Technology and Organizations

If you’re a subscriber to this blog (and I hope you are), you know I’m intrigued by Zappos’ organizational design and overall management strategies. I find myself visiting three different Zappos sites regularly:

• ZapposInsights.com – site and web community around what makes Zappos unique and how Zappos does business. They offer free open tours, formal management training and the for-fee membership site even has a section called “Ask Anything.”
• DeliveringHappinessBook.com – site and web community around the ideas in Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness. They’re sharing and they want us to share too: “Our higher purpose? Delivering happiness to the world. Make it yours too and help spread the word to family, friends and colleagues alike!”
• Zappos.com (a girl does need shoes you know!)

What’s so intriguing to me is that through these sites and organizational activities Zappos seems to have found a way to help others develop culture savvy. Culture savvy, like systems savvy, is a complex area of organizational expertise that is often learned by experience and challenge, not by just by reading or hearing a lecture (for background, see Drinking Beer and Understanding Culture Embodiment). Zappos is offering us a way to learn their approach to organizational culture through a variety of rich experiences and dialogue. (For more on the value of dialogue, see Ed Schein’s article.)

Rich experiences, I believe, are at the heart of helping others learn any complex systems skills. Additional evidence? Consider leadership and design.

Leadership savvy is another complex area that is best taught through modeling, learning by doing, and reflection. Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner write in the 4th edition of The Leadership Challenge that leadership, like any skill, “can be strengthened, honed, and enhanced, given the motivation and desire, along with practice and feedback, role models, and coaching” p. 340. In the related instructors’ guide they continue:

In our own studies, as well as others by the Center for Creative Leadership and corporations like Honeywell, three major opportunities for learning to lead emerge: (a) trial and error, (b) observation of others, and (c) formal education and training. pp. ix-x.

From a design perspective, Dan Saffer, writing for the Adaptive Path blog similarly pushes for an active role,

I was taught that design has three components: thinking, making, and doing. (Doing is the synthesis, presentation, and evaluation of a design; the bridge between thinking and making.)…

Details often get overlooked in just “thinking” projects, as do constraints. Constraints are somehow less solid in the world of thought than they are in the world of making.

So, how do we help others learn systems savvy? By using the same ideas that Zappos, Kouszes, Posner, and Saffer offer for spreading other complex skills: Provide opportunities to try (and fail), observe others, and get formal training when it’s appropriate. We all have to get our hands dirty if we’re going to do this well.

Background examples from prior posts:

Stewart Mader and Sharing Systems Savvy – “Don’t let the words get in the way…. That is, don’t let the terms (e.g., wiki, open innovation) put a barrier between you and the people you’re helping to understand systems savvy. Focus on the work.”

Gaining Value from Blue & White Collar Systems Savvy – Ben Kepes – Value from diverse groups working together, “The mental models held by people in the two roles are different. One is not better or more sophisticated than the other, but they are different.”

Jennifer Kenny – Helping Others Become TOP Managers — “We knew that they knew a 1000 times more about their actual work than we did — training wouldn’t make sense. Instead, we helped them tap into their knowledge using the common language about their work — mobilization of their own ideas. Joint design, metrics and analysis.”

Transformation Through Demonstration: Megan Gailey and the Implementation of Meeting Support — “I tend to focus on the people who are the willing participants… the early adopters. Then through their demonstration and behavior change, show success. [The success] sways the resistors and the people on the fence. Get the earlier adoptors excited and the fence people come along.”

Don’t Hide Your Systems Savvy Practices – “Explicit use of systems savvy is better than tacit use because it allows others to coordinate. Think about the benefits gained in a kick-off project meeting if the group comes to a set of explicit decisions about where files will be stored, how sign-offs will be managed, and the best strategies for communicating.”

Think Out Loud With Me – Rhonda Winter, CIO of Indianapolis Motor Speedway — “If you say, “can you think out loud with me” then even the most bashful will enter the conversation. We may not make the decisions that day, but we get the conversation started.

[Thinking out loud is a] great teaching tool, helps make clear that it’s ok to make a mistake – creates an environment where you can play with the ideas out loud; first idea may not be best, but it’s the conversation starter.”

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?

I’ve noted before that I live in my browser, that Google hosts my life, and I’ve questioned the meaning of workspace in today’s environment. Yesterday at Web 2.0 Expo my workspace got a bit bigger. Microsoft is giving us the cloud form of Office 2010 as Docs.com and its integration with Facebook.

From the Docs.com site:

Now you can discover, create, and share Microsoft Office documents with your Facebook friends. Built using Microsoft Office 2010 – Docs for Facebook provides the best possible document service for the Facebook environment. Seamless integration with Facebook means that the service is all about sharing your documents. Finally docs can be friendly too!

For me, this is all about going where my audience/teammates are. Technology is a tool and Microsoft and Facebook just gave me a new one. How I use the tool depends on the people (where they are and their skill set), and the organizational policies and procedures. TOP Management (technology, organization, and people) means I take all three into account as we build a workspace for a project. The idea of workspace is used broadly here, and will only get broader as time goes on.

The tricky part is how the rest of the world views “workspace.”

I’ve asked undergrad students if they use Facebook in support of homework or projects. The blank stares were interesting. I think the Doc.com/FB integration may change things. Not sure if students will like the work/social crossover, but I expect it will be a benefit in giving them a better space in which to work. No more missing the revision request because you’re on Facebook, it will find you there.

