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.

In short, the collective needs high individual performance to work. It can reinforce individual performance but can’t replace a minimum everyone should do on his own.

Is this going against the belief that social helps ordinary people to do extraordinary things ? Not really. Only a reminder that says that the collective won’t move forward if individuals don’t. This is not a matter of ordinary people or not but of professionalism, seriousness in individual work. Extraordinary things can be made by ordinary people…provided they don’t act with mediocrity (what can also happen to extraordinary people…) or without accountability.

This reminds me of a couple of things :

• Claude Onesta (coach of the french handball team, world, european and olympic champions in a row, famous for his coaching and leadership skills), interviewed about collective excellence, saying “The collective ? Don’t make me laugh ! First, it’s 7 guys at their top, mastering their job and game systems, who know what to do and can do it perfectly. Then comes the collective. But with 7 average players or 7 very good but not concerned ones, the collective won’t make you win any medal”.

• One day, while we were discussing this issue, someone told me :”can a collectively efficient system work without a good management by objective at the individual level ?”. An idea that contradicts the one according to which too much individual measurement kills collaboration ? No. It’s all in the way it’s balanced, in order the collective is seen as a response to individual needs and not as a shelter or a burden.

It’s all about how people understand their role in a wider and global mechanism and the way they contribute to it, as well as the way the mechanism can also help them to move forward. This is a very vague concept for lots of employees are lost in their own organisation, not understanding the sense or the impact of what’s expected from them and seeing the collective as a burden or an easy way to hide, but not a way to move forward.

That’s clearly and HR and organizational challenge. Enterprises need to make sense of work, joint the “I” and the “we” while not falling in the trap of thinking that social will replace individual accountability and fix outdated processes that need more flexibility to be efficient and manageable.

Whatever the way we consider the problem, there is no example of an enterprise dramatically changing the way it operates without a strong leader deeply attached to a vision of business. Nothing new there since this has been proven right for decades even before words like enterprise 2.0 or social business became trendy.

Successful projects have a couple of things in common : a visionary CEO who is deeply involved, a goal at is not about social business and the courage to challenge the corporate culture. And those who fail ? Top executives that are not concerned and not very involved, projects aiming at implementing a social network and a moto looking like “don’t be rough with people, we’re not ready for that”.

Let’s have a look at a couple of cases.

Alcatel-Lucent. Whoever knew this enterprise 5 or 6 years ago should have been surprised when their project came under the highlights. If there were a place where such a thing could not have worked this should have been Alcatel-Lucent. Yes but…one day came Ben Verwayyen. We all know the story. First an email adress so employees could directly interact with him. Then an internal blog. Then, as his own approach was beginning to influence people in the organization, the need for a social network. All of this because his vision of business is made of words like transparency, accountability and that’s the way that he things a business should be run.

Danone. When a CEO (Antoine Riboud) states, in the early 80s, that “The most successful companies are those that think jointly technological change, work design and the changes in internal social relationships.” much is said. The rest is about sustaining a strong corporate culture. In th 2000s they started a program called “Networking attitude” to favor interactions, ideas exchange and problem solving. A program that was only about behaviors, management and the human side of the organization at a moment when web 2.0 and social networks did not exist. Technology will come years after and won’t be a break but a way to reinforce the corporate project.

Then IBM. Looking at the success of IBM, not as a vendor selling social business solutions but as a social business itself, is very instructive. But a large part of the lesson is missed if we don’t step back in time to learn from the Louis Gerstner era (1993-2002). I just reread the book he wrote about the time he spent at IBM (he also worked for American Express and Nabisco before), Who said elephants can’t dance. This book is very instructive for the very reason that, at this time, internet was not what it is today…and concepts like social networks or “anything 2.0″  where not even a dream. But, in some ways, Gerstner perfectly set the cornerstones that made social business possible ten years later.

This is a very important lesson for all those who think that “it’s not possible in our company”, “we’re too big to change” or “we don’t have to change…we’re the biggest, we’re the best”.

Let’s start with a couple of words about the context, when Gerstner was appointed to save IBM. The 400.000 employees company, after having been a forerunner and dominated the technlogy industry for decades (it was founded in 1911), was dying. For analysts the question was not to know what IBM was going to do but when it was going to die. A couple of weeks ? A year ? Not more.

At this time IBM was pilling up all dysfunctions we can see in large businesses today. A gigantic organization without responsiveness. An organization able to make major innovations but unable to bring new products to the market. An overgrown bureaucracy (the number of assistants and people reporting to assistants was impressive, as well as the number of people dedicated to support…tens of thousands in europe for example).

Hundreds, if not thousands, of IBM middle- and senior-level executives had assistants assigned to them, drawn from the ranks of the best and brightest of the up-and-coming managers. The tasks were varied, but from what I could understand, AAs had primarily administrative duties and even, at times, secretarial chores. For the most part, AAs organized things, took notes, watched, and, hopefully, learned.

Inability to roll out a global strategy  : since respect for people was a core corporate value, people had the right to refuse to do something they did not found relevant. This even became an official process, the “non-concur process” that organized the way for employees not comply with decision that were made ! The organization was so self-confident that it was focused on itself, on its internal stuff, forgetting its customers and making their interactions with IBM look like hell. To end, an organization made of fiefdoms, with their own agendas, sometimes competing with each other and even against the corporate strategy. To some extent that, when Gerstner stepped in, the only possible was to split IBM into smaller units…and sell them.

Of course, Gerstner made a lot of courageous and clever decisions in terms of strategy, going agains many things that were decided by the previous leadership team. But he could not have been successful without a deep change in the way people worked. Without deep cultural changes, IBM would not have been able to execute his strategy (or even any strategy by the way..)

