Organizations don’t (only) need builders

May 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : it’s a shared assumption that enterprises need doers. But, pushed to its limit, these logics do not always mean improvement but, paradoxically, stagnation if not regression. As a matter of fact, “doing” and “building” often means adding things to what exists without taking time to unravel it even when it goes against what has to be implemented. It has a well known consequence : a pile of orders, rules and contradictory processes that cause the opposite of what’s expected : lost, employees do anything but what they’re expected to, don’t take initiatives because they always go against an existing rule or, on the contrary, make failure to respect the rules the new rule. Before building, instead of adding, organizations need people who clean things up. Tomorrow’s organizations are organizations that remove things more than they add.

I recently wrote a post on the myth of “superman manager” that was a barrier to any significant evolution of this role. My intent, in this post, is to go further in the reflection. Behind all that, there’s the idea according to which the only people that matter are the “doers”. At first sight that seems obvious. But it highly depends on what we mean by “doing”.

I won’t elaborate once more on the fact that, for many, “doing” means acting in a visible way and micro-managing.

“Doing” also means leaving one’s trace, one’s mark. And that’s not only an individual issue but also a collective one because the whole organization is acting the same may. Managers’ job being to make things work, they try to take the necessary steps. At the organization level, all the managing body is heading in the same direction : taking steps to solve problems and move forward.

That’s where things often go wrong.

Is something doing wrong ? No problem, a new layer of tools, procedures and rules is implemented. Should things dysfunction a little time later ? The same method will be applied. Organizations have been piling layers of tools and rules supposed to make the organization more efficient for decades. Each time with the satisfaction of having done things well for those who have “built” the solution. In fact they often added their own repair patch to the patches others added before them.

At the moment enterprises are making a move toward enterprise 2.0 or social business there’s no doubt they’ll use the same old good methods. New tools and rules that will make sure that the right usage (because it’s all about usage) will be adopted.

So employees will have to sort tools and arbitrate between 15 layers of procedures that prescribe them 15 different behaviors in a given context. The result is often farcical situations where, having to comply with many conflicting obligations, employees do not respect any of them.

For example, I’m often asked “how to be sure this community will work”. My answer is often miles away from the expected one that establishes community managers as the saviours as dying community systems. Sticking to a very strict definition of what a community is, I’m convinced that a facilitation system may help when things makes sense but can’t make miracles. In other words :

• If the community really exists, it will work by its own. A little facilitation can improve things to some extent.

• If the community exists but is not alive, there’s no reason to add systems that will make people go against the systemic and corporate rules, even against their own interest. In this case, the solution is not to add anything new but remove the barriers tha prevent people to make a move from intention to action.

• If the community does not exist there’s no reason to set up a system that will create it. What has to be created is the interest toward a topic, the “community feeling” will follow and we’ll end in one of the two above mentioned cases.

To state things in a more simple way : what prevents new models from working and from solving today’s problems is what has been implemented to solve yesterday’s problems and seldom makes sense today. Examples are more than numerous.

So, lets have a quick tour :

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Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Customer service : avoid being the victim of you social media success

December 27, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : while some businesses are puzzled towards the lack of success of their customer service initiatives on social media, others are trying to find solutions to face the increase of contacts and interactions. Hence the hasty conclusion that social media don’t scale. That’s a big mistake. The only fact that the point of contact is overloaded shows that the media scale. What does not is the bandwidth of the system that prevents from processing all customers requests. This limit is not peculiar to the media but to the processus it supports and that can only be removed by organizational actions. The capacity of the point of contact, should it be called community manager or anything else, can be improved by adding more resources, improving the system, redefining people’s tasks and, most of all, refocusing on exception management.

I often say that organizations that use social media for customer relationship purposes split in two groups : those that won’t take any benefit from it and those that will be overwhelmed with their success. In both cases, things have to be made to improve the situation.

• Those that don’t benefit from their initiative : poor understanding of customer expectations, interaction refusal,  absence of a service logic in communication activities.

• Those that are victim of their success : their understood what was the good positioning, had the right proposition of value for their customers…and were so successful that they can’t keep up with the load, what prevent them for keeping their promises and, then, creates a deceptive feeling among their customers that spreads and harm their reputation.

Today, I’d like to focus on this second group.

To find themselves in such a situation that can be described as a “rich people problem”, these businesses understood that beyond community management they had to have a processus approach. Since they offered an actual added value, they met their audience. But, either because of an exceptional event or a linear increase of the workload, they can’t keep up with their commitment anymore.

I’ve been observing something for a couple of months : many organizations that are successful with external facing social media initiatives realize that the internal organization has to be aligned too. Community managers (or whatever you call them) need to interact with internal resources to find solutions to customer problems what implies they can identity and mobilize them. So it’s an expert location issue. If tools and organization don’t make these actions possible, community management becomes a bottleneck where problems pile up without being solved. In conclusion, a scalable channel was used to replicate the same kind of bottlenecks that exist on the traditional channels they were supposed to make up for.

Should iy be executed in a linear or networked way, a processus has a constraint : its bandwidth, determined by the step that at the lowest processing capability. In our example, community management is the constraint of the processus. Said in other words, improving anything in the customer service processus will be without any effect and won’t change anything for customers since the limit is the community manager(s).

Like many airlines, British Airways is using twitter to solve customers problems. Everything works well in normal times but when snow begins to block european airports the switchboard explodes, as this tweet from R. Ray Wang mentioned :

In fact I think that this conclusion is a mistake : this is not the media that doesn’t scale but there a bottleck that limits the scalability of the processus it supports. The only fact that they can’t keep up with tweets is a proof that the media scale, since the amout of incoming messages exploded. What does not scale is the processing.