What about our corporate workspace? Many companies block Facebook and other social media sites. Rumor has that some even block sites that provide the option to use Facebook Connect as a logon – whether or not the user tries to use Facebook Connect. How do we, can we, separate a communication platform from its social uses? Consider this:

Play at work is substantively interesting in its own right. It also has obvious management implications. Some organizations prohibit employees from using electronic mail for “nonwork purposes,” presumably because such uses would consume network resources such as disk space and would interfere with peoples’ work activities. Conceivably extracurricular electronic groups might distract employees from their jobs and thereby reduce both the quality of their work and their affiliation with the organization. Alternatively such groups could ultimately increase the quality of work through providing new information resources and increase affiliation with the organization through providing new opportunities for employees to discover things they have in common with other employees. (Finholt & Sproull, 1990, pdf)

Yes, we’ve been working on these issues for over 20 years. It’s not an issue of email, Facebook, or whatever comes next, but rather how people and organizations design their workspace and work process either behind walls (physical or metaphorical) or not. The most powerful organizations will use all the tools at their disposal and they will help employees understand how to be productive – wherever they are and with whatever tools they have. Perhaps we need to demonstrate our systems savvy and systems responsibility to be earn this flexibility? Suggestions or examples of how to do this?

What critical innovation activities must be supported by an innovation infrastructure? Short answer is that innovation infrastructure must keep the project’s top goals… top of mind, through…. TOP Management. Whether you’re working with a group of enthusiasts or a formal network of company partners, keeping the team moving in the same direction is key. (I’ll take on the longer answer in Part 2.)

Wednesday I have the privilege of speaking at a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The workshop’s goal is to develop projects related to reducing time and cost overruns in large innovation systems (space, aviation, etc.). The audience includes engineers, systems designers, and academics from across engineering, economics, and organization science. My 15 minutes of fame will be focused on the role of innovation infrastructure — built with technology support and organizational practice — to help make large efforts feel small. This post is my trial run.

I went into the project thinking about how, whether, the needs of community-based innovations were different than those of large formal projects. My conclusion is that even though the community/enthusiast-based projects may be smaller in terms of investment, they are likely to be larger in terms of perspective. This breadth is both a benefit and a burden.

Breadth is a benefit in that innovation needs breadth to help us find new ways to put together solutions. Breadth is a burden in that our focus must be narrow to succeed. Informal communities of enthusiasts are likely to have more varied goals and less oversight to keep them on a particular path.

NASA’s Mark Moore helped me understand the innovation importance of focus on top goals. I had contacted Mark (thanks Bob!) as he was the lead on NASA’s Puffin single-person vertical take-off and landing project. The Puffin project is a great innovation example as it moved quickly and so far is tracking on its design goals. Contrast this with the many delays we see in larger space and aviation projects.

Mark’s says it is critical to keep the top goals on the table throughout the project. The tension here is that an innovation project is likely to be made up of experts from a variety of different areas. (Recall that breadth is good for innovation… but also recall that breadth means people may bring differing goals to the project.) Each area of engineering wants to do its best, though what the project may need is trade-offs across the best possible outcomes. Mark’s phrase: “Every optimal aircraft is filled with non-optimal tradeoffs.”

Both formal and informal innovation projects need to focus on their top goals:

..don’t confuse collaborative innovation with a headless organization. Leadership still plays a critical role in mobilizing and aligning any organization. But the role of the leader is not to create the innovation but to create the environment in which it will thrive (p. 17, The Innovation Zone).

People need to understand the ultimate design goals and how the innovation as a whole must support those goals.

How can TOP Management support our ability to keep top goals, top of mind? TOP Management is the intertwining of technology, organizational practice, and people. In the Puffin case there was an understanding of the human desire to optimize around one’s area of expertise -- and how to manage that tendency via particular practices and simple technologies:

We did not use any advanced collaboration tools, but simply email and WebEx conferencing. The key to our successful collaboration was to keep a small core team that had very clear objectives, with the detailed discipline efforts tied together by a top-down systems analysis understanding of the design problem.

Technology played a supporting role, using tech to support the focus on the top goal. Email served to document decisions and keep track of the trade-offs. (Value of documentation, even in face-to-face meetings.)

While the O and the P of TOP management were highlights of Puffin’s success, I expect that technology could play a stronger role, especially in larger projects. Project communications and workspaces can be designed to highlight the top goals both formally and informally (for no clear reason I keep thinking of Google’s changing logos). Technology could also support the organizational practice of evaluating trade-offs vis a vis the top goals. As ideas role in, the “crowd” can give electronic thumbs up or down similar to the voting possible in some innovation platforms (e.g., Spigit), “liking” on Facebook, or Digg. Puffin was a small project and so I doubt if hardwiring practice would have added much, but for larger projects hardwiring the systems focus on the top goals may be necessary to keep goals from diffusing as you move away from top leadership.

Key to innovation infrastructure is the development, focus, and support of overarching system goals.

“First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” (John F. Kennedy). This was a clear goal statement and ran counter to what many of his advisers thought was prudent (audio track from a meeting where the issues are debated). Many of the advisers wanted to take a building block approach. They wanted to know more about things like the the surface of the moon (would the lander sink) and the implications of weightlessness. Kennedy, however, had a better understanding of political and human needs. You need a clear goal and a clear metric of success. We went to the moon, on time.

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: