Bertrand DUPERRIN | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Don’t confuse enterprises without managers with without management

March 22, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Summary : we talk a lot about the cases of enterprises without managers, praised for their agility and their effectiveness. Businesses show interest for this kind of model and, as the same time, are scared by it. Some even make fun of such an idea because anyone with common sense knows that no business could work without managers. That’s were the confusion lies : no managers does not mean no management. A whole part of manager’s role, in today’s economy, is better done in a distributed than in a centralized way. To work, it needs leadership. And leadership works better when assumed by people who don’t have to assume the hierarchical authority at the same time.
It’s obvious that the key of some businesses’ sucess, form an operational efficiency standpoint, is not the use of the last technology to communicate and collaborate but management and organization principles. And, despite what lots of people may think, these principles car work in businesses of any size.

What scares about these businesses is that they are often tagged “enterprises without managers”. In the straight line of Hamel’s post on “fire all the managers”, How is it possible to run a business without managers ? It’s not that hard if one’s avoid a common misunderstanding that supposes that a business without managers is a business without management. In fact it’s all the opposite : these businesses are more managed than others.

Let’s start with a common objection : businesses need to be managed. Organizations like Semco or Morning star are managed…and quite will. Everybody knows who’s the boss, what’s the party line. They define a global framework, a strategy and allow means. The role of managers is to make it work. To make others successful.

That’s a point that often comes in the discussions about the future of middle management. Middle managers will be rather connectors, someone that put skills together. He will connect those who have something to do and those who have the expertise, the experience to do it as well as possible, to solve problems and handle exceptions. This kind of job can be “un-intermediarized” provided everyone knows that he’s concerned by the success of others and that networking is a cornerstone of the enterprise management principles.

Such systems that make people very accountable do not make management disappear. They only make it distributed. What leads to a paradoxical situation ; management is much more present in these companies that in those where it’s in the hand of a couple of designated people. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: autonomy, empowerment, exception handling, hierarchy, knowledge-economy, leadership, management, morning star, problem solving, semco, service economy, soo

Adopt enterprise 2.0 or adopt your future ?

March 13, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : we can often hear that the path is more important than the destination and the world of enterprise 2.0 and social business is experiencing it every day. Lots of critics and deceptions these last months. There’s a reason to that : enterprises have been told where to do and had to build their path to it without being able to wonder if it was its own destination, a custom-made one. Let’s also had that everyone has his own definition of the definition in question, so everyone is getting quite lost. What if any enterprise should not reinvent its own future, regardless to what would have been build, packaged and standardized by other. If they reach the same destination, at least they will know why. Enterprise 2.0 is not a destination by itself. But, if it’s not a destination, it’s a way to define a path, to choose a way rather than another, a way to drive, a vehicle. Provided these choices are relevant with what will define one’s future, not with a dogma or a current in opinion. Enterprise 2.0 is an utopia that anyone should reinvent according to his context to make it work in the real world.

Will I surprise you if I say that more and more people, even rather positive toward enterprise 2.0, are showing more and more dissatisfaction. There are two kinds of reasons to that. Some objective, some subjective.

Let’s start with objective ones. Adoption is not as fast as expected. Not that many enterprises are really doing it and those who started still struggle at making their program global. Many are still doubtful about the result. Not because no one got tangible benefits but because these benefits still don’t look systematic. I’ve already mentioned this point in some previous posts and will continue on future ones so I wont elaborate a lot here. No structural approach, focus on learning above the flow of work and few things on organizing work, irrelevant measurement tools etc… are part of the explanation.

Subjective reasons then. At the beginning enterprise 2.0 was nothing more than a statement : some organizations managed to do some things in another way by using tools of a new kind (read Andrew McAfee first and second definition).The “why” and the “how” where out of the scope because McAfee’s angle was about “technology enabled organizations”. Tools make some things possible. Period. Now, anyone has to find his own why and how. His path. Then, with time, because of the collective reflection, things moved forward :

- is an organization that manages to implement new ways of working without using tools an enterprise 2.0 ? Regarding to the definition the answer is no. But it has become obvious that what matters is the state of mind, tools only being the ball with which we play the game. So…if one manage to play better without changing the ball, what’s the problem ? First point of difference of opinion.

