The World Wide Web is nearly 25 years old. Google is about 15 years old, and Wikipedia about 12. Mobile phones have been commercially available since 1983, and there are now gazillions of them and not just in the developed world, of course.

This stuff has been around a while now.

Today Amazon no longer only sells books and running shoes – it now sells the building blocks of its own ecommerce infrastructure to others, it develops hardware in the Kindle and is developing an ecosystem all of its own. It isn’t sitting around, cosy in its little digital world. It is busy disrupting the status quo in publishing, entertainment, in digital infrastructure and in retailing,

Activists in Turkey, and before that in the so-called Arab Spring, now use digital networks to get videos, photos and notes about police or government brutality out to the rest of the world.

Here in the UK, an elite team called GDS is seeking to transform government digital services, attacking the highest volume transactional websites in the UK – spreading user-friendly goodness, bringing the best of digital practice to government departments, departments that ran the British empire for hundreds of years.

Communities that have never and will never physically meet raise funds for people in need on Reddit, through Kiva and to get projects off the ground via Kickstarter.

And my dad, soon to retire as a state school teacher after 30 odd years, has been given an iPad, as has every student in his school. What is education like in a world where every person in a classroom has a tablet at their finger tips? Where the greatest universities in the world publish their courseware on the web freely? (See also: Sugata Mitra).

This is the new reality.

You know this. So what. It’s all a bit yada yada, perhaps.

The point is this. We are at a point where digital practices, behaviours and business models are disrupting pretty much everything – education, business, politics, civil society, and so on.

And some organisations are natively digital – those we laud and congratulate loudly. “Well done Facebook!”, “Bravo, Twitters!”, “Go Mumsnet!”. And those guys are great pioneers.

But the most fascinating question for me is what will it take for organisations steeped in and born from the last century or before to make a digital transformation, when their successes were born of old models and practices?

That’s hard. That’s interesting.

Is it classic reinvention story, like Lou Gerstner tells of his transforming IBM from hardware to services in Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Can you achieve it through acquisition, perhaps, this digital transformation?

And in the end, who will make it? Now that’s going to be really interesting.

• Will the US Treasury and the Bank of England move with the times, and will the dollar and the Euro still be suitable?
• Will state governments resist a great atomisation, a fragmenting into digital tribes and physical small communities?
• Will schools work more like co-working spaces?
• And how on earth does an 80,000 person multi-national corporation transform when so much around it is in flux? Who will be on the inside and the outside, how will rewards happen, how will intellectual property be handled, what does leadership look like and who will the shareholders be?
• And what is like to be a person or a team or an office in all of these places – what is like to have the ground moving under your feet, to have to adjust to things that are profoundly different to before, to be so challenged?

Digital transformation.

This is a big ask of us as individuals, with our habits and norms, let alone a big organisation.

Yet the challenge is we have to bring these large complex organisations with us. And what a great challenge to tackle, in service of a better world.

And it is tempting to divide these things – to see the rise of technology and the rise of a new business consciousness as two separate things, but I really believe that they are innately connected. That transparency, openness and the rapidity of the digital world is a powerful catalyst for the rise of employee ownership, for participatory leadership and new networked organisational structures. I guess that’s what Culture Shock is about.

That is what we’re up for at NixonMcInnes. To help positively transform the business world, with digital transformation as the catalyst.

Before the conference kicked off, we were lucky enough to get a tour and Q&A at Namasté Solar, a very cool solar energy company based in the equally cool home of outdoor sports of Boulder, Colorado.

One of the many interesting things about Namasté Solar is that they are co-owned by their employees, meaning that 45 or so of the people that work there are owners and have a say in how the company is run. 

The journey to co-ownership

While Namasté Solar has always been employee-owned, they found that the original ownership structure wasn’t lining up with their values over time. The structure allowed for an imbalance of power: like many start-up companies, they found themselves with a small number of majority shareholders, mainly founders or early employees. They decided to make the business into a cooperative because they felt it was the right thing to do, that it would make Namasté a better place to work, and also because it would be better for the business.

