…cause I can make little or big email-like posts and @mention people…and the interface is so clean and simple.

I was sent a 3 paragraph email today with a few bullet points, a bold heading and an image…it was sent to 5 people in different teams…the email was of a simple nature “…we are doing this initiative, can you guys offer advise or help in anyway…”

When we look at enterprise activity stream tools they really lack in what Google+ offers ie. some formatting, space for bigger communications, and a real smooth interface.

Coming back to my example above; if your work had Yammer, Newsgator, Socialcast, Podio, Tibbr you would of had to resort to email.

…is this an #epicfail or not, what do you think?

Maybe I’m wrong…I’m just assuming these products have a character limit…but I know they allow for little formatting…and certainly don’t have the UX of Google+.

So far there’s one product I’ve seen called Neudesic Pulse that comes close…I would say its UX is the closest to Google+ (they released version 3 not that long ago)

Now in relation to formatting and space…Neudesic Pulse could be better. The status updates tab doesn’t have it (actually I’m not sure if it has unlimited characters)…but if you click the “Articles” tab you can write a long-form communication with some minimal formatting. But you can also collaborate on it, and so forth…so it kind of feels more like an online pages/wiki page type thing…but it could be used for the use case above.

Facebook is similar in that it has Facebook Notes, which is a long-form, but only it has more a blog post like feel compared to the online page like feel of Neudesic Pulse Articles

Anyway, what I’m looking for is a status update tool that allows you to do what I do in email now, but doing it online instead.

ie. I want to write a status update that’s 3 paragraphs long with bold and bullet points and an image, and then @mention people

Hmmm…but I wouldn’t call it status updates, or microblogging, or blogging or wikis…I’d just call it “messages” or “posts”.

Google+ doesn’t have a name for it’s posts, all it says within the text box is “share what’s new…”

It also collapses and expands messages and comments perfectly so one message/comment never dominates the screen unless you want it to

Posts and Messages

Email is mostly known as messages

Blogs are posts (I don’t consider Tumblr/Posterous microblogging, they are just really easy blogging via a bookmarklet and simple interface)

Microblogs are status updates…which kind of blur the line between chatting and broadcasting (eg Facebook and Twitter)

If you ask me Google+ blurs this line the most, but it’s not really microblogging as there’s nothing “micro” about it…your posts can be “macro” if you want…Macroblogging is the most stupid term ever that I just made up…but I just feel Google+ is a little different

Whether it’s the example I gave above, or troubleshooting with colleagues using simple formatting and screenshots; there are still reasons why email is easier
eg posting a 3 paragraph message, with minimal formatting and pasting a couple of screenshots to 5 people

This takes a couple of minutes in email, whereas you can’t do it in microblogging…you can’t do the last bit in Google+ either (in my last post I pointed to Confluence being able to paste images)

If we look at our emails, what’s the average size…perhaps a couple of paragraphs, with some bullet points, bold text and an image easily pasted in here and there…there’s nothing micro about this

So then why is enterprise social software all crazy about microblogging…I get it that it’s easier than blogging and more engaging to be in a network, but an unlimited character limit and offering a few editing buttons won’t make it harder or less engaging.

If most of our emails aren’t that micro and often have formatting (bold/bullet points), then let’s allow messages in activity streams to reflect this

For example if 50% of our emails don’t have formatting, images, and are only one paragraph; then this 50% has a chance to be re-purposed in activity streams (rather than email)…but the other 50% will continue in email, unless activity streams make a few simple changes.

If we want our online messages to be more twitter like broadcasts, and simple conversations and questions, then that’s fine…this replaces a good portion of email. But if we also want posting online messages to do what most of email offers ie. the features that cater for all contexts of communication, then we need those simple changes

Related

There’s more to say, but it was not the focus of this post; like types of posts (idea, task, event, question)…and also posting to a group from your main stream.

This post has focused just on “posting/sending messages”…whereas my previous post also covered productivity and managing your stream.
eg
Search within an activity stream
Follow up/Flag
Put people you follow in lists
Tag other peoples posts
My sent posts
Filter stream by post type (idea, event, task, question)
Filter your stream by person (I have only seen this on FMYI, and perhaps Socialtext)
Filter your stream by date (not sure if I have seen this anywhere, besides the Newsgator pivot viewer webpart…but this is separate from your main homepage)
A robust “notifications” page

This post is a design recommendation for enterprise activity streams to be more in tune with human behaviour experienced by knowledge workers in organisations, by taking cues from email clients.

Why do we like email – because we can easily send and receive, and manage our stuff…the only thing is that it’s messy, it’s private, and we are overloaded (probably something we can’t fix other than lowering occupational spam eg. from being pushed the latest gym newsletter to choosing to “follow” it instead).

The idea is to make a more coherent experience, take it online so information is findable (no longer dies), connect people (better way to sense-make and become engaged), unfollow threads (no more being a victim of reply all), and to have ambient awareness (a more adaptable and agile organisation).

But while we offer this solution, the idea-as alluded to above-is to not take away the usability and the essence of the inbox…the x-factor that makes it so in tune with human behaviour (we receive, send, and manage everything from this one spot).

And coupled with this; is “activity stream overload” going to be the new “inbox overload”…um, yes, but only worse…bring on the filters!!

Some think activity streams and microblogs replace most of email…not so fast…sometimes it is about the technology

Manage the stream

One theme here is for an Activity stream to have the management, organisational, and productivity features that we see in email clients. A facebook type of activity stream does not have enough functionality to suit the enterprise. In the enterprise we need to be able to manage our stream, we cannot let things stream past that we have been asked or expected to action. We need to come back after a week’s leave and be able to catch up with what’s essential (@mentions are the only way at the moment to catch essential stuff-stuff you need to respond to-in a bucket). We need to be able to tag items (just like Gmail tags or folders in MS Outlook), forward them (re-share or send), flag them (for follow-up), filter/sort them (person, date, object type), organise stuff we follow (people, groups, objects, tags) into lists…

And as alluded to before, because this is a “pull” model ie. we choose to “follow”; we can unfollow noisy threads, or even unfollow or block noisy people.

On this note I’m impressed with Newsgator’s Pivot Viewer filtering webpart (video 4 minutes in)

Now compare this to a personal context like Facebook; it doesn’t really matter if you miss out on stuff, after a couple of days absence there’s no crucial need to back read the whole stream…it’s a very different experience and level of importance…leisure compared to business.

All context Posting (no need to shift context, just post from the one spot)

What’s good to see in most Activity streams is that you can post to different object types from the same window…and then with most vendors you can filter the stream by object type.

You can post a status update, or you can instead post it as a question, photo, event, idea, task, etc…
- it would be similar to; when clicking “new” in Outlook or “compose” in Gmail, the menu would list a selection of possible actions eg. A simple text or link update, or is it a photo, question/poll, event, idea, task, etc…all right there in the flow.

Now what if you don’t want to post in your default network stream, but want to post something to a group. No need to shift context ie. You don’t need to go find that group space, instead at time of posting you simply choose from a down-menu if you want the post to go to a group (or @mention the group)…all this is done from your main activity stream.

The idea is to match the convenience that we all experience in our email clients…now we can flick a status update, photo, question/poll, task, event, idea…just like we flick an email…social software should be easy.

NOTE: there are exceptions. We may need to visit the group space to post to a blog, wiki, forum

Formatting

Sometimes I can’t use status updates even if I wanted to and instead resort to email. Here are some reasons: I need unlimited space, I need to copy and paste screenshots, I need to use minimal formatting (bold, bullet points, italics, indent). Enterprise activity feeds need to take some cues from Google+ (except maybe the copy and paste screenshots…that’s hard one without referencing a URL…or maybe it’s not, check out how it’s done in this Confluence video).

If we really want activity streams to be the new dashboard then we need no excuse to use email other than; private (but then again most activity streams have a private message function), or communication with people outside the company (until a standard protocol becomes available, but this is only warranted if activity streams prove themselves as everyday tools)

Consolidated, not scattered content

People like that their email client is their personal information management tool which delivers, houses and organises (folders) all their sent/received content…sort, browse, search for the content. The issue with current enterprise social suites is that your content is scattered all over the place. People don’t like that; they want ownership in the one spot…they don’t want to have to visit a group space or their own profile to find something they commented on, or a post they made…people simply want it all housed in the one spot, similar to their email client. We are used to email clients where we access our left sidebar for all our needs, rather than having to visit other pages…our email clients are the one dashboard skin where just the body in the middle changes…at any time we have access to all our controls

People like to own their content and know it’s all accessible via the one spot…they feel secure…and it’s a less scattered experience.

Notifications inbox as the default stream

What content matters to you most: stuff you follow, or stuff that’s directed at you…it’s the latter right. This is why I think the notification stream or the interactions stream that we are familiar with when using Facebook and Twitter; when in the enterprise context actually needs to be the default home stream.

In other words there’s no such thing as “notifications”, it’s simply your inbox ie. When you launch the web page or the desktop app the home activity stream is your “notifications” stream, which is called your “inbox”…and it has a mark read/unread feature.

If you want to see content you have “sent” then click the “sent” stream in your left hand pane (just like we see in email clients)…you can filter this by authored/participated (comments you have made), by object type, by person, date, etc…

Then if you want to go back to your “notifications” stream you simply click the “inbox” stream in your left hand pane (just like we see in email clients)

Now here’s something new…if you want to see content by people/groups/objects/tags you “follow”; then you click the “follow” stream in your left hand pane (which is something you don’t see in email clients)…you can filter this by object type, by person, date, etc…or even group them into lists

So here’s what you see in inbox 2.0:

• @mentions
• private messages
• comments on my posts
• comments on posts I’ve commented on
• likes on my posts/comments
• who followed /unfollowed you
• who favourited your content
• content people have sent you via the share/send link we see on the footer of stream items
• tasks assigned (and comments) (and progress reminders)
• event invites (and reminders)
• perhaps even who added you to a list

Here’s what others are thinking:

Taking Notes Episode 150: 2012.02.09 - Activity Streams of the Future, with Alan Lepofsky
Predictions For 2012 From An Employee Perspective
Don’t Cross The Streams
Making Activity Streams More Manageable
Enterprise 2.0’s New Debate: Dam the Streams?
Monday’s Musings: Why Next Gen Apps Must Improve Existing Activity Streams
Email Is Crushing Us, Can Activity Streams Free Us?

In my next post I’ll share a comprehensive list of features and functionality I’d like to see in enterprise activity streams.

My main point is it’s not about just following stuff; the follow stream is what’s new, OK got that…and that it’s open conversation by default, rather than email’s private by default concept, OK got that…and that we have moved from personal computing to social computing, OK got that…and all the new emergence, adaptability, x-ray awareness, sense-making, engagement, etc that comes from all that, OK got it. But it’s also about what it’s always been about, managing your inbox; stuff people want you to do. That’s why when it comes to designing for 80% of how you need to use the tool; I contend the notifications inbox, along with filters and organizing content is key…this is missing in current designs, and shouldn’t be as it’s not accommodating to what we are doing 80% of our time. Email is about doing work; and in order to compete or be more useful, activity feeds also need to be about executing/managing actual work…and they can be, we just need the design to facilitate this.

You could say that activity feeds/microblogging aren’t trying to replace email, they are just something new. But the thing is a lot of people just don’t have time…I was in our cities financial district the other day watching exec’s get in an out of lifts with their heads in their blackberry…these guys are super busy, and just won’t have the time to visit an enterprise technology where they can follow stuff…but if we can instead design activity feeds to be an online inbox with the email client feel, then things may change.

One other thing - let’s not dwell too much on industry statistics on enterprise social computing. Why? Because the market is still immature in the design of the tools. We need to address the points I have made in this post, and we need to address process-based social computing (which Podio is leading). Another reason why statistics could be better is “are you educated in social business” (do you know social business theory) or is it new to you and you are just implementing it just like any other IT project

24/04/12 NEW POST - Microblogging or Macroblogging…or simply messages

Some BU’s suggested to me that since their online Community of Practice (online group) is taking off, perhaps they will just have a link on their intranet page to their Community of Practice (CoP)…basically the their intranet page just serving as an entry point (basically a re-direct link)

NOTE: Our CoPs are not just about communication; you can design the homepage however you like using HTML widgets, so they can look very informative like an Intranet page.

Now the problem with this scenario is that a BU online CoP/group is not really something a person not in that BU wants to see as an informative profile page for that BU

ie. online CoPs/groups aren’t usually about informing a general audience, they are about a group of members sharing and learning on a topic…or even doing actual work (yes I know ours are called CoPs, but they are just online group spaces really)

At first I thought BU pages on intranets need to be more like wikis, but then what about a news channel (to inform people) and a feedback channel (for others to ask questions)

How can we have some of the tools we see in our online CoPs/groups, but for a general audience like a BU intranet page serves?

Then it hit me, “Pages”!!!!

A BU will do work/share in online group spaces eg. Facebook groups

A BU will broadcast/inform, and gather feedback from the organisation at large by using a “page” eg Facebook Pages

A Facebook page is similar to a group but designed for a different purpose…a group has “members”, whereas a “page” is “liked”

Only it wouldn’t be Facebook, it would be IBM Connections or Jive or Socialcast or Yammer (yikes Yammer already called their docs/wiki, “pages”)

NOTE: It doesn’t have to be just BU’s, it can be any group who need an online group to enable members to do their thing, but also an online page to inform everyone else

Example

The Mechanical Engineers “online group space” is where members do work and share

The Mechanical Engineers “online page space” is where they broadcast communications to the rest of the organisation on recent happenings, and where people can post questions or share stuff (in Facebook this is called the “wall”)…and it also acts as an “about” page, just like the “Info” section on a Facebook page.

Another example

Our Document Management team have an online group space to do work…

…when they have new releases, they need to communicate to the power users of the document management system, these are the project assistants (PA) and document controllers (DC).

At the moment their online group space doubles up as a “page” in that it has an extra blog to communicate to these audiences (PA, DC) and an extra forum for these audiences to ask questions…when PA’s and DC’s visit the Document Management online group space, it’s really not catered to them at all, other than that extra blog and forum which don’t really get much real estate at all on the group space.

It’s true with our current technology, they could just create a new online group space to do this, and cater the whole space to PA’s and DC’s, but it just ‘aint the same purpose-design as a “page”.

So here’s my thinking…

Rather than a team having two online group spaces (one for them, and one for them to communicate to the org which also doubles up as their information profile/about page, like you see on Intranets)…

How about they have one online group space, and one online page!

