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July 18, 2013 by Patti

Intentional Networking à la Engelbart

Doug Engelbart passed away last week, and there have been modest acknowledgments about his passing, and his accomplishments, among which, of course his most famous — the invention of the computer mouse. (The Economist had a nice obituary, too.)

The mouse was an element of Doug’s vision for how humans and computers could co-evolve to increase the intellectual potential of individuals and groups. Being able to interact with the computer and with others through the computer and becoming more adept at doing it was merely a hardware element.

I became familiar with the vision and much, much more, when I attended one of Doug’s Bootstrap Institute’s 3-day seminars at Stanford in March, 1991. Three days with Doug Engelbart did, I am sure, change many more lives than mine. He introduced a full new way of thinking about work in organizations and used language that today could fit into any knowledge management treatise, for example:

Giving knowledge workers new capabilities for coordinating their work concurrently, with instant access to the correct document, and all the supporting intelligence and dialog trails which led to key decisions, could dramatically reduce product-cycle time and improve first-time quality, boosting an organization’s capacity and momentum. (This text is from my hardcopy dated 11/5/90. Updated version is available on the Douglas Engelbart website.)

His approach for enhancing organizational effectiveness was the A-B-C model, in which the core business work is the (A) activity, and (B) activities were those in service of improving (A) through training, implementing new processes, introducing new tools, and the like. The third level, (C) activities, were those activities focused on getting better at learning, researching, finding, and figuring how to acquire and share the knowledge necessary for improving (B) so as to enhance (A).

He believed that (C) activities were in the main non-proprietary and could and should therefore be work that could be a collaboration across businesses and industries. He attracted many people to the Bootstrap Institute (which has since been renamed the Doug Engelbart Institute) to work together to create this (C) community. And because so much of his vision was tied to the use of computing infrastructure, he sought the support and attendance by many in the computer industry. I was invited to attend because there were several senior people in Digital Equipment at the time who were interested in participating in the effort.

Three intense days included time in Doug’s education lab (the first time I had ever participated in a training session in which all participants had computer screens to view and follow along the instructor’s screen), lots of “foils” (as they were called in that day, no screen display of powerpoint yet!) that expanded on the various elements of Doug’s theory of augmentation and the different cultural, organizational, and systemic ramifications… and lots of interesting people. Below is our group photo. Over 14 different computer hardware and/or software companies represented.

Bootstrap Seminar March 1991

(That’s me in the red shawl. Doug is 2 heads above me.)

Not much really happened with the Bootstrap Initiative as, like most of Doug’s work, he was ahead of his time and probably not a great salesmen nor business thinker. For human augmentation to really work well, computers needed to be interoperable — information from one computer system had to be accessible from any other — but  we were some (not a whole lot, but enough) years away from the environment we live in now with rapid publishing to the web, almost universal sharing through HTML and document publishing standards. All of which made knowledge management possible.

The Bootstrap seminar was one of the first formal intentional network building events I ever attended. Doug was very clear about how important it was for us to get to know each other and that the development of these relationships would make or break the Bootstrap endeavor. At each break, he instructed us to “talk with someone you don’t know or haven’t met yet!”  Not much came of the network, either, but that was possibly also because we didn’t yet quite have the technology for all these people in all these companies to have communications tools so we could communicate in a style that was comfortable for each of us. (Or, the purpose of the network wasn’t sufficiently articulated; or, there wasn’t enough structure for the network to collaborate; or we weren’t sure what the value of this network would be to each of our respective companies. Wish I’d known more back then.)
RIP, Doug Engelbart, and thanks for the gift of many concepts and a language that I believe has served me well.

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June 30, 2011 by Patti

New themes for “Enterprise 2.0”

I spent two days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week  to get the pulse of this emergent ecosystem of vendors, practitioners, consultants, and thought leaders and to connect with many of my favorite fellow travelers from the KM world. A lot has been written already about the conference, and as usual the earliest blog posts were reportage and those coming along this week a bit more reflective. See especially Cecil Dijoux, Esteban Kolsky,  and Sameer Patel (so far).

On the vendor side, it’s clear that as the market is maturing; it’s all about the platform now (see my previous post) and there are a number to choose from. (Some look a lot like intranets, but I think we’re supposed to think that intranets are passé. To me, the intranet is the “home page of the enterprise,” social or not; it has to be where eyeballs start the day, where hands go to search, and where people connect with people and content.)

