Road to enterprise 2.0 : changing behaviors (only) is neither enough nor perennial

March 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the switch from a traditional organizational model to enterprise 2.0 or social business needs a change in behaviors. This evolution often needs specific actions toward individuals to convince them to change the way they work. But is it sufficient and perennial ? It seems that the answer is “no”. Behaviors are determined by outside elements that impose themselves to employees in the context of work. Any action aiming only at changing behaviors will fail one day or the other. Solutions that work on the social web where systemic constraints that weight on people are lighter than in the enterprise are not viable in the workplace.

We endlessly repeat that a successful enterprise 2.0 (or social business…) project needs to convince users. That’s a fact but skeptics or dishonest people have arguments against this assumption. According to the number of things people do in the workplace and behaviors they adopt without being convinced, even being conscious that what they do is not what they should do, we could question a lots of things. Anyway, we all acknowledge thatorganizational change needs behavioral change and that the latter needs conviction. Evangelize, show, demonstrate, encourage…day after day.

If this approach is unavoidable, I don’t think it is either enough or perennial. As a matter of fact, even if the majority is preaching adoption through conviction, I’m more likely to believe in the trio : simplification, sense, alignment.

Sense and alignment because not only it makes things more obvious but also doesn’t force employees to fight against the system. Simplification because I’ve never seen anyone refusing somethings that makes his job easier…provided the two previous conditions are met. As a matter of fact if “easier” means swimming against the current and facing colleagues’ and even superiors’ disapproval, employees often switch back to less risky things.

The above statement shows one thing : when one manages to convince people to change their behaviors, the center of gravity of the organization makes them step back one day or the other. Why ? Because the behaviors they leave behind are the result of their adaptation to a system. A system that defines their objectives, the way they’re evaluated, their progression in the hierarchy, even imposes behaviors that are the consequence of old habits and corporate culture. And, of course, the management model.

Remember what I wrote here on people that can, alone, without being conscious, wipe-out all the benefits generated by others. That’s quite a similar situation : the person in question, because located at a strategic point of the flow of work (most of time because of his position or expertise) is slowing down the flow of work and even blocking it because of his behaviors. And what tells him to behave this way ? The system and the organizational structure.

That’s why, in the mentioned post, I suggested targeted actions to fix this. Targeted on a given person because it’s ability to change is the center of the problem but not by using the person as a lever (convincing him, urging him to do something) but by using levers that will impact the system around the person.

How many people did we saw embracing change with joy and happiness before giving up, disenchanted ? They made the effort of changing but while their environment was not changing they got exhausted. We often hear that, step by step, anyone change under the influence of his colleagues and that makes change sustainable. It’s a half-truth. It’s, in fact, the case when the mass managed to make the system change by impacting those who were driving the system. But if the latter don’t react we all know what happens on a long term perspective.

Actions aiming at making a person or a group change by convincing them of the usefulness of new behaviors are catalysts. But outside of a systemic approach their effect is seldom sustainable. Any approach relying on evangelization and conviction only has its limit even it looks like an easier way to make things change.  Unlike what happens on social platforms on the web : constraints are lighter so it’s easy for users to get out of their system by themselves.

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My takes on the Enterprise 2.0 Summit

November 2, 2010 By 2 Comments

As you may certainly know, I was I Franckfurt last week to attend the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. Like last year I found this edition very dense and highmy qualitative. Many things have already been written since thursday so I’ll only highlight a few points a found essential.

1°) It’s all about the format

Even when you have very interesting cases, it all depends in the way they’re presented. The format that forces the speaker to be very factual in 20 minutes before answering the audience during the next 20 minutes makes things very operational. Enterprise 2.0 has been around for a couple of years now and, in my opinion, the time of inspirational discourses saying “believe of die”, “have the faith” is over. Attendees are expecting facts, numbers and the ability to discuss with the speaker in order to raise the points that really interest them and don’t want show homes and fireworks. Since nearly all the attendees were practitionners, we had the opportunity to  listen to very valuable conversations, much more than when speakers at talking to the echochamber.

There were also expert sessions that were more about stragegy but, once again, no soliloquies. Each keynoted ended with a panel and a discussion with the audience. The best way to make sure tha expert talks benefit to the audience.