So basically “pages” are the new type of Intranet/About page for teams…

…whereas groups are where those teams work, which generally speaking most others in the organisation are not going to be that interested in (remember with scale, ambient awareness can become noise)

Just like online groups are not just for teams (you can have a group about anything), same goes with “pages”; not only can teams use a “page” as their general audience page…but any type of event, topic, etc… could use a page

Eg. If I was running an event, I may use a group space to coordinate it with my team, and a “page” space as the actual event webpage that a general audience can read and interact…both spaces have different purpose, therefore are slightly designed differently.

Perhaps if you create a group space, there is always a link in the admin area for you to create a “page” for this group, and vice versa…this way group/page owners are aware of what’s possible.

Anyway this is typical of this space, where the consumer web is years ahead…and yes, often the functional/features do cross over.

NOTE: I came across this just before publishing Facebook Groups Vs Pages: The Definitive Guide

According to Facebook, groups are “for members of groups to connect, share and even collaborate on a given topic or idea”…Facebook Pages “allow entities such as public figures and organizations to broadcast information to their fans.”

GROUP - share/collaborate (member-based)
PAGE - broadcast/feedback (fan-based)

In other words the “page” is like the quarterly newsletter that is emailed out to the whole organisation telling them what’s being going on in their silo, only now it’s real-time, interactive and more of a social silo…yes the newsletter could still possibly be sent out as a curation of “page” content.

ADDED: I just remembered something, perhaps the concept of “pages” is what Socialcast is aiming for with it’s “Categories” feature, and for Tibbr with its “Subjects” feature.

Anyway here’s a good excuse for a post…

Dr Peter John Chen, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney is publishing a book in 2012 about the Internet and Australia, and politics.

As part of it he’s doing research on characteristics of blog readers…I’m happy to help out on his endeavor by asking my readers if they are interested in sparing 5 to 10 minutes on a survey about this topic

The survey is open to readers of the blog who live in Australia.

All responses in the survey are anonymous and confidential.

The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Australian_blog_readers

I will be gaining access to a summary of the results and will share them with those who are interested

But this post isn’t about this high level view, instead it’s on one particular feature that these peer performance vendors offer; and that’s "recognition/thanks/kudos/recommendation".

For organisations already using social networking tools, I wonder whether it’s going to be effective introducing yet another more specific-based social network. I wonder if instead these functions will be incorporated as new features in existing tools.

But first let’s establish what they are about, lets examine their feature set. Most of them are about changing the performance review process to an ongoing thing, rather than annually…and for it to happen socially online.

The players in the market that I know of are Rypple, Worksimple, Coworkers, Achievers, Saba and now an IBM partner application…get ready for more (eg. Atlassian), especially from Talent Management vendors.

The first time I recall something to this effect was LinkedIn Recommendations Some mildy related tools are Happiily and Niko by Socialcast (which are actually more mood based apps) and Evaluat3.me (this is more a survey about you)

The main feature set of social performance suites are:

• Social Goals (setting objectives, and viewing the status of them on our profile) eg. 20% market growth…what a great way for others to know your progess and achievement
• Coaching
• Feedback
• Performance Summary
• Recognition (Kudos/Thanks/Praise)

View the Rypple features page for an explanation on “social performance”, and how they have created a more meaningful and engaging system that is more than performance appraisal/review, in the way that it’s not so much a review, but coaching goal achievement as it happens (by both leads and peers)…much more transparent, and purposeful.

Recognition (Kudos/Thanks/Praise)

For the focus of this post the feature I’m most interested in is peer/lead recognition (thanks, praise, kudos, recommendations…) For example Rypple Thanks (read and watch the video).

Then there are existing social network vendors have have incorporated thanks/praise/kudos as a feature eg. Yammer and a few others. Note that thanks/praise/kudos is only one feature of Rypple and the like. Yammer is different than Rypple, but they do have a few overlapping features. Read and watch the video on Yammer Praise.

ADDED: Socialcast also have a “thanks” feature.

Recognise how well I use my social network to generate quality productivity

In a past post, Measuring employee’s on the quality of their work and gifting; based on how well they utilise their online network, I focused on the need of an observation technique where we can acknowledge the productivity employees generate from being socially active online within their organisation. Firstly, for the direct reason of acknowledging their good work-and how it came to being-which needs to be recognised, and secondly that feedback, acknowledgement and recognition are positive conditions for people to continue participating and adopt new ways of working (in this case online social tools).

Please read my post as it quotes from some intelligent and experienced people in this industry, and gets to the heart of the matter of where current organisational design clashes with the cultural shift that begins to take place with the addition of working with social tools (ie. like we shape tools, tools shape society). Especially in relation to being measured on your individual contributions; rather than how well you used your network as sources, or even collaborators on your deliverable…and also the time required to participate, build and nuture relationships in order to have a valuable network in the first place.

Just quickly, I should get kudos for knowing the right people to give me advice in order to churn out a quality deliverable. Why? Because this sends a signal to people that connecting to the talent of others is what we are about, we didn’t just hire you for your individual intelligence. One step further is me actually getting people I’ve sourced to contribute to the deliverable; this should have no impact on how I’m measured for individual contributions, in fact I should get more kudos for the same reason above. If we need to hire a team to do a job in the organisation we scout around in an attempt to source the best available internal experts. Well I’m just doing the same thing for my tasks.

I’ll re-quote Oscar Berg which will give you the gist of the post:

A paradox for employees today is that they really need to connect with and collaborate more with more people, and strengthen their personal networks if they are to deliver better results and strengthen our their positions. One problem they are facing when doing this is that most current incentive models do not reward employees helping their colleagues, unless there is a direct and measurable return on their contributions. Another problem is that many organizations fail at making the contributions that employees do outside of their own team visible, and thus if fails to recognize them. These problems put people in a kind of deadlock position. During uncertain times, most people will simply do what becomes visible and recognized by those who evaluate them, their managers. They will most likely also most be asked or commended by their managers to do so, because their managers are in a similar position as they will be judged by their managers on the visible contributions from the team they are managing (and so it goes on, all the way to the top).

Wow, that’s a great piece!

A resume that’s alive

So how do we change this syndrome?

• not recognising the help and work you do beyond your team, or even within your team (if you are not allowed to spend time in your internal social network, and help others in the first place, then you have a bigger problem…which is what the post linked above is all about…in addition to the adoption obstacle of not being acknowledged for knowing who the best people are to source and help to create a more quality deliverable)
• people only doing what’s going to be visible; rather than what’s best for the business

I once tweeted:

Before we visited the Rolodex, now we live in the Rolodex

…this is my reference to Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the like. I think the same can be for social work performance

Before we had a static Resume, now we we live in our Resume

…this is a reference to our profile page and how it lists the work we are doing as it happens, comments, likes, recognition, bio links (all this shows off our expertise, respect, dedication, competency, character, passion, etc…what more do you want raw anecdotes of a person in action…and that are continuously updated).

Moonlighting

For those who don’t know I’m the global lead for collaboration, and part of this is facilitating our online communities. Recently I helped facilitate a new community about career development. My role is more about train the trainer, perpetual guidance; doing my best to enable them and coach them in being acute at their new craft in facilitating…and of course I manage the product in general. Anyway on this occassion I went beyond my call of duty by spending time helping them design their community (I did this as a regional CEO was involved, so it was in my interest). Now this is not my job, I would have no time to do my job if I always provided this service (If I had a team of people then it would be different). But it wasn’t just about the design, it was about actually doing the design. Now my HTML skills are basic, but here I am learning about imagemaps, javascript overlay boxes, and then attempting to code them. I also spent time talking to those in the company that I know have HTML skills, and sometimes got them to do some of the work. Ideally these people could have been internally contracted to do the work, but it turned out my product knowledge was required, and they don’t have that much time to spare. (SIDE NOTE: This is natural human behaviour; you make less time to help someone not in your network, than someone in your network).

Now this took me away from other work; but I thought it was valuable to work on this. From the perspective of my HTML contact; well his role is not a webdesigner, although he does utilise these skills in his role. In this case because I knew he has these skills I asked if he could utilise them on a task that has nothing to do with him, but is entirely based on the respect and history he has for me (and on top of this he was busy with his own stuff)

So here I am going beyond the call of duty within my team task, and here my colleague is performing work for free, on top of his already busy workload.

If we did this work observably online on a social network like Yammer, I’m sure people would of noticed our hard work, dedication and beyond the call of duty attitude…indirectly we become known for our skills and qualities. The double-edged sword is this could become a burden…I say this because this same colleague was helping out another trusted colleague of ours on a task also not within his portfolio…we are starting to call this "moonlighting"…and he’s I must say, a professional "moonlighter". Anyway, it turns out we did this work in email, so no-one really knows we did this unless we told them, or they saw the finished product (which they still won’t know who was behind it). I told my boss about this work, and he was OK with it, and said good work. But there’s a better way that could have more impact or impression on my peers and boss, and also fulfill my natural human need for a job well done (and everything that cascades from that being displayed in my profile page as part of my capabilities and service as you would see on a resume…only I’m not telling you about it, you are seeing it in action). The task owner also continually thanked me in email as we did the job, and then at the end of the job he couldn’t thank me enough…he mentioned that he owes me a beer or 5

We have the first part down ie. we can now work observably online where people can see the work we do as it happens. ie. not only the work, but the quality of our participation and how we are dedicated to the organisation at large. But what if you weren’t looking, these conversations roll into the archives quite quickly.
Now a more formal way for peers and leads to recognise your work is to issue you kudos/thanks/praise, etc…this is not just done as a comment, but it’s an actual feature eg a type of status update. Your profile page would also be the place that shows off your kudos/thanks/praise. Surely this is DIY career development, and gives you drive to keep doing what you’re doing ie participating…which is a bonus for social tool product managers as it helps with adoption.

Now take a breather…as the next part is important.

Beware gamification!

Let’s not start gamifying this and create a leaderboard and badges based on levels for all the kudos/thanks/praise you accumulate, and then have this as the basis for decision-making like resource allocation, expertise or which employees to retain based on their badge level. NOTE: Some vendors use descriptive badges, whereas I’m talking about badges that represent an earned expertise level (which could be based on false praise, and invaluable participation…better known as "gaming the system"). Let’s make sure we don’t let the numbers make decisions for us. Why? Because some people that deserve more kudos than others may not have them as the people they helped out haven’t adopted the online social tools in which to issue kudos/praise/thanks…maybe someone with lots of kudos/praise/thanks is less valuable than the next person; but the numbers don’t tell it that way, and what they also don’t tell is that person is gaming the system with others to accumulate kudos/praise/thanks. Also there is valuable, generous and altruistic work being done offline, on the phone, in email, in IM that will miss out on being recognised, due to not being visible…I have posted an anecdote on this before, here it is again:

Someone mentioned today that they hope our organisation doesn’t measure value based on just online communities. That there is so much community activity done on the phone and in meetings that brings value to the business that may not be known about. The concern is that people that are visible are going to get recognition over others that are more offline workers, who may even contribute more value.

When we start basing decisions on badges we are forgoing badgless, but equally capable people. I don’t want to get into gamification in this post, but what once had immediate purpose and respect (recognition and praise), when quantified or turned into a fetish (accumulated into a total and turned into an entity "the badge"), can lead to competition and gaming the system (doing it simply to gain points, and "it" may be not really valuable stuff we need to pay attention to); it may become more of a tail wagging a dog scenario. The system just becomes a whore, or sold out just like film and music has become (SIDENOTE - luckily web 2.0 allows us to enjoy the honest and more true to artform music/film generated from the long tail)

So the thing here is that as long as there is no prize, people are less likely to game the system. Instead the accumulation of praises and kudos are just another aspect to consider when making decisions about recognition, finding experts, bonuses, promotions; rather than the sole aspect. This is contrary to what some in the Dachis group say (like Larry Irons, I was surprised to hear these words from that crowd):

…wouldn’t the decision to promote one of two equally skilled employees would be just a little simpler if one had five more “badges” than the other?

The new 3rd party IBM Connections app called "kudos" just doesn’t sit well with me (mind you I say this hastily without reading too deep or playing with it). In addition to what has been talked about above, they go one step further and award points for participating (need I mention Dan Pink’s book or psychological research on self-determination.

Kudos Badges works by tracking metrics around what users do within IBM Connections. For example when a user posts a Status Update, they get a Kudos Point. When they create a blog, they might get 5 Kudos Points. When someone recommends a file that someone else created, they get 1 Kudos Point and the receiver of the recommendation gets 3 Kudos Points. There are hundreds of potential actions within IBM Connections and Kudos Metrics enables us to track them and reward users for their behaviour. Kudos Metrics are used to award both Kudos Leaderboard points as well as award Kudos Badges. All of the metrics can be customised and you can even create your own metrics and badges. Kudos Badges comes with a heap of predefined metrics and badges to make it easy to get started. They have been designed to not only reward behaviour but also to encourage users to take further action and educate them on the broader capabilities of IBM Connections. In addition to metrics within IBM Connections, Kudos Badges enables you to create metrics for actions and behaviour in external systems. These external metrics can then be used to award custom badges as well as contribute to a users leaderboard score and rank. For example you may have a sales force system that you want to encourage specific behaviour. Or maybe HR Performance Objectives that you want to reward users for achieving. The options are endless!

It’s all good intended, but I fear it may lead to gaming the system, participation just for the sake of it…it’s old skool km, and not sustainable. Sorry I didn’t want this to be a post about gamification, but obviously gamification starts to bleed or take centre stage in some vendor offerings. What I can see happening is that organisations will get lazy on intrinsic motivations, and just rely on game mechanics.

Speaking of IBM this type of participation-based "pointsification" is one of the factor that did harm to one of their internal social networking sites "beehive" (socialblue)…so indeed we have to becareful of something poisoning the system.

This presentation by Rypple tells me they are very different than this and understand the balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and that intrinsic motivation needs to be the lead singer.

See my posts by Sebastian Deterding and Jane McGonigal on gamification is nothing without gamefulness. I also did an extensive post on the difference between gamers and employee engagement.

I may do a follow up post on gamification since this post has led us that way…I could keep going on this post about point systems and knowledge markets for sharing knowledge and collaboration, but I’ll elaborate on how gamification is not the answer for that particular context

Always good to finish with some philosophy by Dave Snowden:

Reward systems, linking social obligations to targets and promotion criteria are the single most stupid thing that anyone can do in KM or any other system reliant on social interaction. People will always share with people in the context of proven need, but to share in anticipation of that need will not happen. All that happens if you create a reward mechanism is that people game the system. Its another excuse (like the culture was wrong) for an ill conceived approach

What do I mean?

