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Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions
“I’ve earlier blogged about how I find intuition and seeing the value of the tacit knowledge as very interesting perspectives for the decision-making. As social business and new ways of working are now changing the organizations and the entire business landscape, and further adding to the complexity – I’ll find it even more interesting to study decision-making and how understanding is created.”
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- Way of Thinking, very simplified: Logical, analytical leaders are processing information serially versus intuitive and creative ones perceiving things as a whole.
- Tolerance for Ambiguity, again simplified: some of us have a high need to structure information in order to minimize ambiguity, while others can process many ideas and thoughts simultaneously.
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Analytical types have a better tolerance for ambiguity than the “traditional” directive decision-makers. An analytical type of leader usually search for more information and alternatives than directive ones.
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Leaders applying the conceptual style in decision-making are often considering many alternatives out of broad perspective. Additionally they take a longer term perspective. This style gives most room for creativity, the authors claim.
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The forth style, behavioral style, is the most receptive for suggestions from others, peers and subordinates, and leaders of this style love the meetings! They are also trying to avoid conflicts and find a consensus.
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“We need to move forward boldly and make decisions despite incomplete information… but also be prepared to change our path. It’s easy to just shut down when faced with an environment in which you can never be certain or absorb all the information available. But if you are a leader, you need to accept the uncertainty and move forward anyway. “
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When both systems are active, there’s a room for intuition, interaction and emotions – and for better understanding and decision-making.
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When I saw the decision-style model I was right-away thinking about replacing the Tolerance of Ambiguity into the Level of Embracing Serendipity.
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The third association I got is the value and importance of listening in decision-making,
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I found the fifth one, his RASA model, beautiful and absolutely something every one of us should apply in our daily life and the decision-making situations. Acronym RASA comes from Receive, Appreciate, Summarise, Ask – and these four verbs should be part of our personal decision-making, learning processes, and leadership.
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Capability Maturity Model Integration
“Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process improvement approach whose goal is to help organizations improve their performance. CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization.”
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Time for a ‘Maturity Model’ for Social Enterprises
“Now. IDC has proposed a similar approach for social enterprise development, called the Social Business Maturity Model, which is intended to help companies that are growing in their adoption of social business and want to optimize their use of social tools.
IDC’s Social Business Maturity Model consists of 5 stages:
Experimentation
Compartmentalization
Integration
Operationalization
Optimization” -
La transmission des connaissances à l’ère du 2.0
“Les blogues, les forums de discussion, YouTube, Twitter: on ne compte plus les outils où il est possible de partager ou de puiser des informations sur un sujet donné. En cette ère du web 2.0, trouver réponse à ses questions n’a jamais été aussi facile. Imaginez maintenant ce modèle transposé dans votre entreprise et plus particulièrement dans le secteur des ressources humaines.
Hélas, trop peu de gens d’affaires ont compris que cette révolution technologique leur est offerte. Et parfois à très peu de coûts. Bien sûr, le parrainage, le mentorat et les autres formes d’accompagnement sont là pour rester en matière de formation et de transmission de connaissances.”
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C’est ainsi qu’aujourd’hui, Hydro-Québec a centralisé l’ensemble de ses unités de formation. Fini l’époque où tout le monde devait se déplacer vers une salle de classe. Dorénavant, les formations se font à distance. «C’est beaucoup plus efficace. Et il n’y a plus de temps improductif lié entre autres aux déplacements. Ça peut représenter une économie de 25% à 30% dans les budgets de formation de l’entreprise
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Des blogues, des forums de discussion et même des vidéos sont maintenant à la portée des employés d’Hydro-Québec par l’entremise d’un intranet qui n’en finit plus de s’enrichir. «Nous avons créé une sorte de GPS pour les connaissances. Et bien souvent, ce sont des initiatives de nos employés. Par
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la société d’État comptera près de 1000 départs à la retraite par année au cours des cinq prochaines années. «Nos coûts de formation et de transmission de connaissances allaient donc augmenter. Nous avons plutôt choisi de les réduire en mettant en place les bons outils. Et nous n’avons à peu près pas investi d’argent; tout a été fait avec le temps qu’on aurait mis ailleurs», dit-elle.
