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.