Technology and Organizations

Rather than focus on the intricacies of T-O-P Management (technology, organizations, & people), today I’ve chosen a few recent posts by others that are in the context of TOP Management — Please comment with other posts/blogs that you think should make the list.

1. Fear of Bad Ideas
by: Seth Godin

A few people are afraid of good ideas, ideas that make a difference or contribute in some way. Good ideas bring change, that’s frightening.

But many people are petrified of bad ideas. Ideas that make us look stupid or waste time or money or create some sort of backlash.

Seth Godin (author of Tribes) notes that innovation requires failure. Important idea. See also Bob Sutton’s book, Weird Ideas That Work. The implementation of TOP Management will require failure. Who hasn’t tried to build something and found the need to start over, make adjustments, or reweave a section? (For more on weaving, see this post.)

2. Don Norman Believes Technology Comes First, User Needs Last. What?
by: DT (DT is an undercover blogger. His site notes that during the day he is a “dashing Senior Design Manager at a consumer electronics company, you probably would have heard off [sic].”)

Yep. That’s what Donald Norman (of Design of Everyday Things fame) wrote in his latest essay on his blog. You get the gist of his view in this introductory paragraph:

“I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.”

DT closing line is “So yes, Technology first, but if you put needs last or if technology does not collaborate or “handshake” with consumer needs, what is the point of being first?” DT understands TOP Management — working together with technology, organizations, and people.

3. A New Role for the CIO: Reducing Complexity
by Ron Ashkenas

There are four areas in which CIOs can reduce complexity: inefficient organizational designs; product and service proliferation; unmanaged process evolution; and ineffective but unintentional managerial behaviors.

I chose this last post as it points to areas that can benefit from TOP Management.

In each of these areas, CIOs and senior IT leaders need to ask the right questions to engage their staff and their business partners in a dialogue about simplification opportunities. Here are some of the questions that can be asked in each category…

The questions he poses each speak to the relationship of information technology (the focus of the Chief Information Officer’s job) with organization and people. Nice way to blend a technology role into broader TOP Management. I expect Ron’s book, Simply Effective, has other good strategies.

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Bruce Nussbaum recently asked via Twitter whether design thinking was the new liberal arts. He describes design thinking as “the integrative solvent that brings together the programs through a powerful methodology that solves a myriad of problems.” He says we should be moving away from the MBA and on to the MBD (Masters of Business Design). I agree with the importance of “design thinking,” but will focus my thoughts here on systems design. Systems design more clearly, for me, includes all of technical, organizational, and people systems than does the term “design thinking.” I’d also push ahead and say not just “liberal arts,” but “general education.” Basically, I think Mr. Nussbaum and I are both saying that systems savvy and design skills are critical for all of us, and need to be included in broad-based educational offerings.

Universities are getting on-board (and I hope high schools are as well — do you have any links to share?). Atwater, Kannan, & Stephens published a 2008 study of the extent that Business Schools teach “systemic thinking.” While the definitions varied, the majority of the top 63 graduate schools of business were teaching aspects systemic thinking, and 74% of the respondents agreed that the topic was essential in graduate education.

How do we teach systems design skills to people without a technical systems design background?

A simple translation of the basics of systems analysis provides a start. I’ve translated Hoffer, George, and Valacich’s information systems analysis concepts to a more general work systems form with the acronym: BUILDER. The idea is that the first skill you need is how to map where you hope to go with your systems design, and the context that you must deal with to get there.

• Business objectives: These are the basic motivations for what you’re trying to do. You may not think of them as “business objectives,” but it will certainly help you get organizational support if you do. For more personal systems design, just ask, what do I hope to gain from this new tool (e.g., iPhone upgrade) or practice (e.g., telecommuting)?
• Universe: Context and history are valuable both so you can learn from past efforts, and to help you begin to understand the other stakeholders’ interests. Understanding these interests are critical to any future “negotiated implementation.”
• Information needs: Who needs what information, and in what form? For example, in team performance, Transactive memory: Knowing who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate given that knowledge is a key predictor of success.
• Laws: Policies, required procedures, regulations, and the like are an important backdrop to any design. Perhaps you don’t want these to limit your initial thinking, but they ultimately have to be considered, even if just to attempt to change them. For example, financial firms may have federal regulations regarding the archiving of communication. In those settings you must conform to regulations even in the use of social media.
• Dynamics: The time frame and sequencing of stakeholder interactions and build order (Do I have to delete an existing application before I can install the new one?) are the basics of this aspect of the mapping. For any major information technology design it should have “full backup” as a first step.
• Events: By what milestones should the design and implementation be judged? How will you know if you are progressing in the way you hoped? What metrics can you use to track the process.  Tracking is critical as otherwise you can’t know if you need to make adjustments.
• Reach: What is the magnitude of this project in terms of people, money, number of other systems touched? Reach also helps you consider the ROI. How much investment in the process is wise or supported given the reach?

