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.

In 2007 I wrote the first version of this post. Three years and many comments later, many of the same issues are on the table… Laptops don’t kill meetings, inattention kills meetings. Mistrust kills meetings. Bullet points kill meetings. One-to-many information transfer without follow-on discussion/decision-making/action kills meetings.

That said, are laptops, smartphones, and tablets avenues to distraction? Certainly. Checking email, sport scores, or working on a project that is late is a temptation if you have the tools available — and if the meeting isn’t providing value. Systems savvy can help us think about new ways of working given we have always-on access.

I often talk about technology first (following the TOP — technology, organization, people — checklist), but in this case I’ll kick-off with the organizational issues given the leverage they provide. What are the roles in the meeting? Who is attending — and how? Is everyone face-to-face or is it a hybrid form with some people attending virtually? What is the goal of the meeting? (Thanks to Lynne Cooper for inspiring this prior post.) Should you go to this meeting or do you have other more high-priority issues and the meeting can go on without you? Could you just attend for part of the meeting? If you’re the host, is a meeting the best form of work for this task? Huge number of organizational issues that may influence who attends and how — following a hard look at whether or not the meeting should take place. Careful consideration of these issues may reduce the number of meetings you attend or run, reducing the conflict around whether or not people have their laptops open….

People: What human and personal dimensions are in play when we have laptops and Internet access in a meeting or presentation? Be honest with yourself. Sean, an MBA student, recently provided a great comment to my 2007 post. An excerpt:

A couple of my instructors have instituted rules on what constitutes acceptable use during class, but very few actually enforce it. I do not bring my laptop to class because the temptation to do things other than taking notes is too great. So I prefer to take notes the old fashioned way. It works well for me.

Two main issues — Sean’s instructors are letting the class down by having rules but not enforcing them and Sean is showing systems savvy by having the personal insight to make good design choices around his own tools and behavior.

Besides being honest about yourself, be honest about your audience, but also open minded. While this Southpark clip about out of control cell phones in an elementary school class may have aspects of truth (doesn’t most good comedy have some connection to reality?), surely our colleagues have more control. Though perhaps not. Again from a comment to the prior post:

As a professional manager, if one of my staff is on his/her laptop while in my meetings, I can’t tell if they’re taking notes, researching, doing email, or playing games. Well, actually I can – when I say “John, what do you think?” and get back a blank stare or half-answer, I know you’re not paying attention to the meeting. That really limits your ability to progress in my organization. Same is true for phone meetings, by the way.

And finally, the technology: Physical features of technology play a role in how the technologies are perceived. The form factor may make a difference. For example, Steve Rubel blogged about his early experiences with his Apple iPad. When I quoted him earlier, I highlighted this point “A tablet computer changes the dynamic because everyone can tell you are taking notes”, versus, I assume, playing FarmVille, checking Facebook, or handling emails from another project. Cross-platform note/info capture tool provider Evernote has experience with these issues and has taken the side of the notetakers in meetings. They make available the stickers shown above. (That particular one is stuck to my laptop. I may be adding another to my iPhone now that I can connect my Bluetooth keyboard.)

But systems savvy is more than just considering each of technology, organizations, and people. Systems savvy goes beyond in terms of designing intertwined systems where these three dimensions work together for success.

For example, we need to be proactive about how we plan and run meetings and how meetings fit into projects. We also need to be proactive as meeting attendees. Just having a laptop in the meeting doesn’t mean you or your meeting collaborators will gain value — even when people are taking notes. The notes need to be group notes in some way, either as a consolidation or a single source (ideally that was on the screen during the meeting so corrections could be made on the fly). Hmmm. What about presenting from a wiki that is annotated by someone other than the lead as the meeting goes along? You could pull this off using Google Docs or any other multiparty-editable wiki, or even just presenting from within the edit mode of PowerPoint and using the notes section to annotate. In settings where no norms have been set and I have the only laptop/smartphone out (I’m an attendee not the lead in this scenario, or norms would have been set), I’ve learned to announce my intentions, offer to project my notes for all to see, or to post the notes to a shared site after the meeting.

Use your systems savvy to evolve your meeting process and outcomes. What norms have developed in your own organizations? Are they helping you get the most value out of your systems of technology, organizational practice, and peoples’ time?

No news that the Apple iPad came out on Saturday. What is news, and will be news, is how people come to understand and use tablet computing in different situations. I’ve written about the norms of technology use in meetings and classrooms — and about being chastised by a colleague for “texting” on my phone when I was, in fact, taking notes. We have a chance to watch whether and how tablet computing will drive new norms with the iPad bringing tablet computing into the mainstream.

Steve Rubel is blogging about The Tablet-Only Challenge, his “week-long challenge to use a tablet computer, in this case the iPad, as [his] primary content creation and consumption device.” In his post he mentions how the iPad seemed to better fit organizational norms:

In some corporate cultures, it’s more than OK to bring a laptop to a meeting for note taking. However, I often find that it puts a barrier between you and others. If you’re taking notes on a smart phone, people just think you’re checking your email. A tablet computer changes the dynamic because everyone can tell you are taking notes. I used the iPad to take notes throughout the day, which was terrific since I have terrible handwriting.