I’ll ponder that with more pondering…

What was the requirements aspect of designing this skate park?

Was the design co-created with your typical skaters? ie. children, teenagers, adolescents in the design process

And if it was, what was the methodology?

Did they simply ask them what they want, or did they observe other local skate parks?

Did they observe skaters in our local area, to see their makeshift skating areas, and urban structures that provided popular skating recreation?

If they didn’t do this, here’s what could go wrong?

1. Focus groups, but lacks observation

Thanks for the skate park it’s great fun, but there’s isn’t a flat area to the side where we can practice our kick filps and ollies.

But we asked you kids what you wanted, and you failed to mention that…

Yeah I guess we did, I guess we are used to having a lot of flat area, and what we really lacked was a hilly area…so that’s what we really wanted when you asked us…we forgot about our other needs like flat areas, that we take for granted.

2. Best practice may not be best fit

This scenario is worse as it lacks co-creation and observation…

Just say rather than co-creation (and/or observation), the designers looked at other local skate parks as the only design research method…

Thanks for the skate park it’s great fun, but round this local area we are more half pipe type skaters, rather than freestlyle street skaters. It would of been good to have a half pipe as the showcase feature, rather than the quarter pipe.

Or maybe they overlooked bmx riders, and scooters; who would also like the skate park to be usable for their vehicles. 

…actually this is deeper than just design research best practice, it’s even making your purpose and goals based on best practice, and not your own backyard

3. Worst scenario

I don’t think this would happen that often, but it’s building a skate park when you don’t really have any interested skaters.

Scenario’s 2 and 3 needn’t be explored further as they are poor approaches, in respect to real needs, and understanding the context of your users and environment

What could make scenario 1 more effective?

I’ve already mentioned it…we need to observe the users in their natural environment and see how they self-organise themselves ie. what are the attractors, what are the exceptions…

And the other part is co-creation needs to be through the whole process; not just a focus group. That means youth with hardhats on site making decisions that may deviate from the requirements. This means an agile design process.

Another way to do this is have this whole idea, design, procurement and construction project online. In each of the phases the potential users and other experienced people could be chiming in and discussing the purpose, the materials and how the progress aligns with usability. This way midway through the project, we have an opportunity to alter part of the design that will make all the difference to usability and popularity. If project managers use complexity and agile methods they can deal and adapt to uncertainty.

The theme of this post is agile method projects, co-creation from start to end, observation; and online awareness, communication, collaboration and emergence.

I think if all these elements are in place, then your are more likely to succeed. And to be clear, succeeding is not the project management part; it’s the part when everything is done and people turn up to your party, and how long they stay, and whether they’re having a good time.

But let’s be realistic, this is not democratic…the project can be slowed down due to conflicting views and indecision…actually "slow" isn’t bad, it may be what’s needed…mostly what I’m referring to is that once people are truly heard and acknowledged, someone has to make the decision. 

How agile are government projects or the contractors they hire; how do they feel about others making decisions, especially youth?

If the answer is negative; why is this so, is it just entrainment of past patterns, ie. that’s how we always have done it…simply ignorant to better ways of working?

It’s easy to not involve co-creation and observation in your work approach. All you do is make a plan and try and execute it…you don’t need an education for that approach. And when it fails, you have to force people to like it, which isn’t good. As I mentioned in my previous post courses in design thinking, ethnography, social psychology, interpersonal skills, facilitation/coaching and agile methods really need to make the rounds in organisations. 

Highly related links to this post

Should do or context and understanding 

Do people really know what they want? 

The biggest problem in getting to know our customers is that they don’t know themselves 

Stop ‘doing things’ to people and start to work together 

Agile Project Management 

…who decides if a project is succesful? And if a project passes a series of tests and goes… 

A history of Waterfall and Agile 

Set goals for behaviour, not targets for performance 

Ethnography and social context - actual, not reported behaviour 

Surveys are better for opinions rather than needs 

Needs analysis research methods 

So my friend Jase has a problem. His little baby’s cradle swing is draining batteries…he seems to constantly be replacing them. In addition to this the motor seems to be dodgy; sometimes it doesn’t kick in…he has to swing it to get the motor to kick into action…but then sometimes it will stop again. It’s something he has put up with for a long time, and finally he decided to do something about it.

After tinkering a bit he decides to look online to buy a second hand one…but it’s nagging him he has to dish out more money…and besides the one he really wants doesn’t ship to Australia.

He decides to do the natural thing, Google his problem.

Searching, scanning, reading, searching scanning, reading…BINGO!

He comes across a forum post where someone has posted about the same issue…he anticipates what the comments have in store.

And then he strikes gold! He reads that his FisherPrice cradle swing has the same motor as an Airwick Freshmatic air freshener.

Bingo Bango…the cradle swing works better than ever!!

OK I bent the truth a little…it wasn’t posted as a question and someone didn’t deliver the solution as a comment; instead someone decided to share their experience in a forum thread. And then the Instructables site did a typical thing you would see in a Community of Practice; they gardened the gems from the stream (otherwise all this value just rolls off into the archives); and put it in a perhaps more official and findable place as a Wiki Help Guide entry…this behaviour is generally referred to as the "practice" part of a Community of Practice.

People in your organisation encounter problems like Jase had everyday; and I bet the first thing they do is turn to people for answers (face to face or email). The problem is the people you know, may not have the answers…enter online networks.

So we have, Jase (the seeker, the guy with the problem), the expert (the person on the forums who has the answer), and the curator (the site that made this scenario into a help guide). Now ask any of these people what they think about KM; and they’ll say "ha, what??"

That’s right, we label this behaviour (seeking, searching, connecting, curating) a KM approach to problem solving. These people would say "if that’s what we are doing so be it, but we didn’t intentionally try to behave that way, or know we approach things in a KM way"…and they don’t really do they, they are just doing what’s natural; connecting to people. 

Organisations attempt to do this KM thing and spend lots of money and frustrate people, and so on. Whereas my friend Jase just did what was natural. The people who posted the solution also did something natural in an online group space where you have a feeling of belonging, ownership, and social connection.

Dave Snowden’s principles of KM just keep popping in my mind again and again, why, because they are naturalistic, they are based on how we cognitively and socially behave. If economics thinks people are rational, then organisations think people are robotic/servants.

Here’s a few of Dave’s principles that in relation to what I have posted about so far:

We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted.

In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts. 

Organisations try to push a thing or behaviour on people, whereas from our example, what they should be doing is creating conditions for natural behaviours to flourish. Set up technology where people can search for stuff that employee’s have shared. Make sure this system is engaging and serves the essential human need of social connection; for none of Maslow’s needs can be met without social connection (a prerequisite for survival). And by engaging I mean appeals to intrinsic motivations (challenge, autonomy, purpose), and stimulates happiness (the oxytocin/dopamine induced grooming, respect, exploring, sharing, belonging, helping, connecting). And by the way the by-product is that your KM goal has been served, and personal goals are also being served. By that I mean people are practicing KM without even knowing it as you are simply facilitating them to service their needs and pain points. That’s right, focus on the behavioural goal, rather than the business goal. And as for personal goals, this part is the "What’s in it for me factor?"; which I have talked about in my post, An observation of employee engagement. Here’s an excerpt:

Sense-making (re-use, find, ask) 

- people helping each other to get through their tasks and issues 

Build your reputation/recognition 

- have influence by reputation, rather than having to wait years till you are rightly positioned in the hierarchy 

Having the right audience and context motivates us 

Sense of belonging, ownership, and having impact 

- people feel good when they know their thinking and contributions are welcomed and have impact 

We are social creatures

- learning and connecting with others and finding like people to collaborate with is an innate driver 

DIY Career, personal development, exploring your passion

- participating online, as a by product, displays a person’s expertise…this creates an attractor mechanism, where you are noticed by the right people and are offered meaningful work  

I guess a theme here is that you cannot create a knowledge sharing culture; it’s impossible to create culture, culture is emergent (you can only attack the interplay that surface’s that emergence). Same goes for developing initiatives and then pushing them on people…you don’t need to go to management school to do this, it’s dead basic to create something and then push it on people, but it ain’t gonna be effective; infact this type of leadership is a cop-out; it involves not much talent at all. Management school needs to train the managers of tomorrow to understand complexity, design thinking, user experience…and most importantly respect people and understand how they behave. It’s much harder and challenging to co-create, to understand frontline pain points…why don’t people leading initiatives co-create, why don’t they observe people using their prototype, services, process before releasing it…focus groups and surveys are not enough, people don’t precisely know themselves what they need or want till it emerges from them interacting with it (all the while you are taking this in via observation and conversation).

But then again Management school needs more fundamental subjects on transparency, trust, openness, co-creation, coaching…social business is the new lean; don’t you know;) 

The whats and hows 

Now I always refer to tacit knowledge as know-how ie. a skill in doing something eg. how to win a bid on chinese mining projects.

Then we have explicit knowledge which is know-what…this really isn’t knowledge it’s information. Some of it is common information that lots of people know of, and a lot of it is informal information based on experience eg. tips and tricks, how things are done around here. This informal stuff is often referred to as tacit knowledge, and I guess that’s OK. All this informal information paints a picture of the organisational culture; the more you know the more you can navigate and understand, this kind of heightened awareness leads you to be more productive and effective.

Formal information (processes, procedures) are not enough. When people practice work many contexts bring up different colors, all these interactions (informal information) can supplement and complement the formal information. I explained this in a past post:

A manual can only know so much up front, it’s not clairvoyant. The more we experience using these tools in various contexts, situations, purposes and by various people, the more we discover good practices, workarounds, lessons, etc…

Blogs and forums allow us to do this. Perhaps some of this content can be fed back into the manual, but a lot of it will exist complementary to the manual…a wiki is a good way to point to all the gems.

In essence community tools are our coping mechanism. Without it I could not sense-make. 

So back to our story.

The answer wasn’t high-level tacit knowledge (know-how) ie. Jase did not need to do an apprenticeship and overtime face many contexts and situations where he has developed expanse fundamental understanding and is highly skilled to apply himself to any scenario…this is real knowledge ie. you face a situation you may have never faced before and the nuggets in your head assemble into a new formation where you solve the problem; and now this solution is filed in your head (you never have to work it out again). If we can get people in organisations to connect as often as they can with each other (eg. CoPs, etc…) then overtime we become more competent people…we become chefs as much as we can, rather than recipe followers.

In our story Jase came across some knowledge in someone’s head in the form of a forum post where they shared some informal information (a tip or trick). Again, the more organisations have these types of ecosystem’s the better; life is 24 hour learning, and online networks amplify this. 

This is knowledge flow; people connecting to each other in the context of need, conversing, and from what we learn (and then action), becomes personal knowledge (when we action, we experience, and it imprints in our mind). When we do this online we leave behind the whole history of our interactions (observable work), this history thread becomes new information. One day someone will come across that information, and have a conversation, and so on. Information perpetually being remixed for new contexts, and people acquiring personal knowledge. It’s not just the nugget you find that’s gold, it’s that the nugget continuously transforms, it’s in a flux. Information is both a wave and a particle.

Anyway, the story of Jase and the cradle swing is in my mind what KM is; it’s what ideal sense-making is, it’s what engagement is, and what agile organisations are. 

The key point is don’t try and do KM, because you can’t, as KM is emergent…stimulate the conditions for behaviours, motivations, desires…enable an environment where people can sense-make (do their work by connecting with others), and the competencies that people develop as a result and what they leave behind for everyone else is KM.

Walking on the email platform and traditionally run organisations is not the emergence that you want; it’s poor man’s KM, it’s poor man’s sense-making; it’s not engaging, it’s not agile…online networks and social business is the type of emergence that employee’s and the business want…I hope.

Maybe I should have titled this post "KM is emergent" or "You can’t do knowledge management without knowledge flow".

Come to think of it my post "Don’t control, curate" has foreshadowed this post.

What’s important for an organistion is creating conditions for employee wellness and engagement, solving problems and decision-making, and innovation.

We achieve this by allowing people to connect; knowledge flow.

Once we have this then we can do knowledge management. By that I mean we can do the "manage" part by gardening, curating. ie. using links in documentation (processes, procedures, guides, etc.) that point to the threads from the knowledge flow. Our documentation is perpetually evolving; which is what KM is.

That makes KM seem like not a deep exercise; well it’s not really (but it’s not shallow at all, it’s very effective as it’s about awareness). It’s more a curators job of managing what’s spilt out of people’s heads in the knowledge flow and taking that dripping wet information out of the stream and linking it in places that matter like our documentation. And also creating new documentation like topic pages. Yep, part of KM is making playlists. It’s taking information and organising it and combining it so it drives further value.

I know information management is about organising information; so I’ll say knowledge management is about curating information.

But remember the KM practitioner is not only doing knowledge management; they are also facilitating knowledge flow, this is where the deep talent and skills come into action.

I don’t have a name that encompasses both facilitating knowledge flow and doing knowledge management. I think the term KM is meant to encompass both these activities, but I’m afraid KM managers often skip the knowledge flow part; which means traditional organisational design, doing things to people, all that top-down stuff, and failed KM.

When you think about a Community of Practice; the Community Manager/Facilitator does both the flow and the managing content aspect…so perhaps we need to look at these professionals for what KM really is (when I say KM I mean the combination of knowledge flow and knowledge management…let me know if you have a better word)

At work they having been talking for years about lessons learned

…there have been attempts at plans, strategies and whitepapers. You have to get everyone involved and to agree, and then you have to release it, and then you have to enforce it, etc…The whole deal is it’s starting with a top-down approach…it’s artificial and it’s slow.

I mentioned that projects can just start using a blog right now. For there is no knowledge management without knowledge flow. Start blogging the captains log (ala Star Trek)…narrate your work, work observably. All people on the project can use the, or a, blog to share daily experiences and tag their entries. And if you have read this far in this post we don’t need to go over again the benefits to knowledge flow in relation to meaning, connection, purpose, sense-making, engagement and agility.

Then the knowledge management can start - where we view tag clouds from the experience blogs; all these raw anecdotes, stories, observations will form high-level patterns. And from this we may detect weak signals and opportunties, we may see strengths and weaknesses.

And then we can write our lessons learned documents and give talks based on what we have learned, plan new strategies based on our new insights.

Knowledge Management needs stuff to manage, as you can’t manage what’s in people’s heads. Instead if we first facilitate knowledge flow, a lot of what people know (ie. stuff) naturally spills out in conversation (mostly based in the context of need, or even proactively via totally engaged people who narrate their work)…and if this is done online, well then we have stuff to manage.

