Technology and Organizations

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.

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.