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.
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