So Gerstner came with a couple of principles, clearly stated, that were the contrary of how IBM was doing things at this time :

a) I manage by principle, not procedure.
b) The marketplace dictates everything we should do.
c) I’m a big believer in quality, strong competitive strategies and plans, teamwork, payoff for performance, and ethical responsibility.
d) I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues. I sack politicians.
e) I am heavily involved in strategy; the rest is yours to implement. Just keep me informed in an informal way. Don’t hide bad information – I hate surprises. Don’t try to blow things by me. Solve problems laterally; don’t keep bringing them up the line.
f) Move fast. If we make mistakes, let them be because we are too fast rather than too slow.
g) Hierarchy means very little to me. Let’s put together in meetings the people who can help solve a problem, regardless of position. Reduce committees and meetings to a minimum. No committee decision making. Let’s have lots of candid, straightforward communications.
h) I don’t completely understand the technology. I’ll need to learn it, but don’t expect me to master it. The unit leaders must be the translators into business terms for me.

A large part of the book is about business decisions, sometimes contrary to what “normalcy” would have suggested, but most of it is about how he made things work, how he put his principles at work. A whole part is dedicated to corporate culture, a sacred cow no one dares challenging…what he did because it was leading the enteprise to the grave. Same for HR with a dramatic change in the compensation and benefits system, rewards, career management etc…

The book also reveals some crunchy details. For example :

• Gerstner decided to keep employees informed of what was going on as often as possible. Some answers to his messages, positive or even very negative, are quoted in the book. He used email to do so, what was a disruptive way to inform employees in 1992. Some managers did not want things to change. What did they do ? They blocked email coming from the CEO so employees will not receive them…

• About his notes taken during his first meetings with top managers

What’s striking from my notes is the absence of any mention of culture, teamwork, customers, or leadership—the elements that turned out to be the toughest challenges at IBM.

In the end, we can understand how IBM eventually became a global and coherent organization, that turns its internal wealth (people, knowledge) a shared asset and not a burden like it was before. For those who are scared of loosing control, here’s what he said :

Let’s decentralize decision making wherever possible, but this is not always the right approach; we must balance decentralized decision making with central strategy and common customer focus.

If IBM has become what we know today, we need other explanation that the tools they use (and sell). We have to get back to Gerstner to understand how things become possible. That’s also why, years before customers show interest for such products, they built their own enterprise social network : because it was a way to sustain their organization, to enable the way work supposed to be done at IBM.

So let’s come back to the original topic of this post. At a time when enterprises are questioning their social business approach, the benefits, this examples are more than meaningful. Leaders started with a vision of business, embodied by a deeply involved CEO and eventually ended by implementing tools (there are also examples of businesses being successful without technology…we’ll talk about it in future post). It took time, years, to move from the organizational stuff to using technology.

Gerstner shows us that nothing is impossible, that arguments relying on history, size, culture are irrelevant when one has the courage to make things happen. I only hope that today’s leaders won’t wait until they are in the same situation as IBM as (change or die) to find this courage.

Now…last not but least. What would Alcatel-Lucent look like today without Verwayyen, Danone without Riboud, IBM without Gerster. At least one would have disappeared and the other would be very different…

A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Danone to talk about their social responsibility program, what made me learn a lot, believe it nor not, in terms of organizational transformation and had many things in common with enterprises 2.0 approaches. How possible is that ? Read what’s coming in the following lines.

Like many enterprises, Danone has understood that the environmental question will be key in its business. It’s already a cultural fact that is not new at all (remember that Antoine Riboud, Danone’s former CEO, used to say that the responsibility of the enterprise did not end at the facilities’ doors…30 years ago) and new an economic fact. There are many chances that, in a near future, carbon will be monetized, so managing it efficiently leads to a competitive advantage.

How did danone do ? First by stating it in its corporate values and project, long before it becomes a trendy topic. Anyone who has a few contacts with Danone knows that concepts such as double project ou triple bottom line are known by everyone and are a share concern. Such an approach need to be embodied and the discourse has to be turned into action. So Danone established a “Nature VP” so the environmental concern has currency at the very top of the organization. But, since Danone is a business and that there is an economic reality behind all that, that people need to change the way they understand and feel what added value means in such a context, they even established a Nature CFO. The logic is obvious : we’re entering a world when things that used to be secondary are becomming essential. So they need  to be integrated into the value calculation system so what was a cost in the previous vision becomes an investment and an opportunity in 2012.

So they invented “green Capex”, some very concretes things to implement to translate this vision and awareness into business. Looking for ROI on a 3 or 5 years scale to take time to learn and not give up too early. But there were no relevant indicators to do that. So they could have come to the conclusion that it was not measurable, what could have lead to the consequence we all know : the project would have become a dead body because no one would have been able to see its impact or one’s personal contribution through one’s decisions, not even the interest of changing one’s thinking and decision making model.

So Danone worked on designing new models allowing to measure the impact of their business in terms of carbon and its short and long term financial consequences. They experimented it on the field, tried to make the most of new data, made an empirical job then tried to model. The organization tried to measure what matters, since it matters. That’s as simple as that.

It also helped to make something else possible : reducing the carbon footprint is now a part of executive’s evaluation and reward system. So everyone, at his own level, in his business unit, in his field is concerned.

But they still were trying to make sense of it for more and more employees. It means that anyone should understand his own role, impact, contribution to the project. It also means that, when facing two possible choices, one making sense in the old paradigm and the other making sense in the new one, they people should make the right one without fearing to put their performance at risk and sacrifice their bonuses.

So Danone co-innovated with SAP to integrate this new model in their business tools, in their production management system. It was all about putting the new model at work in employees’ day to day lives, in the flow of work and avoid schizophrenia. No contradiction here anymore : there’s a single model, a single vision and not an ideal one set on the top of an old operation model that has nothing in common. All indicators, measurement tools, tools supporting processes takes it into account. SAP brought the technology and Danone its knowledge and IP.

