Headshift: Smarter, Simpler, Social

The Museum and the Zoo

March 27, 2008 :: by olivier 4 responses  

The market for Enterprise 2.0 is booming. Client attention is high as blog readership and conference attendance figures demonstrate it. Individual actors know it as they see both their turnover and workforce growing. Reports from analysts confirm it. This is good news: pioneers can have a decent living :-)

But what this market growth means and implies?

When we look more closely this growth is very traditional in the sense that it is driven by products, i.e. packaged (if not one-size-fits-all) solutions. Software is growing faster than Consulting. What we see emerging is a vast bunch of dedicated products, not a myriad of consultancies. We get back to the classical software market made of one problem - one solution products.

This evolution for me is kind of problematic at some point.

It is problematic for the consulting business. With one problem - one solution products "fun" is over. The only thing that needs to be done is implementation, possibly with the exception of mashups and widgets. Mechanical work. This is the way big IT consultancies like Cap Gemini, TCS and likes are about to get the lion share. Their principal business is manpower. They offer temp workforce to companies that have non-routine projects.

It is problematic for clients too. Intelligence is (about to be) off the radar. Clients are back in the comfort zone where the only decision they have to make is to pick a product and pay. They don't have to think. They don't have to think and manage complexity. This is the same simplissimo behaviour one has at Pret: "grab and go".

This exactly is where the problem is. Corporations rely on specialisation, outsourcing and tacitness. Specialisation is here to manage complexity, outsourcing here to evacuate complexity and tacitness here to hide complexity. It is not perfect. Specialisation impeaches getting the big picture. Outsourcing concretely relocates knowledge out of the organisation. Tacitness prevents management as "you can't manage what you can't measure" and favours egocentric "political" games. Besides those defaults, it offers managers a simple life (and very similar to the one of a Museum keeper).

Specialisation is a natural result of complexity. In organisations, the diversity and recurrence of tasks call for dedicated people to limited actions. The bigger the organisation, the more specialised employees are.
On their side, Business Schools and Universities tend to provide employees to the "best" (understand biggest) companies. As a consequence, they have crafted programs that produce specialists, usually by functions, sometimes by industry. They consequently rarely offer the big picture that actually is required to think processes throughout the organisation as a whole. Result is straightforward: Employees don't capture the relations between processes and how they interact between themselves.
These programs also are built to guarantee that people master specific techniques. The consequence is that people master the "what", sometimes the "how" but hardly the "why". They don't capture the reason why these processes are put in place, how they relate to corporate strategy and how the organisation relates to its environment. The result is straightforward: in organisations, people focus on their own limited sphere of responsibility. The organisation is never thought as a whole and by extension never thought at all. Even strategy is confused with tactics. Managers are partially blind. Call the result limited rationality if you please :-)
Another consequence is that this favours software over consulting. The reason why managers love products is because they make things simple. Products offer an answer to a very limited problem against some money. A problem that is inline with the limited sphere of responsibility and budget of the manager.
And don't expect the so-called Digital Natives to change this: when they'll be in command they'll behave like Mom and Pop. Education to Management has not fundamentally evolved since WWII. And there is no sign of improvement in sight. Case studies favour replication. Overfocus in Management research on epistemologies and methodologies (the how) provides poor results for action (the what and why). As a result, fleeing complexity is trans-generational.

The trick is that the organisation by definition is organic and complex. It is not a Museum; it is a Zoo. It needs constant attention as it is moving through external pressure (competition and regulation), but also internal evolution. It needs intelligence to have its complexity managed. It needs intelligence to evolve smoothly, give away yesterday's routines that today kill value creation, invent new forms of doing things. The bigger the organisation, the more complex and the more intelligence it requires.