- considering the above point, is enterprise 2.0 only about above-the-flow learning or can it be about “in-the-flow” ? Any of them ? Both ?

- the comes the impact of the 2.0 culture, coming from the web. Community, equality, accountability, respect, solidarity, openness. Should enterprise look like this ? Should enterprise 2.0 aim at bringing a new culture or could it focus only on operation performance ? Is culture a goal or a means ?

So there are at least three variable that give enterprise 2.0 at least tenths of faces. With or without technology ? Productive, learning or both ? Adopting democratic principles or not ?

There’s so surprise that, in the end, no one recognizes “his” enterprise 2.0, his own ideal and cherished model in what others say.

Two conclusions before going further :

• the original vision of enterprise 2.0 was rather the statement of the possibility of a tech enabled organization and quickly turned into a debate on organizational evolution in which technology has its place, but not a dominant one.

• a couple of month ago I wrote on twitter : “sorry for those that thought that 2.0 or social will solve all the problems. They only showed the disease was stronger than expected”. We have evidences of that every day : because they tried to focus on the destination, the solution, the minimal thing anyone could understand (an organization where people have conversations into communities by using a social network), enterprises failed at understanding all what has to be accomplished to get there.

Focusing on a poorly defined destination, organizations did not pay attention to the path to get there. Enterprise 2.0 is rather a statement one can make at the end of the road, not a destination one can choose before.

The system matters more than people

March 6, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary :”with, by and for people”…such seems to be the creed of the “social” transformation. And results still look uncertain. Sometimes non-existant, sometimes great but looking like exceptions and not the consequence of a perenial systematic trend. The web syndrome has struck again, forgetting that employees were not common people or the people they are at home. They are a part of a large and complex system that impacts them more than it’s impacted by them. Add to that that this system is what turns potential value into tangible value and it’s easy to understand that the people lever, that is powerful enough to make some passionate people participate into communities out the flow of work, is not enough to change people’s day to day work and the way the organization produces. Nothing will happen or last if the systemic part of the organization is not changed. But if no-one wants to deal with this part of the problem, we’ll still be discussing this point in 10 years about enterprise 5.0.

I already wrote on the need for making the new forms of organization more structurall, that’s to say having them deeply rooted in employee’s day to day work to make them make sense, don’t make them too dependant of people and fashion and, most of all, do not make schizophrenia a part of people’s behavioral DNA. In this problematic lie two cornerstones of businesses’ life and transformation. Until now, Social Business and enterprise 2.0 approaches used to focus on people : accompaniment, supporting adoption, exhortations of all kinds that had more to do with passion and religion than logic. After all, “its about people”. What will happen will because of them and for them (although this point can be discussed). And what about the system ? Only a couple of enterprise 2.0 specialist are mentioning it and businesses, even if they see more tangible benefits there, are afraid of what looks like a change that’s deeper that was was told at the beginning.

But what if the system lever was much more important than the human one ?

What do I mean when I talk about “system” ? It’s a whole made of things like processes, decision making models, job description, review and rewards systems, corporate culture…(this is not an exhaustive list). What’s the impact of the system ? Some will say systems prevent people from showing initiative, that they make organizations heavy, that they have a negative impact on people and their self-fulfilment. Systems can be either good or bad. It all depends on where the cursor is set what can produce any kind of effect as well as the opposite one.

To define the impact of the system in a few words, let’s say that it determines the way people will react in a given situation. Will he make a decision of forward the problem to someone else ? If so, will the decision follow a defined mindset ? Will the person be able to innovate or only chose among a set of pre-defined choices ? Will he help colleagues he has the right skills or experience or will he let them manage by themselves ? Will be share information or anything to help others or consider it’s not his job and may even make him lose a kind of superiority.

