New year's resolution

Don't trivialize your life. Think of how you can add value to you by thinking about how you can change to add value to those around you. Give meaning to your life by creating value for those you love. With sincerity, integrity and a lot of fun.

Value management

We were at a meeting recently where somebody confidently proclaimed that time management no longer exists. Time, according to Einstein is just as reality an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. But that’s not an answer, to our mind time is real, and so is the ability to manage it. What he meant was this: today’s work processes involve so many different (micro) tasks as well as constant interruptions, that on any given day or week you will not be able to finish your To Do list. You can no longer expect to neatly work your way through the set of tasks you, your boss or your family have defined for you. You are unable to finish every single task at the end of the workday or week.

Our work has become more intense, non-linear, unpredictable and sadly, frantic. Information technology has increased productivity, yet it has not given us more time. We still end up with less of it; one of the cold ironies of modern life. We answer our remaining e-mails in the evening, listen to our voicemail driving to work or a customer, our meetings are interrupted by mobile phone calls, there is the morning newspaper to read, but also the newsletters you receive through e-mail subscriptions, RSS feeds and what have you. Your computer contains all the information you use to get by in a day and helps you produce whatever your boss is willing to pay you a salary for. God forbid your computer breaks down, it will freeze up all your productive possibilities! But that might just be a blessing in disguise for many of us; finally some time to reflect and something to blame for not being productive! If that’s the only way to get some peace of mind; forget about managing time, you will never succeed.

There is a way out of this. Stephen Covey has described it in his comprehensive book on 'The Seven habits of highly effective people’, Peter Senge tells about it in ‘The fifth discipline’. The challenge is no longer organizing your agenda, it is prioritizing your tasks and working together with others to learn how to deal with everything that comes your way. The leading consideration is no longer time, it’s value. There are too many tasks to do, so do the ones that add most value. Value involving (at least) four dimensions: personal, social, creative and financial, which we coincidently capture in our assessment of network value.

So, Time management becomes Value management. This requires us to address an entirely different set of questions. Task lists are easily filled, if not by ourselves, others will gladly oblige us by defining tasks they would like us to execute. Value management requires an internal mechanism for determining what is important, an inner sense of direction, an awareness of what pursuits are meaningful and an awareness of the consequences of choosing those pursuits for yourself and others. Value management therefore requires personal leadership.

Personal leadership emphasizes a vision and an understanding of what you want to achieve and what you need to do to achieve it. What most people tend to forget is that it is also very important to know how far you are willing to go, what you are willing to sacrifice in order to achieve your goals. We can have great ambitions, but often prefer to achieve them the easy way. How far are YOU really willing to go if push comes to shove! The same goes for the people you work and share your vision of the future with.

Making the switch from Time management to Value management implies that profound considerations need to be integrated into your daily routine; your shared Vision and resulting goals drive the choices you make and are a constant presence in everything you do. Discovering your own values and how they influence others is an arduous process, determining and sticking to what you really believe in is challenging. It becomes a lot easier if shared with others!

The benefits are substantial. When we master Value management, decisions really tend to become simple and straightforward. This is what Stephen Covey calls a principle centred lifestyle. Some might even say that the satisfaction you feel as a result of an achievement is proportional to the amount of suffering and sacrifice that was required. No pain no gain.

Making it simple

We get a lot of interest and enthusiasm when we explain what it is we are doing. When we ask people to commit and together start solving an issue they have, we often get the objection that what we do is too difficult. “Why don’t you make it simple?”

Define simple. Easy, clear, elegant, clean? Stupid, dumb, slow? Where one man finds his paradise, another comes to harm! Even defining the word simple is not ‘simple’ and at the very least context dependent. Yet we all strive for our lives to be simple, always in relation to elegant and clean, but most of all easy; live the good life! People confuse simple with easy.

People always say that things where better in the old days. Life was simple when you just had to tend your land and live from the produce! Sure peasants who had to work 18/7, 365 days a year and give half of their proceeds to the robber baron who owned their land had a simple life, but it sure as hell wasn’t easy. It was especially hard during winter, disease ridden and they had a very short lifespan. Nothing romantic about it! Only a very limited number in the upper classes had it easy, the rest stole and plundered and even that isn’t as easy as it sounds.

In my experience, simple (easy) answers are always based on either 20-20 hindsight or blind faith. Whatever you think of these options, they are a clear indication that finding simple answers is not easy. Let’s take an example. Philips and Douwe Egberts (Sara Lee) put the very successful Senseo coffee machine on the market a couple of years ago. Elegant machine that provides a clean way to produce a cup of coffee that can be tailored to your taste with easy to use sachets. It’s a bit of a bother that you can produce only two cups at a time, but since we live in smaller family units, that’s not an issue in daily life; for parties we just use something else. This answer to making the coffee we like individually is simple, but do we really think it was easy to get there? Both parties had to build trust, a working relationship and contracts to start working together; can’t have been easy. They had to segment the market, come up with the right target group and they had to come up with a business model that would provide both with a healthy profit margin; can’t have been easy. They had to decide on spending millions on setting up production facilities, marketing campaigns, etc., on a product that still had to prove itself; can’t have been easy. Then they had to roll out, train and negotiate their sales channels, prepare to diversify the different taste options and keep their fingers crossed; can’t have been easy. They only succeeded in combining the resources of two companies and go through a difficult collaborative effort because they had faith in the success of their new product. Now, with 20-20 hindsight it’s a simple no-brainer, but if it was that easy, why did the other efforts Philips set up (with e.g. Nike) not work out?

Because collaboration and innovation are basically simple processes but aren’t as easy to do as we hope they are. When we need to invent something new, or solve a problem, we first need to define exactly what it is we need. Finding the exact need and solving the resulting contradictions to everybody’s satisfaction is the most difficult part of innovation; it takes collaboration. Why? Because there is no room for compromise when solving contradictions, all the while need is a perception which differs depending on context. The more people you aim to help, the more contexts your solution needs to be tailored to. That is not easy! It is best done with a multidisciplinary team, since they provide a multi context base to work from, align people and get them committed. Working with people is fun especially when it leads to something simple, but again it is not easy.

Wasn't it Einstein who said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." I am affraid most people cross this line to make things easy. What is simple about what we do, is that we provide a path to follow. What is simple about how we do it, is that we do it together. What is simple about why we do it, is that we address a need in all of us; to want to learn and improve. The fact that it’s not always easy, is icing on the cake!

Coming back to the initial question. The question that should be asked is: “Why don’t you package the result of what you do in a simple way?” Good question! To us, what we do is simple while we know that what we want to do is not going to be easy. I think that is where the miscommunication occurs. We separate easy and simple on a conscious level, whereas most of the people we talk to do not. Simple things to us are never easy and we love a challenge. So when we talk about simple, we just don’t connect and when we talk about it not being easy we feed the resulting insecurity. This then is our biggest short term challenge. We’ll keep you posted.

Individualism doesn't exist

Individualism doesn’t exist! I have said it before and I will say it again. Egoism yes, egotism sure! The strongest reason to stay in line? Peer pressure! When you are part of a group you conform to the rules of that group or you are out. When you are part of no group, you die! Literally!

I have stated before that the reason why our European governments are concerned over growing individualism is that they are afraid it will split our society, at least their version of it. The current US government has a different point of view, they create their own society/reality and do so through the conviction of faith, a dynamic enforced by the large group of born again Christians who have the firm believe that ‘God’ is in the White House through George W. Bush. They are using the very strong bonds that people form when they agree on principle and see their leader act on that principle without any doubt, and sadly: reflection. Easy certainty. Truth is less important than truthfulness. If enough people have faith in you, however wrong you are, you’re right! We see some changes now, apparently you can’t fool all the people, all the time. Wonder where it will end.