And currently this is what enterprise social computing consulting offers. It is a rare opportunity window to think and manage complexity. It is at the junction of behaviours (social) and processes (computing). An opportunity that Scientific management, Quality management and (smart) Reengineering have offered in the past. An opportunity that KM could have offered if people 1) have not dramatically focussed on classical - one problem, one solution - tools and 2) organised KM as a distinct process from daily work.
The current beauty of the enterprise social computing market lies in the fact that there is no product. It is a consulting, not a software market: the value is to build processes from basic tools. Tools are "basic" in the sense that they do not conform the one problem one solution rule that prevails in IT. These tools are aliens: they have been built for individual web-users, not organisational processed work. These tools consequently require translation because they are unfinished products for the organisation. They offer room for intelligence and exploration as they need to be contextualised, mixed and tweaked to be organisationally relevant and compliant. It is this very nature of unfinished product that opens doors to thinking more profoundly processes and therefore, potentially, the whole organisation. These tools adapt to the organisation, not the way round (as classical software do). The level of flexibility and granularity they offer in terms of functionality open doors to building tailored processes, which is a source of efficiency.
One tool can address many issues and sometimes one issue needs many tools (the social stack.
They also address tacitness because they focus primarily on collaboration and knowledge sharing. But they do so by embedding KM into operational processes. They consequently offer an opportunity to materialise informal and unmapped processes in a simple and meaningful way. (Re)Materialisation of knowledge is the one and only way to manage knowledge. These tools contribute to rationalise knowledge related processes. Monitoring knowledge-related processes is a vast field for optimisation and value creation. Social computing offers new territories for efficiency and competitive advantage.

But the conception of Museum remains dominant. A lot of decision makers do not offer their colleagues and organisation the chance to seize the opportunity offered by social computing. When working on an enterprise social computing project, we have the possibility to revamp / enrich quite a lot of fundamental processes. We have the opportunity to rejuvenate the organisation, create new sources of efficiency, competitiveness and wealth.
We often don't because the client is rarely educated for that. There is a whole literature on the blogosphere related to this reality so I won't detail. We have to trace this back to the education of managers. This would call to open the Pandora box of complexity and enter the field of thinking both the process and the organisation at the same time. Too much for one (wo)man. This would call for impacting the organisation well beyond its sphere of responsibility, competency and influence. Too risky for any "political animal".

Here social computing can help too. And this is the fundamental value of enterprise social computing. Enterprise 2.0 is not only the mere implementation of social computing behind the firewall (what and how) but more fundamentally the introduction of employee participation on managing the organisation (why). We have witnessed how web 2.0, i.e. people participation on the web, dramatically transformed the web. Enterprise 2.0 is there to have the same impact on organisations. Lee and Livio anticipated this in 2002 when they created Headshift.
Now, guess what the knowledge economy calls for? Guess what organisations need to succeed in a knowledge Economy? ... Employee participation. In a knowledge economy, organisations are efficient and profitable by making the most of their employee intelligence. Participation first appeared with Quality Management that considers production is to be organised (not simply adjusted) from a consumer perspective.
In a knowledge economy, the value is not the process but rather the people, regular people, for the knowledge they have and put into action. The consequence is that we move away from the mechanistic and hierarchic models of organisation (systematic management adepts have favoured, mostly by misunderstanding). We actually see the resurgence of organic and grassroot logics. These logics historically are prior to mechanistic and hierarchic models; guilds were favouring them. This generates a funky combination that contributes to change at three levels:

1 - We think the organisation differently.
Communities of practices and interests have appeared on the radar and complement the organisation and representation of the corporation (or administration). The siloed representation through functions (HR, Finance, Sales, ...) or territories gets enriched.
What social computing offers is collaboration tools, but also tools to map relations. Social computing contributes in making the web a - if not the - platform. In doing so it has paved the way for social networks. Social networks are very powerful in mapping weak ties, those ties that prove in reality very strong. Mapping social relations (aka social network analysis) beyond the organisation chart offers a more realistic view over the organisation, the real organisation. It displays what connections are in place to have things work; what arrangements are in place to bypass official processes that are either too old or too narrow to really work. Getting to know these human connections is a dramatic advantage when it comes to managing or changing an organisation. It helps "change managers" change the organisation with less blood and tears. Enterprise social computing therefore helps organisations recover their real identity and evolve more easily.

