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.

Do we need a common enemy?

As I was looking at a very successful TV series this weekend something struck me. What most successful series have in common is that they have an antagonist, an enemy to fight, metaphorically or physically. Somehow this is essential for people to be interested and keep watching the show.

If we take a look in the real world, people gather around the subjects of their interest, but real commitment to a group only seems to happen when there is a common enemy to fight. Something most governments seem to exploit to stay in power. Create a common goal and a common enemy to fight and the fear, anger and frustration of the people is focused away from the leaders who created these in the first place.

I have always thought that metaphors were essential to creating a group conscience and focus its energy. It appears that the enemy metaphor is no exception. Monitoring the metaphoric representation of the enemy is essential, since it becomes an instrument to direct the energy of a group.

Still I wonder. Do we need a common enemy to create collaborative networks? Am I being naïve in hoping that this is not the case? If it is, is the metaphoric approach the way to go?

Vive la evolution!

Getting our message out there is easier and more difficult than we expected it to be. Easier because we have mostly been preaching to the choir; people who already think something worthwhile is happening. Vive la revolution! More difficult because just outside our own group, most parties we talk to have not come to this conclusion, or do not want to get it and lack the curiosity to explore. Letting go of the bars that hold you is a painful process.

It’s all well and good to find confirmation with people who agree with us, and who comfort us and give us a warm and fuzzy feeling by belonging to a group. In the end what matters is that what we see as essential - to awaken an entrepreneurial spirit and have fun innovating together - is shared by a critical mass of people. A critical mass that takes our ideas a step further and starts bringing in more and more people, until finally we have achieved what we want by evolution instead of revolution.

Most people lack our curiosity and are happy with the way things are going; never touch a working system, we have always done it this way, et cetera. This is fact, not condemnation! Resistance to change is a fact of life, even if the grass is greener on the other side. We need to find a path where people feel safe and need to provide quick wins to keep them on it. I am not one of those people who say that the journey is more important than the destination. If you say that about Rome, you have never been there! I do however agree on there being more ways then one to Rome, in which case we’d better pick the fun one.

To those we try to convince this might seem condescending, but since they do not read this blog and I am preaching to my own choir, I will leave you with the assignment to find ways to include people and make us as much a part of them as we try to make them a part of us!

New Orleans

Though not even close to being an expert on American politics, I would say that the White house is very good at 'Economies of Scale' and it is blatantly obvious how bad they are at 'Economies of Scope'. I will not go into the Iraq case, because it has more angles to prove my point than I could write down in this blog. The New Orleans situation is a much clearer case where executive-style leadership, 'We've got good people in all the top positions, we're hierarchical, we plan' is how the Whitehouse is trying to recover the situation. They are going with their strength to a point of weakness. No way can you plan for such a disaster. The governing chain is managed very efficiently for day to day operations, but is vulnerable because its staff lacks the room to manoeuvre and the chain collapses with these kind of disruptions. In my view, the only option is to empower local authorities to deal with local situations and give them control over what is needed where. They are the ones with a clear scope of what is happening and what is needed, but are powerless to do anything with this information until someone on a federal level approves. The interview Ray Nagin (Mayor of New Orleans) gave is a painful statement to this effect.

I always have this optimistic hope that we learn something from these human tragedies, sadly it always ends up a ‘blame game’ with the first signs already showing. Let’s hope this time we can move past blaming people and start empowering them.

Economies of Scope and Scale

It’s a topic that has passed here before, but not explicitly. Why? It is hard to explain the differences between ‘Economies of Scale’ and ‘Economies of Scope’ and more importantly why that matters. Telescopes are a beautiful metaphor where this can be made visual, no pun intended.

