome that is heavily dependent on interactions between people. These are also called “tacit interactions” by economists, which is an attempt to differentiate between routine transactions and interactions that rely heavily on judgment and context. These “tacit interactions” are the most prevalent kind of business processes in which knowledge workers take part. Most of the work of involved in executing these human processes is with the communication, coordination and management aspects of the process. Currently most human processes in business are executed using standard productivity tools (e.g. MS Office), email (e.g. Outlook) and meetings.

I have listed just a few of their characteristics involved in human processes:

"Unstructured - there is a standard framework for the process and how to achieve the intended result, but each case is handled separately and requires human understanding (for both decisions and flow) as part of the process. There isn’t enough standardization between instances of the process that allows for a formal, complete and rigorous description of the process end-to-end. Dynamic - the flow of the process changes on a case by case basis, based on available information and human decisions. A flow can also change while the process is being executed based on new information, or a changing environment."

Then they put it altogether as, What is Human Process Management (HPM)?

Mike Cohn takes this to the human behaviour, and change aspect, where enabling and empowerment from the bottom-up is key to adoption, as workers have a finger in the process pie that they will be using:

"None of the agile processes as described by their originators is perfect for your organization. Any may be a good starting point, but you will need to tailor the process to more precisely fit the unique circumstances of your organization, individuals, and industry. As Alistair Cockburn once told me, “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.”"

Enterprise 2.0 - Complementing and Supplementing existing processes, and assembling new ones

Bertrand Duperrin has an excellent post on the three streams of enterprise 2.0 which puts an understanding out there that enterprise 2.0 is not about some isolated fairy-shary thing that happens on the edges of the organisation…he also posts about it here. Besides serendipity, and formal communications, it’s also about complementing and supplementing existing processes. He says:

"Becoming an enterprise 2.0 is not a goal for any enterprise and should not be. The only one is : improving the way things are done everyday, the way it produces. But what does “production” really mean ?"

1. Formal Production Capability (FPC):

"Being able to produce something defined, following a process in which everyone knows exactly what he has to do, when, and how."

2. Ad-hoc Production Capability (APC):

"Being able to overcome any breakdown or insufficiency […] goods and services have to be more and more customised. As a consequence, production is less and less standardized and the need for readjusting it according to clients who have more and more specific requests is not an accident anymore but a norm […] their unpredictability has to be admitted and a framework has to be defined in order, even if things are not under control in the strict sense of the word, they respect some essential rules. Paying no attention to that and focusing on the traditional FPC causes many dysfunctions and put employees in unbearable situations."

3. Serendipity production Capability (SPC):

"Being able to innovate and produce unexpected things […] has to be facilitated because it’s key in a disruptive economy"

He puts this into perspective using a comparison table, and concludes:

"…businesses have to develop these three points. Not one of them, all of them […] Companies should facilitate the switch between these three systems because it’s what people need to get things done […] There’s no unique satisfactory way of doing things. People have to know how to switch from one to another.

Bertrand has a related post on being adaptive and agile, which I will highlight in a future post.

Co-existence of processes and ad-hoc work

Many I have quoted admit that "process" is a good thing, but extreme standardisation, rules and rigidness can trap people, creating unproductiveness and inefficiencies which is counter to what you are trying to automate in the first place. The key is for some flexibility in the process to cater for change, contexts, and the unpredictable…and to also be able to assemble people and tools to create your own ad-hoc processes.

Ross Mayfield on the folly of process extremism:

"…processes can become calcified and accepted as the rule even when they do not work and make no sense."

I like how Ross sees a process more as a framework, that can be built upon or bendable (similar to Ross Dawson’s view of enterprise 2.0 approaches):

"A process is like a standard. It provides a common definition for others to build upon. This is generally a good thing […] At best, a process should serve as a reference model. Something that others can reference when completing a task. Something that can be leveraged for innovation, a boundary condition for experimentation at the margin."

Nicholas Carr shares his middle ground:

"…meticulously defined and managed processes continue to be a powerful source of competitive advantage for many companies. Look at Toyota, for instance. Its highly engineered manufacturing processes not only give it superior productivity but also provide a platform for constant learning and improvement. The formal structure, which is anything but democratic, spurs both efficiency and innovation - productive innovation - simultaneously"

Nicholas talks about how new tools complement processes:

"The simple group-forming and information-sharing software tools now being introduced and refined will often provide greater flexibility and effectiveness than more complex "knowledge management" systems. But even in these cases, processes aren’t going away; they’re just changing. There can’t be organization without process."

He concludes:

"Bad processes can destroy individual initiative, but well-designed processes, even very formal ones, can encourage individual initiative and, importantly, guide personal and group creativity toward commercially productive ends. I’m not sure you need to balance process and people so much as harmonize them"

Irving Wladawsky-Berger reminds us not all processes deal with unstable environments:

"…we need to standardize those processes where differentiation brings little or no incremental value, so as to avoid the huge inefficiencies involved in re-inventing the same process over and over again."

And also share’s his middle ground:

"An innovative business looks for the proper balance between process - covering those aspects of the business that can be designed, standardized, and increasingly automated - and people - who bring their creativity and adaptability to handle everything else. In a world that keeps getting more and more complicated and is changing faster and faster you need both - but even more, you need the innovation which, when all is said and done, is the truly human element."

Mark Masterson’s insightful take on it is:

“The problem is not business processes. The problem is trying to automate business processes."