Observation: People drawing on their systems savvy (the ability to see the opportunities and challenges in both our technology tools and organizational practices, and how these might work in concert) will see that there are two different issues playing out in the norms Steve Rubal accurately describes. The first is how we individually hold and engage with information (e.g., the best way for him to take notes). The second is whether multitasking is appropriate for the situation (e.g., people’s concern with email checking). These are separate issues with separate design considerations. While I am a strong believer in groups setting their own norms for multitasking, I am also a strong believer in individuals making personal decisions about how they hold and engage with information for the task at hand. The design choices need to be made at the appropriate level: group decisions for group’s needs, individual decisions for individual’s needs.

Here’s hoping that the iPad hoopla energizes discussions of new norms in conference rooms and coffee shops around the world.

Steve, thanks for sharing your experience. I’m following your week with great interest.

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.

Many management books (for example, The First 90 Days, p. 45) suggest that you have structured interviews with your direct reports when you first join a new organization. Eugene Lee followed this advice when he become CEO 2.0 (that’s how Ross Mayfield, one of Socialtext’s founders, advertised the job on LinkedIn) for the collaboration/Enterprise 2.0 platform provider Socialtext. As suggested, he wrote down a set of questions like: how long have you been here, what are you most proud of in your career so far, what will you be most proud of having done when you leave Socialtext?

What’s unique is how this process evolved. He’d scheduled these one-on-one meetings for 30 minutes each and knew that wasn’t much time for people to be thoughtful about their responses — so he posted the list of questions to the company wiki. (A wiki is a website where everyone in the company can post and edit information – and one of Socialtext’s main products.) The idea was to give people a chance to think about the questions before their face-to-face meetings. Eugene didn’t anticipate that given the company’s culture and comfort with social software, like this wiki, that people would just start answering — on the wiki for all to see.

Part of this picture is that Eugene hadn’t come from companies with this kind of transparency. In fact, few companies today are this comfortable with public posts and discussions, and I’m guessing that Cisco and Adobe weren’t during Eugene’s tenure. This public response was a surprise to Eugene: unanticipated, and somewhat unnerving (though he notes that for the Socialtext crew, they wouldn’t have thought of doing it any other way). But here’s the key: Eugene has systems savvy and quickly saw the value of the approach. He didn’t immediately post a recall. He certainly didn’t delete the posts. Instead, he added his own responses.

The wiki posts ended up creating the vision statement (especially the question about what will you be most proud of having done when you leave). There was even a dynamic in that as people were contributing their thoughts, others were “gardening the wiki” — making it a well designed document.

The whole process become something Eugene described as “Getting to Know You 2.0.” Sounds like a beautiful Silicon Valley leadership story. At the time, Eugene notes that it actually felt:

So scary. I’d lost control of the process. How powerful to let that control go…. When you hit a tough spot and need people to do something hard… the trust is enormous… and we make software that helps that.

As a result of the process he was able to prepare a presentation covering: memes, themes, dreams, & seams… what was common, what the aspirations were, and where there were gaps. Getting to Know You 2.0 was a success. It took a combination of technology (the Socialtext platform), organization (a way of working that assumed openness and transparency), and people dimensions (Eugene being accepting of risk, even at this critical juncture with the new company). TOP Management.

This was 2007. Jump forward to the middle of 2009. Eugene got a copy of the book Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor. This book, and his Getting to Know You 2.0 story have become part of how he presents Socialtext’s products to other senior leaders. …and sometimes the transition is stunning.

He recalled a recent sales call with a C-level executive at a large, traditional (the kind of place where the conference room’s mahogany cabinets had mahogany handles), East Coast organization. Some departments in the organization had been using Socialtext social software products and now the question was whether the platform should be offered to the whole company. The meeting was expected to be a private one with the exec and Eugene. Instead, the exec’s staff crashed the meeting and were joined by a top IT exec. Possibly rough meeting, and started out very quietly. The C-level didn’t say a word for 40 minutes, but the end of the presentation he says, “I think we should do this.” The IT exec posed concerns and implied that while this might be good for a California company… “what problem will it solve? Implementations fail when there isn’t a problem being solved.” Pause. The C-level then says “Employee engagement, cross department collaboration.” Maybe this firm’s conference rooms were formal, but this gentleman understood the value of transparency in modern organizations.

Eugene says this story has played out similarly in multiple firms. This transition to transparency is happening and technology is helping to manage the process. He sees this as a leadership issue, the technology is only enabling the interactions. Leaders need to consider:

What does it mean to you, the leader, in terms of not killing transparency? How open book is appropriate? How cross functionally transparent do you really want the culture to be?

Technology, organizations, and people — designed together — TOP Management.

Additional material from my interview with Eugene:
Budget as a Trigger for TOP Management: Examples from Eugene Lee of Socialtext