It all started with the Dutch using two lenses to bring distant objects closer (so they could recognize incoming ships earlier and use that knowledge on the stock exchange) and Galilei using it to study the sky. Through the centuries they built bigger and bigger lenses (telescopes) to capture more of the sky in greater detail. The bigger the lens, the more photons you could capture. The clearer the lens the more efficient it became. Today bigger and clearer lenses are not an option anymore; they can not carry their own weight and any clearer is not cost effective. The solution to getting better resolution is simple, put the telescopes far apart and connect them to each other to combine the images. The visible spectrum was not enough to gain new insight into distant solar systems, so radio telescopes where introduced. These can be linked efficiently and size is not an option anymore. You can link 2000 radio telescopes and combine the resulting images; together with the visible spectrum of 50 linked telescopes you gain new insights into the how and what of the universe.

To those of you who have been reading my blogs, this should sound familiar. The ‘Economies of Scale’ aspect is the bigger lens; the ‘Economies of Scope’ aspect is linking the telescopes. Through efficiency more could be done in the same time, through combining different locations and disciplines (a network!) new insights led to new discoveries at lower cost. A beautiful combination!

That is what we are about. Not replacing one approach with the other, but expanding the possibilities. Efficiency is an important ingredient of today’s business, so ‘Economies of Scale’ are essential. Agility and flexibility are just as important, and this is where ‘Economies of Scope’ come in.

Collaboration and trust; you can't have one without the other!

Collaboration, co-development, joint venture, whatever the name, working together is based on trust, dependence and risk sharing. Building trust starts in that split second where you realize there is something to like in the other party; you start sharing history and realize you share common goals. When you realize that all parties together can achieve dreams none of the parties can achieve alone, you realize you depend on each other. Trust fuels the bonding process; because it provides the assurance the other will not to abuse this dependence. Then comes the moment where you decide to share the risks of your joint venture based on the strengths of the individual partners. It’s also the moment you should be discussing contracts, to provide a legal base for the newfound relationship.

Sadly, we seem to be living in a society that thinks it can skip the first phase. Contracts seem to replace trust in many cases and a realistic view of interdependencies and a realistic sharing and resulting management of risk does not happen. As a result, specifications are fixed and the flexibility and manoeuvrability needed to tackle the challenges we face in these times are lost.

We need to change this attitude and understand that without trust there is no real collaboration. Strengths and weaknesses need to be shared not hidden to position for contract negotiations. Without a clear understanding of the interdependencies of the parties involved there is no realistic risk sharing. Without realistic risk sharing the joint venture will collapse at the first sign of trouble.

Am I asking everybody to trust each other? Of course not! Just remember that building relationships takes time and a substantial investment from all parties involved. There is no magic bullet and there certainly is no magic contract to cover all contingencies that we might encounter while trying to realize a common goal. My message is to start building relationships based on trust now, we need them to grow in order to deal with the challenges ahead.

What makes a good CEO?

In an e-mail exchange following the ‘Entrepreneurship and innovation in the Netherlands’ article, it was stated that project managers are best suited to become CEO’s in these times since they are the ones best qualified to work with multi-disciplinary teams to achieve a target. I had a discussion with a renowned international program manager (Peter Luiks) on this reaction. He is of course of the opinion that program managers make excellent CEO’s ;-)

The definition of what constitutes a project and what constitutes a program is not always clear. Let's assume for this discussion that a project involves a clear target with a limited number of disciplines needed and a program involves setting up an umbrella project from a holistic viewpoint and integrating a number of projects to reach a specific goal. Main differences is therefore size, number of disciplines involved and overall impact.

Both project and program managers know reality drives all events and they know what reality is driving events in their business or process. This insight at the very least qualifies them to take an advisory role to any board of directors. Transparency being such a buzz word of late, a CEO would be stupid not to listen. Programs and projects are run by people as companies are run by people; all need to show visible successes to thrive. For a CEO this quality is essential.

We can identify the following differences between Project management and program management in general:

1. The first is about limiting your scope to achieve your targets; the second is about broadening your scope to be successful.
2. The first is about reaching deadlines; the second is about staying on course.
3. The first is about point solutions; the second about managing situations.
4. The first is about being there for your team; the second about being there for all.