The European reaction to ‘individualism’ is more rules to keep people in line with the prevalent socialistic credo. Our governments limit our choices and how to realize our dreams in the name of efficiency and equality, and now with the web (and other sources of information) giving us more freedom to make our own choices instead of theirs, we have become individualists and don’t care about each other anymore.

This is an understandable reaction from people who have completely lost touch with their voting base and are caught up in ideals that are not prevalent anymore. They hang on to their ideals and make more rules to trap people in their idealistic nets. Their problem is that it has not been working for the last three to five years and will only exacerbate their and our alienation and so-called individualism. People don’t recognize themselves anymore in their so-called leaders, because they only see their leaders limiting their lives instead of providing paths and opportunities to improve them. That is not individualism, that is giving individuals the means to join other original thinkers and come up with new ways of improving our lives, creating new products, services and cultures that benefit the groups they are part of or create new ones that see the potential of doing fun things together. Those individuals that create stuff that has no value will stay individuals and connect to others or drop out of our society, so if there is such a thing as individualism, just use the perspective of the egg and not always the chicken and stop over regulating; whatever individualism there is will become extinct in no time. Communities will be the driving factor of our society. The ‘White House’ seams to be on to this and with the way they have done it, will sadly scare Europe into holding on to old school believes a little longer. See what is happening in the US; we don’t want that to happen here now do we! An argument we hear over and over again. What is happening is the ‘disruptive technology’ version for political institutions; the most discerning aspect of a disruptive force is that the ruling class doesn’t have a clue and in the aftermath is left wondering what happened.

All this may sound idealistic, and in a sense it is. I have an optimistic view of what people are capable of together and for those who think it will result in anarchy, they are just scared of loosing power. We still have such a thing as a legal system that has been set up to deal with crimes and excesses and we should be very careful about keeping it strong and functioning. Rules and regulations that limit our lives though should be a thing of the past. I sincerely hope that we renew our search for excellence and give people the means to connect and work together in ways they think best and create fun new stuff. That will certainly not be done through individualism, but by individuals who together form communities that benefit their members.

Let the buyer beware!

We are working with the University of Twente to come up with a tool to measure the value systems of collaborative networks and their impact on the performance of networks. Whenever I talk to people with a scientific background they invariably ask me about the research protocols and how the research is done in a controlled environment that ensures the research can be reproduced. These are not wrong questions to ask, but they are not really applicable to what we are trying to achieve in the short run. We aim to use the results to drive innovation, improve people’s lives and - not unimportantly - provide us with a living. Considering the latter it is important for us not to be bogged down in a discussion on scientific methodology. Since our approach seems to be ‘working’, we are at this point in time less interested in why. We will put a research module, to measure results in the different value domains, into everything we do. It will provide us with an essential feedback loop, but will also ensure that we can provide a scientific basis to what we do in the long run. The research is important, but we have to apply it at the same time.

This is a trend the internet is fuelling. More and more research is being published on sites that are set up specifically for the purpose of spreading research (or is simply done through blogs) without the much praised and, according to many scientists, essential peer review. The upside is clear, the insights can be used right away (Barry Marshal admitted that their find of helicobacter pilori and it’s consequences for the treatment of peptic ulcers would not have been accepted by science any sooner, but would probably have saved hundreds of lives if the internet had been there when they made the discovery), it can be critically reviewed right away, improved by others outside the specific discipline, etc.. The down side is that there is no way of testing the validity of the research done and the information used to produce a new theory or solution.

Apart from the fact that this down side can be remedied by peer review, that is not without it’s problems either. Just look at what is happening around the cloning controversy in South Korea, the paper is still not retracted, since all authors of a paper have to agree to retract it. Another issue with peer review is the selection of peers. As in other contexts, science is put under more and more strain to produce, that means it is easier and easier to find peers who are willing to take a risk in co-authoring a new find so they can make a name for themselves. It is not that such eager scientists are deliberately being fraudulent, but cognitive dissonance does play a larger role in deciding to support certain research. It is like preaching to the choir and clearly not as transparent as throwing it on the internet, but at least there is a validation process. A process that is not in place on the internet.

Neither of these approaches to the development of knowledge is perfect, certainly not in today’s information society. Primarily because neither solves the most important issue that everybody has to face; how to make sense of the incredible amount of information the internet is offering us. Whether you are a scientist looking for new ideas or feedback on your theory, or a sales man looking for new products to sell, you get so much information on a daily basis that it has become impossible to digest. We try to do what we always do and that is filter this information. On the internet it is called search! Sure there is the emergence of tagging, but that is still in its infancy and for most internet users still unknown and in my opinion useful from an individual perspective only, not from a group perspective.

On the internet there is no certainty of having seen it with your own eyes (even in the real world there never was, but at least we ‘saw’ it with our own eyes), so we have to rely on search engines to filter the information we are looking for. I always had this problem that I couldn’t do a search on a concept itself. You always have to make a difficult formula of words, using AND, OR, etc., to get what you are looking for without too much noise.

Google has found a way out of the noise thing, it made a deal with AOL so that the top results of any search show those links that AOL will benefit from and Google will share the profits. There goes transparancy and independence in one stroke? Looks like Microsoft isn't so bad after all, they said no to this AOL proposal because they found it unethical!

How are we going to make sure we get the information we are looking for from sources we can trust? I sure hope someone will come up with a business model that excludes the kind of deals Google is making and provides us with a transparent means of finding stuff that supports our explorations and get's rid of most of the noise. The only thing left for me to say to all of you looking for information of your interest: “Let the buyer beware!”

Challenging Orthodoxy

Why can’t a hen be an egg’s way of getting more eggs? What makes it so difficult for us to look at things from a different perspective then what we have been taught, or have gotten used to? We like things to be as crisp as a winter morning, so when something makes that much sense, why think about it further? It becomes an orthodoxy and is stated fact! I think there is no absolute prove for any theory out there. In history, every theory has been proven wrong, completely or partially. Complete new theories are rare, extremely rare, especially today. What we are doing is make incremental progress and build on existing theories. The funny thing is that most real breakthroughs where created through challenging orthodoxy. The earth is flat!

The last real breakthrough in physics was quantum mechanics. Einstein, having been a revolutionary in promoting his own theory of General Relativity, opposed the thought of infinite possibility; “God doesn’t play with dice”. With all his brilliance he couldn’t accept a universe built on chance and while having contributed to it in the early stages, became a counter revolutionary to the theory of Quantum Mechanics as stated by Bohr and others. Einstein’s orthodoxy was a mechanistic view of the universe, cause and effect! In his mind, there was no room for a context where the observer was the deciding factor/influence regarding the state of the observed. The results of the observation are relative to the position of the observer, absolutely, but created by the observation? That was just a bridge too far, chance had nothing to do with it. At this moment everybody in physics is trying to produce the great unifying theory, combining Einstein’s Theory of Relativity with Bohr’s Quantum Mechanics; the main issue being Gravity. Einstein’s objections have still not all been fully countered, but through them, Quantum Mechanics has made quantum leaps in providing us with many applications, from lasers to transistors and even new religions.

The point I am trying to make is that by creating new theories, we are creating new opportunities and new orthodoxies that limit other opportunities ergo they will be challenged. The question; shouldn’t we challenge the challenge to orthodoxy is like the opening sentence; a semantic joke to cover up our confusion. It is human nature to create contexts we are comfortable with. If we don’t like what a theory can potentially do to our comfort zone, we challenge it and try to come up with something that either sustains the status quo, or creates a new one we are comfortable with.

Why write about it here? Well, we are on the brink of a breakthrough regarding our thinking in setting up successful organizations and even defining success. Our theory - by no means new, but certainly not an orthodoxy yet - is based on a networked model of organizing and a different approach to value systems. The network members are motivated not only by financial gains, but by the relationships they have and make, the new knowledge they gain and produce and by the personal growth they experience. According to current believes, the hen - the financial value - is the essential ingredient, because it provides a basis to invest in the other three values. What we are trying to promote is the perspective of the egg; by building the other three values, we provide the basis for optimizing financial growth.

added Value creation

Why only Value with a capital? Because that is the central word here. The fact that we want to add value means we have to create more then there already is and sometimes need to create it from scratch. This is always a joined effort and to make value creation sustainable, sustainability needs to be part of the process of value creation.