Knowledge management starts after there is knowledge flow. What if you try to do knowledge management based on a lack of knowledge flow? Well that perfectly describes the top-down way organisations usually approach programs like lessons learned. What happens is that there is a compliance to do lessons learned in project close out, and everyone reluctantly gets together (if they are available as most don’t have time as they have started on other projects). Then they go through the motions, it’s something we have to do I suppose, ok so what did you learn on the project, what worked, what didn’t…

The other thing is that without knowledge flow we forgo learning as it happens; rather than just learning at the end of a project.

I’m not saying to not do lessons learned sessions; but I’m saying without knowledge flow we leave it up to people to try and remember stuff; and the problem with this is that your memory fades, you don’t care as much as the time has past, things seem more linear in hindsight, you need context to trigger what you know. This last one is exactly why a blog is great at capturing experience as it happens. You are in a particular context in a project or someone asks you something, and you may answer it based on your expertise. Done, captured! At the lessons learned review the facilitator can now use these blog fragments to start conversations.

Let’s revisit some of Snowden’s KM principles; the first one I already shared earlier in this post

Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function

The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality. This has major consequences for knowledge management practice

NOTE: I have spoken a lot about online connection as knowledge flow. But the same type of connection and valuable conversation of course happens face to face. Chris Collison shares the value of Peer Assist, Anecdote circles, open space, knowledge cafe’s, etc…). More accurately he shares the value of conversation (which is what we are all about):

As Knowledge Professionals, I believe that one of our most important tasks is to discover, surface, and give voice to experience.

People tell stories about their experience. If they presented or wrote them down, they inevitably filter, over-summarize, and post-rationalise with opinion and analysis – and it’s in that process when the waters get muddied, the purity of experience is lost – along with messages embedded in the tone of voice and body language. 

So what’s the purpose of all this? Improving decision-making and innovation.

Stephen Bounds add to this:

Knowledge Management is practised through activities that support better decision-making. IM is practised by improving the systems that store, capture, transmit etc information.

In this sense, a librarian neatly captures both sides of the coin. The act of building and making a library catalogue available is covered by IM. But the transaction by which a person can approach a librarian and leave with a relevant set of data to make a better decision is covered by KM. 

KM re-visited

I imagine that’s all I have to say about KM.

Actually, this post was inspired by James Dellow and Steven Oesterreich. It was my intention for this post to add to this discussion.

Here’s what Steven is suggesting: 

An idea for a debate: Making tacit knowledge explicit with collaborative technologies? 

Hi All- I want to open this up to the group. We want to have a debate for next years KM Australia and we were looking at the above topic - any other idea’s or suggestions on the topic? 

Here’s what James said in Steven’s post:  

I think that would be an excellent idea. Some suggestions around some similar themes:

* Is the Data, Information, Knowledge pyramid a failed concept?

* Does KM need technology or is it the other way around?

* With the rise of social software, is KM finally dead?

* Was KM only really just a fad? or Is KM just nonsense, created by consulting firms and software companies?

* If we can’t measure, touch or see ‘knowledge’, what exactly are we managing?

* Has KM been held back because of short sighted and reductionist management thinking or does KM just need to pay its way like the rest of the organisation?

* Are some people holding back the progress of KM, but making it sound harder and more complex than it is?

What ever you pick, it needs to be provocative! 

OK, signing off  

G+ discussion 

Linked In discussion

My previous post is about the future of work; in relation to workers being able to work on tasks that they like and swarm type teams that assemble and dissolve ie. teams that only exist to achieve something, rather than the team perpetually existing. Across the post was smatterings of leadership models and employee engagement as organisational design fundamentals.

I posted a link to my post on Google Plus and it received just about 50 comments…that’s more than my blog has ever seen. Anyway two impressive comments were by Sig Rinde on hierarchies (which I will have to think a bit more about) and Jon Husband who spoke of an old concept/program/scheme/methodology called "Gainsharing".

Here’s what Jon said:

The way money is dished out as salaries and boni (that sure sounds weird, doesn’t it?) is directly related to and based on position in a traditional hierarchy, and as some of you know, my position is that (due to the now-networked environment) until the methodologies underneath the process of assigning boxes on the org chart changes (somehow) then money and the practices of ’scientific’ management will remain in place and continue to cause much dissonance and (mostly) needless resistance to change.

Re: money, again. I am really very surprised that no one (well, except me once, in a tweet) has ever brought up the concept of "gainsharing", an old-ish remuneration philosophy and methodology that had some experimentation back in the day when there were still some viable unions.

I’d argue that it at least in concept is tailor-made for a networked world where will perforce see more self-directed work groupings, a massive change in the role of middle management, and a diminution in the more-or-less automatic attribution of positional power and status that we see in traditional hierarchies.

Just think of it .. more of the money paid to people based on what happens as a result of sharing information and knowledge in relevant and pertinent ways, and the distribution of that money paid made on the gains (from a baseline) accomplished by carrying out work.

Gainsharing as a productivity-development and remuneration concept began to go dormant around the year 2000 .. which may coincide with a range of factors .. less unions, more "back to basics" in business after 9/11, and so on.

As I said, I really wonder why no one has brought it up before.

Could it also be that a decent proportion of the people who have been the standard-bearers for Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business are tech-oriented people who are (in all fairness) basically starting to learn about organizational sociology as they go ? < /teasing >"

I really like what Jon gets at, that those who actually do the work are the one’s the get recognised; and at the same time we are not paying others just for their job title (positional power), but rather their effort and talent. And basically that can happen as regular workers now have access to people and information, and perhaps the autonomy to make decisions within their local work environments. So basically we now have the ability, but traditional structures and the profit-obessessed purpose of which business has become (the CEO and shareholder relationship) stand in the way for complete change, as they have much to lose…politics and power play. It’s not always this way.

Gary Hamel puts it more eloquently:

Modern” management is one of humanity’s most important inventions, Gary Hamel argues. But it was developed more than a century ago to maximize standardization, specialization, hierarchy, control, and shareholder interests. While that model delivered an immense contribution to global prosperity, the values driving our most powerful institutions are fundamentally at odds with those of this age—zero-sum thinking, profit-obsession, power, conformance, control, hierarchy, and obedience

I then shared a comment linking to a post by the insightful Olivier Amprimo on the denatured role of management; which riffs off Jon Husband’s thoughts on the shareholder gains driver which is a root that needs to be pulled out, or basically a new plant needs to be seeded for the future of work to naturally unfold.

Olivier says:

…there is one blind element that no one really addresses in the current crisis: the selfishness of senior management.

Back in the 80’s politicians have deregulated the capital market by dis-intermediating it. Before when senior managers wanted to have money, for most of them, it was compulsory to visit bankers. Bankers were lending money at a certain rate, for a certain time, for a certain risk. Bankers are not perfect but they are providing middle / long term visibility.

Since deregulation senior managers issue shares of the company they run (and bankers are forced to design junk products to make a living ). By doing so they transform their company in a commodity on a market and they face competition from all other listed companies, including those in more profitable industries.

This creates a push toward relentless search for profitability. Either they align or they don’t get money, the shares drop and the company goes havoc. To make sure this does not happen, investors have incentivised senior management to deliver short term and high returns.

They have denatured the role of management, that classically is there to secure the long term of corporations.

To be successful senior management has set short term evaluation criteria, mostly on individual basis as this is the easiest ones to monitor. Some people buy it, some don’t and withdraw, demotivated by the absence of sense/long term vision. Either way this is the best way to kill collaboration or ‘engagement’, understood as an effective contribution to the company, the collective…

This is precisely what social computing tackles, by connecting people and surfacing implicitly (i.e. making ‘publicly available’) their contributions. Smart social computing lets people be selfish (ego) yet deliver positive side effects for the group.

As usual Technology is used to solve human and organisational issues. Because this goes against incentives systems and behavioural norms, it is a painful and time-consuming process to make ‘Enterprise 2.0’ happen"

And Jon’s response:

Yeah .. the shorthand for what Olivier (a very very smart fellow IMO) wrote about is <b>"managerial capitalism"</b> .. managing the business so as to earn as much, as quickly as possible, from increasing share prices and the accomplishment of short-term performance objectives approved by a friendly Board and compensation committee.

I responded with a few more links on managerial capitalism:

re: managerial capitalism

After years of stress and long hours to get the partnership, why would I be interested in the long-term future of the business? I have earned my reward, and nobody is going to take that from me until I retire. As an MBA student said to me in a class last night, becoming a partner is like a pie-eating competition and the prize is that you get to eat more pie

- John Steen

This creates the management culture of forcing efficiency changes to the point where you are gambling that no external “knock” will topple you. And with today’s high executive rewards, it is better to go for a few years of high profits and risk being kicked out as a result of lack of resilience than creating a long term viable operation. Trouble is, you are gambling with lives (mining) and shareholder value (recent derivative scandals) as well as climate (fossil emissions).

- Steve Hinton

As a manager organizing work you need to make strategic decisions about the capabilities of the organization. One of them is the level of resilience against external challenges verses operational efficiency…resilience describes an organization’s rebound capability…At the opposite end of the scale is efficiency. The more a network can specialize and streamline, the better it can get at doing one or a few tasks effectively. Of course, the trade off is that it cannot withstand a wide range of challenges, especially if these challenges are not factored in when designing and putting together the network…Process streamlining is another tactic, especially using automated IT systems and machines. Here again, the process will work well until an external challenge upsets the whole thing. And that is what Corporate Management is all about: it is a gamble that the unlikely outer challenges your organisation faces will not affect profits for the year you are responsible. And after all, if the awareness of any external challenges is not present, a manager cannot be blamed for not factoring it in.The recent Icelandic volcano ash surge is a good example. No one could have been expected to factor it in, and therefore the European transport network is unable to cope with an air traffic ban. Companies go bust, people get forced to take paid leave, and huge debts mount up. But there is no blame on management.If international oil companies no longer have any fields to explore and open up, thus reducing their output, it will not be blamed on management if they had only a short-term profit goal to maintain.

- Steve Hinton

Like you say it all comes down to the fundamentals of capitalism:

Reward long-term thinking and punish short-term selfishness

Sustainable value as opposed to shareholder value

From thin to thick value

Anyway I thought I’d Google "gainsharing"; and noodled through about 5 pages of results and read four or five articles

The concept of gainsharing has roots that are much deeper, dating back to the 1930s when a labor leader, Joe Scanlon, preached that the worker had much more to offer than a pair of hands. The premise was that the person closest to the problem often has the best and simplest solution. Moreover, if the worker is involved in the solution, he or she most likely will make the solution work. Scanlon used a team approach to solicit, review, approve and implement employee ideas and suggestions to drive the improvement process. Moreover,

Scanlon and the gainsharing concept shared the financial gains from improved performance. The Scanlon approach often was referred to as “a frontier inlabor management cooperation.

Gainsharing is a very literal term. In short, as an organization gains, it shares. The typical gainsharing organization measures performance and, through apredetermined formula, shares the savings with all employees. The organization’s actual performance is compared to baseline performance (often a historical standard) to determine the amount of the gain. Because gains are measured in relationship to a historical baseline, employees and the organization must change to generate a gain. The gainsharing system is one that builds ownership and employee identity to the organization. The employee becomes more of a stakeholder. Gainsharing is focused on social aspects of theorganization and looks to make many of the smaller day-by-day changes that drive continuous improvements. The steady and small improvements lead to significant progress over time. The performance bar continues to rise in daily work activities, the employee mindset and the way people do their work.

Compared to Lean Six Sigma, the focus of gainsharing is less on technical tools and more on the social and philosophical side of the workplace. Lean Six Sigma is more of a top-down process. Lean Six Sigma involves a limited number ofemployees through performance improvement project teams. On the other hand, gainsharing attempts to engage the total workforce through many different mean

“As we make these improvements, what’s in it for me? Sure it’s nice to have a job, but don’t executives receive larger bonuses when we help make these improvements? Is that fair?” Gainsharing provides the all-important link to this question. Gainsharing companies believe it is fair to share. Gainsharing’s bonus system provides a common focus, “a score.” As performance improves by working smarter, everyone shares. Interestingly, it’s not about the “money;”it’s about the “sharing.” Sharing and its impact on the sense of equity are very powerful, leading to a significant impact on the principle of identity.

As we all know, an owner of a business acts much differently than the workers. Identity speaks to the sense of purpose, belonging, accountability and ownership. This is what sharing drives. As identity and understanding grow, the need for change is recognized. Change leads to improvement, and improvement leads to gains. As identity and the sense of ownership are developed, employees naturally will have ideas on ways to improveperformance. Involvement is a means of “working smarter,” and there are never-ending ways to do so. Involvement and working smarter foster continuousimprovement.

- Robert L. Masternak and Michael A. Camuso

One of the main differences between Gainsharing and Profit Sharing is that Gainsharing very directly spells out what people need to do to drive the gains. A Profit Sharing system pays out if the company beats the goals set to trigger the Profit Sharing payout, but it doesn’t tell people what they need to do to make the profits happen.

Since the Profit Sharing bonuses just "happen" from time to time and people don’t know exactly what they did to make them happen, Profit Sharing becomes an "entitlement." That is, an expected part of their compensation.

Because people don’t understand the connection between what they do and profits, they feel entitled to the profit sharing. You don’t need to do anything particular to receive it. If you work here when it’s paid out, you receive it."

- Charles DeBettingnies

The concept of gainsharing is simple. First, the hospital calculates its historic rates of productivity (and, where measurable, quality). Then, new targets are set. If performance reaches the new targets, the hospital and its employees share the monetary gains. Because it involves money that the hospital otherwise would not have saved or earned, the program isself-funding. In this sense, it is a win-win program for both the hospital and its employees.

- Kent E. Romanoff andJames B. William

I like the concept of gainsharing, but I don’t like its execution. Rather than an incentive scheme it needs to be a natural part of how we work; given the right organisational design conditions, such as autonomy.

To me, gainsharing should be non-existent or in the background, just like KM, collaboration, employee engagement. Now by saying background I don’t mean they are not important, far from the truth; what I mean is that rather than schemes or programs, they simply need to be absorbed in the natural flow of work. They are not promoted as a thing on their own, rather they’re simply part of how we work around here.

To me gainsharing can be thrown in a bucket with all sorts of business goals or ways to achieve business goals. Instead what we can do is pay attention to employees, and behavioural goals…by doing this I think we will see the fruits of gainsharing via an indirect approach.

When you read this sentence tell me how gainsharing is different than KM, collaboration, improvement, engagement:

Recommending ideas and executing them; see where pain points and local gaps are and having the autonomy to budget and run with them. As a result of this type of self-managing and improvement you get a cut of the gain; and do meaningful work and become recognised by peers.

