BlogWalk Chicago Reflections

I spent an excellent day Saturday with both old and new blogging friends at BlogWalk Chicago. Jack Vinson and AKMA have good overview posts and more can be found at BlogWalk TopicExchange and Technorati tag:BlogWalk. With some luck I will find some time to process much of the excellent conversation and output of the day.

One conversation thread that wound in and out of the day was the relation of blogs and social
software to large organizations. Tom Sherman struggled with this discussion and I thought it worth taking a few moments to try and articulate my perspective.One reality for most of us is that we can expect to spend a substantial portion of our time in and around large organizations. I believe they will be part of our work landscape for some time to come. The nature of the work expected of many of us is evolving rapidly. It’s more fluid and less well-defined. Job descriptions, when they are available, don’t provide a lot of guidance.

At the same time the mythology around organizations and work is that there should
be clear guidelines around what is expected of us. I know that I struggle with these uncertainties routinely. Most of the day to day work that leads up to knowledge products and deliverables is fundamentally invisible. The bits that make up email and draft documents and spreadsheet models are hidden and shared only among a handful of people until they are completed. More than anything else, what blogs and social software do is make it drop dead simple to make the conduct of knowledge work visible. To me this is of fundamental importance. Knowledge work depends on our ability to learn and improve as we go. That depends on being able to see what is going on and social software makes that feasible.

Organizations struggle with the notion that they need to learn. Too often, learning is something that someone else in the organization needs to do. Moreover, real learning (as opposed to what passes for learning in too many training environments) is a social activity. These tools will be
central to creating the environment in which necessary learning can take place. Today, that learning activity is almost exclusively the province of those who’ve retained their natural curiosity and inquisitiveness in spite of eduational and organizational systems that work overtime to suppress these natural instincts. The work that needs to be done will force the rest of us to adapt as well. Seems to me that working out this transition presents some interesting work to be done inside organizations.

Column at Enterprise Systems Journal.

This week marks the start of a new sideline for me. Jim Powell, editor of Enterprise Systems Journal, has asked me to write a column for them covering the same kinds of material I talk about here. The first column, Bridging the IT Cultural Divide,
ran earlier this week. In it I start to explore an idea I’ve been
trying to work out about oral vs. literate styles of thinking as they
relate to organizations.

Thanks to the indefatigable Buzz Bruggeman for brokering the introduction. And thanks to Jim Powell for his efforts at edting.

AKMA on organizational change

Who knew that AKMA was an organizational theorist in addition to being
a scholar and a preacher? Profound insight into change and change
management expressed far more succinctly and usefully than most of the
organizational change material you will usually encounter.

New Law.

When trying to simplify a complex
[bureaucratic] system, any change that does not result in an obvious
quantum of simplification amounts to further complication or, more
concisely, any attempted simplification short of a quantum change is
always a complication.

[AKMA’s Random Thoughts]

Lunch with Betsy Devine: tenure, age, and folly

I finally had lunch with Betsy Devine today at the Bombay Club in Cambridge. This was a long delayed get together that was orginally intended to include Halley Suitt as well. Just as well that we ended up doing two separate lunches. I fear my head would have exploded if I had tried to keep up with both of them at the same time.

As with Halley, Betsy and I picked right up as old friends despite this being our first face-to-face meeting. Rich, stimulating conversation about education, organizations, knowledge sharing, writing, anthropology, humor, politics, science, and architecture to name just some of the topics I can remember.

One topic we talked about was what value was left in the notion of tenure in education both at the university level and below. At one point, Betsy served on the board of education in Princeton while her husband Frank was doing the research that led to his recent Nobel prize (how cool is it to get a chance to talk to someone that close to such an experience – who says blogging is a waste of time when it leads to opportunities like that?). Anyway, I was remarking on how odd tenure seemed to be when applied in public school districts. Betsy explained to me that the role of tenure in that environment was not about academic freedom but about creating some protection for older, more experienced teachers (generally women) who were otherwise at risk of being replaced by the newest crop of teachers just out of school who were not only likely to be more attractive to students and parents but much cheaper as well. I had never made that connection.

That flowed into a discussion of similar biases toward age discrimination in business organizations. That flowed into a discussion of the problems in the private sector that let organizations hold onto the profits that might accrue from replacing your aging, expensive workers with younger blood while being able to pass the broader costs of unemployed middle-aged executives with mortgages and tuitions to pay onto the society as a whole. Age discrimination laws notwithstanding, this pattern of privatizing profits and commonalizing costs is powerful and, unfortunately, rational behavior on the part of executives who are charged with putting the interests of their shareholders first. It says to me that our regulatory frameworks are broken in some important ways that will take a lot more than the trading of rhetorical positions that seems to characterize so much of our current public discourse. One reference that I want to reexamine in this context is the late Garrett Hardin’s Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent. I first found this slim volume about 15 years ago. It offers some excellent advice on understanding and acting on our collective responsibilities as informed laypeople in a world increasingly dominated by experts.

