Technology and Organizations

In August 2009 Stewart Mader wrote a blog post focused on expanding our thinking of enterprise wikis beyond wikipedia-style documents. As I think about many of the E2.0 projects my organizational design students are taking on this quarter, I’d like to share Stewart’s 8 ideas here and see if we can’t add a couple.

Here are Stewart’s 8 (please see his full post for his explanations. Comments and links here are my own):

• 1. Meeting Agendas
• 2. Meeting Minutes & Action Items
• 3. Project Management

These top three are my top three as well. A wiki is “a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser….” They are my top three partially because the use is so straight-forward. We all know what the task is; this is just expansion of how the task gets done. They are also my top three because they are so important — and yet often overlooked in organizational practice. No agenda means that it’s impossible to come prepared to the meeting, yet agendas are left out every day. A wiki approach is emergent and social (and thus at the heart of Enterprise 2.0) and intertwines a simple technology into the critical organizational practices of good project management. Please see an earlier post for some basic examples.

• 4. Gather Input — Keep in mind that wikis are all editable websites/documents. This means Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets are in the mix (as well as other web-based document tools provided by other companies). I see at least two dimensions here: gathering input from a group of people (Stewart’s focus) and gathering information from yourself. Regarding the latter, I recently avoiding paying over $100 for an iPhone/on-line logbook capability by building it myself using Google Forms. Any basic survey can be built in Forms and then the form tool deposits the information directly into the on-line spreadsheet (also available off-line if you are using Google Gears.) The iPhone/smartphone capability comes from saving the survey’s web address as an icon on the screen.
• 5. Build Documentation -- I see this one as being useful both in terms of meeting output and in terms of all written work-products. I have moved from being an evangelist of wikis as how to run group writing efforts to being not so passively aggressive about wiki-based group writing as my only approach. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that you often eventually have to move the document into a real word processor for final formatting -- but I bet this won’t always be the case (and I suspect isn’t the case for purpose-built tools like ZOHO Writer -- hmmm. I’ll have to check out the Microsoft Word support…). I’ll also be first to acknowledge that you and your co-authoring team have to become comfortable with sharing “alpha drafts.”
• 6. Assemble and Reuse Information -- Link away! Not only can you cut and paste easily if you have access to all of your organization’s documents — but you can also help your documents live through links. Linking (rather than cutting and pasting) means that the material stays in sync.
• 7. Employee Handbook -- I was in a waiting room for a while Sunday night and happened to sit by a TV playing Undercover Boss — Waste Management. In the episode, the President & COO of Waste Management, Larry O’Donnell, anonymously takes on a variety of entry-level jobs within his company. This is an eye-opening experience for him and he seeks ways to reduce some of the frustrations he finds in the field. What if he opened the Employee Handbook up as a wiki, at least for comments (and maybe they do…)? Is there risk for misuse? Sure there is a risk, but according to Andrew McAfee (Chapter 6), the incidence of bad behavior on wikis and blogs seems to be inconsequential — these are typically not anonymous.
• 8. Knowledge Base — Stewart distinguishes this use from Documentation in that he faces it externally. He gives an example of a moderated (the company checks changes before they are added) wiki that allows customers to see the help wiki and make contributions.

So, how many items can we add to Stewart’s list? I suspect the number will become quite large as more and more of our work moves to the web, but for a start:

• 9. Make Decisions -- Not only can we gather input, but we can make the decision via the wiki as well. The result is that we can always go back and track how we got to the decision we made.

You knew I’d get to ten…

• 10. Work — Over the last year, my bias has become wiki unless proven otherwise. My documents are in the cloud and I share files or full folders as default. As a result I am pushed to practice TOP Management (weaving together technology, organizations, people) as I think about the tools I have available, the practices the working group should focus on, and the skill set of the people in the group (see discussion of how to do a team audit here). Ideally our transfer of material to the cloud/wiki/team portal occurs passively — as part of just doing the task — rather than as a separate action. For example, if we are communicating via email with attachments of our working document, we have to actively save and sync our work. If we instead just work via the cloud/wiki/team portal the work and conversation are already there — passively with no extra effort.