A program manager is capable of a more diverse range of roles than the average project manager. In this sense, the best project manager will not necessarily become a good program manager or vice versa. I believe project managers are rarely good CEO’s because their focus is too narrow. They need clear concise targets handed to them, are very creative at executing in multi-disciplinary teams, but most often lack the kind of creativity needed to self start. They rarely become good program managers for the same reason. A program manager is a political animal without showing it and he or she is self motivated. Is a good program manager CEO material? I don’t know, the ones I thought were really good didn’t want to become CEO. So maybe those are!

Basically, I don’t care where a CEO comes from, the most important quality is leadership! CEO’s are the ones to envision the strategic programs (with a little help from us) and lead them. Lead being the key word here, not manage. That’s where I think collaborative networking comes in; around the strategic programs, multi disciplinary teams tackling issues to come up with solutions and projects to realize them. A CEO is there to inspire, motivate and make sure things move in the right direction. But that’s just my opinion.

Efficiency a risk?

Efficiency is a word that has appeared in this blog several times. Most recently as something that is not enough to save us from the Asian onslaught. Something occurred to me just now and I had to write it down to get my mind around it.

We have made efficiency one of our top priorities in recent years. It started from a competitive advantage PoV and has now been reduced to cost cutting, which is just a subset of competitive advantage. The results are that we have very efficient business processes, very efficient sales processes, very efficient economic processes, et cetera. What we have less and less of is slack in these processes. You know, the room to maneuver if things don’t fit pre-ordained specs. We have become so efficient at what we do that any disturbance of our regular paths leaves us vulnerable.

In short, the more we increase efficiency, the more vulnerable we seem to become and the higher the risks are if something goes wrong. We just don’t see it that way. Why? Because it is hard to let go of Dogma’s and I believe efficiency has become a modern day dogma.

A case in point. To increase customer service at lower costs, we have divided customer requests into categories, automated/scripted the replies, increased efficiency and reduced the number of representatives. Still a large percentage of people do not fit into one of the categories or are not satisfied by the scripted answer. This percentage is making more and more noise and is ruining many established reputations. The people designing and running the customer care centers look at the figures and are wondering what is happening. According to the figures, they are being very efficient and successful. They are not facing up to their vulnerability and to the fact that even small numbers can ruin big reputations. There is a contradiction here that needs to be solved; how do I keep my customers happy without solving all their problems?

I like to make a case here for collaborative networking, people from different backgrounds, working together to solve apparent contradictions. Making a car lighter and more fuel efficient is not a contradiction, it is optimization. Making an engine more powerful and making it lighter is a contradiction. To make it more powerful, it needs to be stronger, in order for it to be stronger it needs thicker walls, with more material it becomes heavier. Only if you bring together people with different understanding of the subsystems and the systems they impact on, can you solve this. It’s a non-linear and relatively unpredictable process until you come up with a solution. The only thing you can do is look at how people have tackled these kinds of problems in the past and use their way of thinking in your approach as a multi-disciplinary team.

That is the dream our network members and I are striving for. The fact that it brings back some humanity in an over regulated system is an added bonus.

Entrepreneurship and innovation in the Netherlands

A recent OESO survey shows the Dutch at the bottom of the list when it comes to entrepreneurship. Two thirds of our population does not want to work for themselves, but wants to work for somebody else. Only ten percent of our listed companies are younger than 40 years, while in the US the number is eighty percent. Another survey shows that people in the Netherlands do not take pride in their work anymore. They only work to be able to pay for having fun outside office hours, for full time employees an average 6.7 hours! It is not surprising we are also at the bottom of the list when it comes to innovation.