2 - We think processes differently.
Processes are not the tables of the Law. Processes are just the contextual (time and space) results and materialisation of how people think it is relevant to act in a simple and stable form to manage things - in order to create wealth - with limited resources. Nothing new under the sun: this is the real message of Taylor. Systematic and Scientific Management is a method. A message that non-education to complexity denatured, transforming the method into a recipe. A problem Quality management equally faced with certifications. This denaturing leads to having people being forced to adapt to processes: Modern Times.
Thinking process as a result and materialisation opens door to working more easily and often on processes. Modern times vanish: people do not adapt to processes; they participate in adapting them. People think when they act, even if this is limited by education and/or scope of responsibility. They might employ muscle sweat, but they also employ their brain. They think and they learn.
What social computing offers are tools for idea generation, conversations and collaboration; to potentially all individuals. Not only it renews and enriches the whole process of managing knowledge from a blunt idea to a validated product (product, service, process, report, ...), but it opens doors for having employees voice to participate in improving the whole organisation. Enterprise social computing therefore fuels the dynamics for learning organisations. [This incidentally evacuates this silly idea of a priori ROI.] Why not taping into that treasure of energy and intelligence (call it wisdom of the crowd or collective intelligence if you please)? What is the logic except loosing time and money and reinventing the wheel?

3 - We think management differently
A widespread form of management is based on a very simple assumption: "Employees are dummies". This is a very negative conception of mankind. Result is that only happy-fews are invited to think. Management have a tendency to exclude people who are to be affected by decisions. People are not called in to suggest or craft, they are informed - eventually trained - when things are done.
The underlying impact of having regular people participate is amazingly disturbing for managers. It renews completely their way of working and interacting with employees and change the conception they have about themselves. Participation opens door to representation. What is at stake is power and influence. This is the principal driver of resistance to social computing adoption. We already witness this on the Internet. Some journalists critic the blogosphere. Some Professors and Researchers critic Wikipedia. Some critics are true but most of them are not rational: their authors struggle to survive. All affirm their aristocratic conception of their work (and themselves). They blindly and selfishly defend their narrow corporation. In fact the impact is very similar to another one the XIX century Europe witnessed: the emergence of masses on the political scene.
This often implicit managerial resistance generates part of current inefficiencies. More importantly it goes against an existing trend towards the disappearance of the "Almighty Manager". This later corresponds to the figure Chandler painted and the ideology served to students, principally future managers. Quality Management made this history on the consumer side. Corporate Governance made this history on the stockholders side. Social Responsibility (CSR) made this history on the social and environmental side. Knowledge Management is programmed to make this history on the employee side. The figure of the Manager needs reinvention, not on paper but in daily life.
However, don't expect organisational hierarchy to disappear.
- The socio-political evolution of "Old Europe" I referred above is a good source of wisdom :-)
- Experiences in inserting pure democracy in organisations that occurred in the late seventies both in Europe and North America were as short as disastrous.
- The social web is hierarchical too: wikipedia has a gang of moderators; "we are smarter" initiators where forced to integrate some (I was one of them); in fact, all on-line communities have central authorities. Groups need leaders. So what is relevant is to rethink the organisational hierarchy in a way that managers proactively listen their employees, not replacing management by self-governance. Social computing offers the tools for this dialogue. We also have to get rid off the idea that technology changes society. Andrew McAfee seems to support this idea. This is not what longitudinal research works prove. It is quite the opposite: society changes technology. Pappy boomers voiced through street demonstrations, their children invented web supported tools for participation that "Generation Y" uses ... natively [a bit of a caricature but in one sentence ...]
So what enterprise social computing offers is not an opportunity for organisations to reach the same level of development that the Internet (an early, underlying assumption of Enterprise 2.0). It's not either about outsourcing production or service to the mass (crowdsourcing): some pre-industrial companies were "homesourcing" (see the silk industry in Lyon) and "cash-and-carry" and self-service appeared before WWI.
In fact, enterprise social computing fuels the dynamics to put organisations on the same level of participation (maturity?) as political societies. What is at reach is more freedom; it is no more schizophrenia between work and home (a trendy argument some time ago for Enterprise 2.0). This is the real promise of social computing and the necessary step for a successfully knowledge economy.

It is not by reducing costs and castrating employees as it happens too often in Europe and North America (and surely somewhere else) that we shall prepare a brighter tomorrow. It is by favouring personal initiatives and driving them carefully and respectfully, each of us, at our own limited level, that we'll find ways for collective wealth and happiness.

But what is at risk with the growth of software instead of consulting is the disappearance of this opportunity window to profoundly modernize organisations and change our lives. One problem - one solution software can only favour status quo.
The risk is to close the Zoo and re-open the Museum.

What do you think?

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