I see BUILDER as providing a set of mapping topics to prepare for the design process. I look forward to taking the next steps: What is design thinking in the context of work systems design? What do all of us need to know? How do we evaluate our TOP (Technology – Organization – People) design skills?  Do we need everyone on the team to have these skills, or is it enough if just one of us does?

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IdeasProject has a great interview with Tim Brown focused on our shifting roles as users, participants, and consumers. He notes that communication technology enables increased participation in how we interact with service providers and takes us back to an earlier age when people were more active participants in their society.

He goes on to speak of all of our need for design thinking (video version below):

I do believe this idea of participation changes design fundamentally and has to change design fundamentally. On one level, you could argue that we all have to become design thinkers. It’s one of those social skills that we all need, that we all have to be able to figure out how to solve problems creatively and to participate, in order to be able to participate. That’s one place you can put it. You can say, ‘Okay, we need to start teaching design thinking to everybody.’

In this world, I don’t think design ever gets finished. Things continue to evolve and morph and change. We have to get used to this idea that design becomes more of an enabling thing that goes on over a long period, rather than something that gets done, finished, and handed over.

Design thinking, paraphrasing from a 2008 post to Tim’s blog, is matching our needs with what is technologically feasible, perhaps with a focus on business strategy, customer value, and market opportunity. There, I think he was offering a formal designer’s perspective — designing for a market. Now he may be broadening the ideas to consider both formal designers and consumers of design — with the idea that design is never finished and is enacted by users/stakeholders.

There is a great deal of traction around these ideas. I’ve contributed All of Us as Accidental Systems Designers, and Systems Savvy: Do You Have It? (as well as prior comments on IDEO and design thinking). Seth Godin talks about change being the results of tribal action, not the action of a “king.” Many people now even do their sensemaking in public: Consider the number of blog entries around the value and forms of use for Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

I focus on organizational issues as systems savvy (my term for the ability to grasp the capabilities of a technology and how technology and organizational practice might be interwoven in new ways) has a great deal of leverage there. Systems savvy is critical to modern organizational function given the complexity and reach of organizational systems. I also think there is special opportunity in organizations. In organizations we are are more likely to formally think about practice than, I suspect, in our individual lives.

Our organizations have increasingly sophisticated work systems built up from meshed organizational practices and technology tools. These systems are constantly in flux due to the needs of innovation and the pressures of economics. We can either let these systems evolve, or we can practice design — all of us can practice design, not just change agents. Stakeholders are no longer mere recipients of work system change except as recipients of vision. Instead, stakeholders are active participants though their own sensemaking (the understanding they have of the work system and the possible options for the work system’s use) and active participation in the design of the system. Thus our need for systems savvy, design thinking, and more proactive participation in our how we get work done.

Tim Brown describes these roles and needs as they relate to the power of communication technologies. I’ll push it a bit further and claim that our reliance on software systems, rather than physical ones, gives us greater opportunity to participate in design and change throughout the organization. Henry Ford’s workers were unlikely to be able to re-engineer their assembly-lines. Many of us, however, can easily participate in the design of our workflows.

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Systems Savvy is the ability to grasp the capabilities of a technology and how that technology might be meshed with organizational practice.  People with systems savvy understand that technologies and practices are intertwined — and they know how to make adjustments to both the technology and the practice to effectively weave them together.