Anything in common with enterprise 2.0 projects ?

We can see that the key success factors are quite the same

• Something deeply rooted in the corporate values.

• A project aiming at changing the model and not making two opposite models coexist.

• High level sponsors that won’t run away when change will become too impacting.

• Implementing the new model in the heart of production flows

• If a relevant frame of reference that brings sense, coherence and alignment does not exist, do what’s needed to build a new one.

• Be fully aligned : people work as they’re measured

• Don’t think about technology before it’s needed and limit its role to what’s essential. As Danone’s IT people said “IT should understand how the vision of the business will impact our systems in the next years”.

But are organizations making such efforts for the projects we’re talking about ? No. Obviously because such projects are not seen as transformation ones or corporate level ones. The top of the organization is sometimes informed, sometimes it initiated things, but is seldom deeply involved. Such projects seldom pay attention to production flows either, nothing is done to change the way decisions, arbitrations are make and adding communities to the existing organization is often seen as good enough. And, most of all, nothing is done to improve frames of references, value measurement, defining what’s a cost and what’s an investment in a world that has nothing in common with the one the current frames were designed for, thinking of externalities, long term impact. Of course it needs to break some old assumptions dow, challenge what we used to think was right.

Would danone have been so successful if they have started with their ERP program ? No. Would internal and external communities have been enough, stating that “producing a lot of carbon + green communities too offset = change”. Not at all (in fact these communities exist but were not “created”, they exist because of the corporate DNA and Danone only offered them a digital place to meet). What if each unit has started to invent its own management system, frame, ERP without any coherence at the scale of the organization ? Failure. And if the “carbon objective” have not been included in the way execs are measured and rewarded ? Failure. And if the IT was thinking about tools instead of trying to understand how to adapt their offer to the corporate vision of business ? Failure.

Should I add more…or is it clear enough ?

The truth is that the “care bear approach” to transformation projects is still too heavy. Change without changing. Step back when people may be too annoyed. No economic sense is made of the project. The focus is on willingness and passion without paying any attention to the need for rationality. The structure of the organization is kept untouched. Behaviors have to change but evaluation systems still promote the behaviors that should disappear. No impact on operations because nothing is done to improve the production system…even when it happens by luck, nothing is done to measure what really happens. In short, everything is done by halves and everyone is surprise that the promise is not delivered.

After all, “like father, like son”. Danone is already very advanced in Social Business (both “social business” : the “2.0″ one and the social and environmental one), without any surprise. They started from the corporate project and values, worked on the human side, on HR, behaviors and management for a couple of years before starting to do anything with software. “Networking Attitude” is one of their management cornerstone, a training and change program, a value that’s assessed when people are hired. It’s one of the only company where I saw the software coming years before the project, where HR took the lead and told IT what was essential in terms of adoption, sense, integration in the workspace…so the IT could deliver more than a tool : a valuable service.

Two more points other companies should learn from :

- in this co-innovation project with SAP, Danone invested its IP, a unique asset that’s the result of years of work on the impact of C02 on their value chain. That did not make any problem to them : what matters is to go fast, create a competitive advantage and stat ahead. No sharing this IP with SAP would have caused delays, even failure. And if other organizations ask SAP for a similar system it’s OK…Danone will stay ahead because they moved first. As Danone’s speaker said “what matters is not the copyright but the speed, the ability to influence and change practices”.

- at the beginning, according to the well known “aim the moon, even if you miss it you’ll find a star” adage, Danone stared with foolish objectives. In 2008 they wanted to reduce their carbon footprint by 30%. It was a very high objective so people understood they had to be ambitious, try new ideas, make the most of any opportunity and not content themselves with “good enough”. Result : as 2012 is beginning the 30% are about to be reached !

Lot of work ahead…

A new year is starting…with the usual prediction challenge. It does not matter if these predictions become true or not, that anticipation is confused with taking one’s dreams for granted : predictions are a part of the landscape and even those who don’t take them seriously expect them. So I’m trying to play the game one more time.

First, let’s be clear on what prediction means. Even if I’m happy with what I “predicted” these last years (understand “I was right”), don’t expect to find anything revolutionary in the next lines. What we usually call predictions is nothing more than common sense (or lack of). Predicting the iPhone en 1990 would have been a prediction. Prediction the need from bringing social into the flow of work in 2009 was only common sense. Rather stating the obvious.

What leads us to a very important point. As long as one is lucid and clearly understands that, even social or 2.0, the real point is enterprise and business, with all the constraints and context that comes with, it’s not that hard to identify where things will block and what concerns will arise. Finding how organizations will decide to respond is much harder. Anyway each one will respond in its own way depending on its culture, its culture, the courage of its executives when it will come to make strategic decisions. Because of all that, we’ll surely see much more diversity than before in social business approaches…

So, here are the trends I seen for 2012.

1°) Budget : from technology to organizational transformation

Before being about people or technology, that’s a matter of money. Technology, accompaniment, internal efforts… And we all know that in 2012 money will fall from the sky and anyone will be able to spend it on any shiny initiative. Or not. So it all depends of a strategic choice for enterprises facing crises : getting ready for the crash or finding the winning way out.

Finding the winning way out may mean many different things. One of them could be keeping the investments and even making more efforts because it’s “now or never”. Another could be of not changing the amount but the allocation. I recently mentioned a survey saying that HR seem to refocus on organizational transformation to the detriment of some other points. I read another one, about services budgets, saying something like “less software and integration, more on building new business and organizational models”.

The most meaningful choice will on whether to favor technology or its usages. It seems that the second may win or at least not being the least considered part of the job anymore. Such arbitrations will be key facts to understand 2012.