But when they did it, they had to do something that many shareholders would find quite intimidating: those few majority shareholders had to hand over power to the whole company. While retaining their original shares and financial stake in the business, the company created new class ‘A’ shares that are held by the employee-owners, which entitle them to one vote on any issue the company chooses to debate, regardless of their length of service or seniority.

Making big decisions in big groups

Decisions are made at monthly Big Picture Meetings, where all co-owners spend the day together being educated on the latest of the company’s business, then debate the key issues before making consensus-based decisions as a group.

The whole principle of this decision making process, and a fundamental reason for becoming co-owned is that ‘no one of us is smarter than all of us’. Namasté believes that it’s better to have your say than to win – that the process is more important than being right or wrong. It’s the highest level of maturity in doing business – if you don’t get your way, you just get on.

To make this big group decision-making efficient, Namasté encourage people to use hand signs to signal they agree and don’t feel the need to make the same point again, and for indicating they don’t mind, or that they can live with a particular decision. They also use representative decision making, where groups elect individuals to debate and agree on specific issues on their behalf.

Becoming part of the team and choosing your role

The process of becoming a long-term employee and/or co-owner is really interesting. Anyone joining the company in a permanent role spends twelve months being mentored, joining the Big Picture Meetings, and getting to understand the business and responsibilities of co-ownership. At the end of the process they have a choice of petitioning to become a long-term employee or a co-owner. The petitions must be approved by a vote of the current co-owners.

Namasté believes that helping people really understand the business is essential if they’re going to be a co-owner and make important decisions. Employees receive coaching on their ability to read the books and understand the finances, and learning to do stakeholder balancing – looking at things from different perspectives and hold different points of view. This is not something people are used to at work, but massively helps people make better decisions that deliver on mission and values.

Learning to communicate frankly, openly, honestly 

Communication plays a big role at Namasté. To work democratically as co-owners requires having very good communication skills, being able to be open and honest with each other to facilitate decision making and to help people be accountable to one another. Namasté practices what they call F.O.H. – Frank, Open and Honest communication. They train and support people to have these difficult but honest conversations, practicing active listening, and when necessary providing a third person to check that people hear what’s being said to them (a common problem in solving problems at work).

FOH was a founding principle for the company, and now one of 10 Pillars of Co-Ownership. Amanda Bybee, Vice President and our host for the day, said it was the hardest, but most rewarding part of being a co-owner – she says all levels of accountability start with an FOH conversation, and sometimes work feels like therapy. Lots of Namasté’s story felt familiar to Will and I, but this aspect was closest to home – at NixonMcInnes we believe very strongly in giving open and honest feedback that helps build accountability and better working relationships.

In summary, although Namasté is in a very different industry, half-way around the world from us, so much about what they do, how they do it and what they believe in felt very familiar. Their practices of empowerment and democratic working were an inspiration, and we’ve definitely taken back some ideas to implement and a new energy to pursue the idea of co-ownership, something we’ve been discussing for a while.

I am very grateful to Amanda and Namasté for hosting us, being so open and honest, and for setting an example to other businesses of how things can be. I’m pretty certain NM will not just be taking inspiration but calling on their experience at some point in the future.

These first thoughts are about how democracy and purpose-driven working functions at scale, from a talk by Kent Thirry, CEO of DaVita – a large private healthcare company based in Denver but with staff and offices all over the world.

DaVita is really interesting because it is a Fortune 500 company with around $11billion in turnover and 53,000 employees, that practices democracy and freedom at work, and brings its values into everything that it does.

Starting from scratch

The story of why they chose to do things this way is really interesting – in 1999 they had gone down to 9,000 employees and in the words of Kent Thirry, the current CEO, the company was at the time ‘technically bankrupt’.

DaVita was being sued by shareholders and half of the execs had quit or been fired – they had no COO, CFO, CIO or VP of HR. They had a high turnover and the workforce was angry and scared. In short, the company had become “not the happiest of places” and its future was looking equally gloomy.

Fast forward 14 years and everything is heading in the right direction, DaVita’s financial performance is good and the life-saving services it delivers have higher than industry average for outcomes like mortality.

So, how did the company turn itself around?

Putting the meaning back into work

When things were looking their most bleak, CEO Kent Thirry decided that what they had to do was create a meaningful place to work – a pretty visionary reaction to the situation the company was in.