What I missed?

Common Craft’s Explanation of Cloud Computing:

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Events happen, and then they’re done. That’s why they’re “events.” But can we really rely on just our brains and notes to gain value from events? Meetings happen, and then they’re done. Presentations happen, and then they’re done. Even the best events, meetings, and presentations have limited value if we can’t step back in time. Two recent posts talk about how to take those steps back in time — by planning ahead — and using available technology and tools to hold onto the material such that it can be found and used when needed.

Charles Hamilton writes about Using the Web and Social Media to Create More Effective Events. He gives a great explanation of what he did to support an “unconference” on the future of journalism (site here). I know I’m going to return to this post the next time I’m organizing a meeting (and I should be thinking about what I could even do for class presentations). One of the key take-aways for me was Charles’ comment that, “In the future, I would recommend creating the event-specific web site much sooner, and using a simpler CMS-, group-blog, social-network or wiki-based system for posting pre-event discussions and comments.” Get the group going early and make it easy for them to connect.

His overall evaluation of the process:

I found that attendees’ blogging, tweeting, recording and instant posting about the event reinforced what they were thinking and learning. Thus, the effectiveness of the event was increased, along with the potential for new learning and insights to cause change in the wider world.

By planning ahead, and interacting ahead, they were able to build the background for greater learning and future reuse. For some of my earlier thoughts on this please see “Poof” goes your idea… When face to face meetings are worse than virtual ones.

My second example is more personally exciting. My friend and colleague, Ted Cocheu (Founder & CEO of Altus) was interviewed by Robert Scoble for Building43!

From Altus’ website:

Altus’ end-to-end video management software enables users to capture, share and search rich media content down to the spoken word. With Altus vSearch, content is accessible on-demand where it can be instantly located and reused.

Imagine being able to search the spoken and visual content of your events, meetings, presentations. Imagine being able to reuse the material and learn what you need, when you need it. Altus provides the tools and services to make this happen.

Companies like Cisco and Oracle have seen the value in this process for years. They have to constantly update their employees and their customers on quickly changing products and services. Other companies have been triggered by the economic downturn to hold their events virtually or in a hybrid form — but have seen that there is a multiplier on the value of the on-demand content — if it is searchable and easily available for reuse.

Ted tells Scoble that though a relationship with a new client often starts because they want to generate content from an urgent, upcoming meeting — that then many clients quickly see how much more value they could be gaining from all the other video content they already have. The content can be more accessible using the Altus process and more social. Individual’s who’ve given a presentation or created other kinds of content have profiles so you can find more of their work, and/or make connections to your own. You can also see their groups and decide whether those groups would provide value to you too. Sure, there are “point solutions” that can do pieces of this, but Altus has the jump on the end-to-end, secure, solution.

One thing I wish… That the Building 43 video had been put through the Altus process so I could search through it…. I will help you out with some timestamps:

• 11:40 in discussion on the difference between “point solutions” versus an overall approach.
• 21:20 discussion of the “spoken word” aspects and search quality — ties nicely to modern presentation formats (more pictures, less text to search on, unless you have the transcript or speaker notes).
• 23:00 Seb Grady of Altus demonstrates the search capability. He reports that the average YouTube video is 2-3 min; in the enterprise the average video is 47 min — none of us have time to watch the whole thing. We need to find what we need, when we need it, on whatever platform is best.
• 25:00 More use case info — Scoble talks about the trouble they had building presentations at Microsoft from material they already had — and how even when they did find the right slides, they didn’t have the accompanying material related to those slides.

Events, meetings, and presentations count as organizational practices in the world of TOP Management (technology, organization, people). Just as any single technology or person can’t run the business on its own, neither can an organizational practice provide needed value without support from the people (the content providers) or the technologies. Both Hamilton’s example and the Altus approach are ways to powerfully leverage technology, organization, and people for greater value over the long haul. Don’t let those ideas go “poof”!