Why now? Because we have just had an enjoyable round table and I want the next one to be fantastic. We talked about valuable concepts, shared valuable experiences, engaged in the proces of innovation and interacted as a diverse group of people genuinely interested in each other. In a sense priceless, but we are all still searching for answers when it comes to how to innovate and work together. That's why I used the word enjoyable.

Where we succeeded was in creating an atmosphere of trust and sharing ideas, where we failed was in the combination of focus and engagement and therefore sustainability. We talked about high level concepts that did not paint a rosy future and are not easy to connect to daily life, depending on concept, part of the audience reacted and part took a leave of mental absence. Then we went into a session that explained all about innovation and only when we started putting it into practice did people really engage and it almost became a chicken run. Fun to see, and we should have started doing that sooner.

Were we failed, was not in our setting of the stage, not in our thinking, it was not in our sincerity or in the selection of people present, actually, that is what made the day fun. What we should have done better is engage people in telling stories and add value to each others story that each of us can take home and use to improve our lives. Storytelling is a powerful means of creating value. It touches things we recognize and engage with, it makes it easier to learn things and it makes you want to add your own experiences to the story. In the end it will not be his story or her story, it will be ours. Then and only then will we all start to actively spread the message by retelling the story and engaging other people.

We have three to four months to prepare for the next one, so we'll do our best to put what I just said into practice and have a fantastic third round table! If you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to leave a comment.

The second installment of our round table!

We held the second installment of our round table yesterday. Some could make it again, others were new to what we try to accomplish. As before, a very diverse group of people. This time we wanted to test our progress from social networking, to innovation through collaborative networks and have fun at the same time.

Mathijs started by welcoming everyone to our own collaborative network and explained what is happening in our businesses and why innovation is desperately needed. He discussed the reality of business not sticking to their ‘allotted’ function in the value chain. Your competitor today, may be your supplier tomorrow and your customer may become your competitor. He skipped through the global equilibrium shift and resulting Asian threat to our welfare, since we are bombarded with that on a daily basis and went on explaining the ‘efficiency trap’ we in the western world are in. A double bind where cost cutting and efficiency to the point of anorexia are rewarded by shareholders and driven by fear of loosing what we have. Combined with the ‘Red queen syndrome’, a slow but sure path to an early grave and almost impossible to escape without changing your value system and thereby who you are, as a company and as a manager/employee. Kudo’s to IBM!

Most where engaged by the picture that Mathijs was painting, but I saw some people starting to wonder: “What did I get myself into here?” First, it’s no fun when your value system is brought into question like this. Second, our cups are brimming with concepts and ways to improve things that we see as going in the wrong direction. Yesterday that cup spilled a little and I am really thankful to our network for sticking with us and instead of mentally leaving the room giving us new insights through asking the questions that needed to be asked. Mathijs finished of by stating that the only way we could counter the processes he described was by re-inventing ourselves and innovate.

Valeri Souchkov took over at this point and with a skill honed by years of experience started to explain his concept of structured innovation. Building on TRIZ – a Russian acronym for A Theory of Solving Inventive Problems – he trains engineers and business people in using a structured approach to innovation and solve contradictions. TRIZ is the result of 40 years of research of more than 300 people (and still evolving). His version of Systematic Innovation further expands TRIZ by adding new tools (e.g. root cause analyses) and organizes the process of innovation. Providing a path to follow and have a fun experience exploring new knowledge, be creative and get results. Since TRIZ has been brought outside of the ex-USSR in 1990, it is today recognized by several world-leading organizations such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Mitsubishi as the best practice of innovation. Check his site for more details.

We ended the session by taking a challenge from the audience and pull it through the initial TRIZ stage of problem solving. First we defined the problem in the form of a contradiction; the positive effect we are looking for and the negative effect we get as a result. We then used a matrix where we could look up the inventive principles that have always been used to come up with an ideal solution. These we had to translate to the context of the challenge at hand and see which one came up with a satisfactory direction for solving the issue. We didn’t have enough time to really finish the process, but it did give the owner of the challenge some fun new insights into what he is facing.

During drinks and diner some very lively discussions where going on. On topic, but also about other things that touch our lives. We ended the day with high spirits and I sincerely believe we have the opportunity to create value together as a network of multidisciplinary people.

Thanks everybody for providing an enjoyable afternoon!

What do you want to become when you grow up?

I was asked this question via SMS yesterday. Fifteen minutes after an exciting discussion with an unconventional thinker who feels trapped and is getting a lot of energy from talking to someone who has been where she is, literally! She feels trapped because she works for a company with a very conventional culture and though being appreciated on an individual level by her co-workers, there is no room for her to play and act on her unconventional thoughts and ideas. The culture won’t let her, even though it is being asked of her to play the role of an unconventional thinker. Interesting contradiction!

For the last ten years, I have always given the same answer: ‘I really hope never to find out!’. My fear being that as soon as I know and in a worst case scenario, become what I ‘want’ to be, I am over the hill. I reckon Roger Federer had a dream of becoming the number one tennis player in the world, now that he is, he wants to stay there and become the best player ever (he already is, but let’s not tell him yet). It is in his character to even after his tennis career look for something else to excel in, in his own quiet way. Johnny Mac in his not so quite way, thought to find it in music and though it probably still is his favorite past time, he has devoted himself to tennis again and through hard work and dedication is soundly beating players ten to fifteen years younger on the senior tour. In the process providing all tennis lovers with some serious fun watching him be the genius he still is. Imagine him sitting on a porch enjoying life with his friends. Well let’s put that doom scenario behind us quickly!

Putting the discussion in perspective, I find that the questions she should be asking are: “What creates meaning in your life?” and “What value do you add by what you do?”. These are far more interesting, or as she says sexier questions. They free up your thinking, they open up new possibilities, and they provide a basis for lifelong growth and renewed purpose. They lay the foundation for new experiences and discovery, in your own life and in those of others. That’s what life is about!

A sense of wonder

You can polish your house al you want, without friction, it won’t shine.

By starting with a multi-disciplinary team, we create a conflict of ideas that facilitates a drive to explore and create value together. Mother nature did it before us; homo sapiens became the dominant species on this planet through strife! The beauty of it is, that this is a self-sustaining process. Because of an experience that remains with you for a very long time, if not for life, the team will always be able to fall back on each other and they know it! The wonder of discovery! In yourself and in others.

We create friction, we create excitement, we create trust and a common enemy in the contradictions that need to be solved to innovate. People become excited about themselves (personal growth), about the contradictions they need to tackle (creative growth), about the group of people (social growth) they are playing with and about the results they will achieve (financial growth)! The group doesn’t have to work together, they don’t simply want to work together, they love to work together.

We provide a team with the means to stay in touch and keep sharing experiences and innovate their lives long after we are gone. That’s what our approach to structured innovation is for; it’s a path to follow together to create meaning and value for ourselves and those around us. That’s what our web hosted platform is for; to facilitate learning, communication, the sharing of ideas, and a path to follow to realize the winning ideas.

Where is your sense of wonder?

The Value of the Intangible

We are running a research project with the Technical University Twente and Nikos (Dutch Institute for Knowledge Intensive Entrepreneurship) , to investigate the value of existing networks in organizations. As such we aim to provide an insight into which aspects determine that value. The results will give decision-makers mechanisms to nourish and stimulate the collaborative network, thus creating more value. Most of a network's values are intangible; we explicitly recognize human, creative and social capital as value domains complementary to financial capital. Ideas (creative value) cannot be touched, yet can generate huge revenues. Relations (social value) are amorphic context-dependent dynamic interactions, as intangible as things get, yet they are crucial to business, whether they be relations with suppliers, investors, customers or employees.