2°) A more operations-driven approach to social dynamics

Some of us have been discussing this point for years but it seems that things are becoming more mature now. In 2009, anyone talking about a social approach to business processes was considered as an heretic. Today things seem to be converging and enterprises are more ready to listen and understand to such discourses that make more sense for them. Or maybe the disciples of the “Care Bears Social Church” have given up and admit that the word process was not a blasphemy anymore.

So, the job is not about keeping the old organizational structure and adding a community layer on its top, out of the flow of work, but :

1°) Bringing  social into the flow of work even it means fixing the flow to make it agile and adaptable

2°) Jointing flows of work and out-of-the-flow community approaches to ensure all the efforts will contribute to value creation. If not, the final conclusion will come quickly : communities = unproductive silos…and once again we’ll have missed a great opportunity to improve things.

But being aware does not mean acting accordingly. Even if a consensus forms on such an approach, it will take time to implement it because it needs organizations to put their hands in the organizational mess and out of age processes. That’s what the “E20 = E1.0+communities” was designed to avoid. Unsuccessfully.

Depending on the choices made in each organizations, we’ll see forks forming in the the social business world. And, in my opinion, one of them is a dead end.

Behind this point lies something deeper…that’s my third point.

3°) Adopting one’s future instead of adopting social

We’ve been talking about “adoption” for ages. Even if I can understand it, it did not take much time to see the limits of such an approach. It’s like saying “that’s new, you may not see the interest but you have to love it and get used to live with it”. It sounds like having to deal with something exogenous. Adoption being about how not to reject a transplant.

There’s another approach, much about a wide and deep corporate project. What challenges for the next year ? How to create more value, more efficiently ? How to make resilience a part of the corporate DNA ? One thing leading to another, if enterprises start to design their organization accordingly, in terms of management models, processus, HR models etc… social won’t need to be adopted but it will grow and spread naturally. Do you want to design an enterprise adapted to its challenge and tool it accordingly or try to make new practices and tool fit in a mould that’s not designed for them and in which they make no sense ? Overlay or structural integration ?

In short, do you want to adopt the social approach or adopt your future, social being only a consequence. What I also mean is that there is not one social model that fits any organizations. It has to be designed to fit specific cultures, needs etc… Organizations that understand they’ll have to design a whole global model for their own purpose instead of copying what they can see elsewhere will be more likely to succeed in their transformation.

The answer to this question will take you on one or the other of the ways that will follow the fork I mentioned above. Enterprise projet or social project in the enterprise ?

4°) Integrating instead of adding

That’s a three dimensions challenge : on technology, organization and people.

These last years, many enterprises have ran many projects, most of time without much coherence, what lead to building stacks. Stacks of technology with no connection between them or with the previously existing ones. Stacks of rules and processes, often contradictory, while making things more simple was the best way to efficiently handle exceptions. Stacks of constraints, exhortation to adopt new behaviors depending on the context.

This lack of coherence weights on projects and does not help to make sense of anything. The consequence is known : less engagement and motivation over time, even unproductivity. Maybe cuts in budgets will have positive impacts. Rather than rushing ahead without properly addressing the problem, organizations will have to learn to make the most out of what thet have and is often wasted or under-utilized.

We’ve seen above, that instead of adding a social part to people’s work, organizations should invent a model that joints in a logical way both the structured and unstructured parts of work, formal and informal ones. It will be the same for technology since, as Bill Ives noticed, it seems that, instead of adding new technology layers, organizations seems to start investing on integrating the existing ones better.

Integration will take place on many fields :

• the organizational one, by replacing adoption by redefining and redesigning roles, tasks, activities and flow of work.

• the human one, by making HR policies more coherent (evaluation, reviews, goals, incentives, competencies location and management…)

• the technological one, by integration the business and social layer, with the help of new standards as we can see in the “social business framework”.

5°) Customer first ! But for how long ?

I hear more and more voices complaining on how social media budgets are allocated. There’s a lot of money available to look nice on Facebook but almost nothing in comparison to transform the organization in order to deliver as promised. Unfortunately we can see few signs that improving the organization through the human and organization will get more funds than social soliciting projects on Facebook or elsewhere. Looking nicer will still more important than executing better…but for how long ?

More time is needed to replace make-up programs with a comprehensive approach that will joint internal and external activities and consider that execution is at least as important as branding. But 2012 may be the turning point. Things may change as budgets shift and social business projects not considered as a part of the social media stuff anymore but as organizational projects that deserve their own (and well sized) funding.

Anyway, some organizations already get it well and will increase their advantage.

6°) The year of culture !

This will be discussed in some future posts but something is sure : no transformation happens without strong leadership and culture. When one lacks and the second is weak, we often see projects that aim  at changing without taking the risk of changing and the golden rule is “ohhhh, we can’t to this is our company”. 2012 will be the year of judgement since organizations will need to arbitrate under the constraint of smaller budgets. Only the projects relying on a strong leadership and culture will survive and move forward. Expect lots of breakage.  These projects will certainly come back later with a new approach but, unfortunately, their project won’t be about anticipation anymore but survival.

Conclusion

No one knows what choices will be made but organizations will have to make meaningful ones in 2012. I mentioned some possible logics here. Between the brave choices deserved by a real enterprise project and “no-choices ” caused by a poor understanding of what’s at stake, social business projects will diverge more and more. Last step before the final collapse of window-dressing ones and the generalization of the rational/pragmatic/business driven approach.

I also think that we’ll discuss a lot the “adopt social vs adopt your future” as it will become more and more obvious that social business is more about transforming the DNA than transplanting a new body.