Mark’s insight in detail:

"We are more efficient than before, but we’re disappointed nevertheless. Yes, our coordination costs are lower than they were with ad hoc and / or manual processes. But now we want more! We want to keep enjoying these improvements in efficiency and productivity, but we want the creativity and innovativeness back, which we are somehow certain that we’ve lost"

Phil Gilbert reminds us where we started:

“The traditional notion of a business process comes from the manufacturing world where you can standardise the inputs and outputs of a given process,” he explains.“With ‘white collar’ processes, the very reason you have human beings doing them is that you cannot standardise those inputs and outputs.”

Sigurd Rinde reminds us too:

"If work was like a water flow and the given framework was the pipe it flows through, then BPM would be the system whereby pipes were shifted from side to side and valves opened and shut to direct changes to the flows. Good enough if the flow is water. Not so good if the water molecules had a mind of their own and actually were able to make directional decisions underway. Funny thing, people can. And more; it’s wanted because people are smarter than machines and that’s why you hired them. Ever broken business rules or botched the main systems just so you actually can get your job done? But of course you have."

This takes us, as always, to being more effective and agile.

Mike Gotta quotes a HBS article:

"Many organizations struggle to balance the conflicting demands of efficiency and innovation. Organizations can become more efficient in the short run by replacing costly, unpredictable problem solving activity with consistent, streamlined routines. However, this efficiency often comes at the cost of long- run adaptability. The more organizational activity is dominated by stable routines, the less the organization learns, and the more rigid and inflexible it becomes. To escape this fate, the authors of this working paper theorize that highly disciplined organizations must actively engage in strategic and selective perturbation of established routines. A perturbation interrupts an established routine and creates an opportunity to innovate and learn."

Endnote

Often enterprise 2.0 is synonymous with "emergence" and "free-form" which mostly relates to what surfaces from people sharing and conversing about what they know. But "emergence" and "free-form" also relates to "processes"…how do I work around a process by being empowered with new bottom-up enabling tools. And what may emerge from using these free-form tools is things like a wiki page to list what to do in different contexts, troubleshooting tips that complement procedures, etc…see my post, Wikis for exceptions and process failures.

In the future I want to look more deeply into integration 2.0..social computing blended with designed process tools.

This post could keep going but I’ll stop here. Some related areas are; the addiction to Best Practices, stifling innovation, Management 2.0, Plans and Targets, and Complexity (uncertainty, unpredictable)…which I plan to post about.

Related

Socialize your business ? What does it mean ?

The Everything 2.0 discussion - the real issue

Process problems and one answer from thingamy

Process flexibility

People versus Process

On Process, Technology and Work Design

Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity

A while ago I posted about using wikis to handle process failures, conversations around objects, and activity-centric collaboration; well these posts highly relate to informal processes and ad-hoc collaboration, which is something Jordan Frank know’s a lot about, and which the software firm he works for (Traction Software) can deliver in a way that really differentiates them from other players in the market like Jive SBS, Socialtext, Open Text Social Workplace, etc… I have left out the IBM Lotus Connections suite as the "Activities" module is in the same ball park as Traction.

Below is the video and some notes.

Jordan talks about processes and ad-hoc work using social tools:

• Workflow systems are great until they fail…a need to have a collaboration safety net.
• Collaboration is not necessarily about making the things that are planned go right, it’s about dealing with the things that are unplanned that go wrong.
• When something challenges the system, and the program team cannot deliver on time (things don’t go to plan…dealing with change and new context).
• We get into case where all of the work, and all of the value for our knowledge workers happens when things break…we change the plan, we discuss the issue, we adjust our priorities
• Besides social tools to help you workaround exceptions to business processes, I like how Jordan alludes to using social tools from the start, as new comers can have access to existing information to help sense-make when something goes wrong (rather then be sent a bunch of emails to make sense of). It’s hard to troubleshoot when what happened till now is not easily accessible or not recorded in a raw fashion…think Google Wave playback as a solution.
• You can’t anticipate a workflow for fixing a problem (with social tools like Teampage) you can model informal processes on the fly
• Jordan talks about a process for document approval, but the problem is by the time it’s developed the process is changed; further to this certain contexts present changes to how you action this process…by the time the process is designed it becomes unable to flex to these other ways to action the same process…and the designers aren’t able to keep up with the people.
• Jordan explains a simple DIY process that doesn’t need a designer and is totally adaptable to changes eg. Document review - tag document "toreview" and send to reviewers, they all leave comments. The person who approves it reads through the comments, and if is happy will tag it "done". This is just one example of a grassroots process using enabling tools that helps workers do their thing…a change from top-down centralised (planned/rigid) to bottom-up distributed (on-the-fly/flexible)
• Shifted from physical imposing of structure through databases and programming, to the more flexible managing by metadata (enforce rules by tribal power rather than constraints that you put into the rules in a program)
• More capable to flexing of today’s needs and changing with tomorrows needs…make sure when business conditions change your business processes don’t get left behind…why do business processes that were designed for two years ago, when we are trying to tackle objectives for today

Here’s a Traction whitepaper that demonstrates using social tools to actually do work.

In another interview on Bas Reus’s blog (which is one of my favourites), Jordan talks about riffing off existing structure and constraints:

"Key is to make use of existing organizational structures, and play with constraints. Keep them, make them or bypass them where necessary. Structures can always change…"

"Zone defense is a bit less structured than man-on-man. Zone defense requires constant adjustments and on-field co-ordination. So, there is a structure indicating an area a player defends at the start, but the structure may change as a play is executed and the players self-organize to adapt."

Here’s a link to a video overview of Traction Software, and a link to the rest of their video’s.

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."