Analysis of intangible values in a business context is not something we have invented. The work of Verna Allee provides a smart and practical way to incorporate intangibles in your business and marketing strategy.

We have designed a questionair that assesses all relevant aspects of value, across the different domains. With that accomplished I realized there is something odd about what we are measuring. The questionair is real enough, and so the answers will be real too. But none of these can be considered ‘objective’ realities. People are asked to judge what they think and feel about certain aspects of their context. They are asked about their personal judgements about what aspects create value, and how much of these aspects is realized, how much of what they think is valuable do they observe in the world around them. This is highly subjective.

We are therefore investigating subjective realities, and one might argue if that is a questionable aspect of our research. Is research not supposed to be about objective facts?

In fact, we do exactly what we should be doing. Value is created by people, inside their own consciousness, even the objectively tangible value we measure in cash. Revenue is still te product of people making choices to buy products and services on the basis of what they personally value; what subjective decisions they make.

This is perhaps less striking for marketeers and psychologists, who fundamentally explore the domain of the intangible and subjective, but in a world that pretends to be so much about hard cash these are relevant considerations.

Individualism my a...

There are many individuals with their own opinions and their own way of looking at things, but there is no such thing as individualism. As our government wants to blame everything and anything that is going wrong in our society on individualism, I get more and more pissed off. Where are our values and what is the norm we hold people up to? We are social beings and depending on context filter our daily life to make sense of it. We subdivide people and situations in categories to give them meaning and the means to talk about them. We create new norms and values everyday of our lives. We innovate and change!

When our government tells us we are growing more and more detached from society each day, don’t care for each other anymore and are only asking the what’s in it for me question, I have just one response to that. Wake up to the changes around you. Stop talking and start listening! Observe what is happening with an open mind and don't try to force your stupid values on us! Yes, they are stupid when you have to force them instead of enforce them! The only reason you blame everything on individualism is because you refuse to let go of old categories that used to make sense of ‘your’ society. People have moved on and found new ways to make sense of their lives, time for you to do the same!

Necessity is the mother of all invention!

It seems like people don't want to think and make relevant choices to their own lifes. When it comes to knowledge we are always looking for a fast food chain, a quick fix. When we need to make choices on where to go, we choose to stay afloat by treading water instead of swimming to shore. When we want to be part of something, we think we get there by fitting in. We want to belong so much, that we strife to become one while our strength lies in our diversity. Work, money, ambition, we bury ourselves in it without wondering why. It’s like a rubber band, we are being drawn between what we want to do and what we have to do. The only thing that will guide us is a personal strategy of what we want, what we have to do and how far we are willing to go to reach our goals!

The essence of strategy is focus! While we are not without focus, the problem is that most of us do not realize what we are focusing on. It has become a subconscious thing because we lack a conscious strategy. In times of prosperity, this kind of behavior is a societal benefit. Since we are not working on a conscious strategy and just want to belong and fit in, there is very little conflict. The resulting stability is what is needed in times of growth. The phrase never touch a working system applies! In times of adversity, this starts to work against us. To improve the situation, we need to come up with a conscious strategy and make hard choices. Choices based on the vision of a better future. The never touch . . saying does not apply anymore. The problem is; the fact that the system is not working anymore is not registered and acted upon. Worse, we cling to our ‘working system’ in fear. Just pretend nothing is wrong. No strategy, no focus.

Reality drives all events! We can cling to non-working systems all we want, it won’t give us anything but a false sense of security. An illusion that will be shattered when reality finally hits us in the face. Talking about illusions; most CEO’s and government officials are in office, but not in power. They are not in the game, they are not playing and learning new stuff in the game and still they pretend to know the game based on ten year old experience. It’s called being over the hill! They are just using the carrot and the stick. Putting the fear in us for the unknown without explaining, or promising us riches without providing a basis. It’s a sign of our times.

Luckily for us, necessity is the mother of all invention. There are always people who see their own needs and those of others and they will come up with strategies and visions to improve our lives. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a platform (business, process and technology) for people to work together, to prosper and create value together? I think so!

Because that’s what it means to be part of something! It is not just fitting in, it means contributing to something that has meaning, to add value and to be valuable! Maybe then we will not be afraid to grow (old), because our life won’t lack meaning!

The end of process? I think not!

I read a challenging statement from Ross Mayfield on the end of process. I don’t buy it! Process is what provides us with a comfort zone, a path to follow, especially when times get hard. Processes change in time to adapt to changing contexts, they will never disappear; sorry Ross, not even formal business processes. The fact that some organizations are in a downward spiral when it comes to innovation has a lot to do with the shareholder induced efficiency and cost cutting dogma’s. This is not about process, this is about context! We just need to recognize the changing context and adapt. To adapt we need to work together in multi-disciplinary teams (Toyota) instead of squeezing every last drop of life blood out of our employees and suppliers (GM) to gain short term advantages at the cost of optimizing ourselves to our grave. The processes should be owned by the people who act them out, not forced to wear as straight jackets by the top brass.

A good process is like a good contract. It doesn’t deal with any and all we want to do together, it describes what we want to do together and provides handles for when we hit an exception to the rule. As soon as a process or contract doesn’t, they become straight jackets instead of a means to provide direction and the necessary safeguards to get there. Flexibility built in! Innovation is for the most part recombining existing solutions and there are proven processes with which we solve our contradictions to innovate. Practically every contradiction has been encountered before and people have come up with principles to deal with them. What we need therefore is not a process to innovate, but a process to come up with the right way to innovate within our context. Try putting that into a contract! You can in a process!

Ross' product is a first step to support part of the needed flexibility with web based technology from a more human point of view. I hope he keeps improving on socialtext, I just hope he won’t forget the role processes play in our daily life.

A unifying theory

A unifying theory? Sadly not in Physics, I am not half intelligent enough for that. What it is, is an elaboration of what Mathijs hinted at in his piece on A new Philosophy. A unifying vision on the Marketing/Customer Knowledge/Scenario planning, ‘classical’ KM and the Learning organization.

Because we are in an environment where change is continuous, with new competitors constantly appearing, where new technology (e.g. mobile) is making new possibilities a reality almost daily, organizations have to continuously re-invent themselves. At the same time they have to be super-competitive and looking out for the ‘next big thing’. So, any organization that wishes to survive must be simultaneously effective in all three dimensions of innovation and change:

1. Understand
   Is about the monitoring, development and recombination of products/services, to meet ever changing needs.
2. Renew
   Over time, new products and services are constantly demanded by the market and new solutions must be invented.
3. Exploit
   Is about rapidly responding to market opportunities, for which we must use top resources to be a first mover.

The dimension of Understand relates to people’s sensitivity to trends, scenario- and ‘what-if’ planning, an organization’s Market forecasting and to elements of CRM and Business (Competitive) Intelligence. Understanding is of no value if there is no attempt to translate this understanding into new products and services.

The dimension of Renewal is about translating our expectations on future demands into new products, services, capabilities and so on. This is essentially the capability development and the Learning Organization part of collaborative networks. It also stresses the point that a Collaborative network is selling knowledge and can always re-train its people to ‘deliver the new knowledge’.

The Exploit dimension covers what might be called ‘classical’ KM - e.g. Re-use, sharing, best practice, communities of practice and so on where we are trying to maximize the return on the knowledge assets we already have. If an organization focuses on renewal but does not fully exploit new opportunities while ‘the window is open’ it will never create the funds for future investments. It is not enough anymore to Exploit, with shorter and shorter product life cycles, the advantage of being first mover will soon disappear.

The key point we are trying to make is what Collaborative networks, when seen in totality, are driving. Collaborative networks of diverse specialists around a strategic topic are ideally suited to understand, renew and then; drive the exploitation. That is what successful innovation is about; the future growth, prosperity, relevance and survival of an organization - any organization!