2°) Europe loosings its hand-ups and finding its way

We often consider that european businesses are more cautious than others when it comes to experimenting new things and more shy when it comes to talk about their initiatives. It seems that times are changing. With Océ, Renault, BMW, Deutshe Telecom, BASF among others, I saw the best case gathering I’ve ever seen. Most of all we we told all the mechanisms of their projects, had insider views and avoided the syndrom of many presentations when, at the end, we tell ourselves “What a great case ! But…in fact,  what did they do, how, and what were the results ?”. During the discussion that followed my session on cultural boundaries, Lee Bryant said that it was high time that european businesses use their difference as a lever and forget the usual reflex that consists in saying “it works in the US so it won’t work here”. I think that it’s the way things are going, considering the way the cases were presented : technical, explaining the whys and the hows. Much more rational than inspirational what is also a demonstration of how they were conceived and implemented with a focus on sense and value rather than engagement and passion.

Still in my session discussion, Lee said that european organization must stop having a defensive attitude toward “imported” concepts. That’s what’s happening. I say enterprises happy to have met their european peers and saying “finally we’re on the right way and, unlike what we could think, we’re not left behind at all”.

Toujours dans la discussion qui a suivi ma session, Lee Bryant disait qu’il fallait cesser d’être sur la défensive systématique face à des concepts “importés”. C’est ce qui est en train de se passer je pense. J’ai vu des entreprises heureuses d’avoir du rencontrer leurs pairs européens et repartir en se disant “finalement on est sur la bonne voie, et on est loin d’être en retard comme on le pensait”.

3°) More processes, less community management

It confirms what I wrote after the last Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and even reinforces it. In Boston some raised the question of tackling business processes but there were still some doubts about how relevant it was to enterprise 2.0. In Franckfurt it was a no-brainer. The need for tying any project to business processes was obvious for anybody. And the workshop I conducted on business processes and enterprise 2.0 was full in a few minutes so I had to refuse people. Does it mean that community management is not seen as being outdated ?

Not at all. It was mentionned in every case and in many keynotes but as a part of a global system, not less, not more. But one thing is sure : it was not the first concern of conference attendees who were more intereted in project design, its mechanisms, the way to deliver concrete and measurable benefits. I can’t remember having heard many questions on this subject and Bjorn Negelmann,  recognized after the conference that attendees did not even consider it a a future skill set.

In my opinions, both have to articulate. But there’s been an historical focus on community management that made people forgot about the other part of the issue and, most of all, employees need to start from what they know to move toward new models.

I’ll elaborate more on my workshop in a future post but you can already refer to this old post and read Samuel Driessen’s notes.

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Fun at work or fun in work ?

August 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

Résumé : albeit the funny side of social media is often used as an argument for adoption, we have to admit that even if organization prefer to have happy employees they ae not ready to pay to make them have fun at work. Either we consider that’s regrettable form of schizophrenia or the consequence of a culture that dates from another century, facts are facts. So fun should only be the happy side effect of something else above all…be free. Used in the workplace, social media offer possibilities like nothing beforme : more than creating funny spaces and times in the workplace, they allow to make fun a part of people’s work, making it at the same time a consequence, a lever,and a part of a continuous improvement logic that interest and reassure organizations.

Amongst the issues that inspire me contradictory feelings about enterprise 2.0, fun at work is not the least.

There’s a belief shared by everybody in the workplace : employees who enjoy what they do are more efficient and it has a positive impact on work atmosphre. One of the best way to make it happen is, to some extent, to make work more fun. In the same way, everybody knows the value of a good atmosphere in the workplace. Note the difference between both : in one case we talk about the nature of work, in the other the context where it takes place : some people may hate they job but love their company, colleagues and the overall context (despite it never lasts for a long time).

A part of enterprise 2.0 value proposal is to bring fun, some even saying that in such a context the intranet looks like a big party were all employees gather. I fully suscribe to this point of view but, at the same time, I’m very uncomfortable with it

- because I experienced it (and still doing), I can tell it changes the way you interact with others, it improves relationships and, even if I consider my internal social network as a business too, I prefer to connect to it when I open my computing rather than openning my mailbox (in addition to the fact it’s a more efficient tool too…).

- no organization would refuse to make their employees happier.

- there’s a lot of organizations (even a majority ?) where the concept of fun at work is not seen as being compatible with work. It means that employees are wasting their time and would be more productive if they didn’t have fun or that they are not busy enough. Anyway, in such organizations, most of employees don’t want managers to think they’re having fun (and managers don’t want their superiors to think they’re having fun too even if they’d like…all are human being and share the same DNA). Maybe it’s a pity but the fact is things are more complicated that we would like them to be.