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L’enjeu, ce n’est plus d’avoir accès à l’information, c’est de lui donner du sens
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“A few years ago we launched a “microblogging” system called Yammer at Capgemini. Yammer is a private and secure enterprise social network that allows colleagues to hold conversations, read posts and actively collaborate with co-workers in real-time. It is contributing to the collective consciousness of the 25,000 people who subscribe to it, a consciousness that is continually shifting and updating, as those people constantly learn and share new experiences.”
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A key challenge for us is how to keep our disparate colleagues up-to-speed, and able to benefit from all of our massive amount of in house knowledge in order to optimise delivering value to our clients. Does social networking provide part of the answer?
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In large part it is about decentralising the information flow, to create greater collaboration from the outside in. Whereas previously information dissemination was all about the centralised business and knowledge management, social networking has caused a shift in the way we communicate: it’s about an event, a topic, a specific information need at the point of service delivery, such as on site at a client facility.
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It is those consultants at ‘the edge’ who are posing the questions and using Yammer. They’re encountering a lot more variability in what they’re being asked to do than perhaps those at the centre of the organisation who are driving the more structured approach of our business to the market.
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Equally threads may link to and tell others that the required information is in the Capgemini Knowledge Management system, the social networking integrates to the other tools.
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There are three distinct groups of users within Capgemini: hugely active; regular Yammers; and listeners.
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Social Networks fail without a core group making them active and interesting, yet all to frequently this core is seen as too dominant and limiting therefore allowing an unenlighted management to state that a pilot is unsuccessful as the active numbers are too low
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Problem solving is the biggest area of usage,
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We have to adhere to a few controls put in place to safeguard client information and competitive intelligence. As social environments change so fast, a traditional set of governance policies would strangle the benefits of flexibility
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Usage tends to be self governing, so if someone Yammers with information they shouldn’t, other users will urge them to stop.
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Understand the limits of technology. No single technology will ever meet the full array of needs that a large company. The evidence is that Yammer is good for solving specific problems, sharing information quickly, and generating immediate buzz on a topic. But it is not so good for other things
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Management’s changing role. Consider the list of things that we use Yammer for: aligning activities, problem solving, information sharing, providing clarification. Now think about the things managers do for a living – and you quickly end up with a pretty similar list.
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But the boundaries between social networking sites and corporate Intranets are blurring all the time, and Yammer is just one of many technologies that sit in this grey zone between the two worlds.
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Killing the status meeting and the next generation of productivity
“Commentary – Right now, 60 percent of the US and Global workforce is made up of knowledge workers; it’s predicted by 2012 there will be a 6 percent difference between the demand and supply for information workers. Even today, with U.S. unemployment in the high single digits many companies struggle to hire qualified workers. These workers are expensive to hire, train and retain – and there are few proven methods to maximize their productivity. “
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The next productivity push will come from optimizing how information workers collaborate, communicate and complete their work
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Information worker management is about orchestration, not micro-management. Hire, train and orchestrate using the right tools
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. Rigid tracked-changes and chain-of-approval are giving way to fluid consulting and a focus on the end product.
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Prudent management requires thoughtful use of resources – and when your resources are the minds of your people, optimization is not about speeding up an assembly line by having parts next to it
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Status updates – via email, a meeting, a PowerPoint deck – kill productivity.
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Information workers spend countless hours gathering information, preparing and presenting about their work rather than DOING their work
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We all want to know the status, but we don’t have the time to waste building materials just to convey it. It should be conveyed by the work execution process.
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Status meetings are the quality control of information workers – they happen after the product is created and are outside the natural process of doing the work.
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Build visibility into the work process and not only will productivity go up, but this new data will allow you to plan for future work and devote resources more effectively.
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Moving to the cloud is the fastest and most secure way to centralize information and create visibility into your organization.
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Procter and Gamble Minimizes Management Meddling
“With not a little pride, Procter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald and Filippo Passerini, his CIO, told Fortune Brainstorm conference attendees that digital investment had successfully transformed their company’s transparency and agility. New networks and innovative analytics gave top management greater visibility into Procter’s people, processes, and anticipated profits. These technologies were making the world’s biggest consumer products firm quicker, nimbler, and more responsive.”
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The more just-in-time information top management could access, the more actively inclined they were to “help” their subordinates.
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“We have fewer top managers now,” he said. P&G’s CEO reduced his company’s network-enabled propensity to meddle by cutting the number of top executives who could meddle
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That’s contrary to net-centric clichés emphasizing how digital technologies hollow out middle management.
