Technology and Organizations

Thursday, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) is hosting author Charlene Li in their Forum series.  She’s presenting Open leadership: How social technology can transform the way you lead (PARC forums are generally free and open to the public, info here).  Charlene is the best selling author of the 2010 book Open Leadership and co-author of Groundswell (2008).

I’ve just started Open Leadership, but I’m very excited about the first chapter: “Why Giving Up Control Is Inevitable.”  I’ve been meaning to write a post entitled ““Let it Go” and “Get Over It” — Why, when not said by your 13 year old kid, these are great ideas,” but Charlene seems to have done it for me.  My main take-away:

..new technologies allow us to let go of control and still be in command, because better, cheaper communication tools give us the ability to be intimately familiar with what is happening with both customers and employees.  The result of these new relationships is open leadership, which I define as:

having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals

She has (positive) examples from Best Buy, Dell, Cisco, P&G, the State Bank of India, and the U.S. Department of State.  This gives me hope.  If, as she describes, “making the elephant dance” is possible, then I am hopeful for my students and for our economies.

Where I expect a full reading of the book will help is in identifying the key levers or touch points for opening leadership.  For example, Tracy Allison Altman’s recent guest post Getting Beyond Pseudo-Transparency: The Role of Evidence in Participation and Performance describes some levers that make modern organizational transparency work.  Tracy closed with:

People + Connectedness + Evidence = Transparent Participation. Without evidence, people can participate in conversations about what really is working, or is likely to work, for their organization. They can come up with theories, make forecasts, estimate risks, and generate new ideas. But eventually, they’ll need some evidence to prove all that up.

Charlene seems to be saying (remember, I haven’t finished the book) that social technologies (e.g., Facebook, blogging, Twitter, enterprise collaborative spaces) give employees and leadership enough insight into what is going on that they can quit monitoring and worry about supporting the business as it moves ahead.

What I’m not clear on is how to develop this kind of vision.  I mean vision in two ways: dream with direction, and ability to discern what’s going on.  I think I have the first kind given my excitement about the growth of transparency in organizations today.  What I don’t know is how to create a general system for discerning organizational reality from actions within social technologies.  Any thoughts on how to phrase that in a question for Charlene? Or, better yet, join me at the Forum.

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Hank Chesbrough will be speaking at the Aug 26 PARC Forum.

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.

Wikipatterns is far more than a book about what a wiki is and how it can benefit your organization/community. It’s a book of project and community support that happens to use a wiki. The book shines for the person or “communication committee” interesting in using wikis as a way of getting work done.

Author Stewart Mader has extensive experience in using technology to support education, work, and non-profit companies. I’ve had the chance to meet with Stewart and came away with an appreciation for his approach. He shares his strategies with us all via the book and its accompanying wiki — of course!

What’s a wikipattern? Stewart Mader and his wikipatterns.com collaborators value learning from example, specifically, learning from patterns of behavior that support or work against a wiki-supported work style. The book (names the patterns within the examples) and website (provides the definition, usage, examples, and possible steps) present the most common of these patterns and examples of their outcomes (about 100 patterns are described). People Patterns and People Anti-Patterns describe positive and negative individual behaviors, respectively. For example:

• Invitation: “One of the easiest patterns, simply invite users to interact with the wiki.”
• Do it all: “Sometimes a Wiki Champion can over do it. If they don’t trust other people to contribute to the wiki, they may feel the need to step in and make all of the edits and additions themselves.”

Adoption Patterns and Adoption Anti-Patterns include:

• Wiki not Email (a favorite of mine): “Use wiki pages to replace email which either broadcasts information or responds to questions.”
• Manager Lock Down: “This pattern refers to the situation where a manager takes ownership of certain wiki content which is particularly visible and unintentionally discourages people from changing their content. The result can be that other wiki users who wish to contribute become hesitant about what content can and cannot be edited.”

The organizational examples are another highlight of the book. Each one notes why the company/organization chose a wiki mode, how they are using the wiki, the patterns they see in use, and the changes they’ve seen as a result of using a wiki (better communication, stronger collaboration, and efficiency being the common results).

I expect people who are experienced wiki users, but do not have or want a role supporting the people of the wiki, may not find much new in Wikipatterns. There are better options for choosing and implementing a specific software platform. Instead, Wikipatterns is a great choice for people looking to encourage wiki contributions, a shift to greater collaboration via technology, and/or for understanding the ebbs and flows of existing communities.

For more of Stewart Mader’s thoughts, follow his blog, Future Changes. Also, please stand by for a post here based on a recent meeting I had with Stewart about systems savvy.

For the first 54 pages of Delivering Happiness I could have been reading about any Silicon Valley 24 year-old entrepreneur with a success under his belt. The next 189 pages WOWed me. This isn’t just CEO Tony Hsieh’s story, but rather a transparent look at Zappos through thick and thin, and what the company has learned along the way. Many CEOs tell their stories after the fact. Tony Hsieh and Zappos tell their story as it develops. From Twitter (@Zappos, @dhbook) to the CEO/COO blog, I’ve had the chance to follow the story for a while (hiring & on-boarding, marriage to Amazon, starting a movement). With Delivering Happiness, I feel like I’m getting to play a part. I see the questions the Zappos community asks itself and I want to reply.

This is more than transparency. This is engagement. The folks at Zappos engage with their:

• customers – a hallmark, see p. 145 describing their call center approach
• vendors – see p. 187 where Fred Mossler describes how they came to give the same info to vendors as they do to their buyers
• future hires – they’re working on this one, but they want to build relationships, beginning with college freshmen, leading to internships and possible hires (p. 199)
• job candidates – the incredibly interactive interview process includes questions like “If it was your first day on the job at Zappos and your task was to make the interview/recruiting process more fun, what would you do for those eight hours?” (See Christa F.’s story starting on p. 169)
• employees – for example, open town hall meetings, the value put on recognizing/knowing fellow employees (the login-in “Face Game” and even how the building entrances are set up, p. 150), and the famed Culture Book (p. 134).