- most companies would be ready to invest to make their employees happy. None to make them have fun at work. I’m not saying that no one understands how it matters, but it’s impossible to come with this argument alone in front of any executive to get fundings for such a project.

- to some extent, even if the “productivity” side of enterprise 2.0 is seducing, many organizations may fear its “funny side”, only for self-esteem and image reasons. So that’s an argument that has to be used very cautiously.

So…how to do ? [Read more...]

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Need to take users by the hand ? Remember they only have two !

July 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It does not matter things are seen from the people or technology point of view, since we all know that people seldom embrace new things keeping their eyes shut and without questionning (even more in the workplace) we all understand that users have to be taken by the hand and accompanied. On the other hand, the failure of many strategies aiming at doing so show that many change programs do not know where to find the hand or have a wrong idea about its location.

It means that beyond the myth of multitasking, employees focus on two things and that all their attention goes there. It’s not a matter of lack of goodwill but they can’t do more if they want to do things well and keep their concentration. So any other issue is seen as peripheral, and dealing with it will force employees either to make it superficially or to stop doing something important, come back to it later and make up the delay later. Nothing pleasant at all.

Every day, people have one hand in their email client and the other in their structured activities (call it process, workflow…) and the tools that help them to manage and deal with these activities. The first is their principal means of communication, the only that even if it’s not properly used, keep them in touch with everyone. The second is the reason why they have been hired, what they are evaluated on, what they have to do (and do it well) before thinking of doing anything else.

That can help us to draw some conclusions in terms of change management. Since, in order to grab a hand we have to know where it is, it’s impossible to do anything without taking into account the email and its place in employees workaday life or the relationship between the new things and the structured activities. Any other angle won’t impact employees and will fail. Then, we’ll have to explain how to put their hands elsewhere won’t prevent them from doing what they used to do before, what is essential to their job.

Any other approach would be like telling a driver “take you hands off the wheel” without telling him that, on top of being enabled to do much more things, he’ll be provided by something that will at least help him to drive better than with a steering wheel.

It also has consequences on technology for both companies that try to implement social software and vendors who provide solutions to these companies. There is an incredible number on players on this market despite it has reached a consolidation phase and each of them is pushing a different approach, focusing on a specific kind of social activity to seduce buyers. The truth is there are only two valid approaches and not one more. The rest is only marketing blah-blah and even if the verbiage may sound seducing, it never survives to the confrontation with real business.

No solution can be sustainably adopted on a large scale in any organization if it doesn’t meet at least one of the following requirements (both is better) :

- high integration in email clients. It can come in different ways, from the most simple one (alerts / notifications) to the most accomplished (widget in the client, shared data and services)

- integration with tools that are used for structured activities (CRM, ERP, BPM…even ECM). Interactions and conversations often come from the need to solve a business problem…guess where these problems emerge and are identified ?

Many lines can be taken in front of employees, many tools can be proposed. The truth is much simple : who does not tackle one of these points of entry is saying things that make no sense for employees, adds problems without bringing any solution.

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Enterprise 2.0 adoption : it’s about comfort

June 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Times are changing. After having spend years discussing the “what and why”, the enterprise 2.0 world is now focusing on the “how” what is quite a good thing. So we discuss a lot adoption strategies, a wording I’m not comfortable with but that will be used in this blog because I have nothing better to suggest.

The challenge is both simple and complex at the same time. It’s about bringing new ways to collaborate in the workplace, positionning and articulating them with what’s existing, while taking the software side into consideration. Generally, we know where we start from (even if I often recommend a deep audit to avoid the biases caused by the misrepresentation people may have of the way their own business is doing) and with a good methodology and good advisors it’s not hard to know where to do. But finding the right way to get there is not the easiest part of the work.

One may be tempted to directly bring employees from the point A to the point B by selling him the approach in a nice-looking gift box. We now know that it seldom works and employee are blamed for refusing change. In my opinion it’s a too easy shortcut because it relies on the assumption that people go from A to B simply by pressing a on-off switch whereas it’s about travelling through a road. And when it comes to make a long trip in a foreign and unknown land, we’re not all created equal.