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If leadership consistently uses networks to micromanage people and processes, then the firm probably has too many leaders
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This isn’t about consolidating power; it’s about assuring that decision-making really does get pushed more deeply into the enterprise.
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Too many companies see greater transparency and visibility as opportunities to super-empower their executive teams.
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Promoting the Purpose Driven Organization and Designing the Collaborative Enterprise
“Deb mentioned that a key differentiator is employee motivation. I have recently seen research to support her position. For example, a study by consulting firm Blessing White found only 33 percent of North American workers engaged in their jobs. Further research has shown that low engagement levels have a proven negative impact on business performance. That would make sense. A study from HR consultancy Towers Watson found that organizations with high employee engagement had a 19 percent increase in operating income versus a 32 percent drop for companies with low levels of engagement.
Deb said that one way to create engagement is with a clear sense of purpose for the organization. This was part of her keynote at the recent Boston Enterprise 2.0 Conference. She said that in the firms she has worked with she have found one single predictor of success. It is a sense of purpose. Even the best people are not successful without a sense of purpose.”
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in a purpose driven organization, every conversation, every meeting is infused with “how do we get better at making this important difference
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First there is creative collaboration that is intended to create something. It could be a product team, a legal team, a team responsible for an RFP, or a marketing launch. There is a specific goal in mind and this goal requires more than what an individual can provide
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what we need to do to encourage such collaboration is make it easy for teams to form, communicate, get organized, contribute, aggregate and iterate on work
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refers to connecting with a broader community – the organization as a whole, or even more broadly than that… The goal of this type of collaboration is to connect dots – find expertise and resources as you need them
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ensure that whatever our endeavor, we are leveraging, to the greatest extent possible, the work that has been done already
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IBM consolidates social media for employees
“To be successful on the intranet, social media (intranet 2.0) cannot work in isolation; successful social computing requires effective integration and change management.”
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Beehive was isolated in a corner of the intranet (like many of its other social media tools), and not at all integrated into the complete employee intranet experience.
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Today, the employee networking / intranet 2.0 experience is interconnected, and integrated into the main intranet – a single platform,
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Some legacy applications such as Blog Central and Wiki Central are still in the process of being completely migrated, but the (r)evolution is underway.
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Access to Connections is via a portlet, Connect & Share, on the IBM intranet home page, W3.
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The most ambitious thing we are doing is our internal phone directory, Blue Pages, with around 600,000 entries (400,000 employees plus contractors, etc.). We’re in the process of migrating all of that into the profile components of Connections.”
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Digital Distractions and the Workplace:
“Here is a recent study that reported digital distractions from Harmon.ie on what has become a major issue at work. It impacts both work and time outside work hours, often blurring the distinction between the two. “
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Two out of three users will interrupt a group meeting to communicate with someone else digitally,
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Relatively few workers disconnect to focus on a task (32%) or during virtual meetings or teleconferences (30%), webcasts (26%) or lunch (12%).
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Users reported getting sidetracked in email processing (23%), switching windows to complete tasks (10%),
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Multiple devices on the desktop contribute to the problem, with 65% of respondents reporting that they utilize up to three additional monitors and/or mobile devices simultaneously
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68% of respondents reported that their employers have implemented policies or technologies to minimize distractions,
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The #1 corporate strategy used to discourage digital diversion is blocking access to public social network
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The user’s email inbox is the #1 location searched, with 76% of respondents reporting email as the first place they look.
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The average user emails two or more documents per day to an average of five people for review, increasing email-based document volume by up to 50 documents per week. The fact that these attachments are stored on multiple local computers complicates the challenge of finding the latest document versions as well as merging feedback from multiple reviewers.
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companies need to challenge the assumption that employees should always be available. Some people do their best work when they’re disconnected, and companies should create a work culture that encourages it.”
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Do You Have A Social Media Innovation Framework?
“I want to answer 4 basic questions:
My Business Purpose: Why am I pursuing this innovation?
Pilot Structure: How can I execute it with the least amount of resources and commitments yet still achieve an appreciable, measurable result?
Evaluation Model: What will my KPI’s be and how will I evaluate the value delivered from the pilot to my business
Pilot Execution & Next Steps: how can I learn as much as possible while also driving towards business goals? “
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Adoption Strategies for Social Software « Dachis Group Collaboratory
This post deals with adoption of social software in enterprises. It might echo with people that have faced problems in getting others to believe that their approach works. It promotes how to “get a feel” for success; rather than a measure of adoption. It’s in-house employees and veterans of the company that know how dispersed a deployment really is.