Man's natural condition

When looking around me, it seems to me that people are not taking time to reflect. They are in their cars, going at a 120 miles per hour, racing to the next red light or traffic jam. It seems like it is man's natural state to go nowhere in a hurry. Reflection is for when you are young! When you go to school and learn! When you enter you're first years of corporate life! As if the reflection benefit ratio is only in the plus during the amount of time it takes for us to 'mature'. Hurry up and stay! Now is the time to produce and become a 'productive' member of society! Play is over! No time for frivolous thoughts or discussions on subjects not directly related to being productive. No chatting allowed! Retirement at 65!

This is wrong on so many levels, that I don't really know where to begin. Peter F. Drucker just past away at 95, he started his career in 1946 arguing that managers should give workers the power to make decisions and take the initiative. Why are many companies still not following this very sensible advice? I think it's because for that to happen you need to know where you want to go, how you want to get there and what you are willing to do to get there, as an individual and as a group or company. That is impossible without wisdom and wisdom is impossible without reflection. At the current speed with which we are changing, it is also impossible to do alone.

The problem is, this takes time and effort and we are so busy getting faster, that we do not want to take the time or effort to reflect on where we are going. I am not saying everything we do is getting nowhere, that is just an exaggeration to prove a point. The point being that we are not taking the time anymore to wonder were we are going, let alone whether we even want to go there. What about enjoyment, what about being master of your own destiny, what about personal leadership. A case in point. In the Netherlands the media is full of the lack of leadership in our country. I agree with the sentiment, but not with the proposed solutions. What we forget is that most leadership is context dependent. Being context dependent, it is essential we give our potential leaders the time and space to find out how their leadership potential fits into the context within which they are to operate. They need to be given room to grow into their potential and that takes play and reflection, individually as well as in a group. It also takes time to gather experience. The problem is; we seem to think that training is enough. Another quick fix to satisfy our need for speed.

There is a very old saying; Think before you act! Take time to reflect on the challenge you are facing and look at both the short term and long term impact of possible solutions. Talk with different people and cherish the dissonant who forces you to look at what you are doing from a different perspective. We need to change our natural state from one where we go nowhere at a 120 miles per hour, to making sure that we get to were we want to go!

Moving out of our comfort zone

I have been trying to write something sensible on why it is difficult to start something new and gather enough people around us to make it stick. I have come close, but no cigar. Until I read Danah Boyd's latest blog here. It's been staring us in the face all the time. We create enthusiasm and interest, because what we deliver is a new experience and a new way to experience. It addresses something on an emotional level that has been bothering many people; how can I be valuable, how can I contribute?

We try to constantly move people out of there comfort zone; discuss what motivates them together with others with different backgrounds and viewpoints. By stimulating a discussion/conflict on a topic approached from each individual's different viewpoint, new insights are created. This is a very stimulating experience that you long remember as invigorating. Based on these new insights, people become creative and innovate. To support the latter we provide the means to do this in a structured way, and in a sense provide a comfort zone for realisation of their new idea. There is your added value!

What struck me in the article - the challenge we face - is that as soon as we gather a significant number of people around us, we start to think the same and slowly become homogenous and start preaching to the choir. We strife to become one when our strength lies in our diversity., and there goes our advantage. How about that for a contradiction! In order to keep sharp, we need to constantly meet and discuss with diverse and new groups of people. We need to constantly diversify! Our own private version of the red queen syndrome.

This is a serious dilemma. Why? Because it is very hard to sell something that needs to change in order to stay valuable. We need to address the short term financial value of what we do in order to sell, but since the added value is based on human, creative and social values as a catalyst for change and creating financial value; we are having difficulty in providing a stable product and a consistent market approach.

Mathijs' piece on pennies from heaven, provides the basis for our grounding. I am looking forward to constantly moving us out of our own comfort zone.

Pennies from Heaven

Knowing what to do is not the same as doing it. Realizing the necessity of taking a certain action is usually not sufficient motivation to actually make a move. Such is man's proclivity for inertia. Is it fair to project this idea onto our prospective clients?
One important aspect of our idea is our approach to values. When we talk about value and added value we have four different dimensions in mind: human value, creative value, social value, and... yes, financial value. These distinctions don't always resonate with our prospects. The issue always seems to be reduced back to: how and when do you produce financial value?
This question is asked for every new initiative taken, implying that we are all in fact very careful to make only decisions that create a certain and fair amount of return on investment. How can we then explain the burst of the internet bubble? How is it that our economy has been in a rut ever since that time?

Financial value... hmmm. We live in an experience economy as much as we live in a knowledge economy, this is illustrated by the high value we put on experiences. We are quite willing to pay good money for experiences in our personal lives; we go skying and scuba diving, drink quality wine, and pay exorbitant prices to see our favorite artists perform. The essence is always the experience. How odd to value such a transient intangible 'thing'?
Financial value is not the bottom line at all. Money in fact is not the most important factor in life, and neither in business. (Life includes business, therefore what is valid of life is valid of business: there is no business without life)
Why then do we limit our conception of value so much in our professional lives? Someone told me recently:"If it doesn't make you any money, you shouldn't be doing it."
That's bullshit. We have to stop this systematic application of a double standard. Return on investment is not the important issue, added value is. If we act only out of financial gain, we paralyse all value adding processes. All financial value is produced by people working together creating and marketing new ideas, it is a consequence of succesful processes in other value dimension (human, creative, social). The surest way therefore to create financial value is to invest in these other dimensions. Of course everybody knows this, and we have known this for years, yet it still seems difficult to act on this common knowledge.

Full circle

In response to Mathijs’ story on a new philosophy, we set up a meeting to discuss how to position ourselves to overcome what we all have our own issues with, ranging from incredulity to frustration. First of all one point needs to be clarified. It’s not that we want to completely replace existing organizational structures. E.g. financial control is not something we want to get rid of or replace.

What we want is a new kind of enablement. Every part of an organization is confronted with issues surrounding the flow of information, most problems that arise, even in rather conventional areas, are in areas of complexity (of information flow). These issues are simply easier to tackle through collaborative networks than through hierarchical control.

Back to the original subject. Individually, some of us have been at this for years and almost 12 months ago we had the idea to start our own company using collaborative networking to innovate. We had discussions within our own network and when we told people we were going to set up innovation projects and manage them for service oriented companies, the answer was always the same: “What differentiates you from all the others?” We thought ‘what others?’, since there were maybe two or three parties out there doing what we do, and they were not that successful at it. Still if we would be successful, copycats would crawl out of the woodwork, so this was a legitimate question. One that we countered by telling people that we would set up multi-disciplinary teams who would be supported by tools to connect, communicate, learn and work together, and our real differentiator; measure their success not only in terms of finance, but a wider spectrum of values. Manage and share people, not knowledge!

There is a differentiation if I ever saw one but, as you can tell from Mathijs’ article, not very successful either. So there we were last Friday, breaking our heads on how to reposition ourselves again. Since most people lost us in translating our concept, but tried to hang on desperately, we arrived at the conclusion that what we are trying to do is apparently worthwhile, but also very difficult to bring across, and apparently even more difficult for our audience to translate within their own organizations. To cut a long story short, we decided to go back to our roots and tell people that we define and set up innovation programs and run the resulting projects.

We have been testing this for four days and suddenly nobody is asking questions anymore. All understand and congratulate us on having found our niche and promise to spread the word. What the hell just happened? We have come full circle and suddenly nobody is asking questions? I can only think of one answer; in the last 12 months we have had a tipping point. It is completely acceptable to set up and run innovation projects because people now see the need. Since they see the need, half our work has been done for us; it is enough to be one of the first to be able to support it.

So, we set up innovation and help you run it! We help you select the right people to tackle the strategic challenges you face, we help you build these people into a team, train them and pull them through a tested and proven methodology for systematic innovation. All this supported with a system that supports communication, collaboration, learning and specifically the innovation process.