OK, what gainsharing brings to the table is you get a cut of the gain…cool. But just like KM, collaboration, engagement, performance and improvement it’s about people being able to do their job better. We don’t need a top-down managed program to do this with targets and outcomes and measurements. We just need to understand how employees work, pay attention to meaning, purpose, challenge, autonomy, recognition, etc…as a result we will achieve our goals (performance, enagement, KM, etc…) in a more indirect way.

It’s the execution, strategy, and implementation that needs to change. Instead of programs, the strategy is to understand employee needs, likes and wants. That’s a generic strategy that will achieve a myriad of business goals as a by product. Not only that, paying attention to employees will surface new business goals management haven’t thought of or realised.

In a nutshell, gainsharing is part of the natural flow of work; when you have purpose, autonomy, and are engaged it’s only natural you come across pain points and want to fix them (and have the means/autonomy to fix them), and that you have ideas. When employees have a stake in what they do, they are more purpose-driven; they act as if they own part of the organisation. For me it’s not about scouting to fix things in order for the money grab; it’s more about everyone improving their flow; it’s not about targets, it’s not a separate thing we do.

I needn’t explain the cancer of rewards and the perversion of targets. Again we are not trying to achieve something like sharing, being more engaged, improving; instead we are simply being.

Of course this brings us full circle to our Google Plus discussions about control, hierarchies, short-term gain, and shareholder value; it’s this dissonance that will continue to prevent complete change.

Actually I like this focus on group outcome and swarm type work, which talks to both my posts on the future of work and measuring employees on group how they help others:

Regardless of the actual plan used, there are several reasons that may account for the growing popularity of gainsharing. First, an increasing number of firms are moving toward a team-based work design (e.g., Scarp, 1995). The basic concept of a job may be undergoing a fundamental change from a prescribed set of tasks and duties assigned to individual workers to a broad definition of expectations, including a person’s ability to perform multiple tasks and beflexible to contribute to one or more work teams depending on need (Manz & Sims, 1993). This new emphasis on flexibility and cooperative efforts is conducive to an aggregate incentive plan, such as gainsharing, that rewards employees for group outcomes (Gomez-Mejia & Balkin,1992J. While team based incentives may be used, their application is limited by the fact that teams are often transient, individuals belong to multiple teams, the performance of various

teams is likely to be interdependent, and inter-team competition may be dysfunctional to theachievement of overall corporate goals. Gainsharing is particularly well suited to a team environment because rewards are linked to the performance of the entire unit which reflect the cumulative contribution of all teams (Welbourne, Balkin, & Gomez-Mejia, in press).

A second reason for the increased use of gainsharing is dissatisfaction with other types of pay-for-performance systems. In particular, programs to reward individual performance (such as merit pay and bonuses) more often than not lead to disappointing results (e.g., Cumming, 1995; Mount, 1987; Pearce, Stevenson & Perry, 1985). Many reasons have been advanced for this dissatisfaction, most notably the difficulty in untangling an individual’s contribution from that of other employees (e.g., Ilgen & Feldman, 1983; Liden & Mitchell, 1983; Yammarino, Dubinsky & Hartley, 1987); performance measurement problems or supervisory rating errors (e.g., Cardy & Dobbins, 1993); lack of credibility because many non-performance factors (such as position in the salary range) enter into these decisions (Schwab & Olson, 1988); and social disruption engendered by increased competition and disgruntled employees who feel that they deserve better (Pearce et al., 1985; Hughes, 1986). As firms scramble to find alternative mechanisms to reward performance, gainsharing is often adopted as a "lesser evil" or as a viable option with fewer negative side effects (Gomez-Mejia & Balkin, 1992)

…some forms of gainsharing provide an operational mechanism to implementparticipative management. The desirability of employee involvement has its roots in the human relations movement as exemplified in the Hawthorne experiments of the 1920’s. Despite much lip-service to this concept over the years, participative management has been more of an academic than a practical reality (Gomez-Mejia, Balkin, & Cardy, 1995). Gainsharing represents a major exception. Many gainsharing plans contain a committee structure to elicit and evaluate employee suggestions thereby providing an efficient channel to promote employee involvement and convert it into an action plan

Participative Management…The oldest stream of theory based research on gainsharing focuses on the basic notion that inducing employees to cooperate by giving them voice and a chance to participate in important decisions regarding their jobs is likely to augment commitment to the organization, improve work motivation, and enhance overall productivity. Employees understand their jobs far better than management and tapping this knowledge through gainsharing offers an important means to increase organizational performance. This view can be traced back to the classical writings of Mayo (1945) and his followers who argued that ". . . the administrator is dealing with well-knit human groups and not with a horde of individuals. . . every social group must face two perpetual and recurrent problems of administration. It must secure for its individual and group membership: (1) the satisfaction of material and economic needs, and (2) the maintenance of spontaneous cooperation throughout the organization (p. 9) . . . the eager human desire for cooperative activity still persists in the ordinary person and can be used by intelligent and straightforward management . . . " (p. 112) Gainsharing provides a medium to accomplish this by aligning the cooperation imperative of workers (through suggestion committee structures) with the objectives of the organization (through the criteria used to trigger payoffs) while at the same time satisfying the material and economic needs of workers (through the bonus system)

Social Dilemma…One of the concerns with aggregate incentive systems such as gainsharing is the so called "free-riding" effect whereby individuals accrue the benefits of the group effort and this serves as a disincentive to individual efforts (Gomez-Mejia & Balkin, 1992a). In the terminology of Cooper, Dyck, & Frohlich (1992), gainsharing creates a social dilemma because employees can benefit from an improvement in group performance regardless of their personal contribution to that performance. In a manner akin to the participative management models, Cooper et al., argue that this social dilemma may be solved through group decision making to decide how rewards are to be allocated within the group.

This literature contributes to our understanding of gainsharing by reminding us that these plans should not be introduced (or indeed studied) as stand alone entities without simultaneously examining other organizational factors that may singularly or interactively affect their success. However, this literature suffers on three counts: First, the empirical tests, so far, leave open the question of causality. Second, the identified factors (perhaps because of their global, often amorphous nature) are difficult to measure and the theoretical constructs themselves are subject to a wide range of interpretations. Third, it tends to neglect the possibility that the gainsharing program may be introduced as a change agent to alter the conditions which have been identified as prejudicial to these plans (such as low employee identification with the firm and lack of control or empowerment).

-Theresa M. Welbourne andLuis R. Gomez Mejia

In the end gainsharing to me means giving people autonomy and meaning at work, full stop. It’s not a program, "look into my eyes there’s no such concept as gainsharing". In their everyday work employees will come across things that need enhancing and improving. To do this they can form swarm teams, they can source their networks and help each other out (they may have to ask for permission, but the employees themselves do the sourcing, forming, and executing…as we now have access to information and people). At this point they can use their autonomy to naturally fix and fill these gaps. This on its own gives them belonging, ownership, meaning and purpose. And on top of that the organisation can respond and recognise in monetary and other ways.

No program, no target, just autonomy.

Related

“I am knowledge worker”, says the Janitor

The cancer of rewards

From strategic planning to purpose and resilience

Measure impact rather than outcomes and the folly of targets

People need ownership to be motivated

Involve front-line people in decisions

Knowledge worker 2.0

Value is created at the frontline not the IT department

The Toyota principle

Management must trust employees to perturb processes

Enabling opportunities for employee driven change

The era of employee empowerment is on us

How do we motivate business to devote their existence to people

The secret is creating the conditions for great inner work life

Where employees want to be

For achievable business goals we need to action behavioural goals

Behaviours are actions not results or values

John Hagel describes this knowledge worker 2.0 shift well:

In those days, the role of the individual was to follow instructions. That’s why you often had big binders full of instructions at large companies…

…it’s about providing individuals with the power to connect, so that they can address things rapidly and do local problem solving.

This new landscape challenges the basic core assumptions of management. Corporations that grew up in 20th century were organizations where the blueprint was to define in advance how the individual was to fit in. It was the job of the individual to fit into the organization, whereas today it’s about how organizations and companies need to adapt to the individual, and how they can develop their talents more rapidly. This is deeply subversive to traditional assumptions about management.

…one of the keys to motivating individuals is to help them connect to their passion for their profession. Monitoring passion level gives you the ability to provide rapid performance improvement. Passionate people are deeply motivated to improve themselves and drive themselves to the next level of performance.

Yep employees want meaning and purpose, they want to connect and have impact, they want to belong and feel ownership, they want autonomy to make decisions (self-manage, create tasks)…a move from extraction to engagement. 

A major obstacle in traditional organisations is the competitive element of what gets measured determines what gets done, and then take this up a level to the silo version of the problem in departments not being able to pass on local costs to other units ("she’s on my payroll, but you want her on loan for free, how do I justify that cost for no output on my end"). Let’s not even talk about non-commissioned work.

And then there’s the informal network of workers helping each other out ie. not a joint task, but rather providing a service for your co-worker as you know one day you’ll need to call on them. Bertrand Duperrin differentiates the difference between service and collaboration:

Because service is a person-to-person commitment rather than a goal-to-people one, it engages employees more, make the whole organization more responsive and make them less reluctant about caring about issues that are not directly theirs.

Collaboration is something one do with someone else to achieve something. Service is quite different.

Service is not something one do with another but something one do for another. The final purpose is, of course, to achieve something, but the immediate purpose is to help someone. And that changes everything.

Yes how well you source your network to produce more quality work, and the amount of help you offer enterprise-wide has always been there, but now it can become visible.

The focus of this post is the passion, empowerment and autonomy that John Hagel talks about, ultimately leading to employees having more opportunity to choose what they want to work on; for wanting and liking = engagement, does it not.

But this post is not only about employee satisfaction, it has a coupled effect that improves organisational effectiveness and agility ie. tasks or problems arise and the talent network swarms around it with little central coordination to attack the task/problem, and then disbands and moves onto the next thing.

I really like this idea of paying attention to the employee experience at work, which may cascade into improved organisational performance and innovation. It kind of reminds me of government paying attention to symptoms of poor education and behaviour, when they could instead focus on family and parenting; jusk ask Rob Paterson. 

Actually Andy McAfee talks about this as the icing or the cake metaphor (4min35sec)…personally for me the cake is your people, and the icing is the organisational performance. 

Freelance

A cinematographer or an actor looks for their own work, they choose something that takes their interest (or sometimes that may not even be interested, but they just need some work to generate some income). When that project finishes they (with the help of an agent) look for another project. In the meantime they have to supplement their downtime of their own accord ie. no-one pays them in-between jobs. They may also miss the interactivity with co-workers, which may me supplemented to an extent by the rise of co-working; here’s more from an article in the Globe:

But for a solo freelancer, it can be even more challenging to build your career when you don’t have an organization behind you. You’re responsible for your own networking and creating your own opportunities.
Freelance videographer Rosa Park misses having people to bounce ideas around with, so relies heavily on her social media for interaction.

What’s good about the freelance model from the other side of the bench is that a production company will choose from the best or most appropriate actor and cinematographer. In an organisation this is like saying we have looked up our social network (expert locator), and exhausted every possible expert within our organisation, and made our choice. You can’t get better than the ability to know who your experts are, and not feel like you have forgone choosing a better person for the job, because you didn’t know of them.

In-between projects

The difference between freelancers and permanent staff is that organisations have to supplement employees who are in-between projects.

In a project-based organisation like an engineering company, you will belong to a functional business unit; you have your BU boss, and when you work on projects you have your project boss. Whilst on a project the client pays your wage (they may not do this directly); this is called chargeable time. When you are in-between projects, the business unit pays your wage; this is called overheads. From the organisations POV, they want to win as many projects as possible so you can be on chargeable time as much as possible ie. it’s in the business’s interest to not have you sitting idle charging to overheads; that’s no way for an organisation to make profits.

Find work you like within an organisation

How do employees hear about new projects?

There may be an ERP system the makes this available, but most of the time it’s through your boss, or who you know. So the more you network, the more you are aware of what’s out there that you may interested in; the more you network, the more relationships you build…generating a relationship with important people (eg. those that recruit), or those who seem to know everything is to your advantage. In the end "it’s who you know".

But maybe we can all have an even opportunity of knowing the right people. Building the right relationships to get you the work you like is one thing that doesn’t come for free, but what can come for free is the first step of having the opportunity to be able to connect with the right people, and be aware of what people are talking about.

Online social networks are like expert locators, but more than that because they are beyond a directory listing, they are also a place where people talk. Access to a social network enables you to see beyond the physical limits of your hierarchy, your office, and who your boss knows. It enables the employer to see an exhaustive list of all the experts; not just by a subject descriptor, but by looking at their past project history on their profile page, questions they’ve answered on forums, and what they may blog about. Yes a blog is an employees opportunity to walk the walk, to talk about your experiences and what your good at, it shows your character. If the right people see your content, it can land you tasks of interest. On the other side it allows employees to connect with all sorts of people and build relationships. The idea here is that you now have a watercooler where you can hear about things, you have connections to people that will consider you for tasks they know you will like, or are good at, or another contact may know about a task and refer you.

So yes you can act somewhat like a freelancer in an organisation, and with online social networks there’s more opportunity of finding work that you like…this is a good feeling.

This really isn’t radical is it?

Right now organisations don’t know who all their people are and what they are good at. So we have experts not being matched to the right task. On the other side we have experts not knowing there are tasks out there that match their interests. So at the moment organisations are wearing a blindfold, and can only see through a little bit. Online social networks lift the blindfold, and project managers and employees can find each other…it’s a win win for engagement and happiness in the workforce.

I’ve blogged about this before, and called it a role-based organisation. A modular organisation where employees gravitate to tasks that suit their expertise and interests. And best of all when in-between jobs, they are still getting paid.

A better known term for this is Subject Matter Networks. Below are a few video’s illustrating what I’m talking about ie. examples of cutting across silos (in the new flat layered enterprise) by looking up a profiles directory and discovering an employees talent (or hidden talent)…the employee now works on a task that best fits their talent and passion, and of course the business has got the best available person on the task. 

The Ask 

Working and collaborating at The McGraw-Hill Companies 

Andrew McAfee also talks about this (2min20sec), where he sums it up in Nelson Mandela’s words:

 "To let your spark of genius manifest itself"

 Dynamic Project Teams (slide 13):

Arise to enable flexible formation of teams to meet emerging needs, while highly utilizing subject-matter expertise

SME’s are recruited informally via professional relationships & communities

SME’s are identified through organizational connections

Contractor

If you take the example of an engineering organisation again, part of their staff are freelancers (they are not permanent employees). A person can choose to be a contracter (eg. engineer, document controller, project manager) ie. like an actor or cinematographer they don’t permanently work for one company, they just jump from job to job, hoping there’s not much downtime in-between. From a contractors POV you choose to take this risk.

