The collective is not always the answer

February 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

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

 

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

But do these approaches come without shortcomings ?

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

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

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

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

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

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Enterprise 2.0 and social business : what to expect in 2012 ?

January 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Résumé : what will be the enterprise 2.0 / social business in 2012 ? It will highly depends on choices organizations will make to deal with the paradox of finding ways to go out of the crisis while not having much money to invest. 2012 will certainly be the year where window window-dressing projects and deeper corporate ones will diverge as well as those aiming at adding a community layer to the existing organization vs those aiming at reinventing the organizational structure and operation models. Should the world be perfect, we’ll see budgets shift from technology to organizational transformation, from adding new layers to integrating existing ones, community approaches becoming more operations-driven, social becoming more a transformation than transplanting an external body. In a non perfect world we’d see window-dressing projects surviving a little bit before the final collapse, because of approaches too disconnected from the enterprise world to deliver results and sustain long term engagement.

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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Software & Tools, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Should organizations limit collaboration ?

April 12, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary :with the coming of social media in the workplace, organizations began to dream of a spontaneous self-driven collaboration that would get rid of rules and organization frameworks to deliver outstanding results. Today we all have to acknowledge that reality is quite different. Facing an impressive amount of possible options, employees are lost, all the more since the value proposition that’s been made to them made no sense regarding to their daily goals and constraints. Tom Davenport suggests us to limit the scope of collaboration in order to reinforce sense and focus : specific tools for a specific goal for a specific amount of time. But even if this way of doing things was proven successful with average uses, we should not throw the to throw the baby out with the bath water and forget community and serendipity principles : both can work together but are not about the same tasks, the same needs. However, Davenport’s idea may work for most people and, mot of all, directly applies to what’s key for them and impacts value creation.

With the coming of social media in the workplace, came the myth of a global, organic collaboration where everyone would collaborate with others not only to do their job but also to do awesome unexpected extra things, out of organizational silos. Years after, we have to acknowledge that it does not work. Or, at least, not the way we expected to.

The reason is quite simple to get and has been dealt with many times on this blog and many other ones. Everything started with the supposed universal and inevitable nature of networks and communities. But…

- networks shoud not be mistaken for communities…that are not teams either…

- communities are communites…and only exist by the will of people who want to more than their work, go beyond, out of the flow of their work. What is not what organization usually mean by collaboration.

- unlike the web where people using a given tool and sharing the same practices gather to do things together, most of work in the workplace happens in structured teams with known and defined people what implies that practices and tools have to be standardized within these teams There’s a big difference between gathering those who changed and change those have been gathered.

So, the “2.0 paradigmp” is still incomplete in the context of traditional production activities if not slightly improved. What reminds me of two things : [Read more...]

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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: , , , , , , , , ,

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 !

[Read more...]

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33 things to know about those who make your online social spaces live

May 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I wrote a lot about community management these last month for a simple reason: there’s so much confusion about a topic that’s said being strategic that heading for disaster and throwing the baby with the bathwater is a really actual risk. But by dint of thinking about it again and again, it seems to me that some guidelines are slowly emerging.

• That’s not because there are social medias in the workplace and that employees use them to do their work that the person in charge of managing their use is a community manager.

• A group of people doing things and interacting through social is not necessarily a community or a social network.

• A corporate social media strategy has to be driven at several levels which are often embodied by different people who have specific roles, responsabilities and objectives. These individual works has to be coordinated and articulated.

• Ca n’est pas parce qu’il y a échange entre des individus en utilisant les médias sociaux qu’on à affaire à des communautés. Ni à des réseaux sociaux d’ailleurs.

So, here’s a few things to know about all these players…

[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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Enterprise 2.0 adoption : you need both a voice and a screwdriver

December 24, 2009 By 5 Comments

This is a sequel of my previous post related to enterprise 2.0 adoption, enriched by the many discussions and comments that followed. Here’s a synthesis of what emerged from that.