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Whilst many things have been written about aficionados and early adopters, it’s critical to involve non-power-users for their insight into the maturity of a deployment. It’s those people that offer the most valuable and realistic view of adoption. Like slow-burning logs in a fire, they take some time to get going but eventually beam us through to a mature roll-out.
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Making social actions accountable to verbs, is something I’ve written about before – they would make metrics look trustworthy and close to business goals. We’ve even seen ROI-driven approaches that might lead to better processes.
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The ultimate goal is process-oriented sociality where critical business processes have been transplanted/forked at points where theprocess is designed to get better through collaboration. The outputs of such business processes being “better” or “quicker” is then easily judged. Results should be more pronounced in companies operating with rigorous processes already.
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o identify missing components in the motivation of people who don’t use your system, consider the following:
- Valence – the subjective importance of team goals for individuals.
- Instrumentality – the perceived indispensability of individual contributions for the group outcome.
- Self-efficacy – the perceived capability to fulfil the tasks required in a team.
- Trust – willingness to rely on a person, group, event or process. This covers the expectancy of team members that their efforts will be reciprocated, and not exploited by other team members.
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So the lesson is – don’t consider always doing a pilot first but give serious thought to a global rollout from day one. One of my clients did that for their social intranet with great results.
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You will know when you’ve hit a wall when:
- Your initial assumptions were wrong and you need to re-jig what you deployed.
- You need to dive into specific teams and get the tool to fit their work pattern – or commonly, a work process. While finding out the details, try not to change the work processes of teams – they might realise and change it themselves.
- Some people don’t have any use for your social software (rare).
Thinking about the economics of surplus.
“In a world of limited resources, the path the wealth is to control the resources. What about in a world of surplus? I’ve been trying to understand the nature of surplus and how it impacts the digital age. So I’m going to share and ask for your thoughts too.”
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Most digital assets can be shared in a manner that does not result in loss. If I have a digital picture and email you the picture, then we both have the picture.
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Digital assets are much more like virtual assets in this sense.
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Ironically, people reverse their concept of theft when it comes to digital assets.
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The information age has caused a surplus. And this changes the value of code. Whereas once it was important for me to protect the rare asset, now I feel encouraged to share more.
Facilitating, leading, managing, hosting, community-ship
“I celebrated Euan’s post by reviewing each point through the eyes of a Community of Practice facilitator. Prior to this I touched on one point called “follow the energy”, which is what the spirit of social business design or enterprise 2.0 is all about.
A discussion on G+ led to points about control, managing, leadership, and facilitation; which Luis Suarez has kindly summarized.”
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Our software at work is called “Communities” as are many other vendors. This can be too narrow or misleading as lots of our so called “Communities” are not that at all, but instead work spaces, task spaces, etc…see here.
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- A common interest or context
- A sense of shared purpose and fate
- A common set of needs
So what do I mean by an online community or shared interest/purpose group space?
I think the “Community Roundtable” do a good job on their “Community Management Fundamentals” presentation:
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Communities exchange to learn, workgroups exchange to execute”
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…true communities form around a common interest in a topic Their purpose is not to create content…the content is a by-product of how the members interact in exploring their common interest.
CoPs don’t usually involve doing a task or deliverable, but the real key word in Kaye’s statement is the word “expectations”.
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At work we don’t use the term community manager we instead use the term community facilitator.
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And when it comes to online CoPs (even more so in the growth stage) facilitating is a more valuable skill than managing
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the whole premise of communities leads to facilitating anyway, as most of what they are about is people coming together to celebrate a shared interest…it’s not so much about tasks and deliverables
Talent, work and technology: Going Foursquare! Gamification of talent management
“These systems are great options to develop leaders and managers supposed to fill the shoes of their elders, and continue with the same type of leadership and management models. Such systems have been extremely efficient in industrial-age corporations such as General Electric, Danaher, Valeo, …
These systems have two important shortcomings : they are selective and static. Simply put, they lead to choose between two leaders or managers and they certainly do not foster innovation (innovative skills, behaviours, gems – see this hack).”
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these systems represent a major hindrance for organization evolution. They often result in HR teams having to work “around the system”. They also result in dissenters and alternative talents leaving the organization.