John Hagel doesn’t think this means the whole economy is going to turn into a market of freelancers

AL: What will this lead us to, eventually?

JH: It’s going to lead to a fundamental shift in how companies are managed. I am a bit of a contrarian regarding the popular view about the impact of the Internet, which is that large companies will go away and we will all become individual contractors and free agents. I think large institutions in general still have a significant role to play, but it will revolve much more around the notion of helping people to accelerate their talent development.

So then I ask if your company is flexible enough can you act as a pseudo-freelancer within your organisation and get satisfaction from finding work you like, and that work also finding you. That is, can you work without the worry of needing to find the next job on your own and without the worry of needing to somehow supplement your self when there is down time in-between jobs. You certainly can. Engineering companies don’t just run on contractors, they have permanent staff that belong in business units and work on projects. As mentioned at the start of this post; in-between projects the company pays them till the next project comes along. In this interim time they gather in their BU and reflect, fix processes, innovate, but most of all the leads are doing business development and looking for new clients.

Your other choice is a true freelancer where the boundary of one organisation is not your limit, you have a much bigger playing field to find a project (I suppose much more opportunity to find something you like). But the downside is when in-between jobs you have to survive on your own; this is the choice with lower security.

The balance of permanent staff and contractors

From the organisations POV they would want a mixture of permanent staff and contractors. Having permanent staff means they carry the culture and goodwill that you promote to clients, and they also carry the organisational knowledge ie. they have been groomed, the company has invested in growing their talent. It’s good to have smart people permanently by your side. It’s also practical as when there’s a new project it’s much easier to ramp up and dip into your in-house talent pool. But it’s not viable for all your staff to be permanent as you may not be able to afford to pay them in downtimes, so access to contractors makes for a balanced approach.

Greg Satell explains this common sense:

…firms exist to minimize transaction costs. Anybody who has run a technology company in an up market knows exactly what he’s talking about.  It’s often much better to pay people a salary, even if they are idle some of the time, than to try to find freelancers whenever you need something done.

Alan Murray explains how the organisation is not good as the market in allocating resources for a given activity, and alludes to traditional command structures as the obstacle:

The corporation might not be as good at allocating labor and capital as the marketplace; it made up for those weaknesses by reducing transaction costs…It was simply too complicated and too costly to search for and find the right worker at the right moment for any given task, or to search for supplies, or to renegotiate prices, police performance and protect trade secrets in an open marketplace.

Resource allocation will be one of the biggest challenges. The beauty of markets is that, over time, they tend to ensure that both people and money end up employed in the highest-value enterprises. In corporations, decisions about allocating resources are made by people with a vested interest in the status quo. “The single biggest reason companies fail,” says Mr. Hamel, “is that they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.”

The new model will have to instill in workers the kind of drive and creativity and innovative spirit more commonly found among entrepreneurs. It will have to push power and decision-making down the organization as much as possible, rather than leave it concentrated at the top. Traditional bureaucratic structures will have to be replaced with something more like ad-hoc teams of peers, who come together to tackle individual projects, and then disband

This really is a turning point; the organisation as being more effective than the market due to minimising transaction costs; and now with a more networked organisation it too can be as agile as the market in regards to resource allocation;where the best people are on the right job (whether they are known by leads, or gravitate to a job themselves), and the tasks of value can surface from the bottom-up (frontline) as well

Rex Lee calls this "You as a Service" (YaaS):

1. Scale…As big as a company is, it can’t possibly hire everyone. What if it needed one idea from one person and that was it. Would you hire them? Would you even consult with them? Even if a company could hire everyone, what kind of bureaucracy would be required? By tapping into things like Innocentive, individuals become their own services

2. Efficiency: For the same reason Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize in economics in explaining why firms exist. The need to vertically or horizontally integrate was spurn because of cost inefficiencies. It was simply more efficient to buy out the partners or hire them then it would be to create contracts with everyone you worked this. This is now changing. To the extreme there are now companies with virtually no employees such as CrowdSpirit.

You can now be a service. A thought source. A problem solver. A creative entrepreneur. And the globe is your marketplace. What a fascinating world it is when we can all hang up our own "Open for business" signs.

What about shared services employees?

So far I have talked about functional BU employees in a project-based organisation. But what about shared services employees within these organisations.

I don’t think this should be any different; the difference is that they are not groups that form to serve client projects directly, instead they are groups that support project workers; in doing this, part of their experience is working on internal projects of their own kind. For example someone in the HR unit of a global organisation may be one of 100 people. If there’s a new initiative about "onboarding", the online social network will help managers and workers find each other; meaning we have the best possible person leading the onboarding initiative, and that person is happy to a have a task that matches their interests.

Most of the time in a shared service like IT or HR, we don’t jump from one internal project to the next. Rather we have our everyday tasks, and also specialise on an internal project task. Where this can start to weaken is when a person is on too many tasks, leaving them no-time to do their everyday tasks. 

This can cause fatigue.

Let me go a step further; what about if HR have an internal task that requires someone from IT to do substantial work on the task. If the task itself doesn’t have a charge code then the IT manager is paying the IT person to do that task rather than the HR Manager. This is what organisations are all about, we have functions and come together to achieve things. But what if that IT worker is over extended ie. their manager lends them to work on too many cross-functional tasks. Both their everyday IT tasks will suffer, as well as those cross-functional internal tasks, as they just can’t spread their time.

I find this is the problem with swarms being an informal practice; when the swarm is not funded or resourced properly it suffers. The IT worker may let the task down, and the IT worker also is not keeping up with their usual daily tasks.

So if we are going to swarm we need to officialise this concept.

Why, because time and resources get abused, and cracks can start to appear when the internal task does not have a charge code.

Bertrand Duperrin puts it this way:

…businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used…businesses don’t understand free across its departments.

Luis Suarez covers this topic in a video (22mins) where he says he often works on tasks on other teams but does not get financially compensated, and alludes to HR needing to pay attention to keep up with the way we work now. He talks about the potential intangible benefits ie. if in the future he is looking for some work he will have goodwill with those he has helped out in the past (he will have demonstrated his competence and character) and they more often than not would help him out. But it may even be that your job security is ok, all you need is some expertise outside the skills of your team…ah yes reciprocity.

Luis is asked a question (29mins) about what your boss thinks about you juggling extra work, and what if it exhausts you. Luis says it’s ok as long as it doesn’t get in the way of his main job. In the end the person who issues his pay slip is the tasks that take priority. I think this could be more progressive. Yes the first step is your boss mainly caring that you perform and deliver, rather than trying to squeeze out every moment of your presence. If it makes you feel engaged, fulfilled, and getting your brand out there to work on other tasks, etc…then go for it. This is the first hurdle that I now hear many workplaces are jumping over cleanly. 

Like I mentioned above; where the progression needs to be or thought about is that we get fatigued with all these tasks (I’m on that committee, I’m in this online community, I’m helping out her on her task, I’m answering a question over here, I’m in a task force initiative over here, etc….) Sometimes it’s not so easy to relax your effort on a task outside your main job as your involvement may have committed you somewhat. But since your boss pays your pay slip you have no choice and as a result these other tasks suffer. Quick help for others like answering questions or showing them how to pretty up their powerpoint is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about those other tasks you may do on other teams that may soak up a portion of your time over an extended period. 

What’s the solution? Part of it is what Bertrand says about passing on local costs. But even if that other team are willing to pay for your temporary help, is the organisation agile enough to do this sort of on-the-fly resourcing. I think we need to see organisation’s have more capability to deal with this…more job rotation, multi-skilled workers…

What I’m getting at is an evolution where we lower the constraints so the future of work-where we do that swarming type thing-can flourish.

I spoke about the above here and here, but you needn’t read it as the concept is covered in this post. 

Do we get paid for one-off help

Something I briefly mentioned is swarming around a problem; but what if this coming together is not really a task yet, or may not ever be a task, it’s just a problem that will be solved with the right answer (the questioner may then go on and implement, or indeed they may need the help of the answerer). We have talked about the notion that a person gravitates to stuff they have expertise in, and is then able to work on that task (given costing is worked out, and given they have time away from their every day tasks-or perhaps other resources can fill the gap in the everyday tasks till they get back). It’s kind of a shuffle isn’t it.

What if the answerer has given an answer and the questioner does not require them to do anything further, then what has happened here is the answerer has helped them for free. Why do this if you are not getting paid for it?

The interaction may have had the potential to lead to work on a paid task. If not, then you have helped someone out who appreciates your touch, and will reciprocate where possible in the future. The other thing you have done is you were watched by lots of people when you answered the question…the metaphor of an applause is comments and ratings, or perhaps not much was said, but none-the-less you will be remembered by all these listeners…by participating you are making yourself known and promoting what you are good at, and this is going to help get you future work. Knowledge sharing is power. I think this intrinsically motivating approach is enough, I don’t think we need to turn this concept into a knowledge market. Again this relates to what Luis was talking about above in relation to what I call goodwill.

I expand on this point in my post, Measuring employees on the quality of their work and gifting based on how well they utilise their online network.  

Ad-hoc teams of peers, atomic-model, role-based, freelance, talent networks, temporary groups, ronin, crews, flocking, social teams, swarms, value networks, communities of experts, circles of influence, innovation labs, sand dune teams, dynamic project teams

We have talked about freelance work, and the ability for permanent staff in project-based companies to act as if they were freelancers within their own company. The difference being the latter is supplemented by the company in-between jobs. Another point depending on the company is the latter may not be choosing their own jobs, they might be chosen for them; unless they are the type or organisation that creates the conditions for this to be enabled by allowing employees to connect enterprise-wide in an online social network.

The is how this new organisational model works. Rather than people being stuck and immovable in a functional based model, the organisation has another layer or capability to operate as a task-based model. That is people find work they like, or the best people in the company swarm around a problem, assemble to solve the problem, then buzz away to the next task, initiative or problem. 

This type of operating is quick team-based, but is different to how we think of teams. These type of swarm teams are not long-term, people may not know each other, and they only exist to mend a problem ie. they don’t exist just because…they are not an existing team of experts.

Swarming is not the only name they go by, the following excerpts describe the many names for this type of operational model.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger related to a comment Tom Foremski made on one of his earlier posts referring to this as the "atomic" model (like my film industry example above, Tom too alludes to the "Hollywood model"). This is not in relation to acting like a freelancer as a permanent employee, but instead he is referring to the true notion of a freelancer, as he mentions, "why having them sitting around on salaries in-between jobs":

“In some ways, I see your post-retirement life as being somewhat futuristic, in that it will be the way many people will be working in the future.  It’s what I call an "atomic" model - collaborating with others on specific tasks/projects and then dissolving those collaborations as you work with others on different projects. In some ways, this is the way Hollywood has been working for decades.  And it’s also one that I increasingly see in Silicon Valley.”

“It’s a model that increases individual productivity and also organizational productivity because you bring in consultants/experts for specific tasks.  Why have them sitting around on salaries in-between projects?”

“You’ve retired from the old style of working and you are now pioneering the new style of working "

Irving describes his new work model (via Luis Suarez’s Intrapreneurship post)

I have transitioned from being an executive working full time at IBM to my present position as a self-employed professional associated with a variety of institutions.  Roughly speaking, two thirds of my work is spent consulting on innovation and technical strategy, primarily with IBM and Citigroup, but now and then with other companies as well.  A quarter of my time is spent with universities, primarily MIT, Imperial College and SUNY’s Levin Institute.  The remaining time is spent in various other activities, including boards and government panels.

People often ask me what I have been doing since I retired from IBM, and when I tell them, they typically say that it sounds like I am busier now than when I had a full time position.  I generally answer that while I am indeed quite busy, being a self-employed professional is markedly different from working full time at a large company like IBM, both in obvious and subtle ways. 

My time is now my own.  I have a lot more flexibility and personal choice in what I do and how I spend my days.  The boundaries between work and personal life, already very porous when working at IBM, are practically non-existent.

But, as a self-employed individual, I am also on my own.  While the various institutions I work with provide me some degree of support, their infrastructure and processes are geared to support their full time employees, not part-time professionals and contractors.  I thus have had to come up with my own infrastructure and processes suitable for my present distributed work style.

From here on we are talking about the swarming within organisations that I mentioned earlier (ie. pseudo-freelancing within a company, or basically choosing work you like)

In a post blog post I quoted Margaret Schweer talking about this shift to a role-based organisation, where talent is shared:

Many of us are transitioning away from job to roles based on work for some portion of our organization. This is an important paradigm shift for leaders – ownership for talent is shared. Talent needs to be flexibly deployed against the areas of highest value for the organization.

The ability to structure work and talent in a flexible fashion increases the organization’s ability to rapidly and effectively respond to needs in times of crisis or opportunity.

The organisation still has the hierarchy network formation, but it also has a talent network formation. Hierarchies may be a good model to win clients, define, and manage the work, and the talent network are a good model to form the team and actually do the work.

This approach is like an ecosystem where both managers and employees have access to information and people. BTW - I really don’t like the idea of looking at this from a big brother perspective of employees being slotted into boxes.

Stowe Boyd talks about how being a freelancer enables him to pick and choose his work, to do work that has meaning (the purpose behind the time and effort we put into our work) and then he ponders if this can happen within organisations (which is the focus of this post):

Speaking personally, I am a long-time freelancer, and I work with a wide variety of clients. But I am motivated to find meaning for my actions through work (as well as extra-work activities), and I select projects based on how they line up with my abiding motivations.

So this begs the question: Can individuals — including people working in companies — come together on ad hoc projects, projects of limited duration, and still be aligned with their meaning for work?

He then points to thoughts by Neil Perkin on ad-hoc talent networks:

"Part of the reason that this is so interesting is that it is symptomatic of a broader trend – the rise of talent networks. In the case of Co:, the founders describe the agency as a ‘brand studio’, likening it to a movie studio that pulls in talent to work on specific projects, facilitates a good result, and provides the environment and the infrastructure for effective collaboration. One of the founders, quoted in the New York Times, talked about how “teams are formed around individual client needs, and when those needs are satisfied, the team is dispersed”.

Relentless digitisation and the recession have combined to create an environment in which the value of much of what we have known is depreciating, and which increasingly requires a culture and a pace of innovation that is consistent with start-ups. Organisational value is shifting from protecting knowledge assets, to encouraging knowledge flow. In ‘We Think’, Charles Leadbetter said: “In the past you were what you owned. Now you are what you share”. New models are springing up that follow a philosophy where access trumps ownership. Assets are increasingly about relationships."