What felt different (and this has been said by many) is the shift in tone that occurred based on the selection of keynote speakers  away from vendor pitches (with a glaring exception or two) and toward thinking about the nature of business and work. The Wall Street Journal picked up on Jive‘s CTO’s comment  “that the emphasis has shifted toward business outcomes” in its article Enterprise 2.0 is growing up.” But it was not just about business outcomes.

It was also about the nature of business, relationships (companies <-> customers <-> employees), and some pretty simple principles of management. I had picked Mike Gotta‘s workshop, Organization Next, to attend on Monday, bypassing (except for an occasional drop-in) the Blackbelt practitioner’s session. (Ok, so I was just looking for a larger picture all along and at least at this E2.0 conference I found a lot of good stuff to listen to.) Mike’s workshop was HR-focused, looking at ways that HR managers are coping with/thinking about responding to changes in the employer/employee relationship. Daniel Rasmus did a nifty scenario planning workshop that brought home the number of uncertainties that exist about the world we live in.  Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden also did some great interactive exercises around organizational agility and change management. It didn’t feel like a technology conference at all.

(Sara also did a terrific keynote on Wednesday, “why employees are/should be managing the company,” introducing the notion of working within a complex system: setting the proper boundaries that enable leadership to emerge. She started with the metaphor of streams of humanity on the sidewalks of New York and how people can move in and out of the stream easily.)

In his elegantly constructed Tuesday morning keynote, the always inspiring John Hagel nimbly set  the tone for a business-focused conference. Starting with last year’s big E2.0 question “How do we get adoption for social software?” he linked adoption to passion and performance (“If you are interested in performance you have to be interested in passion”). People who are engaged in activities they are passionate about will connect with other people — and if you’ve got the platform available, and right, then they will use it in conjunction with passion. The only metric that matters is engaging passion.

(Later in the morning, Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly talked about how social collaboration was enabling emergent leadership in the organization. In his terrific stories, he emphasized how people succeeded because they were able to follow their passions. In the afternoon, in a session on innovation, Roy Rosin from Intuit talked about building an innovation environment: “[it means…] letting people build on their passions.” Sara Roberts said, in her workshop on Monday: “Meaning is the new money.” )

Rachel Happe, of the Community Roundtable, talked about the strategic imperative of communities: “Relationship and Culture are the only sustainable advantage.” And, she insists, that it takes time to cultivate communities, that our tools and technologies are pushing people “on a collision course” with information (beyond the capacity of our brains to process well),  that people must be given time to develop relationships and in an environment — culture — that provides the context for acting on information. “All management is community management.”

Rachel also emphasized changing organizational structures, confident that network structures will remain viable.  Organization structure had also been a big topic for Sara on Monday, who brought it all down succinctly to “What are we trying to do?” “Who needs to be connected with whom?” “Who is already connected?” “How can we foster the connections we need?”

John Stepper described how the “social media” journey at Deutsche Bank started with that core KM method, communities of practice, followed by a community of media enthusiasts, and a focus on expertise before going to technology. He summarizes this approach nicely here. In his keynote, he described how working in networks (oops, I mean communities) helped people to “step out of the org chart.” Terrific phrase. More organizational talk from Jim Grubb, VP of Communications at Cisco: “Your “org chart” is a people chart that needs to be dynamically ordered according to what you need to do in the moment.”

Enterprise 2.0 itself is a highly collaborative event and organizational microcosm. The tweet stream transcripts (767 pages, 20 per page) and links to presentations and blog posts are all posted in the self-organizing wiki set up by Jim Worth.  The community that organizes around this conference deserves a better name than Enterprise 2.0 (and “social business” doesn’t cut it, either). This conference was renamed and repositioned from a series of conferences on collaboration software and technologies, I think around 2008 (after Andrew McAfee coined the term, which was just 5 years ago.)  The co-evolution of people and technology is reaching a point where we can, and should, be looking outside the boundaries of enterprise technologies to understand how to manage, work with, and enable people to work together to create value beyond the corporate sector. E2.0, Boston 2011 has opened the door to many more conversations about how we move into this future.

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May 18, 2011 by Patti

Leadership & Networks: Complexity & Self-Managed Teams

A visit to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to see the marvelous glasswork of  Dale Chihuly resonated in many ways, but salient for me was how looking at and reading about how these works are put together. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about leadership and networks. One of the key “tenets” in my list is to “embrace complexity;” when I reach this part in my NetWorkShops I often use the Snowden Cynefin Framework, and then talk about how the leader has to let go of trying to define specific results and outcomes. Leadership is about setting and holding a vision, setting guide lines for accomplishing the work, providing tools, infrastructure, coaching, and political support so that people can self-organize to do the work, and watching for patterns to emerge.

