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.”

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

In a recent contribution to the Ideas Project, Ross Mayfield (founder of Socialtext) notes:

The big shift that we’re seeing in organizations that are leveraging social software thoroughly is this shift from a need-to-know to a need-to-share culture; the ability to increase productivity by the way that you’re coordinating your organization, in not just ways that are pre-subscribed, that are intelligently designed, but enabling them to emerge.

In the video, many of his examples focus on the signaling capability of micro-blogging tools like Twitter (or Socialtext Signals – an enterprise tool with security built in) — both for how such tools can support the fast pace of internal activities, and for keeping track of your brand and customers’ needs.

The organizations making this shift are more agile and can gain an augmentation to the hierarchy as knowledge flows more directly to where it is needed, at less cost to those with the answers.

Ross also acknowledges the power of learning from Gen Y (see my thoughts here), “There are also generational shifts that most people are aware of, not just the kids who grew up doing their homework on Facebook; we called that cheating when they were in school. They come to the work force, demand similar tools, and we call it collaboration.” Gen Y, and even some of of the rest of us, understand that knowledge can be easily shared given modern tools and actively seeks effective strategies.

Case in point: A current MBA-student of the Stanford Graduate School of Business demo’d a tool she’s building based on the needs of students studying together — apart. She noted that current distributed forms of work make it harder to just ask a friend for homework help, yet intelligent tools could provide support — without becoming too intrusive.

This is exactly the balancing act we need in organizations. We need seamless response to our information needs, without breaking into the immersive performance of our colleagues. While I can’t point to any perfect solutions yet (examples appreciated if you know of some, or even some with just slight imperfections), both Ross and the Stanford entrepreneur are illustrating clear options.

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Yes, I’m a fan of Socialtext. Scott Schnaars (Senior Sales Exec at Socialtext) and I are doing a workshop on August 25 inspired by my Kill Email post. More formally titled, Value From Communication & Collaboration Tools: Put Email in its Place!, we provide frameworks and case examples of how to engage the power of collaboration and social networking in real-world situations. This isn’t about the one particular tool, but rather an approach to managing collaboration in your firm. Join us!