Who has systems savvy? I suspect all the readers of this blog have some degree of systems savvy.  However, there are folks whose efforts and thinking make them excellent models for all of us:

• Brian Humphrey, LA Fire Department
• MIT Professor Pattie Mae and Ph.D. Candidate Pranav Mistry
• Tony Hsieh, Zappos
• John Seely Brown, past Chief Scientist at Xerox and past Director of the Palo Alto Research Center

My examples in this blog tend to focus on information technology, but systems savvy also applies to industrial and other technologies.  For example the first person who thought about how farm chemicals might be more safely, cheaply, and effectively applied by “plug-and play” direct connectors (versus farmers having to fill, mix, and refill their spreaders by hand) also had systems savvy.  Technology possibilities provided opportunities for better, safer, practice — but these had to be realized and implemented by people with systems savvy.

Deep technical or organizational expertise is not required for systems savvy.  It’s an appreciation of the possible… which might even be limited by deep expertise if people instead anchor on present uses.

A degree of systems savvy is critical to both technical and organizational designers.  Systems designers (the people that design the technologies we use) with systems savvy can design the technology with “triggers” to help others better understand the possible uses of their technology.  For example, IDEO and Kaiser Permanente co-designed an information board that helps new parents and nurses keep track of the “journey home” following the birth of the baby.  The technology had clearly “flippable” cards (designating whether the step was completed or not), a whiteboard surface and pen, and clearly marked areas for adding information.  The design makes clear that cards can be reordered, should be flipped as steps occur, and provides a clear dashboard of the process.

Your Journey Home Board

Organizational designers with systems savvy can imagine how not-yet invented technologies might help their organizations effectiveness and efficiency, and ask for such technologies to be designed. Hilton Hotels issued a Request for Proposals last year asking for “game” tools to help them show employees how different actions can affect a guest’s mood.  Hilton’s training exec David Kervella saw the value in a particular technology form, but had to get technical experts to help him realize the vision.

My ideas on systems savvy are a work in progress and I would appreciate your comments.  Some earlier stages in this evolution include:

• Systems conductivity (here & here)
• Accidental systems designers
• Mental models of systems

I hope to spend some of my summer interviewing people who have demonstrated systems savvy.  Beside those I note above, who else do you think has systems savvy?  Personal introductions appreciated.

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The more I think about “All of Us as Accidental System Designers,” the more I wonder about how to teach the skills.  Yesterday I spent the afternoon on a field trip to IDEO with a group of visitors from Syngenta and Purdue University.  My guess is that everyone at IDEO has the systems conductivity capabilities I’ve talked about.  They are able to consider the broad range of both technical and behavioral options, and they have high intrinsic motivation for “having a positive impact” (be that more environmentally sustainable products, or impact on your firm’s bottom line) in a way that thinks about meshing technology and practice together.
I heard the phrase “design thinking” a lot during the presentations and tour. Tim Brown’s (of IDEO) blog has an interesting discussion around the definition of design thinking. It opens with “Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

IDEO has a strong connection to Stanford’s “d-school,” the Stanford Institute of Design. The d-school page has the following to say about  “design thinking”:

Having worked with hundreds of organizations to design products, services, and environments, we believe true innovation happens when strong multidisciplinary groups come together, build a collaborative culture, and explore the intersection of their different points of view.

Many talk about multi-disciplinary collaboration, but few are actually successful at sustaining attempts to see what will happen. Even strong partners often lose interest because they cannot get along well enough or long enough to see the fruits of the collaboration.

We believe having designers in the mix is key to success in multidisciplinary collaboration and critical to uncovering unexplored areas of innovation. Designers provide a methodology that all parties can embrace and a design environment conducive to innovation. In our experience, design thinking is the glue that holds these kinds of communities together and makes them successful.

Their Tranformative Design Class looks wonderful: (Bill Moggridge of IDEO is one of the instructors)

Transformative Design examines the implications of design decisions: the ways in which your designs change the world, and also the ways in which the world changes your designs. In this project-based course you will learn how to employ interactive technologies to create designs to expressly encourage behavioral transformation. Class sessions will be structured around project work and interdisciplinary discussion of topics such as self-efficacy, social support, and mechanism of cultural change; accompanying lab sessions will familiarize students with basic hardware and software tools for interaction prototyping.

I don’t see a strong information technology focus at the d-school, beyond that mentioned in this course, but I may just be missing it.  Modern information technologies often have an abstraction that makes their deep understanding — a prelude to understanding how to include them in systems design — more difficult than more concrete products.  I’ve subscribed to the d-school blog and look forward to learning more about their programs.

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