Going hands on to get your arms around Enterprise 2.0

I was not able to attend last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I wanted to pick up on something Andrew McAfee had to say during his keynote there, however. Here’s his set up:

I found myself in an uncomfortable position at the end of my short keynote speech during the Enterprise 2.0 conference yesterday. I got through my prepared material and still had about five minutes left in the alloted time. So I had to ad lib.

The idea that occurred to me (from no identifiable source) was to make Enterprise 2.0 personal. I compared where my thinking was a year ago to where it was today, and tried to convey how big a shift had taken place.

[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]

He goes on to share some of his observations about blogs, social networks, and how organizations are taking up the mix of technologies that fall under the Enterprise 2.0 rubric. For example:

I used to believe that blogs were primarily vehicles for blaring opinions, and that bloggers generally proved Kierkegaard’s great quote that “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” I now get a large percentage of my daily food for thought from blogs, and write one myself. It’s proved to be an unparalled vehicle for getting ideas out into the world, getting useful feedback on them, and meeting people who are interested in the same things I am.

[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]

What struck me was the particular importance of hands on knowledge in appreciating the importance of these technologies. The organizational value of these technologies is in how they change the possibilities for productivity and effectiveness of the managerial and executive core. You need to work with them in a substantive way to appreciate what they can do for you. That makes them different from so many other applications of technology in the organization. McAfee has made that investment and has become an effective spokesperson for them. How do we get others in similar positions to invest in the necessary learning?

Better thinking about performance improvement

  Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Gawande, Atul

I’ve always been troubled by the phrase “best practices” thrown around loosely in business settings. In certain engineering and professional settings, the term can have an important legal meaning. Even then, “best practice” is always a moving target. Better, Atul Gawande’s most recent collection of essays nicely crystallizes my reservations and offers useful insight into how to think about performance and performance improvement in knowledge work environments.

Drawing on his experience as a surgeon, Gawande reflects on the connections between learning and practice; both as an individual practitioner and as a field. His essays provide fascinating insights into how the practice of medicine has evolved over time; ranging over such diverse topics as hand-washing, battlefield injuries, and obstetrics. For that alone, Better is well worth reading. But it offers broader lessons as well.

Rooted in science and medicine, one thread that Gawande examines is quality of evidence. The gold standard is that of the double-blind, controlled laboratory experiment. However, action in the world and the demands of day-to-day practice cannot always wait for that standard to be met. There’s a wonderful quote from Samuel Butler that captures this problem; “Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.” Many of Gawande’s stories shed light on the reality that we often must make decisions on the basis of imperfect information and knowledge. We may not be able always to meet a gold standard of evidence, but we still benefit from a methodological commitment to hypothesis, experiment, and measurement.

Gawande’s observations on measurement and performance evolution in obstetrics provides one good example. He starts with the development of the Apgar score; a simple, concrete, measure of a baby’s condition at one minute and five minutes after birth. I am particularly struck by the insight and cleverness represented by recording the score twice in such a short interval. That creates a connection between measurement and action that drives performance improvement; it creates a feedback loop well matched to the human system it is embedded in.

Moving up a level from an individual delivery to a hospital’s performance, the Apgar score also serves to drive performance improvement at a more systemic level. In addition to informed clinical judgments about performance, we now have some numbers we can compare against one another and over time. Because these numbers tie to clinical judgment and performance, they can be used to evaluate changes in practice. Changes that improve the scores stick; those that don’t are abandoned.

This logic sheds some interesting light on a tension between “evidence-based medicine” and performance improvement more broadly conceived. Careful, clinical studies of problematic deliveries showed that Caesarian-sections had no measurable advantage over forceps assisted deliveries. Yet, no obstetrician uses forceps anymore and C-sections are used more and more routinely to the point where some claim they are over-used.

Understanding why has important lessons for anyone interesting in improving the performance of knowledge work in organizations. The difference comes from whether you are looking at performance at the systems level or the individual practitioner level. Learning to use forceps is a complex skill; difficult to observe, difficult to learn and difficult to teach. A C-section, on the other hand, is straightforward as surgical procedures go, highly observable, and teachable to a wider range of competent OB/GYNs. If you are trying to improve the outcomes and reliability of the system as a whole, your payoff from pushing C-sections over forceps is much higher. This is a classic example of improving a system by reducing variability. It is also an important reminder to be clear about where you are trying to improve performance.

 

 

Literate thinking as a barrier to Enterprise 2.0 adoption

Most of the technologies lumped under the Enterprise 2.0 label presuppose some facility with the written word. I wonder to what extent that presents a barrier to adoption in many organizations? Moreover, I wonder how visible that organizational barrier is to those who are already facile?

I’ve written before on oral vs. literate cultures in organizations (Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part 1 and Part 2), using the distinctions that the late Walter Ong introduced. Leadership and power in many organizations correlates with comfort and facility with the spoken word. Those same individuals are not necessarily as facile or comfortable with expressing themselves in writing.

Email doesn’t really count, as it appears to be less public and, therefore, feels less threatening. Even so, we still hear of senior executives who avoid using email directly. (Maybe one of the attractions of the Crackberry is that it provides a built-in excuse for doing little real writing). So too for Powerpoint. It is not a tool that lends itself to literate argument and expression.