In a very near future, connectivity will be a key factor of competitiveness. That’s obvious because it was ties businesses to a complex environment to feel its changes, its moves to react relevantly. Another point is that, since no one can know everything, everyone need to be able to get in touch with someone who knows to do a better work, solve problems, make decisions.

So the future of the connected organization is discussed a lot but that hides another reality : the connected employee. Of course, there won’t be connected organizations without connected employees. That’s obvious but help us to consider what’s been undertaken by lots of organizations with new eyes. Some tried to be highly connected with their external environment while disconnecting their employees. Others tried to improve their internal connectivityfirst. That was the starting point of many enterprise 2.0 or social business projects : employees need to be connected.

Yes but…connected to what ? If you’re trying to understand why many projects of this kind are still struggling at delivering tangible results, a part of the answers lies there.

- connecting employees with information : yes. It’s been done at two levels : social bookmarking (what is still a minor usage of internal social platforms) and exchanges within communities that is main objective of many projects.

- connecting employees with employees : that’s the role of social networks. But, to work, it needs that people can be identified through their contributions and up to date rich profiles.

That’s working but, in most cases, not very well. Of course there are exceptions but not enough to think that a new era has strated. After the novelty and euphoria phase that can make 80% of employees or more register on the social platforms that hosts these new usages, numbers can quickly decrease and, in the end, only a few percent will be active users and contributors. Not that high regarding to the investment. One of the reasons is obvious : considering the social platform as a bubble disconnected from the rest of the intranet is a first step to failure. The second reason is that even if people are socially addicted (what is not proven at all), even if they are willing to exchange and connect with their peers, employees are not internauts nor the ones they are at home.

The reason why employees are part of the organization seems to have been forgotten by everyone : contract of employment. Behind this piece of paper hides something that matters : people have a mission to accomplish, objectives to reach and the whole will impact the money they will earn and how and how fast they’ll progress in the organization. Even keeping their job or being fired. Maybe, for some, being social is something bigger than these little materialistic considerations. No matter the bottle since we have the social ecstasy… Really ?

As a matter of fact the conclusion is simple : organizations tried to connect employees to everything but never to their work. That what explains how reluctant employees were to jump on the social bandwagon and how hard it is to make social behaviors more systematic.

- even if, today, sharing and finding knowledge is a part of nearly everyone’s job, from a conceptual standpoint, when usages and implicit rules does not tolerate it, when the management sees it as a waste of time, people quickly step back to the centre of gravity of their work : produce, deliver, execute. Hence the fact they quickly give up tools that allow things that, despite very useful, have few room in their day to day work.

- even if organizations try to make social a natural, common, accepted and even required behavior, the fact social and business tools are poorly (if not) integrated makes things quite difficult.

- applying social to anything except production and delivery activities locked social into an unproductive silo.

So, what to do to find a kind of new balance ? Make both approaches make sense and ensure that one contributes to the other and is not a bubble isolated from reality.

- first by reconnecting people to their work…in their mindset and in the real world. We can hear here and there that social networks strengthen connections, reinforce membership feeling and that it’s good for engagement. Maybe. But if, on the other hand, nothing is done to make management more human and, sometimes, less violent, I’m not sure anything will improve.

- bringing social behaviors in the flow of work. Networking and having conversations to learn is a good thing. But implementing flexibility, agility, to produce, organize, coordinate is even better and few social projects address this need. That’s true that one takes less risk at optimizing what is not about work…

- bringing social content back to business information flows, in context, to it will help people to find solutions, and deliver a real added value without polluting their information flow.

As for the first point, we’re very far from the goal. But we can keep on dreaming. We’ll have to deal with the second, as soon as possible, if we don”t want to state once for all that what matters the least in social business is work. And we see more and more solutions that will help to deal with the third. Of course, that’s only software and it can’t change everything on its own but they may help organizations becoming more aware than social is also a way to deliver and produce.

Each solution has its own approach, deals with a large or small part of the issue but that’s a good start. Let’s mention (non exhaustive list…)

• Tibbr that was one of the first that offered to aggregate business and social information to make business contents become social objects people can act and collaborate on. Same idea at Jamespot with their Social Ready approach and more recently at  Salesforce

- the global collaboration hub as seen by IBM. Vulcan allow collaboration and interaction in context without having to switch from one tool to another nor flow disruption, whatever the origin and the nature of the information.

- a more task management driven approach for Asana and Azendoo.

When we talk about the future of enterprise, we often mention the need for getting rid of the rigidity of processes, autonomy, processes, making the system (organization and IT) serve people instead of making people serve the system. It need a very scarce resource to work : time. It also need trust and a strict definition of the limits of autonomy, understood by all. Without that, tomorrow’s enterprises won’t last under this form.

I often say that the largest part of employee’s activity is and will be more and more about exceptions handling and problem solving what supposes to have time for creativity, innovation; knowledge and practices exchanges etc.. In fact that’s only half true. That’s true when everything that could be automated has been (some things that could not be automated have been , in fact, automated but that’s not our point today). As long as everything needs no judgement and does not tolerate any exception has been modeled and given to the appropriate tools. This is the one and only condition to make people focus on what they excel at and are much better at than any software. If it’s not met, “essential routines” will require most of their time on tasks where their added value is poor and where they’ll be rather sources of errors.

That said we have to admit that the dawn of social tools in the workplace brought more confusion to things that were not easy to get. Before, it was very common for employees to capture data on many different tools. This the reason why lots of information where not captured or updated because doing so was both boring and time consuming. “Social” brought a new layer of troubles. In addition to capturing data in traditional business tools, employees had to switch to social tools to say “I’m doing this and need some help to solve that problem”, identify the right resources to progress. Reason why most people stick to the basic, well known, lowest common denominator of their work. Today we’re seeing a solution slowly emerging with the integration of social and business tools, the latter being able to send signals into the firsts, not participating into the conversation but becoming conversations starters. Globally speaking, the ability to easily, directly (even automatically) link an object (document, event generated by a business tool) to the conversations that relates to it will be essential.