Stowe moves on to talk about swift trust and temporary groups ie. groups that assemble for a task, but don’t have a history of trust or formal coordination, yet they are successful. For me this is because each person is happy within themselves as they are all doing what they like…basically happiness is contagious and can make happy groups. Also it’s not about the group it’s about the task. ie. we usually have pre-existing groups that do tasks, and now this is turning this upside down by saying we have a group that has formed around a task, and will then dissolve.

He points out that the temporary groups approach (and the Ronin, as he calls the freelancers) is kind of the opposite of past hierarchical approaches ie. less chance of power play, and low cost experimentation and agility (Clay Shirky often talks about traditional structures going for the less risky, rather than potentially best approach)

Increased Agility — A company that can react and quickly act to changing conditions has to possess a different sort of balance…a company can bring together short-term teams of specialists to attack new opportunities, and if they fail, they can do so quickly, at low cost, and simply disband the team.

Swift Trust — Companies can avoid the high and seemingly inescapable costs of internal politics with permanent employees struggling for power and autonomy as soon as a hierarchy is created. 

…impermanent teams can come together and accomplish projects with the least amount of politics, because a/ the participants are all aware that the project is of limited duration, b/ the team members are able to assume functional roles based on their previous experience with a minimum — or zero — training, c/ the project is based on distributed, complex, non-trivial tasks that require deep expertise, and ongoing coordination or work activities, and d/ people can suspend their need to build deep trust because it is a project comprised of other ronin (freelancers).

…this non-convergence, this lack of long-term collective agreement, is not a detriment: it is in fact the reason that the friction in short-term projects is so low. Because the participants are only cooperating as short-term ‘connectives’ — when considered in any timeframe larger than the duration of the project — they avoid the social inertia of forming long-term ‘collectives’…

Dave Snowden alludes to a common concept of swift trust in his concept of "crews"

A crew works because its members take up roles for which they are trained, and where their expectations of the other roles in the crew is also trained and to a large extent ritualised.  This means that people can assemble into a crew without the common forming, norming, storming & performing cycle.

Michael Lissack calls it "flocking":

Flocking is the ability of the organization to recognize good opportunities and to flock resources around those opportunities — much as birds in an unselfconscious and reflexive way will rotate the leadership of their flying wing as one bird gets tired and another represents the “next hope.” Having the ability to flock is having the ability to take advantage of opportunity. This is much easier said than done.

Boris Pluskowski calls it Social Teams:

…we “exist” as a community, but we “achieve” as a team

“Social Teams”…members may never have met each other, but nevertheless choose to work with each other to achieve a mutually desirable goal or function.

Social Teams are not top-down, nor bottom-up; they can be purposely set-up, or self-formed by team members; they can exist in purely social settings or as corporate sponsored groups.

They are a collection of individuals who have a common understanding of the “game they’re playing” (ie the team’s purpose); know in which goal they’re trying to score in (ie have a shared understanding of what ‘a win’ looks like); and are collaborating together to achieve that aim.

They incorporate the structure of a traditional team, with the social contract of a community.

Deb Lavoy posts about assembling for a task and then dissolving; she calls it a move from teams to swarms:

…organizations are transforming ever rapidly from institutions where people support processes and technologies, to one where processes and technologies support people. People are, authentically now, the actual value of and infrastructure of the organization. We solve problems by bringing the right people to them at the right time. The cross-functional team is now such a fixture in our workplace that we forget that 10 years ago it was a big deal. The idea that a team is not defined by a specific organizational structure is finally so accepted a truth that it hardly stands mentioning now. We know that differing perspectives, give and take, mutual analysis and common understanding leads to better, faster learning — which means better, faster outcomes.

But as our concept of team moves from a predefined structure to a ” swarm,” the way we interact personally with each other, within teams, among teams and the role of management is changing in fundamental ways. New values and new skills are needed to flourish in this fluid environment.

Verna Allee calls these formations value networks:

The true shape and nature of collaboration is not the social network – it is the value network. Value networks are purposeful groups of people who come together in designated roles to take action or produce an outcome. Only through the power of value networks can we address our complex issues – together – and create a more hopeful future.

Padmasree Warrior calls them ad-hoc communities of experts:

At Cisco, we believe that the rigidly structured silos that were traditionally put in place in most enterprises will give way to more fluid, ad-hoc communities of experts. Increasingly, companies will rely on Collaboration Networks that bring together “clusters of experts” to get critical projects completed. These groups will form dynamically to achieve a shared outcome. This self-organizing cycle repeats itself on an ongoing basis, as the need arises. It’s both efficient and effective, in part because experts are drawn to projects and are thus motivated — rather than being “assigned” in a top-down fashion

Tara Matthews (via Luis Suarez calls them dynamic project teams):

Dynamic project team. A group of people where some members stay the same, but most members come and go during the life of the project, working closely together toward a common deliverable that is a job related focus for its members.

Slide 4 from Luis "Collaboration is changing from stable teams to groups where membership is dynamic - Mortensen & Hinds"

Slide 8 from Luis "A Social Business is…Creative - allows the right mix of talent and information to come together to deliver new insight"

Keith Sawyer calls then innovation labs and talks of J. Richard Hackman who calls them sand dune teams: 

I tell how W. L. Gore developed the Elixir brand of guitar strings, with a team that formed spontaneously and unofficially. In Chapters 8 and 9, I describe many companies that create temporary, cross-disciplinary teams to foster innovation (I call them “innovation labs”). Now, I’ve just learned that the leading guru of teams research, J. Richard Hackman, believes that these improvisational, emergent, and fluid teams are the wave of the future.* He calls them “sand dune teams” to indicate that they are impermanent. His key points echo my 2007 book: 

These teams are best for “fast-changing contexts in which surprise is the rule”. They often emerge in emergencies (There’s a lot of research showing the role of improvisation in emergency and disaster response; in Group Genius, I begin Chapter 2 by telling a story about the 1980 Naples earthquake). They do best when they operate in organizational units of 30 people or less, so that “unitwide norms and routines” can be shared

I like how Larry Hawes speaks about these swarms, as he refers to the concept of tasks being realised not only in a top-down way, but also from the frontline. For example a bunch of workers who are on the frontline communicate to managers a gap or a pain point, and are given time and resources to assemble to fix that gap…the manager being an enabler.

I believe we are nearing the time when entire organizations will make that same shift of perspective. Hierarchical command and control structures already have (mostly) given way to matrixed organizations. The next step in organizational evolution will be the formation of networks of individuals who work together to solve a specific business challenge, and then disband. The organization will support their endeavors by providing the assets and services listed above. Organizations will endure only as long as they can continue to form networks of knowledge workers and supply the assets and services those workers need.

Keith Sawyer gives an example of bottom-up created tasks by way of ICU Medical, Inc:

These self-forming and self-managing teams came up with better ideas than any one manager could have. To take one example, one of the plant workers thought that the forklifted delivery of parts from the warehouse to a molding site was overly inefficient. He got some colleagues interested, and they formed a team to re-examine the manufacturing process for the Clave, a top-selling product. Six months later, they introduced a new process that is saving the company a half-million dollars each year. In the new company culture, teams often are allowed to implement their ideas even if top executives are opposed. Dr. Lopez, as the CEO, has always retained the right to veto a decision, but years later, he still hasn’t done so.

Vineet Nayar, CEO of the Indian IT services company HCL has written a book on employee autonomy [video]:

The era of employee empowerment is on us and businesses need to harness the skills of their workforce to improve productivity and meet customer needs. This is created by giving front line employees the responsibility to take action that will benefit the customer without layers of bureaucratic approval.

Vineet…is gaining recognition for transforming the business through a radical ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ philosophy. He talks about the value zone being where customer value is created. He says:In traditional companies, the value zone is is often buried deep inside the hierarchy and the people who create value work there.The value zone in the first wave was on the shop floor. 

For more on this type of frontline autonomy or perhaps the lesser frontline continuous improvement, there’s no other than the Toyota principle.

So where does this lead, it means there’s a shift. Yes people are being matched to tasks, and finding their own…everyone’s happy. But they are also initiating the task themselves (which have to be approved), which is different to the managers setting the tasks.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter says:

Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders.

Circles of influence replace chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership — consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more effectives than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done.

Employee happiness aside what we are talking (which has been in the air for 50 years) about here is optmising our absorptive capacity; take it from Michael Lissack:

Organizations with high levels of absorptive capacity will tend to be proactive, exploiting opportunities present in the environment. Conversely, organizations with modest absorptive capacity will tend to be reactive, looking for solutions to problems as they arise

ADDED 5-10-11 - oDesk video - The future of work

Project teams at work are beginning to resemble movie production teams

Independent individuals with unique talents get together to work on a company’s project

At the end, they all go their separate ways. They might work together again in the future. They might not. 

What about leaders?

I’ve already mentioned Vineet Nayar; next look no further than W.L. Gore for the future of leadership, either watch this video of CEO Terri Kelly (and another) or put a smile on your face by reading the excerpts below:

Our leaders have positions of authority because they have followers…we allow the voice of the organization to determine who’s really qualified to be a leader, based on the willingness of others to follow…One of my associates said, ‘If you call a meeting, and no one shows up, you’re probably not a leader, because no one is willing to follow you.’ At Gore, the test of leadership is that simple: are others willing to follow you? We use a peer review process to identify the individuals who are growing into leadership roles. (snippet)

…our associates, who are all owners in the company, self-commit to what they want to work on. We believe that rather than having a boss or leader tell people what to do, it’s more powerful to have each person decide what they want to work on and where they can make the greatest contribution. But once you’ve made your commitment as an associate, there’s an expectation that you’ll deliver. So there are two sides to the coin: freedom to decide and a commitment to deliver on your promises. (snippet)

Our associates get to choose what commitments to make. If they didn’t know they’re going to be evaluated by their peers, they might be tempted to take on an assignment that is personally interesting to them, a hobby, but one that’s not important for the company. But instead, every associate is constantly thinking, ‘I want to be viewed as making a big contribution to the enterprise,’ so they’re constantly looking for opportunities that will leverage their strengths, and that they’re passionate about. So there’s a natural, built-in pressure: every associate wants to work on something impactful. (snippet)

Typically, an associate will be evaluated by 20 or 30 peers…You don’t evaluate people solely on the basis of what they’re doing within their team, but in terms of the broader impact they may be having across the company. And then beyond their contributions, are they behaving in ways that are collaborative? Are they living the values?……it ensures that real talent gets recognized. This system avoids the problem of paying someone more because of seniority or title. No system is perfect, but ours levels the playing field and allows real talent to emerge and get compensated accordingly….…we ask our associates to view performance holistically, in terms of someone’s total impact, versus focusing on a few specific variables (snippet)

A maverick (which is the title of his book-read the first 6 pages-and see an extended video or some shorter one’s here and here) of this style of leadership and self-organised employees (the real enterprise 2.0) is Ricardo Semler from Semco:

• Every new management hire is interviewed by people who would report to him. If they don’t give him an okay, he doesn’t get the job.
• During annual salary review each person is given a choice to decide his new salary level. He is provided with information about what others at similar level are getting within and outside the company. If he asks for an exorbitant raise, management does not say no. But he has to face the peer pressure because his salary is going to affect profit share of others in the business unit.
• Same applies to expense reports. If he decides to stay in a five-star hotels and others in similar situation normally stay in a three-star it is known to others and the peer pressure works.
• All the employees have access to financial statements and training is given to each person on how to read the balance sheet.
• Each new team can decide and buy the furniture they would like to use.
• Each employee has a vote in important decisions affecting them like where to locate the new plant out of multiple choices.
• In short, employees have great freedom to make decisions. They are encouraged to have all the necessary information to take a decision. As a result they also have the responsibility for the decision because their actions are visible to all and those who are affected put the pressure either encouraging or discouraging such actions.

His focus is Treat employees like adults:

We simply do not believe our employees have an interest in coming in late, leaving early, and doing as little as possible for as much money as their union can wheedle out of us. After all, these are the same people that raise children, join the PTA, elect mayors, governors, senators, and presidents. They are adults. At Semco, we treat them like adults. We trust them. We don’t make our employees ask permission to go to the bathroom, nor have security guards search them as they leave for the day. We get out of their way and let them do their jobs.

Another non-traditional leadership style and culture is at Netflix:

Our model is to increase employee freedom as we grow, rather than limit it, to continue to attract and nourish innovative people so we have better chance of sustained success

And let’s not forget Google:

Google engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally. This means that if you have a great idea, you always have time to run with it. It sounds obvious, but people work better when they’re involved in something they’re passionate about, and many cool technologies have their origins in 20 percent time, including Gmail, Google News

Let’s not forget IBM either; and back to Luis Suarez’s slides and video, where he talks about Social Business. But in particular Luis talks about how online community members are volunteers and alludes to taking a leaf from this community approach to the real work approach where knowledge workers volunteer, or moreso can have the freedom to choose projects and tasks where their skills and passion best fit. This really ties in with my past post where I talk about community-ship.

I believe WorldBlu is where you will find more of these progressive companies. 

Steve Denning has a lot to say in this shift in the meaning of leadership:

Principle #2: New role for managers: From controller to enabler

Focusing on continuously adding new value for clients requires a change in the way work is carried out, because a traditional bureaucracy is not suited to innovation. It was designed to produce consistent performance from largely non-skilled workers. To reach the new level of performance, the organization has to empower those doing the work in self-organizing teams that are responsible for deciding how the work is to be done. The result is a dramatic shift in the role of the manager from controller to enabler. 

Organize work in self-organizing teams: The default model of doing work shifts from individuals reporting to bosses, to organizing work in networks of self-organizing teams who regard their clients as “the boss”, not the manager. The teams are responsible for deciding how much work to attempt in any cycle, and how to do the work. 

Transmit passion for the goal: People only give their very best if they believe that it is worthwhile. A generic form of a compelling purpose is delighting clients. The manager’s role is to create meaning at work (the purpose of the whole organization as a whole is to delight clients) and meaning in work (the purpose of each team in each iteration is to delight its clients). The manager must articulate the goal with clarity, consistency and passion.

Transfer Power: Creating self-organizing teams that unleash the talents and creativity of their members requires that management transfer power to the team to decide how to go about the work for the duration of the work cycle. The risk involved in transferring power to the team is manageable as a result of the protections offered by dynamic linking: by working in short cycles, nothing can go too far wrong. In this way, performance is given priority over predictability—the opposite of the bureaucratic practices of traditional management.