About a third of his staff thought he’d lost it, a third liked the idea but didn’t think it was possible, and the rest said that it was what they had always wanted. Either way, Kent went about making it happen – by having 700 employees create the mission and values, then aligning the business with these. The belief was that they had to create something larger than themselves in order to be successful.

These values now permeate much of what DaVita does. For instance – employees are hired based on their fit against the values, employees are score against them, the CEO scores the most senior people, and they score him.

Once the whole company has been reviewed, key people across the company are sent facilitator kits so that they can explore the highs and lows in scores with their colleagues – Kent Thirry says it’s most important to concentrate on the bottom 20% and support them to improve.

Encouraging and reinforcing behaviours

There are a set of behaviours that Kent Thirry described as key to reinforcing their values and culture:

• Empathy and compassion: when people are underperforming, it’s important to help them understand how others are experiencing them – to help them see beyond their own perspective – and then to understand how to support them to change.
• Honesty and accountability: the leadership must be honest and open when they have breached a value because accountability is what makes the values most real.
• Reflection: at team meetings, people are asked to fill in a scorecard, based on how they think they are doing against the company’s values. They are then asked to sit and reflect on this, because healthy cultures encourage reflection, and use it to create meaningful action.

Creating business that means something

The message from the CEO was that DaVita believes business can be an amazing force for doing good while still meeting capitalist responsibilities and objectives. Being purposeful and benefiting society doesn’t have to be in place of being financially sustainable or making a profit.

While they hold profit and market value important, what they reward are values-driven behaviours and helping others out. They reinforce this with inclusive language through how they talk about themselves. They describe DaVita as ’a community first and a company second’, they  call their employees team mates and their head office is known by everyone as the ‘DaVita Village’.

Despite the clear business benefit they have gained from putting values and purpose at the core of what they do, they’ve actively refused to put an ROI on their cultural work, claiming it’s how they live, not a programme of investment.

Learning some lessons

I found Kent’s talk and how DaVita run their business really inspiring. While I knew from the textbooks that creating more freedom and democracy at scale is possible, their story is of how it’s literally turned them and people’s lives around.

I tried to pick out a few insights that I found useful:

• Co-create your values, don’t try and tell people what the values that they should live by are. It can make the difference between people acting on them and them being meaningless words on the company website.
• Hire and review on your values, not just skills, experience and achievements. Most often, when people get fired it’s because they’ve breached your values, so don’t leave it until then to check in.
• Work on everyone’s ability to empathise, be compassionate, honest and accountable, to make your values real. Otherwise, when it’s not going well it will be very difficult to have the conversations you need to.
• Make regular time to reflect, personally and collectively, to really check you’re living and working in line with your values. Reflection is so often overlooked in the busy-ness of day-to-day work but key to creating a values-lead business.
• If you want people to act on your values, reward and celebrate it when they do it exceptionally, don’t (just) celebrate people meeting hard performance objectives.
• Create movements, not programmes of work. Give the work over to the whole company, don’t just drive it through leaders and HR. Having some guiding principles or a container to work in helps, but create the conditions for people to take it on.

Watch this space for some more ideas and thoughts from WorldBlu 2013.

WorldBlu are the organisation that benchmarks and lists the world’s most democratic workplaces. Its mission is to see one billion people working in free and democratic workplaces.

We’re proud to have been on the list five years in a row – running our company in this way is what makes us who we are and is how we believe business can be better. It’s us literally putting our money where our mouth is.

While many people think of us as a small organisation that prides itself in doing things differently, democracy in the workplace is not ‘niche’ – the 51 companies on the WorldBlu list for 2013 range from international software and energy companies to medical components manufacturers and has a combined revenue of $17 billion.

Why become more democratic?

There are lots of very good reasons for adopting more democratic working practices, that are about both about personal and organisational wellbeing. In short – giving people more freedom and empowerment not only improves their sense of job satisfaction and personal wellbeing, but can lead to companies making smarter decisions, and being more profitable over the long-term.