If the first point misses, time lacks and energy goes (is wasted on ?) essential but repetitive tasks where the human factor has a poor added value. If the second misses, the new social layer will be more a burden than an opportunity.

Going further, we can even add that if these foundations are not perfected and solid, anything that will be added to move toward new organization models will generate more troubles than benefits.

It’s always easier to be agile and mobile when one’s feet are on a solid ground rather than a friable one.

When we talk about new organization or management approach, about the tools that support new ways to communicate or collaborate we often use the knowledge economy as a justification. Moving from an industrial to a knowledge economy means a deep change of context and responses of a new kind from businesses. That’s an obvious fact and none of the current social business or enterprise 2.0 expert has coined anything new : there already was an abundant literacy on these new forms of organization while most of os where still learning writing and counting at school. If we take the technology side apart, any old book from Peter Drucker could be a best seller if published today with the same texts and a socially fashionable title.

So knowledge economy is there and both organizations and people have to deal with it. But what do they do it so slow, with so much reluctance, fears and doubts ? Why can’t we see this draught, this collective march that happened when the world faced its last similar evolution ? The answer is easy : because the knowledge economy does not exist. Not because it’s a dream kept alive buy a few passionate and lunatic people but because it’s not a concrete reality, foundations on which we’ll be able to craft the future.

A field was not enough to craft the agrarian economy. A factory and some steam or electricity did not found the industrial economy. There were organization models designed for the factory. Labor laws evolved to lead the change. Financial mechanisms were set up to make the requires investment possible, what made industrial economy grow. A factory did not made the industrial economy but a set of rules, practices, mechanisms did. They turned a need and an opportunity into reality.

So, what’s about knowledge economy ?

One swallow doesn’t make a summer and a knowledge worker does not make a knowledge economy. Knowledge work exists. Knowledge workers too and they represent each day a bigger part of the working population. They are the resources that may help to build a sustainable growth for the future. But that won’t happen unless some requirements are met.

As a matter of fact, even if the potential exists it’s poorly exploited. First because businesses don’t do everything possible to make the most of it…but that’s an easy pretext. Businesses  also are  looking for sense, for reasons to do things. They don’t find these reasons because they are operating in an environment that did not change that much during the last 50 years. Consequence : they struggle to reinvent their model, to reinvent themselves. Evidence  is those that success, that find the way of a new durable growth, are those who made choices that were both “obvious” regarding to where the world is heading and crazy according to the current environment in which they operate.

What’s missing to craft the appropriate environment ?

- innovation : programs that encourage innovation and sustain creation of innovating businesses.

- an appropriate legal and accounting environment. It will be quite impossible to move further In an economy that relies on people when everything that’s about them is seen as costs and never as investments. Globally speaking, we need to rethink everything that’s about time. The knowledge economy needs time to create knowledge, trust, learn. Time is an investment when wisely used. Short term approaches leads to resource wasting and shifts adaptation costs to others without removing them.

- means to link incomes not with jobs but with participation. Both inside and outside businesses. Many systems relying on people and communities from which businesses draw benefits rely on the voluntary participation of as many people as possible. That’s not a problem as long as it’s a secondary activity that comes in addition to a “real one” from which people get money. When principal activities are becoming scarcer every day, this model that many think is the model of the future, needs to be sustained differently. Even inside organizations this is a major barrier to new approaches to emerging collaboration, where people can’t find what’s in for them and managers find themselves at risk because of the use made of the resources they are accountable for. Let’s remind that cost allocation is a collaboration killer.

- an appropriate legal environment. Don’t forget that, in many countries, the new way of working we’d like to encourage and the use of tools that sustain them are close to the legal border line, because of regulations dating from decades. Yes, law is lagging far behind…so much that some will advise you “not to care about it”. But the risk is actual and huge. The point is not to break all what exists down but to find a new balance that fits today’s context. In the meanwhile, this is one more reason not to go even if it would make sense.

- the future of businesses will depend on the people that will make it. Provided they have the right mindset and toolkit for the upcoming years, not for the past ones. The education system needs a fix too.

- infrastructure that will sustain both local and global growth. A wide scale fiber program is as essential today as railroads were one century ago.

- since it’s all about global challenges that are quite beyond what businesses can do, we need a long term vision at the countries level. And we’re still far from that. For instance, a couple of months ago the French government installed a “Digital National Council”. Quite a praiseworthy decision in a country where “digital” is a strange, poorly known and even scary thing fior elites still stuck between the 60s and the 80s are are more focused on bringing the past back to life that dealing with the future. Praiseworthy initiative I said….until I had a look at who will make it up. Not to criticize those who’re in (they are recognized and legitimate professionals) but to think about those who are not. Except what I call “pipe sellers” and those who sell things through the pipes…nearly nothing. An education system expert ? A tax system expert ? An HR professional ? A labor law professional ? The lack of vision is obvious. “Digital” is only seen as a new channel to deliver contents and goods. Can it be leveraged to transform our organizations, the way work is done to drive future growth and competitiveness ? Is this question worth ? Of course it is. is it a part of the national ambition ? Not at all because this ambition does not exist and none of our leaders gets a thing about “digital”. If they do there would not be a state secretary dedicated to the “digital economy” but the minister of economy would be in charge of all that.

I’d also like to remind that, because they were not good at knowledge work, businesses had to find their profitability elsewhere in the last decades. On financial markets. If you’re looking for some of the causes of the financialization of economy that lead to the extremes we know you have a part if the answer here : their inability to turn themselves into knowledge organizations because of the constraints of an economy that’s still designed for industrial work and only for that.