A new Philosophy

As we have been making the first moves towards applying our ideas to concrete market situations, a number of issues are propping up. I’ve been thinking about one in particular; the seeming discrepancy between the power of our concepts and conviction and the apparent lack of response, or at least commitment, from the market. Interest? Yes! Enthusiasm? Yes! Committment? Maybe later!

What is it that we are trying to sell? How can we understand the reluctance in our partners and clients?

In thinking about these questions the following ruminations entered my mind.

There are a number of tools, methods and concepts out there that also cover some of the issues we are addressing with our collaborative networks. There is the notion of ‘communities of practice’ championed by Etienne Wenger, which is certainly collaborative and valuable, but does not involve our multidisciplinary approach; there is 3^rd generation knowledge management, which recognizes the fact that people--not information or systems--should be central to any approach to knowledge management. There are things like ‘competence management’ and ‘personal development’ which pay attention to the aspects of work that are important, and in fact essential, to individuals, and yet difficult to translate readily into financial (shareholder!) value. All of these ideas are being used to organize and implement better, more effective/profitable, ways of doing business.

So what value are we adding? What convinces us so profoundly that we have a unique contribution to make to the general theme of people-centred collaborative models? First of all I would say that we integrate the important elements of existing models. But this is perhaps an easy answer.

The main idea we’re selling is, that what is needed is not some extra method or toolset to add to the organizational structure, what is needed is a whole new way to organize as such: a new philosophy of organization. The centrally managed organization, diversified into divisions and business units, obedient only to shareholder interest, is too inflexible to respond accurately to changing markets. More importantly internal organizational boundaries seriously sabotage integration of information across processes. Responsibilities are completely fragmented. In addition to this the organisational departmentalized structure significantly hampers the exchange and creation of knowledge. We are victims of our own ‘knowledge is power’ adagio.

We need to let go of the desire to control processes from the outside, from some kind of distant higher-up management perspective. All the solutions to the problems of efficiency, and more importantly effectiveness, are already available to the people actually operating the processes. Involve them and your innovations are sure to come, your changes are sure to last…
We claim to provide solutions to this transition, and I am convinced we can deliver. Let’s create the opportunities to do so.

Tribe or community release 2

Read Danah Boyd's article on Autistic Social Software. Clearly a rebel with a cause and a smart one at that. She sees through all the technology driven social software raves and as a conclusion states that there are three ways to approach setting up and developing technical solutions in social contexts. Read it!

Amongst others, she adds a third option to the 'Tribe or community?' article (see friday october 21st); the possibility to create bespoke technical solutions based on indepth knowledge of a group's dynamic and to make the resulting technology ubiquitous. I would like to call that; First time right!

On the one hand I think that is the best way to go. Infinitely superior to technology push and better than trial and error. On the other hand I am afraid we do not live in a utopian world and the best we can hope for is a mix of the trial and error approach with the 'first time right' approach. The more we understand the context of a target group, the more the balance will shift to the latter!

In the end we need technological solutions that fit within the context of our lives and support us in doing what we do best, which is to build a group of people around ourselves based on trust and shared group memory. We've been doing this for tens of thousands of years and I think pretty successful so far!

The amorality of Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr

I have just read, belatedly, an article by Nicholas Carr (here) on the amorality of web 2.0. Finally someone not only has the guts, but also the smarts to put into words what some of us have been thinking for quite a while. He states that the religious fervor with which people follow the web 2.0 bandwagon in hopes of transendance is misguided to say the least. Read it yourself, for he expresses it better than I ever could.

I agree with his conclusions on the amorality of web 2.0 and the fact that it contains many competitive and possibly destructive business models for existing business models. I do not think however that it will kill existing culture. That is not something a machine (as he calls it) can do. That can only be done by people. What we see in many western countries - a levitation of main stream culture towards the lowest common denominator - will happen in web 2.0. That is our sacrifice for living in a democracy. The only hope I nurture is that people will get 'first choice' through web 2.0. First choice meaning the choice that fits you, and not the one that is forced upon you through economies of scale. Amazon is a nice example; sixty percent of their sales are books outside their top 150.000. So there is hope for us yet!

Tribe or community?

We got an invitation to join a ‘meeting the expert’ panel on providing services to set up communities / tribes. In thinking about this from an Internet Service Provider's perspective I realized there are two ways to do this. You can go the lowest common denominator way and try to attract as large a crowd as possible, or you provide the means for many small communities to do their own thing.

The first route is what Hyves does. You set up a meeting point for people (specifically the 13 to 21 group) to gather around and meet like minded spirits, but you keep it simple. Easy search algorithms (I am 17 and he/she is 17 and we live nearby) to find each other and easy ways to start communicating with each other, share pictures, etc. OpenBC has a business approach where you can meet entrepreneurs to team up and as an entrepreneur find people who can deliver services you need in setting up or expand your business.

The specific challenge with this approach is that you have to constantly provide new services to keep your tribe interested in your specific platform and off course be very entertaining by creating the right events to make sure people keep using your services. Tribes are nomadic, so the bandwagon effect is something you have to take into account when setting this up. It often becomes a fad that people (the tribe) follow and fades out after the initial enthusiasm fades and a new fad (competitor) starts.

The advantages are easy set up and maintenance as a trade off against the maintenance effort in keeping the tribe interested and the need for constant vigilance to provide new events and services. This approach is a bit of a hit and miss approach with potentially short lifecycles.

The second route is to provide a framework for creating small groups around specific topics. Provide these communities with the means to find other people with the same interest, share information in a structured way and to separate the good from the bad apples. Let them manage themselves and provide them with limited means to create their own services.

The advantage is that these communities will maintain themselves as a trade off to the initial investment in time spent on helping people start these small groups and in building a simple interface to build your own service (look at ning). Once you got the thing going, people will start to use it and create their own communities using your service framework. This approach is a trial and error approach with a long life expectancy for resulting communities. You will also have to create many to create a large enough revenue stream. You would be a first mover, since large scale is what dominates the web today. A longer lifecycle can be expected!

What is important when doing either is that you start communicating with the people who are using your services. Communicate in a way that you build the trust needed for them to tell you what to do next. Create a system and processes where people can Pull you where They want to go!

The choice you make is up to you. Both have the potential for differing business models (from advertising to subscription, to pay per use) and I personally think there is no best way to go at this time. Just choose the path closest to what makes your own company tick. Just remember though that much of the large scale market is being cornered by Amazon, Ebay, and the likes of Yahoo and Google. You need to differentiate yourself from very powerful players.

The hard fact on the soft side

There is very little research on combining the way people interact with the way technology should support interaction and communication. It’s mostly one or the other and rarely both. There is also very little research on the combined value systems of networks and how they can be synchronized to produce a concerted effort. There is a lot of research on one and very occasionally two angles (Financial and Social), rarely from a combined value system (including Creative and Human capital). At Crossing Signals we are doing holistic research in this area and want to capture the resulting strategic value of a network given its context.

The hard fact is that nobody seems to be interested in the soft side of innovation and collaboration. The contradiction is that given that most attention goes to one dimension (money) there is no way organizations can set up successful collaborative initiatives to innovate, because they do not apply to our basic nature (to improve ourselves), nor to our passion, nor do they align behaviour or empower people to explore for themselves. It has to make money now! By focusing on one dimension, it will never make money in the long term, only on the very short term. Again the ‘red queen’ syndrome, we need to run faster and faster, just to keep up.

I know of one company for instance that has a substantial intranet, where their employees ‘abuse’ newsgroups to spread client briefings. Instead of finding out what a newsgroup offers to move people to use it that way, they take a short cut and come up with a new application (technology) and force everybody (rules and regulations) to use it and appoint managers as the moderators (enforcers) for the new system. I have said it before, and I will say it again: “If you don’t give people a vote, you give them a veto.”