When we talk about a starting point, we don’t only mean the current practices in the workplace (that are not even unform but are often aligned by dumbing down) but also personal practices.That’s an important point because a part of the issue is related to social media which is the first significant example of adoption of general public tools in the enterprise world. But we also know that people won’t adopt at work at work behaviors they don’t have in their own private life. So it’s important to know what is their actual state of adoption before going further. Do they use such or such tool ? Are they passive ? Active ? Connectors ? Only readers ? It really matter even if these practices will have to be professionalized. This has to be assessed at both individual and collective levels because we’re talking about collective practices. If 2% employees are heavy users and 98% refuse to have a Facebook account, even if the 2% are a real opportunity, the 90% are the limitating factor. Encouraging the firsts won’t be of any use if the others don’t make any progress.

In order to make the 98% make some progress we can wait for the “practice leaders” to help them. It may take some time, leaders can discourage. That’s a good idea but maybe some facilitation is needed. And to go further we need to go beyond the way they master tools and their capacity to adopt new behaviors. We need to care about their comfort !

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Are you piloting or experimenting ?

May 6, 2010 By 3 Comments

When an organization tries to embrace something new, the first steps are made in a very cautious way and that’s logical. Even when there’s a clear idea of what is being done, things have to be tried on a small scale to validate some things, compare the plan and the reality. I don’t even mention cases when something is tried without having any idea of the purpose and of the possible benefits that can be expected.

This applies to many things and enterprise 2.0 is not an exception. So, even if this post will be more about this topic, many things can be generalized to other fields.

I won’t rewrite the debate that took place last summer about knowing if this preliminary steps made sense or not. As a matter of fact, when a critical mass is needed, a smaller scale may made this steps more or less relevant. In concrete words, the question is about :

1°) Knowing what is being done

2°) How it’s called and explained.

[Read more...]

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Is enterprise 2.0 possible without positive thinking ?

March 16, 2010 By 2 Comments

I’ll start with a statement that’s nothing new and won’t surprise anyone. We are all different, with our cultures, values, expectations, and even if things may look quite uniform at a local scale, the diversity of our world becomes obvious when we have to work in a globalized context.

In the same way, any idea, trend, concept, carry with it a part of the culture of those who created it. May we talk about jazz, gastronomy, democracy, basketball…they crossed the borders with their creator’s values and, as time went by, managed to become implanted in many countries by embedding a part of the local culture, being revisited by locals to become acceptable according to their own identity.

One of the charasterics of enterprise 2.0 is that it’ s tinged with positive thinking, something that’s very unfamiliar to us and that we can’t really understand before having many interactions with foreign people (even if we’re sometimes made aware of it at business schools…but nothing is like real experience).

Without going too deep into details, let’s say that that a culture that promotes certain values, where people always things they could improve things, make tomorrow better than today, where work and being successful at work are seen as means to improve one’s personal life, carries genes that are not neutral at all. It makes it natural and easy for people to explore new things, to engage with others and that becomes very interesting when a new field has to be explored, most of all with the topics that are ours.

This is clearly explained here:

Successful people act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Successful people often find themselves in situations where risk and uncertainty is hanging over them and if they were to take on a negative mindset then failure would rear its ugly head. Instead high achievers embrace risk and uncertainty in difficult situations and keep a positive outlook. Nine times out of 10 usually end up with the results that they had in mind all along.

Positive attitude is extremely important, as it encourages individuals to approach each day, and each problem, with a bright outlook. In a team environment, a positive attitude encourages a team to work together with individual styles and personalities. Positive attitude is not only about choosing to have a good outlook through good times and bad, but also about learning to love what you do. I have observed that outstanding business people are successful because they deeply love their work.

The french edition of wikipedia tells us that :

• it’s supported by moral qualities such as love and work, courage, compassion, résilence, creativity, curiosity, integrity, knowledge of oneself, moderation, self control, wisdom.

• collective value and ideals are : justice, responsibility, public-spiritedness, parenthood, support, professional ethic, team spirit at work, leadership, project and tolerance.

I can’t prevent myself from thinking that, not only the behavioral logics of enterprise 2.0 can be seen there, but also that everything that deals with deployment, adoption, often leverage these values.

I can’t prevent myself either to notice that, to be direct, our culture is quite the opposite. Not better, not worse, but different. Strict separation between private and work life, work seen as a constraint and not as something that helps self-fullfillment, mistrust toward enterprises and any attempt to “swallow” the individual, to lock him up into the group. I’m exaggerating on purpose but things are very close to that….

Once we acknowledge that, what conclusion should be drawn ?

[Read more...]