What disasters have to teach us about organization

An interesting piece in Tuesday’s NY Times on a researcher who studies disasters to better understand people and organizations:

A Sociologist With an Advanced Degree in Calamity. Kathleen Tierney, a disaster researcher, says that catastrophes change the way people experience time. By By CLAUDIA DREIFUS. [The New York Times > Science]

There’s lots of good stuff here, but this quote in particular caught my eye:

one of the things you see in a crisis is devolution of authority to the lower levels of organizations, and that happens, in part, because there are so many decisions to be made. Also, effective decision making has to be responsive to what is happening at a given location. The centralized commander is too far away for that. You generally see people taking responsibility themselves.

One organizational advantage in a disaster or crisis is that centralized commanders don’t generally have the time to get annoyed when subordinates decide to take responsibility for themselves.

My own sense is that more of our organizational life is coming to resemble crises in one form or another and that we need to incorporate that reality into our ways of working. Two authors come to mind immediately. The first is Peter Vaill who introduced me to the notion of “permanent whitewater” as a metaphor for today’s organizational world. I’d recommend both Learning As a Way of Being : Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water and Managing As a Performing Art : New Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change. [Halley, this is the reference I meant today, not Peter Block, although he’s worth reading too]. The second is Gary Klein’s Sources of Power : How People Make Decisions. Klein’s work shows how much real decision making relies on “gut instinct” informed by experience with lots of similar chaotic situations.

The cubicle turns 40

I’m not sure whether this is best understood as an example of unintended consequences or of the inevitable evil/cluelessness of the suits. Regardless, it is certainly a story worth understanding in more depth.

As a consultant I’ve spent most of my career working in temporary spaces of one sort or another. There is great power in being able to quickly rearrange workspace to meet immediate needs. More often than not, that has worked best with the cheapest and simplest of furnishings. While cubicles capture the form of flexibility, they often miss the spirit. And the hardest issue is usually how to avoid the furniture police.

Happy 40th Birthday, cubicle!. Mark Frauenfelder: Metropolis‘ Yvonne Abrahams profiles Bob Propst, inventor of the office cubicle. A great example of a neat idea morphing into its opposite.

cubicleSo, in 1964, Herman Miller’s Action Office system was born. It started with a huge open area, sectioned off to give workers completely enclosed spaces if needed, or semi-enclosed spaces for a more social kind of privacy. Offices were arranged in such a way that workers would be likely to have plenty of contact with each other and with management.

Propst’s forward-thinking motives were misinterpreted by some companies, which simply crammed more workers into smaller spaces and took advantage of the system’s huge potential for savings and tax breaks … “Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places.”

Link (Thanks, Bill!) [Boing Boing]

Learing caution in designing technology for organizations

There seem to be a whole series of great entries showing up in my aggregator around the theme of how technology interacts with the world at large (that’s the point of using RSS aggregators isn’t it?).

The more time I spend trying to mesh technology with organizations, the more cautious I become. I still believe that carefully designed and deployed technology is essential for organizations and societies that hope to survive. But that design has to factor in how human systems shape designed systems over time. One of my own design goals is to seek to channel and shape that evolution so that unintended consequences are a smaller percentage of the outcomes and that there is a higher probability that the unintened consequences are more likely to be desirable than undesirable. One important aspect of that is to be very clear in pointing out things I believe to be technologically impossible. Technology cannot be the right answer to every question.

Good and Bad Technologies.

Fred writes about Clay Shirky’s comments about good and bad technologies and freedom to innovate:

The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past — freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.

The narrow sense of freedom, in tech terms, is a freedom to tinker, to prod and poke and break and fix things. Good technologies — the PC, the internet, HMTL — enable this. Bad technologies — cellphones, set-top boxes — forbid it, in hardware or contract. A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.

And none of this would matter, really, except that in a technologically mediated age, our grand freedoms — freedom of speech, of association, of the press — are based on the narrow ones. Wave after wave of world-changing technology like email and the Web and instant messaging and Napster and Kazaa have been made possible because the technological freedoms we enjoy, especially the ones instantiated in the internet.

The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don’t need to be a huge company to change the world. Microsoft gears up the global publicity machine its launch of Windows 98, and at the same time a 19 year old kid procrastinating on his CS homework invents a way to trade MP3 files. Guess which software spread faster, and changed people’s lives more?

Simple, and so true!

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

A very accurate description of where we are going. Groups that fail to recognize this will not succeed. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle’s Weblog]

Agility and adaptiveness. Ray Ozzie

I suspect that this has always been the case. What is happening now is a growing appreciation for the truth of this observation and more effort directed toward understanding and shaping the adaptation as it occurs.

Agility and adaptiveness. Ray Ozzie:

“We should distrust any elaborately planned, centrally deployed, and carefully developed business system or process. Successful systems and processes will be agile and dynamically adaptive; they’ll grow and evolve as needed over time.”

[Seb’s Open Research]