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Yesterday was the beginning and the end of the DARPA Network Challenge. MIT’s Red Balloon Challenge Team won in less than 9 hours. (Press Release pdf) DARPA tested the power of social networking and found it powerful. According to CNN, DARPA will be interviewing the participating teams to understand how they built their networks, motivated participation, and collected their information. Realize that false positives were an issue (certainly you can ask people what they see — but how do you know if you can believe them?)

From the DARPA site:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.

…and I missed seeing any of them (one was in San Francisco’s Union Square — so I had a shot).

The MIT strategy focused on the viral creation of a social network of support:

Sign Up, Invite Your Friends, Help Science, Win Money! We’re giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that’s not all — we’re also giving $1000 to the person who invited them. Then we’re giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on…

They made sure the payoff model was clear:

It might play out like this. Alice joins the team, and we give her an invite link like http://balloon.media.mit.edu/alice. Alice then e-mails her link to Bob, who uses it to join the team as well. We make a http://balloon.media.mit.edu/bob link for Bob, who posts it to Facebook. His friend Carol sees it, signs up, then twitters about http://balloon.media.mit.edu/carol. Dave uses Carol’s link to join… then spots one of the DARPA balloons! Dave is the first person to report the balloon’s location to us, and the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team is the first to find all 10. Once that happens, we send Dave $2000 for finding the balloon. Carol gets $1000 for inviting Dave, Bob gets $500 for inviting Carol, and Alice gets $250 for inviting Bob. The remaining $250 is donated to charity.

Brilliant.

• Motivation: For you, your friends, for charity
• Opportunity: The MIT Red Balloon homepage was built to easily accept the finds), DARPA made sure they weren’t hidden in invisible locations
• Ability: MIT gave clear hints about how to do this — invite your friends (why didn’t anyone invite me?!), use Twitter, Facebook

Yes, this was a social networking story — but you can also look deeper to understand the value in the MIT approach. They didn’t just rely on social networking, they practiced TOP Management. Technology: They built a solid website enabled to take in exactly the information they needed and then certainly had some technical processing to manage and evaluate that data. Organization: They created clear organizational practices – “This is how to organize your friends,” “this is how you get paid.” People: They used tried and true foundations around the management of human performance — Motivation, Opportunity, Ability.

Well done! Other insights into MIT’s process (or those of any of the other teams’) appreciated.

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A few weeks ago I ran across this IdeasProject video of Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur. He opens with descriptions of how sharing changes everything — sharing versus protecting your ideas. Good points, but he really hooked me when he talked about the value of sharing ideas with social media friends, and how this gives you instant access to their thinking:

It has already changed the way I think. I feel like I live in a room, which is across the world, but I can just call a friend and there will always be someone to answer one of my questions, as long as I share as well with them. It’s two ways. It’s about living in a world with a community that can help you….

It changed me completely. I cannot think alone anymore. I need to think with my friends, all the time.

I think you can extend these ideas to blogging and other public writing. I blog and tweet to think with my friends (join with them in a virtual conversation). I gain from their comments as Loic mentions, and I benefit by having the goal of framing my thinking to join with that of my friends. Psychologists describe this as the “cognitive benefits of teaching.”

The opportunity to microblog, blog, and/or post to Facebook all also have the benefit of being motivational. My friend Leslie Coff and I were talking Monday about how we are often inspired by our friends to write a particular post. For her it is when she has had multiple similar questions from her patients (she’s an amazing acupuncturist and provides a blog as additional outreach). For me, it’s often when I’ve heard similar questions from my students or business colleagues. Our friends can inspire a more thoughtful response than we might be able to give that the end of an appointment or in a quick question and answer period. We are inspired to think, to think for the benefit of our friends, and hopefully for the benefit of engaging in a conversation on the topic.

Do you have time to tweet, blog, or post to Facebook? How do you not have time? If your job is to have ideas, and/or to find ways to share ideas, then enlisting your friends in the work — even if only by giving you a virtual audience — can speed the thought process. I also find great value in documenting my thought process. It took a while for me to be willing to share my alpha drafts with the world. As Loic says later in his interview, “The new way of doing it is getting feedback from the very beginning.” This has its risks, as Loic notes: your friends may tell you you’re wrong, your competition may see what your up to — but the benefits to your thinking win out.