Of course, systems can be more or less rigid or flexible. Practically speaking, organizations used to build very rigid systems when they tried to bring the taylorian approach in the service industry. Now they realize that more flexibility is needed…but still struggle at changing or improving the system.

Of course, some people can also have fringe behaviors. More restrictive or less respectful. But from a global standpoint, most people in any organization will act according to the system, no matter they prefer doing things differently or not. They may show some reluctance, not do their best but, in the end, people follow the system.

As a matter of fact, is there any other explanation to the following facts :

• while a large majority agrees on that the way we’re working is not working, very few take advantage of opportunities like the implementation of a social network or anything else as long as the system is kept unchanged.

• many people that are highly networking and connected in their private lives become isolated and try not to draw attention on themselves at the moment they step in their office building. And that seem logical, obvious and full of sense to them. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: Communities, culture, decision-making, Enterprise 2.0, execution, in the flow, learning organization, management, organizaiton, over the flow, process, production, social business, system, systemic, work, workflows

Do new organization models scale ?

March 1, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary : Can the management innovations we can see in middle-sized structures work into larger businesses ? The question is worth being asked and, at first sight, the answers seems to be no. If we have a closer look at some successful cases, it appears that scaling up may not be the right wat to follow and, on the contrary, that large businesses should rather scale down and adopt smaller and more responsive units. As a matter of fact, most of the dysfunctions we can see in large business are caused by the will to scale up things that work in small units. The only concept that can scale up is communities, what often fails because of too much manipulation. But these two approaches are not antinomic. One works for operations, on a small scope, and the other for learning on a large scale. What’s at stake is being able to joint the approaches.

In a previous post I started wondering if the organization models that works successful in middle-sized organization and are very close, by their nature and results, to what many businesses would like to implement, would work in larger businesses. As a matter of fact, it’s legitimate to wonder if what works for 1, 5 or 10K people could work for tens of thousands employees.

1°) One should not try to scale coordination and execution models up

A part of the answer comes from Ricard Semler. Semco keeps operational units smaller than 140/150 people. When more people are needed, units are split. After a small period to adapt, it appears than two units of 150 people perform better than a single one made of 300 people. Dunbar’s number seems to be still relevant so.

Similar thoughts at Morning Star. They think their model can work for larger organizations. Why ? because that’s not because an organization is bigger that the size of units should grow accordingly. Consequently, it’s better to have more smaller, autonomous and agiles units that cooperate efficiently. Moreover, not all units need to have a high level of cooperation : sometimes a lower one will be good enough.

Is it an heresy regarding to economies of scale ? Not at all. As Hamel said in his post about Morning Star, management is the least efficient part of the organization. Bigger units may help to share resources (even if it’s also possible with smaller ones) but causes lower management efficiency and quality. What leads to ask the question the reverse way.

If highly hierarchized pyramidal organization were borne, that’s precisely to address much more employees with only a little bit more managers, by cascading. The system quickly shows its limits, making anyone do nothing without the approval of one’s superior, what paralyses management and slows the whole system down. A couple of weeks ago, a piqued manager told be : “Me ? A manager ? Once I have approved the change of lights in the toilets and the (free) reparation of the coffee machine, I’ll see if I have time to take care of my staff and their projects”. What looks like the now famous story of Ben Verwayyen, Alcatel-Lucent’s CEO.Alcatel-Lucent needed to hire an assistant in Poland. Each person involved in the recruitment process said “ok…but I prefer to ask my boss for validation”. So the request climbed the organization hierarchy, 16 people asking their boss if it was ok. The request ended on the desk of a 17th person : Verwayyen himself. What made him fly into a temper and tell the whole organization :”I don’t want this kind of thing to happen again. Take you responsibilities and make the decisions you have to make at your level”.