I recently came across a couple of blogs that very nicely mapped this recipe to the concept of self-organizing teams. One, a very nice blog by Dave Gray who  continued his podular theme in a post, Give pods a chance. He likens pods to self-directed work teams, and then gives examples from 3M, Amazon, and the Chinese motorcycle industry.  He emphasizes that podular, modular design needs to happen in the context of a connected company. He says of Amazon:

Bezos does have an answer though: Break big problems down into small ones. Distribute authority, design, creativity and decision-making to the smallest possible units, and set them free to innovate. Small teams focus on small, measurable components that customers value.

Gray does not skirt the problem set: rewarding teams rather than individuals, dealing with loafers, and so on, but stresses that if you are in an industry in which complexity is increasing, you need to “take another look at organizational forms that play to natural human strengths, like ingenuity, curiosity, and the job of making a clear and recognizable impact on the world.”

Co-incidentally, Rachel Happe posted a vision of the social organization that provides additional detail about what it takes to provide an environment in which employees “self-commit” to projects that have been defined within the scope of the overall company strategy and direction. Managers are there to coach and support employees as they choose projects and navigate their careers. Rachel focuses on the social environment that is being enabled by the communications tools available to us; this is a nice counterpoint to Dave Gray’s description of how the pods (“projects”) innovate and create breakthroughs.

So, how did Dale Chihuly get me off my butt to finally write about this? It turns out that his projects are all about how he provides a vision, a set of guide lines, and a desired future state to the artists who work in his studio and who set up the art for exhibition. The Lime Green Icicle Towerconsists of over 2,400 individual pieces of glass that were blown and shipped to Boston. If you look at the video of its construction you may wonder about a detailed specification of how all the pieces were to be assembled. The fact is, there was nothing detailed. The parts were put together in Boston using the sense (vision) of what the finished piece was to look like, but was otherwise assembled in context, on the spot.

My sense of this is that the teams Chihuly is using are self-organized at two points in the artistic process: first, after he has a vision for a piece and describes the colors, shapes, and overall aesthetic that he is going for. Glassblowers work within these boundaries to create the amazing, individualistic shapes and contours of the pieces. Then, given boundaries for what the finished work is to be, they assemble those pieces, never entirely sure of what, exactly it will look like. The relationships among the pieces is always different, whenever a finished work is assembled, but the results are always true to a vision.

 

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May 10, 2011 by Patti

Co-Creation — because the knowledge is in the network

I heard a great talk this morning by Francis Gouillart, who along with Venkat Ramaswamy, authored The Power of Co-Creation: Build It with Them to Boost Growth, Productivity, and Profits. I’ve been hearing the term “co-creation” in a number of contexts, so it was really good to get a real feel for what’s been happening with the concept, and hear real stories about it.

The concept is not unfamiliar to those of us who were engaged in various forms of process, work, and product design in the early 90s. As Francis talked, I wrote down “participatory design,” and “socio-technical” as those early approaches came to mind as he emphasized the core aspect of co-creation: working with all the constituents in the ecosystem of a product or process to understand their needs and working with them to design the product, process, or system.

He shared a great story about how the French postal service used co-creation as the starting point to address problems of low employee morale and declining revenues. The story illustrated, through increments, some of the principles of co-creation:

  • Stakeholder won’t participate in customer co-creation unless it creates value for them. By letting employees determine their own hours, the postal service was able to decrease absenteeism.
  • The best way to co-create value is to focus on the experiences of all stakeholders. Once postal employees began talking to customers, they discovered that much of the dissatisfaction with the postal service was because of the restrictions on their hours of service (closed from 12 - 2:00pm for lunch as is French custom) The postal service expanded its hours to match the times that people were normally in town for market (in rural areas) and even until 8pm in cities.
  • Stakeholders must be able to interact directly with one another. Bringing customers and postal employees directly into conversation was the path to understanding the customer experience and how to improve it. They had to talk to each other.
  • Companies should provide platforms that allow stakeholders to interact and share their experiences. In many cases, platforms these days are interactive (more on this in a later post). But in the case of the postal service, La Poste started having small meetings to coach customers about selling on e-Bay. This had the effect of greater use of e-Bay and (guess what?) more business for La Poste!

