Technology and Organizations

Windows Phoenix Team at Red Bull Flugtag from Terri Griffith on Vimeo.

John Hagel recently highlighted Aaron Saenz’ Are We Too Plugged In? Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds in his Facebook stream.  John chose this quote from the article: “Prioritize down time. Enhancing your mind sometimes means knowing when to give it a break.” I have evidence to support this summary (even some that’s rigorous): The energy and innovation in evidence at Red Bull Flugtag and academic work on the value of some forms of work interruptions.  My take away is that we need to be realistic and thoughtful about the value of play as we design it into our work practice.

From Saenz’ article:

It is apparent, however, that unplugging from the internet, removing yourself from all distractions, is beneficial. [New York Time columnist Matt Richtel] took a team of scientists on a rafting trip away from all connectivity. Even the skeptics noticed a profound difference in their own behavior after a few days unplugged. We seem to have a finite amount of ‘working memory’ in our brains, removing distractions may allow deeper thoughts and reasoning to use working memory taken up by information overload.

I spend most of my work time thinking about how best to weave technology tools, organizational practice, and human capabilities into a powerful, appropriately balanced, whole.  I call people who have the skill to do this balancing “systems savvy managers” and I’m fortunate to get to highlight their examples in this blog.

Aaron Saenz puts this balancing in the context of down time.  He notes:

As neuroscientists explore the brain we may be able to better design the flow of data to optimize our mental performance. We may find that productivity is maximized when we check emails three times a day, when we only have four windows open on our screens at once, or if we limit texting to times when we’re not driving. Until we have that precision guiding our online behavior, it’s up to each of us to figure out how best to plug into information technology. But take my advice: prioritize down time. Enhancing your mind sometimes means knowing when to give it a break.

Many management scholars would agree.  Jett & George, for example, provide an overview of the role and types of interruptions in the workplace.  Great summary of negative distractions versus helpful breaks that can recharge energy and enable creative ideas to incubate. Mainemelis & Ronson tell us “ideas are born in fields of play” and present a framework discussing the practical relevance of play.  But Karl Weick says it best for me, “Play is important not because it teaches some new skill, but because it takes activities that are already in one’s repertoire and gives one practice in recombining those into novel sets.”

It’s the practice of recombination, a skill critical to innovation, that provides me with the best evidence for the value of play as down time.  There are areas of management research (e.g., work on transactive memory in teams, pdf) that point to the value of teams working on job-specific tasks and with their job-specific teammates.  However, in the case of innovation, I believe that recombination is the job-specific skill and there is benefit to being off-task as noted by Jett & George and Mainemelis & Ronson.

Richtel took scientists rafting to force them into disconnected down time.  How about the team of Microsoft Business Group employees who took part in the Long Beach, CA Red Bull Flugtag? In Flugtag, a team builds a craft that theoretically can fly from a 30’-high pier.  Four pushers and a pilot are allowed on the pier and the whole craft, including pilot, can weigh up to 450lbs. Quoting from one of the pushers, “this is about as Microsoft a project as you could get – you have a bunch of super-smart guys and girls playing with polycarbonate, power tools, and CAD [computer-aided design] programs.”  For two months, eight Microsoft employees spent their free time designing the Phoenix.  In less than 12 seconds, the craft was off the ramp and floating in the water.  Not a record flight, but a valuable experience:

• They got to practice a different kind of innovation than typical in their work
• They got to connect with new people at Microsoft — the team was built by emails to a diverse set of employees
• They got to take a break

Finding systems savvy ways to weave play into your life can be more than just fun — though Flugtag is GREAT fun — it can have innovation value for your organization.

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.

There are no silver or “magic” bullets for organizations.  Google Wave was a single technology bullet.  The introduction of Wave had no organizational practice wrapped around it and little indicating consideration of how people would perceive it.  Organizations are complex systems and betting success on any single dimension is unlikely to work. There was no implementation. There were limited use cases.  Even access was limited until recently, meaning you couldn’t drag others along with you in your experimentation. (Wikipedia version of the history here.)

As I understand Google’s approach with Wave, it was to give Wave to the world as a platform.  Developers were expected build tools around Wave that normal people would use (perhaps as email platforms are built around Intenet email protocols).  I bought into that approach and followed the Google Wave Interest Group so I’d be ready when the developers got it all together.  I tried to get some other generally early adopters to try it out, to no avail, and many others were similarly frustrated.  Conferences were where of I heard the most success as the real-time/rich communication aspects were highlighted in that focused environment.

According to a Google announcement, Google will stop their own development of Wave and may shut down the site after the end of the year. Open source access to some of the capabilities will remain and aspects may be included in other Google products. Jeffrey Mann, writing for Gartner, points out that developers and users may be less likely to spend effort on Google products given the apparent lack of long-haul commitment.  Wave was only fully open to the public as of May 2010 and the cited reason for shutting it down is low user adoption.

The folks at Google are smart.  They’ve done (and do) amazing things. But they do seem to have technology bias that may be getting in their way.  In Kathryn Schulz’ recent interview with Google Research Director Peter Norvig we get some clues:

From a story about the founding of Google:

One of the venture capitalists came to [company founders] Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] and said “OK, the first thing you have to decide is, is this company going to be run by sales or by marketing? They said, “We think we’ll take engineering.” He laughed and said, “Oh, you naive college kids, that’s not the way the real world works.” And they said, “Well, we want to try it.” Ten years later, that experiment is still running; engineering is still the center of the company. And it seems like it’s worked.

I’ll argue that this single-minded approach sometimes works because some of Google’s products are so good, or fit into existing systems so well, that they can get away without implementation.  But I think Wave (and perhaps Google’s other visible failures) indicate that they could do better by stepping away from the myth of the silver bullet.  Om Malik says, “I’m not sure Google is capable of understanding people on that level, and that’s the reason why the company strikes out whenever it tries.”  For added success, Google needs to understand people and the organizational systems we all live in.

Google seems to need more systems savvy.  Systems savvy management is the opposite of a silver bullet approach.  Like the woven fibers of a bullet-proof vest, systems savvy management intertwines technology tools, organizational practices, and people for flexible strength.

What did I want from Wave?  I liked the idea of a persistent activity stream that could handle multiple file types.  I saw it as a way of consolidating project documents with their history and discussion.  We have this to a degree with products like Socialtext, and given Socialtext’s careful consideration of the broader issues, I expect they’ll be tracking the Wave experience.

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