• There must be someone on the driver seat

As Oscar Berg pointed out, there must be someone in the driver’s seat. Seen from this angle, of course, adoption can be driven. Rather, it has to be embodied : someone has to embody both change and novelty and carry it all with a loud, clear and intelligible voice. It’s about explaining, convincing and, in some ways, create dynamics and a kind of enthusiasm that will help things to happen. That’s the role of internal evangelists, adoption leaders and advocates.

• Enthusiasm and good words are not enough.

Even if those who are convinced, the passionate ones, the early adopters are numerous, we are forced to admit this is not enough. If it was, the adoption isue would have been solved for long and we wouldn’t be discussing it anymore. In their daily job, employees can hear the voice that says “it’s possible, it’s good, it’s beneficial….” and still prefer the status quo. Sometimes by fear but it can be dealt with with a good accompaniment. Sometimes the problem is deeper. Employees think that “yes, in a perfect world it would really be great, but it makes no sense in my particular case”. And they are often right.

John Tropea tackles a part of the issue here and here. Generally, if what the voice says is counter to what the common logic would make employees do, they won’t listen to it and follow the old rules that design their job and the way they are measured  even if they find them irrelevant. More, the benefits being inexistant if only a few people change, one has to change with his peers (or a large number of them) in a coherent way.

This pointis not about convinction or carrying a message. Even the bggest enthusiasm can’t do many things against the daily reality nnd workaday concerns. So it’s about working on alignement and make things become coherent. This is the manager’s call and has to be done as close to employees as possible. Of course the “voice” matters, it will explain things to managers, will share hints, best practices, but at the end the solution will imply a screw will be given in the organizational day to day mechanism, that will make that what the voices says will  not be only words anuymore but will be turned into facts.

This adoption depends in no way of enthusiasm and advocacy. It’s a matter of sense and alignment.

• What can be driven ?

Obviously everyone has his own vision and I won’t pretend mine is better. In my opinion, to drive something, you must be able to concretely change it by your own will and actions. One must have a hold on something to actually be able to drive it. So a part of the daily activities can be redesigned in order to align them with the pursued goal, assessment and measurement too as it was done at Cisco. But, in the other hand, and despite the hudge amount of energy spent, it’s impossible to have a hold on people’s mind, to be sure they will be convinced and change their minds. Evangelists can only do their best to make it happen but, since they don’t have any hold on the complex human mechanisme, it’s impossible to modelize what will make everyone see the light whithout any exception.

In the strict sense of the word, if activities’ transformation can be driven, leaders can only do their best to change people’s minds. We also have to acknowledge that the ratio between the ressource that are involved and the final result are more predictable in one case than in the other. [Read more...]

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Does driving adoption mean being off the point ?

November 26, 2009 By 4 Comments

I’ne never been that comfortable with the concept of adoption when applied to enterprise tools. More precisely when the point point was “driving adoption”.

Of course adoption is necessary. And, like every necessary thing, businesses can not afford not to drive it. Nothing but pure logic…but it can’t prevent me from feeling its sounds odd. I was slowly getting used to these words when Paula Thornton brought it back to my attention.

Let’s start with the meaning of words.

Driving : giving oneself the means that are necessary to achieve someting and the appropriate indications to pilot actions.

Adoption : action of making something one’s own in a voluntary way. Supposes the benefit, sense and implications are understood.

If both are necessary, I still can’t put them together in the same sentence. The reason is obvious : if adoption implies spontaneity and a choice that’s not made under duress, driving means make people do something unnatural because if it were natural people would adopt without any external intervention. Some may say that driving only means “create a breeded ground” but I don’t think that’s how companies see things : it would mean they don’t have any hold on the result and, as a result, they only try to make their best so things can happen instead of considering they have an obligation to produce results, what is not conceivable for most businesses. So driving adoptions means making people do unnatural things and such an approach explains how things are so difficult, why people don’t adopt or adopt reluctantly.

Is it a dead end ? Not at all. If both adoption and driving are necessary, we have to be cautions not to mistake what has to be driven and the final result.

[Read more...]

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