People have looked at how forums and newsgroups work (or not) and concluded that only through moderation can we direct the way a network of people is moving and keep everybody involved. Bullshit! We know how to do this, it’s been known for over sixty years and it has been done for over 20.000. We need to empower people to moderate themselves. For this to happen we need to ground them in a common purpose and empower them to find the best role to contribute by themselves. Leaders, workers, coaches will emerge! As Steven Covey said: “It is as if we are still practicing bloodletting, although we know all about bacteria and how they work”.

I will give you an example of progress. In e-learning we are moving from web based course catalogs, reusing existing content and using the internet as nothing more than a new transmission channel, to a story based approach of coaching and redesigning the way we learn. How did we get there? Trial and error is how we did. Story based learning is as old as the human race, but with the advent of new technology we completely forgot about it and sold the technology bigger than it could deliver. Only now are we slowly moving back to our roots, because e-learning didn’t deliver on its promise or even premise. We apparently have to hit our head into a brick wall (preferably at high speed) to realize we should be doing things differently.

At Crossing Signals we are trying to turn the tables and look at what motivates people to want to use certain solutions, what values trigger him or her to do so and how that makes them interact with other people from other disciplines and backgrounds. Within their combined context! First build the community, than worry about the technology. We need to know how people want to work, what they value in themselves, the people they work with and the body of knowledge they expand. Only then do we start thinking about the enabling technology.

As logical as this sounds, we run into a chicken and egg problem here. There is no perception of short term financial benefit. Worse, the financial result of our work can only be estimated once the initial research phase has been done and we have a clear picture of were the company wants to go and the network can. The fact that this led Boeing to save billions of dollars on doing the right innovation projects and killing the rest, or Samsung to create an innovation culture around perpetual crisis is apparently not enough for the vast majority of companies to follow this route. All are interested in the research and its results, but no one wants to be the guinea pig. I can tell you that in live, we are all guinea pigs. The hard fact we have to deal with is that our challenge can apparently only be met by going the e-learning route. Trial and error it is! So let us make huge promises to be able to sell and then deliver incremental steps with small financial pay-offs.

Welcome to the twenty-first century!

P.S. There are about three subjects in this article that deserve more attention, so expect these to return here.

Composing a collaborative network

When it comes to networking, there is a lot of theory on the subject. The same goes for collaboration. Both can be taught and learned. They are a logical combination, because one is an extension of the other. So, why are so few people in the Netherlands doing it?

A nice analogy is composing a piece of music. Everybody can be taught how to do it, what method to use and what tools to apply. The problem is, having a correctly produced piece of music, not necessarily makes it something people will want to listen to, or even make it sound like music. Apparently 95% of us can learn how to produce a piece of music, but only 5% of us are real composers, talented people who not only know how to write/compose a good piece of music, but also know what to put into it for people to enjoy. A very small number of those even have that divine spark needed to become a Mozart or Beethoven. Still a large number of people enjoy making or listening to music others have composed. We just need the right composers to lead the way and provide the pieces for us to play. Play being an important word here!

When ‘composing’ a collaborative network to create an entrepreneurial mindset and drive innovation, the logic is; we need a producer to facilitate and composers to combine the different instruments (disciplines) into a collaborating team of musicians (specialists). Our goal; to dare produce new music (entrepreneurship) and find new ways to produce music (innovation). We run into three issues. The first is what’s in it for the producers (c-level management)? The second is who are the composers (the leaders, coaches, mentors, creationists)? The third is what methods and tools (algorithms) can we use to deal with complexity and shaping a team out of people from different disciplines? I am excluding context to make a point, in reality all these questions will have context dependent characteristics.

Regarding the first issue, I suggest you read the rest of this blog, all the answers are in here. Lower risk, accelerated capability building, agility, etc. All you need to deal with the ‘red queen’ syndrome. It’s a no-brainer.

The second is an interesting challenge. Who are the people who not only form a group of different specialists around them to tackle a strategic challenge, but are also capable of sustaining the network to bring out the agility and innovation potential? No, these are not automatically current top management or middle management. Shareholder power has transformed most organizations into risk avoiding, optimization oriented creatures and has produced the management to suit its needs. The required skills and mentality for optimization is a small part of what we need in a composer. We select the few that not only have it in them to compose, but who have the spark to create and the passion to pull through and inspire people. Who are in control of their own destiny through personal leadership. We revive the hopefuls in current management positions and provide a path for high potential composers to come to the fore and take their place in the creative and innovative process. A process that brings us to the third question.

The third is about the means we have to put at a composer’s disposal to support them in composing with their network. What can we offer to pull people through an innovation process? Starting with generating a viable idea and going forward by putting that idea in practice; providing the right benefits to stakeholders involved, selecting the right tools to implement and plan the implementation. There are many tools to do the latter, but very few to generate the right idea. Of the tools for doing the first there are no integrated solutions to provide the network with a place to work, learn and communicate with each other. At the moment we are researching our own environment to build context dependent solutions.

Getting back to the initial question: “Why are so few people in the Netherlands doing this?”. I think we neither have the right means nor the passion to produce interesting new ideas anymore and for the few that do, our optimization paradigm prevents us from seeing the added value. A nice contradiction in our social welfare state; with all the leisure time available, there is no room to play anymore. So, I’m finishing my article and together with my colleagues going out there to preach and provide a path for people to follow and to have fun following.

Everyday life

Having just started using a potential platform (open source) for our collaborative networking efforts, I find it hard to get some involvement going. The reason is, I think, just as simple as the reason for writing here. An event, or in this case the lack of an expected event, triggered my imagination and the need to share that in writing. In other words I needed to be moved, called, addressed, remembered, et cetera, to write this article. I also needed to find the inspiration and resulting energy to actually start writing.

Coming from a brief stint in e-learning and knowledge management, I always thought that a system that facilitates choosing the right subject combined with delivering the right content would be enough for people to gather around, use and add on to. My mistake! In the beginning the subjects where forced (top-down) upon the masses and if you don’t give people a vote, you give them a veto!

Our bottom up approach and giving them a vote does not take off as expected either. We provided a group of people a choice of subjects, the sub-group choosing ours, we provided with content, books, presentations, links, we even provided the means to add whatever the group wants to itself. In direct interaction with the group, there is energy, enthusiasm and drive, maybe not enough focus and own initiative, but the first is a matter of experience and if the experience is a happy one, own initiative will follow. By the way, if that is naïve, let me know! The result is that there is some activity, but most still happens outside our environment.

The lesson learned so far is that any system that facilitates collaboration not only needs to be bootstrapped (which we did!), it has to be kept going by creating events that are interesting and motivate people to make the next step (which we are apparently having trouble with). An interesting subject and the right content is clearly not enough to keep things going.

Is it the system, is it the group using it, are we not providing enough triggers/events to make the network self sustaining? We are still doing research and looking for the answer, but I have a sneaky feeling that the way we behave in everyday life (chaotic and triggered by the events occurring around us) is what we will have to emulate until the network becomes self sustaining. This means that any system supporting collaboration in networks will have to offer the means to create many different events and will have to provide a wide array of services and the mechanisms needed to choose the matching service. Different groups may well use different services to cover the same event! In other words, it needs to emulate the non-linear way we interact with each other and our surroundings. Looks suspiciously like everyday life.

Qapla'

Why start a new blog with the Klingon verb for success you may ask? Well, there is no such thing as coincidence. While attending the Cordial event at 'Kasteel de Vanenburg' in Putten I had an energizing discussion with a very interesting consultant/nerd/show man; Daryl Plummer (Group VP at Gartner). He ‘performed’ a fantastic presentation on the need for Service oriented architectures and its evolution to include event driven architectures. A technology presentation filled with human experiences, metaphors and lots of humour. When the phone rings, that is an event, when you pick it up you use a service to communicate with your neighbour who tells you that your dog is trying to eat their cat, which is an event. Your neighbours would probably consider it a service if you could prevent Butch from eating Fluffy. A beautiful and extremely funny way of describing the difference between a service and an event. He then went on explaining that day to day live is based on events first and on the choice you make regarding the service to deal with the event second. That is a concept that is near to my hart and part of what we are doing here. Networks are event driven and we want to empower people to not only ease the choice of service through the sharing of information and experience with others, but to empower them to build their own services to make their lives easier. Using his words, we want to compose networks by assembling the needed disciplines and orchestrate its direction (give it a self sustaining purpose).