What would be needed to make the system work again ? Closeness, trust, membership feeling, engagement, cohesion on shared values and goals…what leads us to the need for smaller units. That’s not contrary to the need for getting rid of silos. It’s possible to work with both smaller, agile, close and permeable units, and organize learning and exchange at a larger scale (read the next §). Execution and learning logics are complementary and happen in specific contexts that need their own rules and practices.

In the end, the point is not anymore about scaling a “Semco-like” organization up but scaling typical large businesses organization down to build smaller and more responsive units.

2°) Learning and exchange logics scale up easily…in theory

We started with systems focusing on decision and execution. But what about those aiming at improving exchanges and learning at a larger scale, what usually refers to things like knowledge management and learning organization.

That’s supposed to be the role of communities, which are known to scale very well and work in very large businesses. At least in theory. I already mentioned it there but it’s worth summing things up. Community works very well…until organizations try to manipulate them. Consequence : we can see vibrant communities working very well, relying on the only will of employees, sometimes out of any enterprise program. On the other hand, at the moment enterprises decide to build employee communities things get complicated for a reason : employees see the initiative as more work to do, out of their flow of work and their job description, a work that will benefit more to some other people than to them. That’s often the case with communities aiming at crowdsourcing ideas to sustain a program owned by another corporate entity or team that will make the community work without anything in return.

The issue may be fixed with thoughts on the evolution of the work=pay equation to contribution=revenue. But we’re still very far from that. Meanwhile, the big misunderstanding between enterprises and communities will last a long time.

3°) Joint is more important than scale

So it appears that the “scale” issue is about two logics : operations and exchanges. Production and learning. Each logic needs a dedicated plan that works on a specific scale.

• Production (coordination, decision making, execution) : small scale, strong ties, intense interactions, most of time synchronous, little latency.

• Learning (exchange of practices) :large scale, weak ties, loose interactions, most of time asynchronous, much latency.

What was wrong these last years is that enterprises thought they could solve all their problems with exchanges and learning, what lead to say “don’t change anything and add communities”. But communities do not contribute much to coordination, work, day to day executions. That’s not the relevant place for getting things done even if they can contribute. Communities are rather a long term investment on knowledge than a tool to improve instant execution.

So what matters is to joint the two logics.One will work at high speed, intensively, for day to day work while the other will work more slowly, in the background, for long term achievements. But what many organizations still call enterprise 2.0 or social business used to focus on only one of these logics, neglecting operational effectiveness. Even if communities work, if nothing changes at the execution level, a bottleneck forms that annihilates any effort made to turn the organization into a learning one. Making knowledge more accessible and shared has few value if the work using this knowledge is not made more effective.

So, the relevant question, was not to question scalability but address very targeted and operational issues, a global approach to be implemented at the team or unit scale, one after the other.

From a very practical standpoint, making knowledge exchanges more easily between facilities or business units is key to agility and time to market. But if nothing is done to improve the way it’s put at work, in the way decisions are made and executed, only half of the job would be done. And this half with hardly create any value because of the bottleneck that will remain downstream.

To know more about similar approaches, you should read what Dachis Group says on podularity and a couple of examples.

PS : some still wonder if the cases I mention in this post deserve the enterprise 2.0 or social business case. A legitimate question because we’re far away from social tools adoption…but I don’t think such a debate will have any interest for businesses. What they need is a clear understanding of how it works and the impact on day to day operations and created value, whatever the name.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: collaboration, communitiies, coordination, Enterprise 2.0, execution, learning, learning organization, management, morning star, organization, pods, podularity, semco, social business

Email is not bad for productivity only

February 23, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary : email causing organizational unwieldiness and information loss is nothing new. Businesses like ATOS decided to fix this issue once for all, using means which effectiveness will need years to be assessed. But the email case has another side that’s less mentioned : the impact on wellbeing and the risks on employees health. That’s the reason why Volkswagen decided to deactivate Blackberry devices out of office hours. A single culprit but two different approaches that may even but contradictory from a cultural standpoint. But in the end the same conclusion : technology is often a scapegoat that hides behavioral issues.