I am pretty annoyed with the way the Dutch look at innovation. Innovation is about efficiency and therefore doing things better. We are very good at this! As stated before, it is also about doing better things. The latter is something the Dutch do not seem to grasp anymore. We are still cutting costs (through efficiency of our processes) and only looking at short term financial impact. Margins are only up temporarily because revenues are not increasing. We are slowly but surely destroying the capital we have built through entrepreneurship in the preceding centuries. Since it’s a silent crisis and not a plane crashing, we do not seem to mind or care.

This slow degradation of capital (human, creative, social and financial) is happening in most of our larger companies, our educational system, in our health care, and in our governmental institutions. We do not seem to realize that the still raining Taylor dogma of compartmentalizing our work through defining every process detail in the name of efficiency stifles innovation and the leadership needed to innovate. People are just performing routine jobs, haven’t gotten a clue to what is happening two steps down the road (or up) and consequently don’t care anymore about what happens outside their immediate (very limited) sphere of influence. As soon as you try to step outside the confines of your job description, somebody will immediately cut of your head. Where is the pride in what we do?

We are ruled by fear, the fear of making mistakes, the fear of losing our job, the fear of immigrants, et cetera, et cetera. We pride ourselves in not making mistakes, we pity people who lose their job, we pamper immigrants (or used to) and deny them the opportunity to make something out of their own lives. Once you run a company that doesn’t make it, it’s the end of your career. You did not learn something, you failed! Once you take a risk in a big company and it doesn’t work out, it’s the end of your career, you failed. The only ones floating to the top of our society are the ones who do not make mistakes. Guess how many decisions they made involving any risk whatsoever. I’ll give you the answer, it is probably none!

Excuse me for ranting, but this is why I started this blog. Collaborate and innovate, look at new possibilities and at possibilities in a new way. Follow your passion and work together with people who share that passion and create. Learn from your mistakes and from each other. That is how the Dutch became the first Hegemony this world knew, before the English and before the US. We showed courage, worked together with people from all creeds and shared the risks amongst each other. Let's start exploring again!

Why go for collaborative networking in your organisation?

If you ask a believer, the answer is not the same as that of the average CEO. A believer sees the common good of finding kindred spirits, sharing information and exploring new ventures. Innovation through friction within multidisciplinary teams is a given. Therefore, this is automatically going to conquer the world! Where have we heard that before? A CEO on the other hand needs to be convinced that what we do leads to more revenue, higher margins, or lower costs.

One can only achieve any of these targets by increasing efficiency and/or effectiveness. By not only doing things better, but also by doing better things. Deliver products at a better price/quality level, with better service, et cetera. So far, we have gone down the 'Economies of scale' road. Continuously lowering transaction and interaction costs relative to the number of products/services we produce. The problem is that the knife we're using to cut costs has become more expensive than the costs we are cutting. Especially large firms have compartmentalized their organizations and departments into small dependent units that are extremely efficient at what they do, but have no clue anymore about the outside world while still being dependent on that outside world. So when something happens outside their scope, they act within their limited set of rules. Result; service goes down, a whole batch of products contains mistakes, et cetera. Only the board still sees the big picture and so the board constantly has to step in to set details straight and change the rule set to accommodate incidents. See where this is going?

What we offer through collaborative networking is the ‘Economies of Scope’ way. Not a magic bullet, but a means for your employees to come together, learn from each other and by achieving new insights together, innovate. We let people from different disciplines meet around objects (products) or subjects (service level) and get to understand each other's differing view points on the same matter. This is the basis for creating new insights and in turn is the basis for innovation. Not only do they come up with innovations, but as a multi disciplinary team are also much better equipped to come up with the goods to prove it; a solid business case. Because we are going to support network activities through web based tools, we not only support the current team, but also the rapid inclusion of new members and a means to research the behaviour expressed and together with the University of Twente and the Institute for Network Cultures accommodate the tools to better meet those needs in the future.

Does this mean a CEO can sit back and relax? By no means! He or she has to show commitment to this way of working and reward co-operation and resulting success. Real leadership is needed to motivate the networks to produce and give direction to where they are going. In this sense, nothing has changed; we still need people to inspire us!