If we also take into account how much the knowledge economy shares with the service economy, we can understand how big the challenge is.

Knowledge work exist. Knowledge workers too. The potential in terms of growth and jobs is obvious. But knowledge economy is still a dream while, beyond what businesses can do, it’s a new society model to be implemented if we want to build foundations for tomorrow’s growth.

Without such an approach, many will find that enterprise 2.0 or social business initiatives have too little impact, are too soft or not enough something. Don’t try to find the reasons anywhere else. As well as we’ll overlook the real problems, everything we’ll do at the enterprise scale will look very futile.

1°) Because it’s an european event

Cases and experiences are often shared nationwide. French ones in France, German ones in Germany etc… This event is a unique occasion to compare and benchmark things from all over Europe with, for example AXA, BASF, Lufthansa, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, Danone, IBM, Alcatel-Lucent, Lyonnaise des Eaux, Allianz, Saint-Gobain, Bayer, JC Decaux…and many others.

2°) Because of top level speakers

A look at the speakers list will be enough. Many VPS, directors…that will speak about the strategic dimension of projects that are deeper than giving their information system a facelift. As for experts that will also be speaking, I think their names are very familiar to you. The focus will be on strategic projects, value creation…what leads to the next point.

3°) Because the nature of the discussion is dramatically shifting

As we can see, the point is not about knowing how to bring social media in the workplace anymore. At least, not for most speakers. The real question is about designing a new model for the enterprise to face today’s challenges, how to create value in a complex and unpredictable context, what do organizational experience means in 2012. The agenda perferfectly reflects this…

4°) Because of the Keynotes

In addition to talks and discussions on cases and best practices, a conference should also bring something more in term of vision and sense. Something that will shape the business for the next years. So you may like to see :

- Rawn Shah,  social business transformation expert at IBM (also author of  social networking for business) and Yves Caseau (Vice President Bouygues Telecom, author of  Processus et enteprise 2.0) discussing about social and community approaches and how it will impact processes and new excellence models.

- Richard Collin (Grenoble Business School- Nextmodernity) ans Jean-Christophe Kugler (Renault) discussing the new organizational models as well as the future of processes and workflows

- Dion Hinchcliffe will be talking about the evolution of business models and key success factors for organizational excellence.

5°) Because of the format

No one way speech here. Each session includes a discussion with other practionners, experts and the audience. So the audience has time to ask questions and challenge the speakers. The conference is organized so that speakers and audience have time to exchange and debate and the time allowed for discussions is quite the same as for speeches.

That’s all… for more information, please visit the ‘Enterprise 2.0 Summit here.

The registration page is here...and people who register before december 17th will get a 800€ discount.

See you there !

People talk a lot about social business, enterprise 2.0 or similar concepts to refer to new ways to organize work, new relationships between people and between people and their work. But that’s only the smallest part of a global transformation that impacts the whole economy, a transformation that need to be taken into account if we don’t want all the efforts made at a micro level to change the way people work to be irrelevant with the economic structures that exist at a macro level.

Taking into account the deep change of the nature of economy and the relationships between players (not only economic ones) does only not mean  stating that the world is changing and urging people and organizations to change. That’s what has been done for years and we have not admit that was not enough. It’s about aligning the macro context with the new nature of economy, to make efforts that are undertaken at a micro level bear fruits.

We’re heading towards new value creation models that don’t adapt very well to manufacturing and taylorian ones that have been set up to help things in the past. I already mentioned the accounting side of the problem…and that’s only a part of the issue.

Today, value is created through information sharing, connecting people and knowledge, in a networked and decentralized way. In fact…not exactly. To be more precise, this decentralized and connected world works in the background of the economy we know, making it work faster, better, even in a more balanced and responsible way for those for make the most of its new potential. This background activity works both inside and outside enterprises, bridging both worlds. On the other hand, this background world need to make sense for people involved in to work well. They need to know in which way it could be beneficial to them. It’s very well explained in this McKinsey post, titled  “the second economy“.

If the “first” economy, the one we know and see in our everyday lives, works according to well known logics and rules for what’s about people’s contribution to value creation and and what they get from it (even if the balance of the system is more and more questioned), there’s no such thing for the second economy. It relies on the invisible, voluntary and often unsolicited work of lots of people, in either their personal or business lives. The problem is that it creates value and improves competitiveness for the visible economy while there is no remuneration model for participants who created value for others.

For instance, inside organizations, it’s about all the “over the flow” dynamics that are peculiar to enterprise 2.0 or social business. Participation into communities, open innovation, knowledge sharing to help others. Globally speaking, a whole part of the digital economy now relies on these invisible anonymous players (you and I….) : sharing, “like”, “+1″, communities, crowdsourcing are the most visible parts of the system. Who’s making the most of it ? Other anonymous, businesses…

Everything seems to be working fine so why should be talk about it ? First because it does not work that well, or nor as well as it should or could. Second because it may stop working and collapse if no one pays attention to the players of this second economy, their contribution to a system that does not pays off for them.

Of course, we can say that, in this system, people’s motivations are of a new kind. The pleasure of giving and learning. Recognition. Reputation. That’s right. But it does not work on a very large scale, on a macro level, and even less in the current changing economic context.

As it’s written in the McKinsey post, the first economy creates less and less jobs and relies more and more on the second one that relies itself on voluntary activities that cost nothing. They day when both will be well articulated well reach the following situation : more and more value created on the one side with no repercussion for those who helped to create it on the other side. If contributors, in the meanwhile, lose their job, see their incomes decreasing, suffer from more pressure, there are chances they question the way the system works and stop participating.