The war against email is going on. After ATOS that tries to ban its internal use, Vokswagen just decided to switch Blackberry devices off on week ends. One more defeat for email and once more victory for alternate solutions ? Not at all. As a matter of fact, if the enemy is the same, reasons have nothing in common and both decisions rely on radically different philosophies.

At ATOS, things are seen from a productivity standpoint. As I mentioned, email was not the problem and the cause has more to do with information management practices. Mark Fidelman even made a more severe analysis that’s really worth reading.

Volkswagen is far from this productivity approach and focuses more on what is becoming an essential issue in today’s workplaces : wellbeing and work/life balance. VW things that it’s good to have time on one’s own, not to be 24/7 under other’s pressure. After all, if there are days off that’s for a reason. And, contrary to ATOS, VW do not plan to replace email by any other kind of tool. Switch off. Period.

So we can see that both companies, even if having complementary approaches, don’t tackle the same issue. Some may day both has to be done, other would argue that replacing email by social tools will even increase the need for being always connected.

There’s something cultural behind this debate. If the ATOS case raised a lot of discussions, reactions to the VW one were much contrasting. “How can a serious employee not be connected at any time ?” “That’s not a way to run a business in 2012!”. One more evidence there’s also a wide gap between countries that pay a lot of attention to employees like germany and those who have a different view of the importance of work in life.

Is it possible to stay available while not being overwhelmed ?

A funny way to assess a social business project

February 21, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : become a social business….enterprise 2.0…social business…communities….as many phrases that are used every day with very little consensus and may mean anything and its opposite depending on who listens. Even worse, these easy shortcuts often prevent people from wondering about the every nature of their projects and what lies behind. When reality starts to emerge its often too late to get the means, the sponsor and change the scope of things to be successful. What if we tried to tell what things are really about without using 2.0, communities, social or social network ?

It’s now clear that phrases like “enterprise 2.0″ or “social business” are used to describe many things that sometimes have very few in common, without having a clear idea of what really lies behind. From long term structuring projects to window dressing ones. Besides, most of the projects that fall into the first category were not “2.0″ or “Socbiz” at the time they are designed. Some even started years before the social and 2.0 vocable started to appear. They were tagged “2.0″ or “social” afterwards because of their results, the technology that was used, sometimes just to showcase them at conferences. Projects that fall into the second category are often called social from the very beginning of their design and often aim at making people use a technology the IT bought, to do like other companies or because some believed that “since 2.0 is the remedy to anything, let’s deploy a social network”. Most of times, people in charge of the first kind of projects took months or even years to make their project mature, to deal with cultural issues, redefine work, HR practices while those in charge of the second often won the right to lead a social project at a corporate lottery, with a goal poorly defined by people who did not get the social stuff better. What explains why they often run short of means to really move forward when they realize what’s really at stake.

In short, it’s really important for the people in charge to know what hides behind words. Important for them, but also for all their colleagues, providers, stakeholders who’ll be impacted and have to contribute in any way. Words have sense, sometimes not the same for everyone. Saying “I want to become a social business” or “I want to deploy a social network” has as many meanings that there are people who listen to the speaker.

For example, when I heard such things, I understand “Ensuring that, in my organization, anyone can access and mobilize the right resources to get things done and bring decision and problem solving as close to the problem as possible”. If the person saying that thinks “I want people to share ideas into communities” it’s clear that we’re facing a big gap.

All the words we use in order not to make ten-lines-long sentences (2.0 being used for “building the capability of…bla bla bla) ends up by being problematic when no one uses them to tell the same things. It comes with a double risk : no only the project is built on a total misunderstanding but also the person in charge only discovers what’s at stake overtime…too late to get the means he or she needs to be successful.

For that matter, I hear more and more vendors saying that when a prospect comes, saying “I want to become a social business” they feel more worried than happy. Same things with consultants being told “I wand to deploy a social network”.