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One thing the zillions of pilots attending AirVenture 2009 have in common is the need to grasp a great deal of disparate information, and then maintain that information for on-going testing. They are similar in this way to doctors, lawyers, and others who either have to prove their proficiency on some schedule, or whose knowledge base changes such that they must have on-going education. Personal computers and the Internet have changed the options for professional and most other learning. We can now often choose between face-to-face instructor-led, online, dvd-based, or a blend for our learning. When we have the luxury of making the choice ourselves, what’s the best choice to make?

The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi is to have said “Know Thyself” in response to the question “What is best for man?” I have said something similar, though not in Greek, in terms of self-selecting formal (e.g., a formal class) versus informal learning (e.g., searching the internet) based on your level of competency (low competency: pick formal, high competency: informal). Here I’ll focus on rank beginners so the choice of formal has already been made. How do you use knowledge of your own learning style and context to effectively pick the best way to learn? For example, how do choose between face-to-face, online, dvd-based, or some combination for ground school?

Today I talked to representatives from two of the top pilot training materials providers: Gleim & King. Both companies provide the full range of topics and formats. I’ll focus on Gleim as I had the greatest chance to chat at their booth. I asked Katie (Thanks, Katie) what the issues were in making the choice between an instructor-led face-to-face (my local flight school uses Gleim books) and the home-study options.

She asked many good questions, including:

• Do I have the ability to make a weekly course? In my case, not really: 10 Wed nights, I’d miss some for work.
• Do I mind asking questions in front of others in the class? No, I probably ask too many for the instructor’s comfort, though.
• Would I be paying by the hour? No, so the overall cost of the course is not a determinant in my case.
• Do I need a schedule to keep me going? Probably not, I’m pretty disciplined about some things — and many of the home-study programs track you and will make contact if you seem to be slipping.

These points focus on schedule and discipline.

She also covered topics that I’ll call “learning style.” Do you learn best when you read things over at your own pace? Do you learn best when you print things out to go back to? All the pilot education programs have options for computer-based instruction that includes videos, testing, and review. Here’s where it is helpful to know your learning style.

Learning style speaks to how people take in and process information. However, the learning style you are most comfortable with may not be the style where you will learn the most (pdf).

Moallem provides an approach to evaluating learning style:

• What type of information is best perceived? Concrete, practical, oriented toward facts and procedures; or conceptual, innovative, oriented toward theories and meanings?
• What modality is most effective? Visual representations of presented material—pictures, diagrams, flow charts; or written and spoken explanations?
• What organization of information is preferred? Presentations that proceed from the specific to the general; or presentations that go from the general to the specific?
• How is information best processed? Learning by trying things out, working with others; or learning by thinking things through, working alone?
• How does understanding generally progress? Linear, orderly, learning in small incremental steps; or holistic, system thinking, learning in large leaps?

Courses, instructors, and individual decisions about how to study can all be tailored to the above. I expect people reading this blog have enough educational experiences to draw upon to make judgments about the forms where they have been most successful. Using these questions I can see that a self-study approach is likely to serve me best, especially when combined with my scheduling problems.

I know myself enough to focus on the frameworks, visual presentation, and general to specific – this is possible in either instructor-led or self-study. Self-study, however, wins out in my case for learning by thinking things through, making mistakes on my own and in developing a holistic, systematic understanding of the material (rather than a more linear approach). This last is hard in setting where a class agenda must be followed for a group of people.

Generalizing back to more common settings: when organizational learning experts make decisions about how to provide training for the whole organization, they are doing it from the perspective of what is going to be best on-average. It is rare that they can focus on an individual’s particular needs. That said, as individuals within organizations, we have the ability and responsibility to find the best way to maintain our own knowledge. Many organizations do provide options in the forms of education they make available. We are all learning all the time, even if we don’t have to prove it to maintain our professional standing or licensure. Given available options, we are all becoming learning system designers (just as we are all becoming systems designers of our work settings in other ways).  At the same time, knowledge is becoming more of a currency. Use your knowledge of your schedule, your learning style, and your own discipline to stock your account.

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