To me, it just makes sense – treat people like grown ups, and they’ll act like grown-ups. Let them find and create a shared sense of purpose and ownership, and most people will go above and beyond to go and deliver on that purpose.

In terms of creating a social business culture and structure – open, innovative, flexible and more human centered businesses – democratic practices and principles are very effective tools in the toolbox and also lend themselves very well to digital and social media.

Celebrating failure

Aside from open book accounting, transparency on salaries, devolved decision making and other practices, one of the fun ways we try to develop a culture of trust and learning is the Church of Fail.

Put simply, we all get together and take it in turns to talk about a time where we recently messed up, or things didn’t quite go to plan, and say what we learned about it. Everyone else claps and whoops, and you’re not allowed to stand down from in front of the team until they’ve stopped.

It’s a lot of fun, but takes some nerve to begin with – generally speaking, our education and work systems don’t teach us to be honest with each other about their failings. We’re taught that we get in trouble for getting things wrong, and rewards only go to those who consistently succeed.

But messing up is part of learning, and if we’re not learning, then we’re not improving and developing, as individuals or communities/organisations. And without a sense of shared honesty, we can’t have proper accountability between us. Church of Fail not only gives people a platform to share their ‘fails’ but actively celebrates them.

On Thursday, Will and I are taking Church of Fail global. We’re going to introduce it and run a session for the attendees at WorldBlu Live, people from all over the world who will hopefully find something useful from it to take back.

I’ll also be taking notes from the other inspirational speakers, and will be visiting some local organisations doing things a bit differently, so watch this space and our Twitter account for more.

• We’re encouraged to do stuff we enjoy at work
• We measure individual happiness on a daily basis using tennis balls
• We make decisions democratically using open, honest communication
• We celebrate our failures in our ‘Church of Fail’
• We have access to ‘the full picture’ through open book accounting

We understand that fulfilment and happiness at work is not directly linked to how much you earn*. It all eventually comes down to these two things – purpose and meaning.

Like Dostoevsky once wrote:

“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”

But of course, not all businesses are like this. In fact, now at least half of employees in the West are unhappy at work and in the USA, job satisfaction is at its lowest level (45%) since record-keeping began.

Don’t get me wrong, we are getting better. But I’m still deeply disappointed when I hear of family members who have been in a professional job for years, climbed the ladder and are earning a few buck, but still don’t feel appreciated for their long-term loyalty. It bugs me that they aren’t praised or acknowledged and aren’t made to feel worthy or valued at work.

And it aggravates me when I hear friends talk about some great ideas they’ve had about their own companies, who have been made to feel inadequate by their leaders and are silenced by their inability to speak freely at work, to share their ideas and to help change the company for the better. 

I would probably be the same. I’d probably think it was completely normal to enter the company at the bottom and have to work my way to the top in order to interject any opinion. And for a while, even here, I felt inadequate, like my opinion wasn’t justified. That’s just how it is, right?

When I started out here, I wondered what right I had, as a newcomer and a junior, straight out from university, to have a say in the way the business ran. Surely everyone knew better than me – right? Yet, I started noticing that my views were taken seriously and it was for the benefit of the company that I was able to spot opportunities for improvement. After all, who’s more qualified to do this - the people at the top who are in the thick of the decision making and are being pulled and stretched in all different directions, or those who are actually on the ground doing the work and experiencing the way said company is run?

And it’s not just about this, but it definitely feels like a massive part to me. It’s about being made to feel valued and being treated as a human being.

This is the opportunity for business leaders today. As philosopher, Roman Krznaric, says:

“We have entered a new age of fulfillment, in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning.”

Let’s grasp this opportunity.

Not just because it benefits us as individuals, but because it will unleash the potential of employees and have a tremendous impact on the way the business runs. 

The French writer François-René de Chateaubriand hit the nail on the head when he wrote this:

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

This blog post was actually inspired by my colleague, Max St John who wrote a blog post about finding purpose in his life and decided to write his own personal mission statement.

And I’d encourage everyone to join him in doing this. I’m currently working on mine and might blog it when it’s done.

* Disclaimer: I’m not saying we’re the best at this. We’re definitely not. And it’s not always easy. But we do understand how important it is and are constantly striving to get better.