The Culture Book: During drinks at a local bar (a common form of Zappos engagement), Tony asked the group to talk about the Zappos culture for the benefit of a new hire who was with them. As they finished telling their stories, they realized that story-telling was an amazing way to bring the culture to life. Thus began the Culture Book. Every year employees are asked to send an email describing the culture in 100-500 words. This (unedited, except for typos) material is published in a book they give to prospective employees, vendors, and via request (yes, I have one!). The process isn’t just about building the book and documenting the culture. It’s an open-ended way of interacting with the employees and has resulted in other changes, including a monthly newsletter response to emails that “Ask Anything.”

This level of engagement is raising the bar for all of us. Zappos has approximately 10 million customers. That’s 10 million people who see what engagement can be like. True to their values, Zappos isn’t trying to hoard the insights that lead to this engagement — Zappos would like us all to join the Delivering Happiness Movement:

Over the next several months, the site will evolve to become a place for you to read and share your own stories about Delivering Happiness, passion and purpose, in business or in life.

In time, we hope this site will become a place people can play a part and learn about the ongoing movement of delivering happiness to ourselves and one another.

I think they’re on to something. I’ve said that transparency is the concept of the quarter, and I’m thinking that that if we talk about transparency and engagement we may have the concept of the decade. I’ll return to these ideas in a post on June 7 (release date for Delivering Happiness). I’m looking forward to thinking more about the impact the Zappos experience can have through the book release and the continued growth of Zappos Insights.

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I’ve based this blog on an advance copy of Delivering Happiness, so please note that the page numbers may shift a bit in the final version. Bloggers, here’s the link to request your own advance copy.

MIT’s Tom Malone and Wired Magazine’s Clive Thompson have new articles out showing the opportunities we have when we use technology either as a mediator of collective human intelligence or as machine intelligence to add to our own. Malone’s focuses on the opportunities for decentralization within and across organizational designs. Thompson’s speaks to individuals blending their own “smarts with machine smarts” in a form of “cyborgian activity.” Both describe the vast differences people have regarding the underlying values of possible new approaches and the differences in awareness regarding the opportunities. One of my goals in this blog is to acknowledge individual differences in technology and organization understanding and help to create awareness for better organizational design.

MIT’s Tom Malone provided the following in his interview:

So much has been made of the ways that technology has evolved–computation, storage, communication, and now instrumentation—and how it has completely changed what companies can know. As a close observer of all this, do you see executives keeping up?

Well, sure, executives and everybody else knows about the new kinds of technologies that keep popping up. But there’s a key perspective that a lot of people don’t really get yet, which is that these new technologies change the essence of organizations.

To a greater degree than any technologies since those that enabled the Industrial Revolution, we’re now in the midst of a transformation in how businesses are organized. And the changes are not in production technology, but in coordination technology.

Malone credits Mitch Resnick of the MIT Media Lab for the idea of the centralized mindset describing “a set of often unquestioned assumptions about how to organize things, about how to get things done when you’ve got a bunch of people involved.” Malone suggests that most of us are still victims of this mindset and that it limits how we approach ways of organizing.

Clive Thompson, speaking of the results of Kasparov’s freestyle chess tournament where computer, human, or combined teams could compete, “The most brilliant entities on the planet, in other words (at least when it comes to chess), are neither high-end machines nor high-end humans. They’re average-brained people who are really good at blending their smarts with machine smarts.”

Thompson continues:

People who are thrilled by personal technology are the ones who have optimized their process — they know how and when to rely on machine intelligence. They’ve tweaked their Facebook settings… trained up the [artificial intelligence] recommendations they get from Apple’s Genius or TiVo.

And crucially, they also know when to step away from the screen and ignore the clamor of online distractions. The upshot is that they feel smarter, more focused, and more capable. In contrast, those who feel intimidated by online life haven’t hit that sweet spot. They feel the Internet is making them harried and — as Nicholas Carr suggested in The Atlantic — “stupid.”

Both articles end similarly pointing to the need to better understand how to bring technology and human capabilities together. My own work takes on this challenge. For example, Greg Northcraft and I suggest the following in our chapter, Borgs in the Org?:

• We need to be assume that practices and structures will change – technologies change, organizational needs change, the people involved change. Our approaches should change, or at least be reevaluated, in sync.
• We need to grasp organizational realities that may provide or inhibit a particular technology or practice use – organizations have policies about use of technologies within their walls and/or vary in levels of support and availability. Just as we should think about what to take on a trip, we should think about what to take into different technology/organization environments.
• We must understand that systems integration is a life skill – systems design is not just for information technology designers. We have choices about which phone to use, which applications to work with, etc.
• We must have an appreciation for when to integrate technology and when to stick with a tech-lite organizational practice. Learning may be better with the metrics provided by a technology — or using a technology may hide outcomes in a way that reduces our learning. We need to make informed decisions about the best path.

Ironically, we need to learn to weave technology tools, organizational practice, and human capability together to be effective — even though it was the mechanization of weaving that triggered the Luddite anti-technology movement of the early 1800s. The ability to acknowledge the possibilities across the dimensions of technology, organizations, and people, and then weave them into strong and dynamic organizational design is what distinguishes people with Systems Savvy.  Systems Savvy may be the most powerful skill we have in modern organizations.  Systems Savvy allows us to see our opportunities and make effective decisions about technology, organization, and even basic work process.