Technology and Organizations

Last night I had the pleasure of introducing John Hagel at a TEDxBayArea event.  He came to talk with us about The Power of Pull, his new book with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, and the broad-based shifts in our organizational and social environment.

Others have written great general reviews about the book (e.g., here & here) , so I don’t feel guilty about putting a systems savvy filter on my comments.  I see The Power of Pull as emphasizing the need for systems savvy management.  That is, the environmental shifts described in the book demand that you use a solid understanding of available technology tools, organizational practices, and human capabilities to weave together effective organizational and personal action. The Power of Pull also gives us examples of what this weaving might look like.

The Big Shift: Environmental Changes That Demand Systems Savvy Management

Before, the pattern of how technology tools, organizational practice, and people were woven together was generally pushed down from above, and not always effectively. Things have changed.  We have entered a period where important patterns (everything from organizational innovations to personal work strategies) can come from anywhere.  The Power of Pull describes three waves of this Big Shift:

• First wave of the Big Shift: New platforms built on the Internet.  This wave has already arrived.
• Second wave: Focus on flows versus stockpiles of knowledge.  Our feet are wet on this one.  Facebook, Twitter, corporate and employee blogs, customer-built technical support — these are at the forefront of this wave.
• Third wave: Organizational changes that result from the forces of the first two waves.  The emerging business relationships built on communication from throughout organizations are examples of this wave. SAP, for example, opened enough of its technical “secret sauce” to engage a number of partners who could then develop SAP innovations independent of SAP own engineers.  Turns out these efforts are beneficial to all.

The Power of Pull

With these shifts we have the opportunity (need) to “pull” rather than waiting for opportunities to be pushed down from above. We can pull by gaining access to people and resources in ways we never could before, attracting people and resources through our own participation and personal and project branding, and then using these resources to contribute by achieving new outcomes from our own potential.

How we do this is where I see the value of systems savvy management.  How do we decide what pieces of the technology infrastructure to use for our access?  How do we decide how to best build systems that help us attract the right people and resources?  How do we design organizational systems that will help us achieve our goals (working with the people we’ve attracted, the technology systems we have at our disposal, the organizational policies and procedures that distribute benefits to all involved, all with and understanding of our specific context). Systems savvy can help us weave these components together into something that can surf these waves of transformation.

John suggests five steps to start with (my weaving suggestions in italics):

1. Master the strength of weak ties. Use technology tools like LinkedIn or Facebook to access people outside of your usual circle.  Then find or create opportunities to meet face-to-face in ways that support your passion — just sharing coffee is not enough, you need to focus on work-related issues to understand each others’ relative strengths and who else you might want to bring into the network.
2. Grow your personal ecosystem. Use technology tools both inside and outside your organization to find activities that can support your tasks (perhaps a community of practice).  If you don’t find any, build one.  Use technology and organizational practice to strengthen the infrastructure in terms of its focus on learning, building a common language, being a repository of good ideas). Have a system in place for finding new members over time.
3. Choose wisely where you live and spend time to be in the right place at the right time. Use your technology tools to track the right times and places.  Start relationships before you get there and use your tools to maintain the relationships over time.
4. Find environments where people share your passions. For me the critical term is “share.”  Find the environment and then share.  This may be face to face, over the Internet, or a hybrid approach where you meet occasionally.  The conference behaviors John describes are great for keeping your (and others’) enthusiasm high.
5. Join a creation space. My favorite. Be it face to face or virtual, engage with people to create along the lines of your passion.  For me this is finding the opportunity to engage with others who use systems savvy on the job.  By working together we can tackle the bigger problems or use our diversity of background to solve the tricky small ones.

My summary: Use available (or acquirable) technology tools and organizational practices to build your ecosystem and then do something with it.  Play fair — be a producer as well as an acquirer from the social network.  Appreciate that small twists and turns made at the right time result in strong, beautiful, work.

Yesterday was the World Electric Aircraft Symposium sponsored by GE Aviation. Craig Willan chaired a full day of visionary perspectives and technical updates from Burt Rutan (Scaled Composites), Bertrand Piccard & Andre Borschberg (Solar Impulse), Chris Van Buiten (Sikorsky), JB Straubel (Tesla Motors),  Erik Lindbergh (Lindbergh Electric Aircraft Prize), Randy Babbitt (FAA), Robert Iorio (Ford), Chet Fuller (GE Aviation) and others.