So it’s important to be clear and explicit about what one really wants to achieve through these vague concepts.

The other day I was remembering an old TV quiz game that was famous a couple of years ago in France (in fact…rather decades). It was called “neither yes nor no”. The concept was quite simple : candidates were interviewed for several minutes, asked questions, and were not allowed to use the words “yes” or “not” when answering. It looks quite easy but let me tell you that “surviving” 2 minutes was exceptional. So an idea came to my mind : wouldn’t it be useful to play the same game, replacing “yes” or “not” with the social buzzwords : social, social business, enterprise 2.0, communities…

It would be very valuable for a couple of reasons :

• assess that there is a real, deep project and not something shiny based on the vague understanding of catch-all concepts

• if the project lacks legs, the game will force people to deeply think about what’s behind, refine, improve, ask the right questions and re-define things using concrete and practical concepts, with a clear understanding of the needed actions…the whole explained with words any business person can understand.

• make sure that the project will survive the death of buzzwords and the decline of fashions because it will be deeply rooted into the business.

Ready to play ?

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business Tagged With: Communities, Enterprise 2.0, social business, social networks

Social business : target blue collars and forget technology ?

February 16, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary : there’s still a large gap between the social media promise and what’s really happening. A gap that’s getter smaller every day but so slowly that many people find it worrying. While large companies still struggle with dealing with their internal contradictions despite of massive investments and fail at mobilizing employees that are mostly white collars, we can see that smaller organizations are sometimes more successful even if mostly made of blue collars. A surprising paradox ? Not that sure. In fact its all about what one think the social promise is. While some focus on building communities and adopting software, some implemented pragmatic management practices, focused on production, delivery and decision making. These last ones often get better results in terms on impact on work as well as employees’ well-being.

When we talk about the need to make organization evolve there’s an easy shortcut that emerges quickly : it’s about qualified white collars spending most of their time in front of a computer. This shortcuts comes even more easily that, for lots of people, the transformation in question depends on the use of a certain category of software, what restricts the change program to a certain category of people. This assumption is broken into pieces as we can see to what extent things are complicated with this population and are forced to admit that tools makes absolutely no sense if not embedded in the “official way work is done”.

As we also have seen before, nothing works without a strong will of changing things as deep as possible. What leads us to ask again the question : “what’s en enterprise 2.0 or a social business”.

We know that it does not depend on the use of such or such software. Software can help but is not enough to tell if a given organization deserves the 2.0 or social label.

So we could have a deeper look at organization principles and flows of work. Bottom-up flows, empowerment, intrapreneurship approaches aiming at making the right resources available at the right place, at the right time to deliver what the customer is expecting, focus on delivering a product or service and less of validation/decision workflows. A collective efficiency approach relying on agile coordination and fluidity in exchanges and learning.

In this case it’s clear that, considering knowledge workers, software can play a major part in the transformation job. But what about other workers ? Don’t they face similar issues ? Don’t they need responsiveness, don’t they have to make better decisions, be better at exception handling, problem solving ?

Do they have to be the casualties of the social transformation ? Not. And, in fact, they are sometimes more advanced than we may think.

Let’s have a look a three cases.

From noise to situational intelligence

February 10, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Sumary : many users say that the problem that enterprise social platforms is the risk of infobesity and informational noise. Reality is more complex. As for infobesity, these platformes only collect information and have few impact on the fact people and systems generate more. The problem is more about how to distribute this information. Then comes things like activity streams and micro-blogging tools that raise another question : what’s necessary and what’s superfluous. In fact there’s a new context organizations and people are not very comfortable with. In a complex business world, it’s essentiel to feel signals to act and adapt permanently to external events that impact one. Feeling does not mean deep reading and understanding. Employees will have to learn to optimize their situational intelligence by making the most of the surrounding noise without being submerged by it.

