Technology and Organizations

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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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

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TOP (tech, org, people) Management isn’t just about action.  It’s also about being able to do effective analysis.  It’s the ability to avoid the problem of having only a hammer …and so seeing all issues as nails.  It’s also the ability to avoid errors of attribution: for example, attribution theory tells us that people have a self-serving bias such that they attribute positive outcomes to themselves, and negative outcomes to external factors.  TOP Management pushes us to consider at least three sources in any analysis.  This high-level “checklist” can help us get to the root cause of issues more effectively than could any approach focusing on a single attribute.

The Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina concluded that the governmental response to Hurricane Katrina was a “failure of initiative” and “a failure of leadership.”  Using these terms they put the problem in the hands of people, and note where people did take exceptional initiative, they saved time and lives.  Perhaps it makes sense to give this a human cause given it is such a human tragedy.  However, the solution will be found by weaving together all of technology, organization, and people.

Luckily in their broader analysis (I’m drawing from the Executive Summary of Findings and the Preface), the authors of the Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina covered each of technology, organizations, and people in their analysis.  They took great care to avoid politics alone, or finger pointing alone.  As a result their summary is of greater value as we strive to learn from this disaster.

The Committee’s deep focus on coordination leads me to believe that they saw the need to more tightly intertwine technology, organizations, and people, with an understanding of the value of agility (p.1).  They connect massive communications damage and failure with the outcomes of “impaired response efforts, command and control, and situational awareness” (p.3).  They also highlight that “a lack of personnel, training, and funding also weakened command and control” (p.3).

From p.1:

“Many of the problems we have identified can be categorized as “information gaps” — or at least problems with information-related implications, or failures to act decisively because information was sketchy at best….  Information sent to the right people at the right place at the right time.  Information moved within agencies, across departments, and between jurisdictions of government as well.  Seamlessly. Securely.  Efficiently.

Unfortunately, no government does these things well, especially big governments.”

They continue,

“The federal government is the largest purchaser of information technology in the world, by far.  One would think we could share information by now.  But Katrina again proved we cannot.”

This is because technology is not a silver bullet.   Without a solid and complete National Communications System (p. 3), joint training (p.4), and human initiative — TOP Management — even the most sophisticated systems aren’t effective.

The complexity of emergency response, and the breadth and depth of the Committee’s analysis, highlights for me the value of teams as we think about how to bring together technology, organizations, and people.  No one person will have all the needed knowledge and information.  Perhaps a well-placed leader with systems savvy can guide a team of experts across the different dimensions — but how much more effective can we be if more people on the team at least have the high-level system savvy vision to help them see where their individual expertise fits?

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Y2K, 9/11, H1N1, the financial crisis.  Crises trigger change.  Thank goodness. Otherwise many organizations would look the same today as 20 years ago.  Crises push people to look at opportunities within technology and organizations for responses to the crises — or to take the steps to go along with already built, yet sometimes ignored, technological and organizational innovations.  (Great example of this at UPS in a comment to a prior post.  Thanks, Paul!)  Crises are a case where the People dimension of TOP Management provides extra value.  Our human reaction to crisis gives us an opportunity for change. Managed well, we get to make lemonade out of lemons.

After Y2K, Chris Farrell interviewed (Transcript, Audio) Paul Saffo, Suhas Patil, AnnaLee Saxenian, Rafiq Dossani, Shankar Muniyappa, and others.  Farrell’s analysis included:

Economists initially looked at Y2K as a productivity killer.  Imagine a town threatened by a rising river. Every able-bodied person in town is put to work stacking sandbags. It’s necessary work to save the town – but it’s unproductive work. Nothing gets built. No food gets grown.  With the Y2K bug, programmers, chief information officers, project managers, and other digital workers were getting paid to do unproductive work – stacking sandbags of silicon. No innovative investments. No new productivity enhancing software.  But economists were wrong. Y2K wasn’t a flood.  Instead, think of it as clearing a path choked with underbrush.  Once the trail is open, it is much easier to zip from point A to point B. Y2K gave companies an excuse to clean up their software and hardware underbrush – a critical factor in today’s improved business productivity.

H1N1 may be our next “opportunity.”

In a comment to Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s post, Stay Home and Work,  Jennifer Fraone of the Boston College Center for Work & Family (on Twitter @BCCWF) notes:

…in light of the recent H1N1 flu pandemic, we should also add the fact that telecommuting programs should be implemented in organizations for business continuity reasons. Organizations that utilize regular telecommuting, and develop the technology to support it, will be better prepared for employees to work from home in the event of a disaster or pandemic.

At the Boston College Center for Work & Family, we have long been advocates of fostering more flexible workplaces. We would be happy to join with you in the dialogue to promote flexibility in the “re-invented” modern workplace.

Prof. Kanter had made the point that the barriers to remote work “are the usual human ones” — the P in TOP Management.  It may take a crisis, sadly, to push us to deal more effectively with Kanter’s stated issues of trust and culture.

The tech community is seeing the need to get ahead of the possible H1N1 pandemic.  In a current white paper, Cisco Systems offers: “To ensure business continuity during disaster or pandemic events, it is critical to enable fully functional virtual offices for their workforce.”  In another blog supporting the tech community, Kristen Caretta writes “…for those with no business continuity plans, it’s not too late to craft communication and other policies to ensure that business continues uninterrupted should conditions deteriorate.”  The post also notes that you need to walk a tightrope in terms of being prepared while not scaring employees.

Managers with TOP Management skills will use the threat of H1N1 to prepare for risks, remove barriers to flexible work, and focus the energy in broadly productive ways. They will:

• Weave together technical solutions that can support their organizations under extreme conditions (e.g., vast increase in employees working from home, customer call center increases for health related products)
• Build organizational systems that focus on collaboration skills, productivity, and awareness of others — even when not face to face
• Engage people in innovation and change such that the technology and organizational improvements stick

Have you noticed your organization taking steps to prepare for an H1N1 outbreak?  Has the focus been on the health and safety issues, or are they looking at broader issues?

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Yesterday was Reid-Hillview Airport Community Day. One of the activities was a tour of the Control Tower. Great experience. Thank you to Vincent and Spencer for taking the time to explain the process that keeps hundreds of flights going in and out safely. Thank you to the rest of the team for letting us observe you at work.

I was surprised by how physical the process is, versus my high tech expectations. Yes, they have access to radar and a huge portion of the work involves radio communication with the pilots going in and out of the airport. But they also make heavy use of those big windows and a unique physical tracking system.

They track planes by type, tail number, and request for inbound or outbound route — by writing the information on plastic “pucks” with a grease pencil, and then physically sorting that puck onto the taxi and runway slots. We weren’t allowed to take pictures, so I’m showing a similar process below using wooden blocks.

When I asked about the process, using the plastic pucks versus keeping track on a computer, I was told that sometimes “elegant is best.” Great point! The solution is elegant in that the physical blocks trigger sensemaking (in my words) more than a screen version might. They can push a puck slightly out of its track to highlight that more action is necessary. All the members of the team can immediately step in to provide relief given their common understanding of the system. Elegant, green (no need for power or paper), easily visible to all in the room — good for team visualization.

Beautiful approach to a complex problem. Sometimes systems savvy means using elegant, but less high tech systems. Comments appreciated describing other examples.

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