I was attending given my interest in the innovation infrastructure side of the story, and the fact that I think an electric airplane (i.e., quiet) sounds like heaven.  I’ve been talking with people from the emerging electric aircraft world for the last 9 months or so and was thrilled to hear that the symposium had to be moved to a larger venue given greater than expected registration.  This is the first time I’ve seen an innovation community from near the beginning.  Thank you to Bob Waldron for the heads up!

I also was interested in what, if any, advice I could give to the leaders around how to support the community.  The players are diverse, ranging from EAA (the membership organization that puts on AirVenture, Oshkosh), the burgeoning firms (see my prior posts on Yuneec, Sonex, and Cessna/Bye Energy), standards committee members, foundations (CAFE, Creative Solutions Alliance), NASA, and individual enthusiasts.  Or at least I thought that was the community.

By the end of the symposium I’d decided that thinking only about the people and organizations interested in electric aircraft was too narrow.  The speakers came from across the world of electric propulsion.  GE, Ford, and Tesla all have deep connections to aviation either through history or personal interests, but their expertise is much broader than just aviation. The community is one of “electric propulsion” or perhaps “high reliability/light weight electric propulsion.”  The answers won’t come from a narrow perspective.  In fact, the common theme throughout the day was the necessity of government, industry, academic, and enthusiast collaboration.  Solutions will come from across the systems needed to make this work.  There is no single hurdle to overcome.

I’d first chosen to include this picture just because it made me laugh. That’s a Southwest 737 (with the new navigational capability installed) lined up with a USAF C5 Galaxy (one of the largest military transports). The caption provided by the photographer was “Think she’ll fit?” Cracked me up, especially as I’d done a walk-thru of the C5 yesterday.

But then I realized the picture related to my thinking about the electric aircraft community.  We shouldn’t be trying to shoehorn the community into a particular space.  Instead we should be letting the innovation flow across the components in a more synergistic way.

I’m going to let the events of the last week settle a bit.  I look forward to continuing the conversations and have as some homework re-reading Huggy Rao’s work on enthusiasts in innovation. His ideas of “hot causes” and “cool mobilization” may speak to how to best limit or open boundaries around this community.

How can you follow the development of the electric aircraft revolution?  Follow the prizes:

E-Flight Prize
LEAP
NASA Green Flight challenge

Wired’s Aug 2010 cover has Will Ferrell in a white skin suit with the title, “The Future That Never Happened.”  I’m going to where the future IS happening (hybrid planes, flying cars, personal electric aircraft, and all): AirVenture.  For the next week or so I will focus on electric aircraft and any other whiz bang innovation I can get a picture of.  I’ll be fighting over 550,000 other enthusiasts through the mud and aircraft noise to see what Boeing, GE, Airbus, NASA, cutting-edge vendors, and 1000s of homebuilders have to offer.

AirVenture is the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual convention, airshow, and meetup.  From July 26 to Aug 1, 2010, Oshkosh, Wisconsin will be the heart of innovation — as well as the busiest airport (yes, busier than Atlanta given that the OSH control tower can handle over 3,000 flights in 10 hours).  I’m going to leave the Silicon Valley behind and focus on innovations you can get inside.

Electric aircraft had some exposure last year, but 2010 is a major milestone —  GE Aviation is sponsoring the World Symposium on Electric Aircraft as well as the Aviation Learning Center.  I’m looking forward to daily themed forums (search here with keyword: electric) and Friday’s full-day event:

Demo flights are on Sat, but I’ll be on a commercial flight home unless I can find a better ride… hint… hint.

Hope to see you there.  I’ll be wearing shirts with either Santa Clara University or N58PP logos — say, “Hi!”

Last night I had the pleasure of joining in an Evernote Birthday Meetup (video of enthusiastic participants). I hadn’t realized when I said yes to my invitation that this was a global event. The more I heard about Evernote Global Meetup Day, the more I saw this as a great example of Hagel, Seely Brown, & Davison’s ideas of “Pull” (The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion).

Evernote (the cross-platform note/info capture tool) invited its community to join them in a global launch of their “meetups.” From their blog:

One of the challenges (read: exciting opportunities) that comes with not being an inherently social app is the need to make everyone aware of all the great ways to use your product. That’s why we blog, tweet, tumble, youtube, facebook, podcast, email, and now…meet up!

Though I live about 10 miles from Evernote HQ, I was in Tucson and attended the one organized by Olga Yiparaki. (Thanks, Olga!). Since we had over 20 people, Evernote sent along a care package full of stickers, mints, and a table sign. My favorite, proudly displayed on the lid of my MacBook Pro is, “I’m not being rude. I’m taking notes in Evernote.” We had a great two hours of sharing best practices, interesting use cases, and discussions of integration with other tools. There were high levels of systems savvy at play as people talked about how they used the Evernote technology for work and home and how they had made changes along the way to both workflow and technology.