I am not easily impressed, but this was an exception. In a meeting afterwards we discussed how we could enable business people to not only drive the development of new applications, but also make it so easy that they can develop simple event driven services for communication and collaboration without any coding knowledge. During the discussion the word Qapla' came up; I should have known he was also a 'Trekkie'. We do not only share the same view on the use of technology, but we also share a love for all things Star Trek (with the possible exception of Enterprise which they cancelled when it finally began to show some promise). We also both laugh ourselves silly when it comes to the extreme lengths some people go through to dress as their heroes. We're plain clothes fans. There is no such thing as coincidence and I may just take him up on the invitation to visit the Dragoncon event in Atlanta next year in September.

When I look back on the two day Cordial, the meeting with Daryl and the presentation of Futurologist Paul Ostendorf on the first day including the resulting discussion together with Colby Stuart and Jonathan Marks where the highlights of the event. Paul gave us a video supported view on the future and role technology will play. He did this on his own presentation software which looked superior to Powerpoint in more ways than one. I will have to look into that on www.neoversum.com, I wonder if there was fruit involved. Colby already described his presentation and the resulting discussion in her blog, so read it here!

I also had a short discussion with the founder of Cordys (Jan Baan) on the topic Colby ended her blog on the Cordial with. Where is the human element? He was initially taken aback because he linked my question with the organisation of the event, so I rephrased my question to: How will people drive the development of applications and drive the role of applications in how they collaborate? To him their product is more about human beings than it has ever been. I think he meant that it is for the good of human beings working in organisations and using services because it reduces complexity, is easier to maintain, easier to build and hopefully easier to use, but that still did not answer my question. With a thank you for the invitation, that was the end of our discussion though.

Cordys is using the terms business collaboration and excellerate (excel and accelerate) on every corner. I see application integration through an enterprise system bus and an orchestrator that can be used to accelerate application development through process modelling. This will make the ICT architecture of any company more agile. Bravo! I do not see collaboration between people or a search for and nurturing of excellence though. These are human concepts that technology can enable, but not inspire or replace. While I am very impressed with their product offering I think Cordys has a challenge in that their staff is very homogenous, very technology driven with the exception of a few sales & marketing people. I see a company that is very good at technological innovation, but seems to lack the ability to innovate their business to make money. They still do things the nineties way. To close the gap between their technology prowess and the business need of their customers, they choose to partner with consulting oriented system integrators. In my opinion, these companies have the same problem as Cordys; they are not focused on adding the human being into the equation. The paradigm shift from technology driven development ‘here’s technology and this is how you must use it’ to user driven development ‘this is what I want to do, who will create the service?’ (think of blogging and tagging as an example) has not reached them yet. They will need to reinvent themselves or repeat the late nineties mistakes of many of their predecessors and become a takeover target within the next six months.

Broaden your scope!

Collaborative Networking is most often associated with knowledge management. Immediately all the doomed KM projects spring to mind and it is perceived as old wine in new bottles. First of, KM is for a large part a ‘contradictio in terminis’. Knowledge is not something you can manage directly; knowledge is a unique combination of information and experience that resides within people. So at best what you can manage is information, people and the sharing of experience between them. When by KM, people mean that knowledge is to be governed as a strategic asset, it becomes interesting for us. If knowledge is a strategic asset, who is to actually govern it?

Almost all KM projects have been top-down and micro managed, pretty unsuccessful I might add. The actual actors, the practitioners who use the knowledge, have rarely been involved in setting up KM solutions. These actors form social structures (networks!) to share information and experience within their field of expertise, because almost any field has become too complex for any one man to fully cover. In a sense they are already governing their own field of knowledge. Most KM projects ignored these social structures to their ruin. This is where Collaborative Networking comes in, to support this governing process and give the means to direct the knowledge and energy of a network to the actors themselves. To define the field they are responsible for, to support the social structure, interaction, capture of interesting communication (stories, cases) and to support an infrastructure to store and share information, methods and tools and to learn together.

Without top down commitment however, this will be as doomed to fail as the original KM projects. Top management is needed as a facilitator; to put in place the support structures, the reward structure, the infrastructure, etc. We help directors put a value to the networks within the knowledge field(s) they are responsible for. We help them define those fields from a strategic view point, we help them to understand, appreciate and direct the performance of existing networks and have the actual practitioners of non-networked fields of knowledge create new ones for them. This is done by benchmarking networks and potential networks on their social, human, creative and financial value, by monitoring their progress and by giving directors the means to ensure they do not fall below minimal thresholds for these values. We help pick the fertile combination of knowledge and available practitioners and help directors grow new opportunities through innovation, agility and a broadened scope.

Do we need a common enemy release 2

Though there are only two comments visible on the previous article, when I include e-mail responses it's the most controversial article so far. Reactions varied from one end of the spectrum to the other with little in between. Discussions I had on the subject mirrored these responses. Apparently there are two ways of interpreting the question. One is from a point of view where we have to fight a physical enemy that is threatening our lives (fear); the other is from a point of view where we need focused conflict to achieve and learn anything. Both are formed by our experiences and prevent us from looking at the question from a more philosophical point of view.

As both commentors point out, what we need is something to gather around and put a concerted effort in by applying to peoples need to create and add value. But, what is that something? If we want to extinguish poverty, isn’t that out of love for our fellow man, with poverty as our common enemy? When we tackle ignorance, again we do that out of love for our fellow man with ignorance being the enemy. To stop child labour we are uniting in not buying products from companies who use children. The first example is pretty clear, the second and third get muddier. Does our fellow man feel ignorant? If he doesn’t, he is not going to like our interference, if he does, will he understand that we are helping him? The parents of child labourers are desperate, because they need the income their children generate to survive with their family. It’s not about good or bad, or war and peace! Without a little empathy for all parties involved, it’s easy to create a new enemy out of love!

With al due respect for those who do not agree with the metaphorical representation of an enemy being needed to unite people, there are so many examples to prove this point. To get equal rights, women had to unite against the male establishment, something we are still seeing today in many muslim countries. Men are not ‘the enemy’, but their views are. While still loving their men, women fight against their views that brand them as inferior. In the Netherlands I visited a meeting of ‘De publieke zaak’, literally translated ‘The public cause’. This public forum was created to bring change to a government that is estranged from its citizens. One of the remarks of a former minister was that citizens only seem to unite when a government project threatens their quality of live. Such as a new railway track, highway, etc. In this he stated the government responsible for this project is not perceived as the enemy by those protesting, it’s a conflict of interest between citizens (represented by our government) who need the extra tracks and those who get them through their backyard. Does the committee against the track see it this way? Come on! The government at the very least chose sides and became the enemy. In order to create a new government, we have to destroy parts of the old one. Do you really think the ‘to be destroyed’ parts are going to thank us ?

All change is perceived as a threat because people do not like to change the status quo, even though status quo does not exist in human society, but that is food for another article. Perception is truth! Love is an important ingredient and trigger for change, but whether you like it or not, in order to get a critical mass of people to enable change you are going to be perceived as the enemy by those who do not want to change. They become your enemy, however much you love them. If you want to create, build, and add value you, love can be used to tap into the creative potential inside all individuals, but to focus it and maintain it, you need something more. Love is just too tricky and subjective to be used as anything but a catalyst. My simple conclusion is this. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck! One of the laws of nature; in order to create we destroy something else. I think we need a common enemy to unite against, but whether we do or not is irrelevant, by our actions to change things we’ll get one anyway.