Process change vs culture change 

For a long time we’ve been helping to develop policies, write processes and guidelines, create reports and workshop campaigns and activities with our clients, all with the aim of creating more digitally engaged organisations.

As more of our work becomes about wider business and behaviour change, and we start to engage more systems thinking, we are better able to see the patterns of ‘stuck-ness’ emerge – to explain with an example: we identify a need and a solution with our client, it’s in line with a corporate strategy to deliver digital transformation, or create a more innovative and collaborative culture, but somehow it repeatedly gets sticky, and we all struggle to get it off the ground.

One of the most common barriers is the dominant culture and the associated organisational behaviours.

To clarify – when I talk about developing as a social business, I’m not talking about becoming better at social media marketing or embedding a social CRM strategy.

What I mean by social business is an organisation that’s more responsive, more open and honest, more collaborative and inclusive, one that creates the conditions for innovation and taking more risks, strives to be less hierarchical – even has more conversations about what really matters and what we’re actually here for.

But even just taking more risks is a big shift for many businesses, especially when the prevailing culture is often about risk management, the control in the hierarchy and a need to paint a positive picture instead of sharing in our failures and learning from our mistakes.

What management say vs what leaders do

The funny thing is that management often say that they’re all for it. The messages that staff hear might be all about the need to innovate: “We want you to take more risks” or the need to be more involving with customers using social media: “We want you to be more open and collaborative.”

This is one explanation for how a seemingly forward-thinking organisation feels far from ‘forward-doing’ . If management don’t have the understanding or confidence around the basics of social media, and what it means to be more open, authentic or collaborative online, then no matter how positive the words, their decisions and behaviours will reflect this. And as the old saying goes ‘actions speak louder than words’.

Taking people on learning journeys

One of the ways to help senior teams understand and embrace this kind of very personal change (there are many approaches, I’m not saying this it the only, or ultimate – just one I’m finding helpful with my clients) is using the Action Learning Set methodology.

Action Learning Sets are sometimes referred to as ‘reflective learning’ as they’re a way for individuals to go on a bit of a personal journey, around any issue, with a group to help them reflect on the experience. It’s an approach that’s particularly suited to adult learning, as it relies on experience through action over time, instead of being told by an expert, and is one that’s widely used in business.

In an Action Learning Set, each person in a group sets themselves a question that relates to the topic or issue, and an action that they’ll take away to help them explore that question. Periodically (typically every 4-6 weeks) they return as a group to share their experience and hear the other’s reflections and questions, to help them understand things a bit deeper, before going on to set a new question to take away.

The methodology is pretty simple but requires careful facilitation to keep the group from deviating too far from the core of the topic, and more importantly, from talking about themselves and their individual learning. It’s very easy to talk about things, and actions, but the reason this approach can be so effective is that it encourages deeper, more introspective and ‘reflective learning’.

We’re working with their senior teams to help them demonstrate ‘social media leadership behaviours’ – with the aim of them role-modeling a desired change for their wider organisation.

Why take this approach for social media?

It’s pretty obvious that social media isn’t the real issue – the understanding and the cultural change we’re all usually trying to instigate is where there’s more collaboration, less perceived control in/reliance on the hierarchy, more willingness to take risks, etc.

As I’ve said, the drivers for culture are a relatively complex and myriad, but if you’re starting from a point where hierarchy is important, then leadership behaviours and beliefs, and how they manifest in the decisions that get made, are pretty powerful.

Amazingly, some heads-of see this as problematic.

Really? Can it really be a bad thing when groups of employees are trying to have conversations and build new things? Surely opportunity is a better word.

Still not convinced? Well, here’s our top 7 things you can learn from a below-the-radar enterprise social network.

1. What conversations are bubbling up waiting to happen and who’s having them.
2. Who your champions should be when you take the leap to embedding an enterprise-wide social network.
3. How the particular tool works and what users do and don’t like about it – great insight for specifying the right tool for your organisation.
4. How users benefit from the tool.
5. How people use the tool and how it fits with working practices.
6. How the organisation can benefit – eg reduced email, greater transparency on projects etc.
7. How mature the culture of collaboration is within the organisation and what might need to be done to make your organisation more joined up.