Hold the team accountable: The transfer in power is conditional on the team actually delivering on delighting clients in each cycle. The transfer of power is thus an offer, for which the team must accept the responsibility to deliver. Then in due course the team is accountable for delivery. It involves creating a setting where a team has an appropriate role in deciding how much work can be done and in removing impediments so that the team gets on a steadily improving trajectory. After standing back and letting the team get on with the job, the team is held accountable for the results as determined by the client. 

Others like Rachel Happe include this employee flexibility in their future of work pondering:

Employment becomes a cross between a long-term commitment and free-agency: The organization provides employee overhead (benefits) in exchange for a commitment to work a minimum number of hours on organizational projects.

…Managers no longer ‘own’ a functional piece of the business but either manage a group of employees to help them choose projects and navigate their career or they manage projects.

…Employees are free to self-commit to projects for which they are interested and have time. Project managers define project roles, time needed, and associated pay and are responsible for recruiting team members and managing the project to completion…

Actually I’ve noticed that my notes that are in Rachel Happe’s link above is a summary of the thinking in this post.

JP has much the same to say:

1. The person will select the “task”, rather than be given the “task”

Ever since the inception of the modern firm, people were given tasks to do in a prescriptive, deterministic manner. Initially this made sense, since firms were built on industrial-revolution models, and linear workflow was the norm.  But that was for a different time, and the environment has changed completely. Talent is at a premium…The most precious asset of the knowledge-worker enterprise is the knowledge worker, her human and social capital, her relationships and her capabilities. It makes more sense to expose knowledge workers to problem domains and then giving them the resources and tools to solve those problems.

3. True team-based work will become the norm, not the exception.

For decades we’ve been talking about teamwork in the enterprise, but that’s what it’s been for the most part. Talk….The “team”, in practice, is distributed across different departments, functions, locations. And the very structure of the firm militates against teamwork, since these departments, functions and locations tend to optimise within the department, function or location. That optimisation is often underpinned, even accelerated, by the reward system in place, which places a premium on the results of such local optimisation. Interdepartmental cooperation and collaboration is, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes very much on purpose, made difficult.

JP also recently re-iterated the requirements for the future of work (the real enterprise 2.0):

Work is changing;..too often, we spend time exception-handling as the squarenesses of the pegs that come our way, stoutly and solidly resist our ability to place them in the roundnesses of the process holes we built to receive them

Hierarchical structures were the most efficient way of getting things done: deciding what’s to be done, allocating the tasks to people, giving them the resources needed, sending and receiving the “orders”, aggregating news of progress, dealing with the “conflict” of change, monitoring progress, intervening as required. This is not the same for knowledge workers; often, such decisions are better taken by domain experts closer to the “coalface”. Overall vision and strategy still tend to get set by leaders and leadership teams, but these are leaders, not managers, with the responsibility to do just that: lead.

As a result of these trends, there are new demands on the enterprise. Knowledge workers need smarter ways to discover what needs to be done, the context in which to do it, the tools available, past learning. They need smarter ways to discover potential team members, people with the right mix of skills to carry out the tasks. They need better dashboards to tell them about their operating environment, external and internal stimuli and feedback loops. They need more effective ways to train for all this, to learn the patterns rather than the processes, so that they can apply their personal and collective intelligence to solve the problems they face.

Oscar Berg describes his running environment; the way that his network and technology enable him to fulfill and optimize his running. But he also mentions that this is not possible without the fundamental drive:

…it couldn’t have been created without a deeper understanding of what motivates people and how to design an environment that triggers the right behaviors.

So the bottom line is this: If the environment described above can turn almost anyone into a runner, we can be pretty sure that a work environment that is designed with an understanding of what make people more motivated, collaborative and productive at work, and where performance models and management practices are adjusted accordingly, can turn an underperforming business to one that thrives and outperforms its competitors.

Let’s conclude with Stowe Boyd:

In this not-too-distant future businesses may principally be organized around helping every employee find and achieve their personal meaning for work, instead of trying to indoctrinate workers to a corporate agenda.

Think of a playground. When a kid approaches a play ground they really don’t need their parent to set their task (play on the slide) or find an existing task and involve them (build sand castles with those children over there), instead within the boundaries and purpose of the organisation employees can find their own tasks. Will the future of work become more like the playground where you are expected to find your own place and tasks, and leads approve, enable and coach them.

Hang on there’s more…

Stowe points to a post by Rawn Shah on the future of work 

The autonomy to choose who to work with and what projects to work on is going to become the basis of a new Work Bill Of Rights. Freelancers have that choice inherently, since they simply can turn down work with potential employers. Inside the worksplace, full-time employment in a social business will be based on this degree of freedom.

This points to a paper where Tom Malone talks about cheap information access as a pre-cursor or reason that flexible work can happen…I think we can add online social networks as an ingredient:

I think we are in the early stages of an increase in human freedom in business that may, in the long run, be as important a change for business as the change to democracy was for governments. This is happening because cheap communication lets more people have enough information that they can make sensible decisions for themselves instead of just following orders from people above them in the hierarchy. And that means we can have the economic benefits of large-scale enterprises, such as efficiency and scale, and at the same time have the human benefits of small scale, such as motivation, creativity and flexibility.

I’ve covered Andy McAfee’s thinking on this before.

What Rawn has to say:

We still realize that there are significant benefits of working in groups and organizations, but many now realize that the pendulum swung too far to force work behavior to fit into the limitations once ascribed by the lack of communications, geographical location limitations, growing employee bases, diversity of job roles, and on measuring individual contributions to completed work. The forces of automation, communications, globalization, and competition have created practical solutions to minimize or eliminate many of these.

What a way to finish with Rawn’s description of flexible work employment (this is the person who works within an organisation but as the freedom to select tasks)

Actually how about we finish with the impact and future of freelance work by Sara Horowitz (via Stowe Boyd)

Everywhere we look, we can see the U.S. workforce undergoing a massive change. No longer do we work at the same company for 25 years, waiting for the gold watch, expecting the benefits and security that come with full-time employment. We’re no longer simply lawyers, or photographers, or writers. Instead, we’re part-time lawyers-cum- amateur photographers who write on the side.

Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops/coworking spaces. Independent workers abound. We call them freelancers, contractors, sole proprietors, consultants, temps, and the self-employed.

And, perhaps most surprisingly, many of them love it.

This transition is nothing less than a revolution. We haven’t seen a shift in the workforce this significant in almost 100 years when we transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Now, employees are leaving the traditional workplace and opting to piece together a professional life on their own.

Given this is the trend; if organisations want to attract and keep talent (which impacts on performance, or moreso, which is the lifeblood of the organisation in the new era-remember we have gone from people following instruction manuals to knowledge workers applying talent to situations as they arise), they need to offer this type of scenario where employees can act as pseudo-freelancers within an organisation.

That’s the end of the post!!

HERE’S SOME RELATED TOPICS

Personal Outsourcing

Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers.  John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

- Joe McKendrick

Billable time

…time sheets tend to create an implicit acceptance that agency labor should be bought and sold as a commodity. This conflicts with what most agencies say they sell — they say they sell “solutions” or “innovations.” But in this way, they are very similar to temp agencies, which sell nothing but the labor of their temp workers.

If your daily practice of categorizing your time into “billable” (good for the company) and “non-billable” (cost for the company) then it is arguable too that you internalize these goals. You believe it necessary to be sufficiently “billable” for you and the company to succeed. But what of the many profitable industries hire workers that are not “billable” at all? How do they survive? If profitability were about billable hours, then many high value-add industries such as pharmaceuticals, investment banking, and oil & gas would simply go under.

- Sam Ladner

Culture – Did Michelangelo get paid by the hour or by the job?

Busyness vs. Burst: Why Corporate Web Workers Look Unproductive

Small Firms, Big Lawyers: The Real Reason for Timesheets 

Introduction to “Agency Time”

Billable Hours Presentation

The Real Reason for Time Tracking Systems

Is “hiding” time an act of resistance? A paper presented at ILPC09

Ladner, S. (2008). Laptops in The Livingroom: Mobile Technologies and the Divide Between Work and Private Time Among Interactive Agency Workers. Canadian Journal of Communication, 33(3), 465-491.

Ladner, S. (2009). “Agency Time”: A Case Study of the Postindustrial Timescape and Its Impact on The Domestic Sphere. Time and Society. 18(2/3). 284-305

Gig Economy

…a transition away from measuring performance by your sheer presence and instead measuring that same performance based on the results you provide and deliver, resulting in the elimination of the traditional work hours.

- Luis Suarez 

The Freelance Revolution

The 21st century workplace: moving to the edge 

Do we need defined hours of work any more? 

Do We Need Defined Work Hours? 

Smashing The Clock  

The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time 

CNN.com: Are Jobs Obsolete?  

ADDED - A Google+ discussion here 

"When an organization doles out bonuses, raises, awards and promotions based on individual contributions, what’s the carrot for social participation?

I, for example, am mainly measured by my individual efforts: how many customers I work with who go on to buy my software; what leadership roles I fulfill inside and outside the organization; what assets I create for others to reuse. This is all right and good, for how else can an individual be measured"

- Gia Lyons

Will sourcing my network for help, reduce the measure of assets I produce, if so I will produce something of less value on my own, at least I get all the credit and a bag of carrots?

This is a generalisation, we are all wired to socially connect, some more than others, (in fact we don’t survive unless we build horizontal relationships and help each other out…think about who helped you iron out an issue on your recent spreadsheet, or who helped you find a person or locate information last week) but this natural behaviour is impeded by organisational design constraints (ie. time should ideally be spent on our own tasks).

Gia explains what prompted her post. She was contemplating whether to go the social route on a task or to keep it to herself, as she isn’t measured on how well she uses her network, she says:

"…there is a direct correlation between the number of assets I create in a quarter, and my quarterly bonus…"

This is not about engagament and what’s in it for me.

And it’s not about incentives to participate; what this is about is recognising people for how well they work based on utilising their network (MIT study found that in one organization the employees with the most extensive personal digital networks were 7% more productive than their colleagues).

And something more deeper than ratings, which I covered in my post, The ROI of time spent helping others, and performance reviews

Will how well I use my network to tap into talent to produce that report be recognised, compared to just using my team resources?

Gia explains:

"What’s missing is a measurement of how well I use my network…how do we measure a person’s prowess at making their individual contributions better because they knew who knew what, and had a relationship with them such that they could tap their expertise…whether directly or through their social contributions, at a moment’s notice?"

Now we are talking about being recognised and measured for how well we use our network to deliver our requirements.

Coupled with this is the time spent building your network, and building and maintaining relationships. For more see my post, People who invest in creating a relationship with you are rewarded with your experienced POV

Basically you need time to spend using social tools to get to know people so you can use them properly.

Here’s how Gia puts it:

"To network, one must be social, must participate in online communities as well as offline, must spend time getting to know others and letting others know them.

Aha. Being social requires a stiff price: spending our most precious commodity, Time.

So really, we are asking people to spend precious time to do something for which they are not measured."

And her conclusion:

"Fix this, and you will have removed a major obstacle to the inside-the-firewall business adoption of social networking and productivity behavior."

It’s a fact that we utilise our networks in an offline way to get our work done. Now we can also do this online. 

But does this mean we now need a way to measure this just because we can see it? Or have we always wanted to recognise people for how well their network works for them, only we had no way to do it?

Or is the reason a tactic ie. a way to increase adoption ie. the more we recognise contributions, the more people participate?

I think it’s all of these, and also a way to encourage cross-silo awareness and collaboration. 

Look at the reverse of this. We take the time from our tasks to help others on their tasks, as this is reciprocated or perhaps this is the organisational culture. Our bosses understand that even though they pay us and give us time to deliver our tasks, that sometimes they are actually paying us to help out others…as long as it’s not detrimental to our own tasks, or our health.

Given this do we need to be measured, not just as Gia puts forth on how well we source and utilise our network to deliver our work, but also how frequent and valuable our gifts to others are.

I always use the quote by Bertrand Duperrin:

"…businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used…businesses don’t understand free across its departments."

Which is similar to Prems notion of Social collaboration:

"Where people collaborate outside of the contractual obligations? Which means outside of the role structures & job descriptions in the organization? Typical of a matrix organization, no? What do you think? What are your views on ‘social collaboration’ and ‘role power’ in a collaborative enterprise (a bit more complex than a matrix organization)?"

I think this is a variation of Google 20% time or non-commissioned work or cognitive surplus. In that model you are free to spend some time to work on your passion, whereas I’m still talking about regular tasks set by your unit…but what I’m getting at is that your boss is ok for you to spend a certain portion of time in gifting others as the organisation at large will absorb that cost from your business unit.

eg. 10% of your work week can be spent on tasks that are not your own, or perhaps volunteer on.

Doesn’t this happen anyway…yep, but if it’s part of official organisational design I think it’s a step forward to growing into a collaborative enterprise; and certainly a win for "sharing" in KM circles. It’s also a win for employee enagagement, as workers can be fulfiled gravitating to tasks that interest them. 

Related

Lose the person, you lose their network that made them valuable

What gets measured determines what gets done

Collaboration built into structures and compensation

Recognise silo bridge walkers in performance evaluations

I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!!

Is knowledge hoarding all about your pay cheque?

Networks, Collaboration, Cooperation and silos

Value is often defined at the divisional level

People who invest in creating a relationship with you are rewarded with your experienced POV

Performance review according to embodying core values

Performance reviews are typically based on pre-determined expectations

Value is often defined at the divisional level

Social business - feel the dissonance; a look into the disruption of Taylorism

VIDEO Andrew McAfee: Can you have your hierarchy and network too? 

2min50sec - In reference to not just team work, but to enterprise-wide

"My provocation is why would you not bake into everyone’s job description and into their performance review some level of enterprise helpfulness or enterprise collegiality"

Oscar Berg nails it: 

A paradox for employees today is that they really need to connect with and collaborate more with more people, and strengthen their personal networks if they are to deliver better results and strengthen our their positions. One problem they are facing when doing this is that most current incentive models do not reward employees helping their colleagues, unless there is a direct and measurable return on their contributions. Another problem is that many organizations fail at making the contributions that employees do outside of their own team visible, and thus if fails to recognize them. These problems put people in a kind of deadlock position. During uncertain times, most people will simply do what becomes visible and recognized by those who evaluate them, their managers. They will most likely also most be asked or commended by their managers to do so, because their managers are in a similar position as they will be judged by their managers on the visible contributions from the team they are managing (and so it goes on, all the way to the top).