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Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Being done with the enterprise 2.0 value discussion

October 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

Summary : many still wonder what new tools will bring to their organization and still have trouble visualizing the benefits. The reason is simple ; they imagine these tools in their current organization while it’s difficult to see their contribution out of a new way of working. Organizations built rules to accomodate to the constraints of existing tools. If these constraints are removed by new tools, organizations have to built new rules that will replace the current ones.

I recently found this post on the value (or lack of) of a new technology. It applies to new technologies in a general way, applying it to social software is very instructive.

First, let’s try to answer a few simple questions.

1°) What’s the main power of this technology

It makes information sharing easier and more efficient as well as enterprise-wide discussions related to business issues, the whole taking place out of organization and application silos. It allows anybody to identify, mobilize, put together all the information, data, expertises and people on a scale that was impossible before because of the above mentioned silos. So it allows, in fine, to provide employees with what they need to be efficient in what is called the “knowledge economy”.

2°) What are the limitations this technology is removing

The difficulty sharing unstructured data, identify information and people out of a silo.

3°) What rules were built to accomodate these limitations ?

In the context of a given business process, organizations started with the assumption the information needed for delivery and decision making was not findable. So they built operation models that rely on preset rules aiming at minimizing exceptions even it it meant to deliver an acceptable result in any situation but never something adapted to a very specific need. Assuming this, knowing that people will never have to look out of the process, the time allocated to informal-out-of-process-and-silos-collaboration was considered as wasted time…what impacted the way people were measured.

List to be continued…

4°) What rules should be implemented now  ?

I won’t elaborate that much on this point because it’s specific to any situation and many contextual elements are needed to give an answer that applies to a specific business, industry, business process. But it may look like “service oriented organizations“, social routines,articulating structured and unstructured work activities, rethinking quality…

Taht’s only the starting point of a deeper investigation that has to be conducted within a given organization. Anyway, conclusions are the same than those I made about the ROI of enterprise 2.0.

- technology has no value by itslelf

- technology should allow to to things that couldn’t be done before

- rules were set to accomote the limits of previous technogies. The new technology has no value is old rules are not replaced with new ones adapted to the new potential that can now be harnessed.

In one sentence : rules have been set to accomodate constraints. If any technology removes constraints, rules have to be changed or the technology will be useless.

To end, when organization wonder “how to think” their social network or any social media project, they should wonder what rules have to be removed and what should replace them. Designing such projects without thinking a new way of working is removing all the value of the project from its beginning. It’s also the evidence that, to convince an IT dept,  a value co-construction process has to be implemented with business people because it’s simply not their role to care about how business is done.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

From the enterprise that adds to the one that removes

July 16, 2009 By 2 Comments

Still in the “how to adapt the way we work to new challenges”, a frequent question is to know how to get employees involved.

If we rely on what I said here, three cases can be distinguished.

- when employees follow rules, processes.

- when employees are left alone and have to go out of the usual patterns to achieve their goals.

- when the organizaiton relies on employee’s willingness to participate.

I won’t tackle the third one here because it’s marginal in comparison with businesses main issues and needs a specific approach. But the two first still remain.

In the first case, which is about enriching an existing process, one or two rules have to be added. I specify that adding rules doesn’t necessarily mean adding an extra workload : it’s often about making public things that used to be kept for one’s use, that were only shared by two people (debrieffing a mission or a project with a superior…) because there was no relevant way to sharte them, or that were shared through irrelevant tools (email…)

In the second case, it’s the contrary. What can make people switch to an “adhoc” work mode in order to attain their assigned goals ? The answer can be found in the difference between a “push” and a “pull” mode : in one case the organization has to add pressure to move forward, in the other it has to remove constraints.

For some reasons you will easily find by yourself, no one never think about removing things while managing a transformation project. Managers, project leaders, executives have their pride, which is about what they built, not what they remove. Building, adding, shows that one is really doing somethings, it increases one’s status. Removing make people think you have no solution, you try the easy way. To some extent it’s considered as lazyness. Even if removing needs a lot of work, even if it’s more complex that adding something, organization only pay attentions to those who do, those who add. Anyone who build a huge labyrinthine system will be rewarded, not the one who removes barriers what is seen as a “non-achievement” that is not worth being on a CV.

Just imagine what this kind of attitude would look like in medicine. It would be like treating appendicitis not by removing an useless organ but by making a difficult transplantation. You can find the opposite example in the software industry where many OS or softwares are made by endlessly adding new layers on an old base no one masters anymore, because things have been added for decades without simplifying anything. Ten years later, we all can see what it means in terms of user experience, maintenance etc…

Businesses who will do things the right way will be those who will learn how to reward those who remove instead of endlessly adding useless layers that harm the organization.

Years ago I wad told that the evidence that a software has reached maturity can be seen by its designer’s ability to make it more simple and remove useless things instead of adding unneeded features, a pretence of progess that is in fact a true regression. Some industries discovered the LEAN method, knowledge industries need to learn from them.

Then, and then only, organizations will reach a kind a maturity.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , ,

Efficiency, performance, constraints and things 2.0

April 16, 2009 By 3 Comments

We saw in a previous post that one of the best ways to improve performance was not to push to people to make impossible things but to get rid of the constraints that crub their performance. Once that said, if the vision is understandable by everyone (rather than trying to push something large in a blocked thin pipe, better unblock and enlarge the pipe), it’s still useful to see what can be done in the day to day work.

So let’s find out what those constraints are and how to get rid of them. This will also be a good way to understand that enteprise 2.0 is not a goal by itself but a trigger to achieve organizational goals.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,