1. People are responsible and don’t waste their time posting pictures of cats, abuse colleagues or share inappropriate content.
2. ESNs aren’t about IT (in this case IT probably didn’t even know it existed). They’re about people.
3. People don’t need lots of training and heavy guidelines to get on board and get something from an enterprise social network.

How many roll-out plans look a bit like this…

1. Set tool up
2. Test it
3. Get comms to write a blog from someone senior extolling the tool’s virtues
4. Email employees to tell them the tool is there
5. Run a few training sessions
6. Measure take-up
7. Quietly forget about it while a handful of adopters chat among themselves

Sound familiar?

If so, it’s probably time to think again. And a good place to start is at the top.

At our recent roundtable on internal social networks an interesting debate revolved around the question: “Is it ok for directors to have private groups?”

It’s a toughy. And every bit of the NixonMcInnes consciousness would scream against such old school, control and command thinking.

But there is a case for some project-based, private internal networking. Not least in terms of actually getting top dogs onto the platform. If these lynchpins use it, understand it and enjoy the benefits, it’s going to be a lot easier to make it an everyday part of the way the organisation works.

The thinking behind ESN groups should be ‘open by default’ – but private where they absolutely have to be to get directors to the party.

And once seniors are engaging, internal comms professionals should be leveraging that presence. First by helping leaders take small steps in the direction of openness and secondly by making them advocates for the platform.

Research from MIT Sloan suggests that one of the most powerful ways leaders use ESNs is to simply recognise people’s efforts. So make sure your big wigs respond to comments on their blog (and, yes, make sure it is their blog not something hammed up in the comms dept); ask questions; congratulate people for good work; welcome new joiners, etc, etc. Anything light touch they might do if they were walking the shop-floor looking to meet, listen and learn from the people with the ideas about how things could be done differently.

When it comes to ESNs there will always be reticence about using them for the first, second, third or even fourth time. For some people in some organsiations the idea of posting something in a public forum is akin to asking them to stand on a table in the canteen and give a rendition of My Way. It just doesn’t happen.

But if there if the lights are down, the karaoke machine is on at full blast, the drink is flowing and everyone’s having a go, well, who wouldn’t join in?

It’s a bit like that with ESNs. The atmosphere has to be right, there has to be a precedent and there has to be a sense of purpose too – even if that purpose is to have some fun.

One attendee’s story attested to that. The MD posted a comment asking a question on the new ESN and it was met with a deathly silence. Until one ‘super user’ piped up with some advice in response. The MD responded positively and invited more feedback and the conversation started to flow as others joined in.

So that is the role of organisational leaders when it comes to ESNs. It’s not about being the guest of honour who cuts the ribbon to get the thing started and quietly sidles out the side door. It’s about hanging out and enjoying the party. Who knows what conversations or connections will happen as a result.

See last week’s blog post looking at the business value from enterprise social networks. Next week for the role of community managers and champions in embedding your ESN beyond core early adopters.

The computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

—STEVE JOBS

Hello! My name is Tom Warner and i’m very excited to introduce myself as the latest member of the team here at NixonMcInnes. I have worked as a Developer and Producer in various digital agencies and I am an avid musician and maker. I am also a proud daddy and husband.

My NixonMcInnes adventure started here. As you can see from the job description, there is a pretty broad spectrum of things involved in my role. Thus, for the purposes of brevity, here is the elevator pitch:

Talking tech

A practical understanding of technology is so important in the conversations we have with our clients. I want to make sure that when we’re talking about technology, our voice is fresh, interesting and honest.

Innovation

From quick apps built to test simple ideas, through to complex tools backed by deep research and consultancy, I am hoping to continue our great technology work in ways that spark conversation and drive innovation.

Sharing

I am really excited about contributing to the awesome work we already do at NixonMcInnes around training and sharing our experiences. I have a particular interest in closing the gap between good ideas and their implementation in the real world.

Making

Incredible things are happening in the world of Making and I am very proud to be a member of BuildBrighton, an electronics, technology and arts workshop here in Brighton. I am really excited about keeping the Maker movement an important part of the NixonMcInnes mentality and I’ll be pushing forward things like the Happy Buttons, as well as looking into ways we can bring Making to our clients.