Evernote Global Meetup Day’s connection to Pull comes from Evernote and their community joining together to access people and resources, attract a community that is relevant and valuable, while pulling insight and performance to achieve full potential. This is very different from top down, pre-scripted “push” approaches and is likely to squeeze more value out of our current opportunities and motivations. (I’ll do a full review of Pull soon.)

Evernote announced the idea, allied with Meetup to support the arrangements, offered a package of goodies, and left the rest to the community. I think of couple of new users were created in Tucson, and I know I have some great new sites and human resources to follow.

What other events have you seen that take advantage of the power of Pull? This is a powerful combination of technology, organizational practice, and human motivations.

In July of 2008 I wrote a post called Kill Email, Move to a Platform of Pages and Applications/Widgets. A lot has happened since then. I’ve had the opportunity to offer a seminar with Socialtext’s Scott Schnaars about gaining value from communication and collaboration tools (we were kinder and “put email in its place” rather than trying to kill it in public) and the collaboration offerings, for the most part, keep getting better. I think it’s time to revisit the issues in light of these changes, and in light of peoples’ experience with reducing their reliance on email.

Gary Orenstein’s recent post, The Cloud Collaboration Wars Ramp Up, sets the stage:

Cloud collaboration has now expanded beyond the core of e-mail communications to include social networking, group content creation and management, presentation sharing, project management, integrated voice and video, calendaring, scheduling and more. Let’s take a look at the big players and other possible entrants….

Luis Suarez, an IBMer who has worked for two years to create a “world without email,” shows us how it can be done. Luis has a real job, at a real company, and yet has gotten his email traffic down to 14 per week! He does it by being an evangelist for collaboration and knowledge management (I think that actually is his job) and helping people find better ways to work. No, this isn’t always easy for him, but it does seem to be working and his following grows.

Jeremy Sluyters, Director of Business and Collaboration Systems at JMP Engineering Inc, also gives us a real-world window into how each of us can can play a role in work transformation. From his blog:

I was onsite with a customer making some changes to their production system, and I was trying to figure out how to get a “program running” status from a robot, and pass it to a usable input on my controller. I posted this question on www.controlsoverload.com, a site I have recently started for the controls and automation community. Since this site is just starting out, I also emailed a couple people that I knew would know the answer, and included a link to the question. And I knew who could help me because I have been in this business for a long time – how many times do you know exactly who to ask to get an answer?

The next morning I had two answers to my question, and was able to map the status from the robot to the controller. Yes email would have worked just fine, but now this question and answer is alive and well in the cloud, and one day if you ask Google about monitoring the program running status of a Fanuc robot, you might just get that answer. By the way, at the time I asked Google the same question and did not get anything close to the answer. If you ask now, Google will give you the right answer!

For all my efforts to shift to a world of collaboration platforms, I still dealt with 13 emails in the first hour of my day. Four of them were signals (as per Andy McAfee’s SLATES acronym for Enterprise 2.0 technologies) — these let me know about changes that had been made on a wiki, and that a stock price had moved. Signals emails are good. As long as email is part of work, it serves as a great dashboard for tracking signals that can trigger your attention to particular collaboration platforms to do the actual work. Two other emails were short coordination questions that would have been great for Twitter (if Twitter had an easy way to direct message multiple people). The other five were interesting as they were from a group where we’ve actually tried to find a way to use a collaboration platform and failed. This is a cross-organization, cross-interest, cross-level of technical experience project with shifting membership. We’ve stuck with the lowest common denominator (for now!) and I dutifully cut and paste the info into a wiki.

The idea is that email is not for doing work (see Sluyters’ example above regarding the value-add if the work is done within the community’s platform). Email is good for signals (especially automated ones). Email is good for initial contacts — though often those emails end up failing as they are trapped by spam filters. Email may even be good for mass communication across multiple communities, but wouldn’t it be better if we just cross-posted the information to the communities’ sites?

My current strategy is to be open with project collaborators about my preference for working via collaboration platforms. I strive to use my systems savvy and explicitly consider the technical and organizational realities with each group. I’ve sent emails discussing alternative forms of communication to my University President and have had thoughtful conversations with his communications director about our students’ work settings and whether or not we are effectively preparing them given how workflow is managed on campus. I tend to take the initiative and simply set up a project site when asked to participate in something new. I can’t say that I’m always successful in shifting the project work to the site, but I hope that by raising awareness I at least bring us one step closer to more effective and efficient communication and workflow.

One project at a time…