Today, one of the major barrier to involving people in such dynamics in the workplace is that they don’t get anything from it (either qualitative or quantitative) or the fact managers have no interest in letting “their” resources contributing to other’s value. If we want intrapreneurs employees we’ll need to understand all the consequences of the system and reward people with more than just fine feelings (should I add lots of employees are  in the red at the end of the month). In the same way, the day when internauts will become mature enough to understand that by “liking” a page they contribute to marketing actions for free, they help Facebook making money, they even destroy some job…they’ll question the “value” of a “like” and claim their piece of the cake. They’ll remind that, in 2012, some said that this economy was generating lot of value but few jobs…and understand why.

In short, when value creation needs less and less formally identified people that bear fruits from it and more and more informal contributors that are not involved in any formal processes, it’s time to create the mechanisms that will balance the system if we don’t want it to collapse.

But things are not that gloomy. We “just” need to focus on how contribution to value creation and rewards works together in an economy that’s is becoming more and more intrapreneurship and value networks both inside and outside the enterprise. It raises the question of “personal business models” for people involved in the system. Making such models possible and define how they work, the balance between people and groups. Lots of challenges in the pipeline for HR…but not only : it’s more than an business issue, it’s a society one.

If no one pays attention to this, one day will come that in the version 2.0 of Maslow Pyramid, everyone is not at the top and that most of those who are asked to participate are not looking for self-fulfilment but meeting very basic needs. What is, today, a nice to have will become a way of living, so it will be able to pass remuneration issues over silence anymore.

NB : this second or background economy does not only connect people but also machines. The role of machine will increase as they become smarter, forcing people to become more relevant, find other ways to bring more added value if they don’t want to be pushed out of the system. To learn more about this point, please read Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. More to come soon on this blog.

I’ve been observing many organizations on they journey to new forms of organization, no matter if it’s called enterprise 2.0 or social business, and the least I can say is that some of my early convictions are being reinforced day after day. Don’t worry, this is not about any outstanding disruptive concept or awesome discovery, but only common sense that can apply to any project. But, on the other hand, the only outstanding thing about this is the fact lots have believed and made others believe that so basic principles would not apply here for such a long time. A little but like if Boeing or Airbus started designing a new aircraft saying “for this one we’ll consider that gravity does not exist”.

In other words

1°) It’s easy to start with small shiny projects and end with a nice end result even it if means to make things more attractive that they actually are.

2°) Counting on passion and keen interest help doing this easily. But the further you’ll want to go, with a greater ambition and and wider scope, the more a rational approach focusing on operation efficiency will be needed.

3°) If we compare the progress curve with a hill to climb, a time comes when passion and interest aren’t enough. Even if they can conceal the lack of work on sense and alignment at the very beginning, adoption logics show their limits one day or the other. Something more is needed to climb the last mile.

3°) Talking about sense and alignment means making this new operating model logical, understood, coherent in the context of work. Making it structural. This can’t be done without rethinking management practices and making business processes evolve, what’s been a taboo for a long time even if things are slowly changing.

4°) Making a break in the middle of the journey is not possible. No one can say “I’m going to this point but not further…I don’t want to handle such or such kind of issues”. At this point the comparison with a hill is quite relevant : who stops on the middle of the way does not stay immobile but regresses. As a matter of fact, even the more engaged zealots are returning back on earth, tired of swimming against the current, adoption behaviors that go against the very nature of their organization and even against their own interest. So they end in letting things go.

In short, one can install any software, fall into the community illusion, thinking that making people participate in addition to their work in above the the flow communities will be enough. If nothing is done to proceed to the newt next, interest and motivation will decrease because of lack of coherence, direct benefits.

I’m even ready to bet that many of yesterday and today’s so-called successes will be only souvenirs in one or two years. When the community bubble, disconnected from the reality of operations will burst, when programs relying only one people’s willingness and passion will fail and, with them, window-dressing projects.

Guess what ? It’s more or less the conclusions of a recent McKinsey study. What does it say ?

In the study we can learn than bringing new social approaches and tools in the organization actually  generates some added value. We also learn that, will time, more and more organizations have reached this step. But we’re also told something much more important. Compared to last year’s study, the number of organizations that are well advanced in the change process has decreased.

What’s the difference between the ones and the others ? The business process side. Like it or not, it’s what structures work and align it with value creation. Anything that does not impact them ends by looking secondary, even futile.

Respondents expect social technologies to modify many of their organizations’ current processes. In addition, many believe that entirely new processes could arise if barriers to use—cultural obstacles, for example—fall (Exhibit 8). The respondents affiliated with fully networked organizations are the likeliest to believe that greater process change will occur in their own organizations. In larger numbers than respondents in other clusters, they think that social technologies will lead their companies to adopt entirely new processes under current conditions and to do so even more aggressively if all constraints were removed.

 

But the most valuable learning is that so one can stop half-way to avoid questioning the organization’s deepest principles and tackle sensitive areas. As a matter of fact those who don’t try to make it to the end of the road slowly step back and regress. Consequently, all the undertaken efforts will be vain because, in the end, the organization will logically get back to the starting point. What should remind us that the only person that knows what an organization can make out of such projects is the person who usually asks the question, not the ones it’s being asked to.

Another notable thing considering the discussing on whether organization should decide to face the crisis by strengthening the current structure or by changing it :

Companies should prepare for more substantial disruptions. Since many executives believe that significant changes will occur as (or if) constraints on social tools and technologies are lifted, companies that can create change themselves—instead of reacting to it—are likely to benefit the most.

It seems clear that rather than opposition to change or reaction, the ability to create one’s own change is what will define the survivors.

As a conclusion, we’re talking about strategies that can’t work with halve-measures. The vague stacking of communities on the top of existing organizations, the deployment of a software which use have to be found, the “I would like to change without changing anything” attitude is not enough. Without a global plan, projects are doomed to fail.