Thanks for listening

I strongly believe in the power of technology when used in intelligent, appropriate and ethical ways and I am super pumped to be able to work to that vision here at NixonMcInnes. It’s going to be an exciting journey and if anyone reads this and wants to chat about what NixonMcInnes might be able to do for you and your organisation, involving technology or otherwise, don’t hesitate to contact me. Thanks!

As with all of these events, we were joined by an inspiring group of leaders from large private, charity and government organisations.

We are working on a practical white paper to help organisations whatever stage they are at in their enterprise social journey. But, in the meantime, I wanted to share some of the topics we covered in the morning debate. These highlight the key challenges internal comms professionals are grappling with when it comes to internal social networks.

Proving the business value

There’s been loads written about the soft benefits of enterprise social network (ESNs). Much less on the hard metrics professionals are being asked for to justify investing in a tool or proper community management.

That absence of hard metrics is making it difficult for some to tackle the reticence around internal social that persists at the top of many large organisations.

But instead of accepting the status quo, lots of comms people are going for the stealth approach. Introducing pilots or subtly supporting colleagues’ from across the organisation who are taking the initiative and introducing guerrilla platforms.

The under-the-radar approach is paying dividends, helping to create powerful use cases that demonstrate the value of collaborating, sharing information and starting new conversations. And for many organisations, those use cases are proving more convincing than supposedly ‘hard’ data with dubious relevance.

If you build it they won’t necessarily come

Adoption remains a key issue for organisations investing in ESNs. With so much initiative fatigue, the last thing anyone wants is a platform that sparks a limited amount of interest at launch but shortly withers and dies. Even a platform that is vibrant but only among only a small group of core users is not delivering against its potential.

What was interesting about the discussion was the common understanding that integrating a new platform into people’s habits and processes was about a lot more than just educating them about the tool.

Any behaviour change needs robust change programme thinking. But even then there are no guarantees. Unless the change reflects the cultural norms of the organisation it is always going to fail. As one delegate put it: “Encouraging collaboration in a non-collaborative culture is one of the hardest change goals you’re likely to face.”

So if you are a closed organisations where communication is top down – or you have offices with partitions and little interaction – you will need a lot more than a social platform to get people talking, sharing and collaborating. Yes a social tool can support a cultural evolution, but it cannot secure a revolution singlehandedly.

More next week on the role of leaders, community managers and champions, engaging with frontline employees, and the future for ESNs.

(Image by Paul Bica)

A recent model we’ve been looking at is called The Chaordic Path. Essentially this shows the relationship between chaos and order.

Most people will favour, recognise or relate to an environment which strongly holds one of these binaries at its core. Whether it’s in their personal or work life, some people will lean towards the chaotic side of the path, and others, the ordered side.

Personally, I sit more towards the chaotic side. Doing the type of work we do at NixonMcInnes, in an environment which experiences so much change, you need to be fairly flexible in your ability to adapt and embrace chaos.

However, The Chaordic Path demonstrates the need for a balance of these two binaries in order to be more effective within these environments – whilst sitting bang in the middle of the pathway is idealistic.

To strike this balance, or to become remotely close, a minimum amount of chaos in a structured world is required, and visa-versa.

This could mean, in an ordered world for example, ‘doing something different‘. A recent Meaning Conference speaker, Karen Pine, talked about the significance of this – breaking out of normal routines in everyday life. Wearing different clothes, taking a different route to work or just changing the position of your desk in the office are all potential opportunities to change your outlook on life and, as Karen argues, also changes your personal effectiveness and well being.

In a chaotic world, the minimum amount of order required to increase effectiveness could be as simple as starting out with a question.

The idea of starting with a simple question for any ‘chaos’ experienced is fascinating for me. Our current culture, however, is averse to asking creative questions because of our need to find quick fixes.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

I’ve found that questions can be powerful for organising ‘chaos’ intrinsically, or it could be a means of structuring something more physical, like a meeting for example. I was even prompted to write this blog post as a result of asking myself a question, “How will I implement some of the recent models and frameworks learned, to improve my work?”.