(I have taken the principles, bolded above, directly from the HBR article by Gouillart and Ramaswamy on this topic.)

A number of the themes within this concept resonated strongly with me. First and foremost, it’s a network story. I strongly believe, and have articulated many times, that “knowledge is in the network,” and that the future belongs to those who understand how to tap into, and to learn how to weave and leverage strong networks. In the HBR article, the story of how the Indian company ITC transformed their agricultural business in India — and the lives and welfare of the farmers on whom they depend — by creating a network built around e-choupals, internet kiosks spread across the countryside that provided information in local dialects on the daily weather, crop prices, and other news; advice on farming methods; and an email service that let farmers interact directly with scientists.

But the kiosks were only part of the “platform.” The real power in the network came as ITC identified lead farmers to manage the kiosks and create local networks around them. The conversations generated around the e-choupals identified new ways that farmers wanted to interact with ITC, so that ultimately ITC created a network of hub facilities, each of which provided higher-level services to 40 or 50 e-choupals.  These networks continue to create value for ITC at the same time that the experiences of the farmers are continually enriched.

The second theme that emerged for me in listening to Francis is how the process relates to, or could leverage value network analysis. (See also here.) Engaging all the stakeholders in understanding the ecosystem is a core part of the VNA methodology. Also critical is that, as the value network mapping process proceeds with stakeholders identifying each of the exchanges (tangible and intangible) that they have with one another, conversations emerge that speak to the quality of those exchanges. In co-creation terms, it’s about the interactions. I sense something a bit different about how the co-creation process goes a level farther (or deeper) than the VNA mapping and it will take me some time to think about how to introduce this into my VNA practice. But the end result is the same: ensuring that every member of the network receives value from the exchanges, and that ultimately the value network itself is creating value as an ecosystem.

I was still a little curious about how co-creation differs from its socio-tech ancestors, but didn’t get a chance to ask the question. Fortunately, @jackvinson was there and he offered the cogent insight that what is truly different is that the leadership that is promoting the process redesign have, in successful cases of co-creation, let go of requiring a specific result. That is (in complexity terms), in the old days management created too many constraints on the outcome whereas they must now be comfortable with setting looser boundaries and letting real value emerge. (I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of leaders and setting boundaries the past few days as well, after recent posts by @snowded and @davegray on self-manged teams, but I’ll save that for another post as well). And, of course, social media has transformed our ability to engage stakeholders in real, ongoing, deeply engaged conversations. What a great new world!

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March 22, 2011 by Patti

It takes a network: strategic planning

The Leadership Learning Community hosted a very good webinar this afternoon with Eugene Eric Kim, who talked about the process  to develop a movement-wide strategy for the Wikimedia foundation.  He spoke to the central question, inherent in creating large networks, is how to position and leverage the planning process to engage the network itself. Slides are here.

What it comes down to is that the more people you engage in the strategic planning process itself, the more committed and active contributors you will have in the network going forward. Eugene summarized five basic principles:

  1. Focus on questions. Questions generate, but they also — and this I found very compelling — build capacity in the network. The goal of the planning process is not a detailed plan that lays out five years of specific work and activity, it is alignment around the mission, goals, and priorities. The power of the questions is that it helps to build that alignment.
  2. Create a space.  I talk about space as one of the key elements of Style  in Net Work. Locus — place, space, and pace — gives the network its feel, its sense of comfort, color, and continuity. The WikiMedia planning process was driven by many face-to-face meetings that defined what it meant to be in the network.
  3. It’s all about people. Identifying members, asking  them in, building relationships. Eugene made an interesting planning point here. They used the 90-9-1 rule as a way to work through how many people they would have in the network and the number of people they would, in the end, count on being active. Across the Wikimedia landscape, there were some 700 projects, so starting with an estimate of 1 person per project led them to assume they would have 70 or so actual contributors. This turned out to be very close.
  4. Model transparently.  Some people think that shifting to a network mindset means giving up control, but it is actually learning to share control. (In my leadership NetWorkShops, I emphasize leadership rather than control, but the focus absolutely on sharing.) All network leaders need to be open to change, but also to keep things moving toward that ultimate goal.
  5. Fail forward fast. Networks are complex. You can’t predict outcomes, and you often have to go with what you’ve got and to make adjustments as you go.

The result of the planning process Eugene outlined is the Wikimedia Strategic Plan. It’s a testament to the power of using a network: an elegant document that captures the alignment of 1,000 people who contributed in 50 languages. This network’s mission: Making a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Now, that takes a network.

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