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New report on the state of enterprise 2.0

March 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Cécile Demailly had the kindness to send me the report she made about the state of enterprise 2.0, a report than can be purchased here. It relies on the responses of people from 50 large organizations, often international, and the fact 48% respondants are french gives a very interesting picture of the double context (local culture in a global organization) that makes the matter unique and unsuited to generalization.

I won’t go further into the details and conclusions to preserve the interest of the document, but I’d like to share some thoughts all the same.

- numbers are consistent with my own experience, what is a good start.

- the report also tackles some issues not everyone is comfortable with. In particular : ROI, doubtful leadership, the gap between what organizations expect and what makes sense for employees. Conclusion are objective without any kind of bias.

- some new surprising angles that are very interesting : comparing adoption in B2C vs B2C contexts for instance.

- it’s consistent with the way I see things, most of all on from the employee’s perspective. I have a few posts in preparation about that and that’s true that, at least in our local context, autonomy, even when offered, does not spread through good intentions. On the contrary, its beneficiaries ask for a clear definition, a defined framework, sense.

- an interesting maturity analysis and, here again, a relevant focus on employees, on the “does it make sense, what are my challenges, my needs” instead of the “how to make them adopt this thing”. This reminds us, once again, than trying to make people happy despite of them and fufill our own dreams through them is neither efficient nor desirable.

There are also some points I’d to go deeply into. I’ve a meeting with Cécile in the next days and it will be the perfect occasion.

Enjoy your reading !

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What place for communities in collaboration ?

March 2, 2010 By 3 Comments

The switch from a compartimentalized enterprise collaborating on a small perimeter to an enterprise that harnesses mass collaboration and leverages social networks and communties is much harder than many expected.

But is “transformation” a relevant word ?

First because collaboration has many differents levels and scopes that not exclusive but complementary. Enterprise 2.0 does not mean the end of groups and groupware but brings a new dimension that helps getting rid of the known boudaries and addressed problematics that could not be before, or not in such an easy way. Then, and that’s a consequence of the previous point, because employees’ logic is to find a path to go from one logic to another without denying what they used to know and do before and still makes sense.

Communities form on a topic and is crowded by conversations about this topic. People’s driver is to share, learn, find solutions, make ideas emerge that will not immediately apply to something, answers to problems what may not have emerget yet. Unlike traditionnal formal structures, these communities have no objective to achieve at a given due date. They are more likely to be defined as background and ongoing processes than by defined things that have to be delivered at a given moment. Meanwhile, employees also collaborate into formal structures and there’s no doubt that their participation into communities improves their ability to bring the right answers into their everyday collaborative activities.

Compared with the web, 10% employees are very comfortable to participate in vibrant communities. The other 90% will only join them to find answers to problems that happened and could not be solved in the in their workaday perimeter.

This is not trivial at all and is the evidence that enterprise 2.0 only makes sense in a global framework that takes into account all the contexts people face.

• the approach must not only focus on the social dimension but on bringing some coherence to all the contexts, explain them to employees and help them to position in each one.

• tools may support a fluid circulation through all these contexts for both people and information without any break in flows and dynamics.

• the intensity of of the new practices may differ according to the context. Each context has its social side and needs but in a more and or less intense fashion. That’s not an “all or nothing” deal.

Let’s also admit than, on a cultural point of view, many organizations are not comfortable with communities and conversations but a first step maybe to focus on team efficiency, on day to day tasks, to help people and culture grow bolder.

For instance we often hear managers saying “people are here to work and not to have conversations” what is quite se same as the “I’m not here to run a social club” that Andrew McAfee used to illustrate how the “social” word was hard to het. For these people, maybe a workaday/task/project driven approach to “social” may make more sense, reassure and would help to demonstrate some benefits even if the challenge in terms of behaviors is more modest than in the “social big bang” approach.

Booz Allen Hamilton is one of the best example of successful enterprise 2.0. They started with the social and community approach. At the last Virtual enterprise 2.0 conference they told more about their future roadmap : integrated document management solution, incorporate the benefits of E2.0 methodology into structured projects and team sites. Be sure that other companies which are not BAH, this would have been the start. A few weeks ago I was on a panel a large company told that its main concern was to start from the existing and build on it.

So, we have to be aware that communities are not an end. It’s a component of a global framework and has to be considered as such and not as an exception to the way the organization operates. This also mean that community management is only a part of a global management problematic and, without articulation, community management may have few value.

Collaboration and communities

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