On the one hand we see enterprises thinking about a more efficient way than email to organize information flows, exchanges, collaboration and information sharing. On the other hand the alternate solution also bring their own questions and fears.

As I recently said, after a large french company decided to ban internal emails :” that won’t decrease the amount of information that will only move to other places”. As a matter of fact it’s more about changing how one manage and deal with information flows than changing tools.

As a matter of fact, social software platforms will be more and more like “catch all”. As they improve in terms of functionalities, they will soon be able to catch anything any information produced, whatever its form or the software that produced it. Some think it may lead to infobesity but that’s not my opinion. Any information that need to be generated will be generated, the social platform only being the receiver, the container. We can even think that such platforms will help to prevent content replication across different systems.

The problem is not about information catching but information redistribution. From the user side, it means wondering what needs to be pushed to him and what should only be made available for whom searches it (improved by suggestion mechanisms to address the grey zone between both. Something bizarre since we are all deeply influenced by current approaches that, despite of the fact we’re submerged by too much pushed information, we still fear to miss something so we do nothing to clean up our information flows.

Two components of these new platforms raise questions : activity streams and micro-blogging tools that generate information flows in which many fear to drown themselves. What lead us to wonder if we need so much information and if it’s really useful.

The collective is not always the answer

February 2, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary : one of the assumption on which many enterprise projects rely is that the collective is better than the sum of the individuals that composes it. This have been proven being right many times. But is it that simple ? In systems that struggle at jointing people and groups, in which people have more and more difficulties to see to see what is their contribution to a global purpose and what this purpose is, there are three obvious risks. The first is to built an organizations in which the collective makes no sense. The second is to use the collective to avoid facing individual issues, a way to blame others for one’s lacks. The third, on the enterprise side, is to believe that the social or 2.0 orgnanization will be the remedy for irrelevant processus no one dares changing.

More ideas can be found in ten heads than in a single one. 100 people are stronger than ten. Crowds are wiser than individuals. We are more efficient when we act together as a living organism than as a sum of individuals. As many facts and assumptions that make organizations think about 2.0 or social approaches of work. With some “magic words” raised as remedies to all diseases : “communities”, “network”, “ties”, “together”.

But do these approaches come without shortcomings ?

Implementing those approaches and the tools that support them often aim at improving collective dynamics through more efficient interactions between resources, bewteen those who have something to do and those who can help them to do better and faster. Gathering and exchanging seem to be the cornerstones of these approaches. But :

• Interacting is not producing : conversations, exchanges are preparatory to action but, in the end, there’s still one person that has to deliver something, make a decision, act. People co-innovate, co-design but action is still an individual issue. One may mention co-writing something with solutions like Google Docs as an exception. But, with a closer look, it appears that someone always have to “clean up” the document, align styles and ideas. Doing so helps a lot a the beginning but anyone who once had to do this cleaning job on a document written by 4 or 10 people can tell it’s like hell. The more basic unit of work, the task, is and will remain an individual issue if we adopt an execution driven point of view.

• many organizations trie to use the collective as a remedy for individual discipline, accountability, professionalism issues. If one does not behave as a professional when managing his tasks, its workload, gathering everyone won’t solve the problem. Things may even get worse because of unproductive interactions that won’t improve anything, no one having done the preparatory work needed to make group discussions productive.

• the focus is put where there problem isn’t, avoiding to tackle what’s core, and accountability moves from individuals to the group. “If I don’t do that, the community will”. SInce everybody thinks the same, the collective does not do anything. Remember that a community is nothing more than a gathering of individuals who may have their own priorities and agendas. When the community does something, it only means that one or some of its members have individually decided to move forward. So we thank the community while, in many cases, only one of its members should be thanked. Communities don’t move forward if, at least, one member does not decide to.

• but organizations are doing the same mistakes. “If we bring employees to communities, if we make them more social, they’ll make up for our crappy processes without us having to work on that”. On the contrary, these dynamics need strong processes to give people reasons and time to move toward the collective. [Read more...]