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HR teams should analyze the recognition & engagement systems in social networks, that are specific to each social network focus (professional, conversational, friending, …). Such systems have been able, at the same time, to engage an ever increasing number of members while being able to make each individual stand out in regard of her/his particular abilities, friends, opinions, postings, …
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Adoption of such a system should start where new social technologies and usage is high, but also in parts of the organization that are in dire need of innovation. Adoption of such a system is not a simple, unidirectional project. It is a continuous feed-back loop, in which new dimensions are added to the recognition system as new business, functions, geographies adopt the system
Want to See the Future of Social Business?
“There are executives who are social and there are executives who are anti-social. There are executives who do social well and executives that don’t. Some claim to be leading social organizations, and there are those that boast that they are not. There are executives who have thousands of followers, and there are executives that have none.
There are social executives that say, “Trust me” or “Admire me,” that tweet, “Believe me” or “Look at me,” or that yell, “Follow me.” But there are very few executives, only a fraction, who are actually creating next-generation social experiences for their companies like Jeff Schick.”
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- 17,000 individual blogs
- 1 million daily page views of internal wikis, internal information storing websites
- 400,000 employee profiles on IBM Connections, IBM’s initial social networking initiative that allows employees to share status updates, collaborate on wikis, blogs and activity, share files.
- 15,000,000 downloads of employee-generated videos/podcasts
- 20 million minutes of LotusLive meetings every month with people both inside and outside the organization
- More than 400,000 Sametime instant messaging users, resulting in 40-50 million instant messages per day
- 29,000 communities
- Over 25,000 IBM employees actively tweeting on Twitter
- Over 300,000 IBM employees on Linkedin
- Approx. 198,000 IBM employees on Facebook
IBMs Social Business Stats
Internal
External
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The IBM Social laboratory is also using gamification and crowdsourcing principles to reduce the cost of internal projects. Schick cited a language translation and localization effort for product manuals that typically cost the company millions. Yet IBM was able to significantly reduce the expense and increase accuracy by awarding points to employees who helped translate the documents. Employees with the highest point totals earned money for their charities.
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Social analytics is playing a huge role in not just making recommendations of content, people and communities, but in recommending what an organization need do to better its financial results. By using Cognos Consumer Insight technology, we’ve got detailed insight into the interaction of people and content.”
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Think of Atlas as both a map and periodic table of social elements, used to determine how people interact. “It can mine who’s reading who’s blog, who is subscribing to who’s social bookmarks and who is subscribing to specific communities,” explains Schick, “It can identify and draw relationships between people and how they collaborate by analyzing instant messaging, Notes Domino, Outlook Exchange and other messaging solutions.”
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When IBM integrates their Cognos Consumer Insight solution with IBM Connections, they are able to conduct sentiment analysis across their communities, blogs, activities, discussion forums, and micro-blogs to determine if projects are going well or not. Add Atlas technology to the mix, and IBM can also analyze sentiment in email. With that powerful concoction, predicting the viability of internal projects will get easier.
What Apple Has That Google Doesn’t – An Auteur
“One person is the Decider for final design choices. Not focus groups. Not data crunchers. Not committee consensus-builders. The decisions reflect the sensibility of just one person: Steven P. Jobs, the C.E.O.
By contrast, Google has followed the conventional approach, with lots of people playing a role. That group prefers to rely on experimental data, not designers, to guide its decisions. “
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The auteur, a film director who both has a distinctive vision for a work and exercises creative control, works with many other creative people. “What the director is doing, nonstop, from the beginning of signing on until the movie is done, is making decisions,” Mr. Gruber said. “And just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art.”
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“Steve Jobs is not always right—MobileMe would be an example. But we do know that all major design decisions have to pass his muster. That is what an auteur does.”
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Google has what it calls a “creative lab,” a group that had originally worked on advertising to promote its brand. More recently, the lab has been asked to supply a design vision to the engineering and user-experience groups that work on all of Google’s products. Chris L. Wiggins, the lab’s creative director, whose own background is in advertising, describes design as a collaborative process among groups “with really fruitful back-and-forth.”
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Google is an engineering company, and as a researcher or designer, it’s very difficult to have your voice heard at a strategic level,”
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Apple Is a Design Company With Engineers; Google Is an Engineering Company With Designers.”
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Mr. Villalba later wrote that he had no intention of leaving Teambox and cooperated to experience Google’s hiring process for himself. He tried to call attention to his main expertise in user interaction and product design. But he said that what the recruiter wanted to know was his mastery of 14 programming languages.
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