Jordan Frank of Traction Software argued a while back that organizations benefit from using the tools in simpler ways (Beta bloggers need not lurk in the enterprise). While I agree with his arguments, they also reinforce the notion that feeling uncomfortable with literate thinking is a barrier to be addressed. Jordan’s suggestions are probably among the best advice for routing around this issue in most organizations.

If my hypothesis has any merit, it does suggest that some of the objections to these technologies will be rooted in emotional fears and insecurities that will be unexpressed and potentially inexpressible. To someone who can’t swim, “come on in, the water’s fine” isn’t very helpful encouragement.

 

Alan Kay on learning and technology

Alan Kay is talking once again about what went wrong with the personal computer and personal computing. Here’s a pointer to a recent interview he did with CIO Insight magazine that is well worth your attention.

A CIO Insight

Alan Kay was recently interviewed for CIO Insight magazine’s Expert Voices feature. In this piece entitled Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped–Now, Alan discusses the mindsets that stand in the way of real innovation – and what his not-for-profit VPRI is doing to address the issue. In the article, Alan defines Croquet as one of those efforts and as “a new way of doing an operating system, or as a layer over TCP/IP that automatically coordinates dynamic objects over the entire Internet in real time. This coordination is done efficiently enough so that people with just their computers, and no other central server, can work in the same virtual shared space in real time.”
[Julian Lombardi’s Croquet Blog]

Alan is up to his old tricks of trying to invent the future instead of predicting it. His focus remains on viewing the personal computer as a learning tool more than a productivity tool, which means, among other things, that you should be prepared to invest time and effort in that learning. He is not fond of efforts that sacrifice the real potential of tools by focusing on making the first five minutes easy and entertaining at the expense of crippling the long-term capabilities of the tools.

Alan remains a disciple of Doug Engelbart:

 Engelbart, right from his very first proposal to ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency], said that when adults accomplish something that’s important, they almost always do it through some sort of group activity. If computing was going to amount to anything, it should be an amplifier of the collective intelligence of groups. But Engelbart pointed out that most organizations don’t really know what they know, and are poor at transmitting new ideas and new plans in a way that’s understandable. Organizations are mostly organized around their current goals. Some organizations have a part that tries to improve the process for attaining current goals. But very few organizations improve the process of figuring out what the goals should be. [Alan Kay: The PC Must be Revamped Now]

There is a potentially deep and rich connection between challenging knowledge work and technology. But realizing that potential will require different attitudes about how much time and effort we should be prepared to invest in learning. Organizations thinking about investing the technologies collectively identified as Enterprise 2.0 should also be thinking about what investments they should be making in the appropriate individual and organizational learning

Strategic sensemaking and Enterprise 2.0 technologies

The increased importance of sensemaking will prove to be one of the central drivers for Enterprise 2.0 technologies adoption. Organizational theorist Karl Weick positions sensemaking as one of the central tasks in organizations. Dan Russell at Creating Passionate Users provides a nice definition of sensemaking that will serve as a useful starting point:

Sensemaking is in many ways a search for the right organization or the right way to represent what you know about a topic. It’s data collection, analysis, organization and performing the task. [Sensemaking 3]

The value of the sensemaking notion in organizational settings is that it highlights the active requirement for managers and leaders to construct sensible accounts out of ambiguous, ambivalent, equivocal, and conflicting data. In a world (imagine Don LaFontaine here) characterized by significant technology, organizational, and strategic change, the problem of sensemaking becomes more acute.

It occurs to me that there is an useful analogy to be made between sensemaking and open source development practices; in particular with the adage that “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.” Instead of counting on the insights of a mythological strategic genius, you distribute the problem to the wider organization. Many of the more interesting strategic planning processes (think scenario based planning and future search conferences, for example) are ultimately grounded in that notion.

One of the attractions in Enterprise 2.0 technologies is that they make these strategies more feasible and scalable. Blogs, wikis, tagging, etc. allow participation to scale beyond what face-to-face methods can support. They make it possible to generate and organize more extensive raw materials and inputs to planning/sensemaking processes. Wikis with good version tracking and refactoring capabilities make it both safer and easier to generate and work through alternative representations/sensemakings.

Realizing this sensemaking potential will require brokering some introductions and partnerships. Those adept in the techniques are likely to not be versed in the ways that the technologies reduce or eliminate some of the key barriers to successfully using the techniques. Those who understand the technologies may not be aware that the techniques exist, much less that they could benefit from technological improvement. One starting point I would suggest is for those promoting Enterprise 2.0 technologies to investigate the sensemaking planning techniques and practices and map points where the technologies enable, simplify, or improve the techniques.

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Ross Mayfield points to an interesting post by Bob Sutton at Stanford. Ross nicely captures the essence of Bob’s post.

More important, for my selfish purposes, is learning that Sutton is blogging. Sutton is a Professor at Stanford’s Engineering School, the author of several recent, excellent, books on management and innovation and one of the vocal proponents of the design dimension of management in today’s knowledge-based organizational world. I’ve added his blog, Work Matters, to my subscriptions and commend it to you as well.

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Bob Sutton, who was an inspiration around the time we started Socialtext, is becoming one of my favorite bloggers. I’ve been sharing his posts like The Snowstorm Study in my internal blog and talking too much about the No Asshole Rule. But Strong Opinions, Weakly Held is an absolute gem:

…Perhaps the best description I

Balancing diligence and laziness

Some time back I came across the following quote in The 80/20 Principle : The Secret of Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch, which I’ve been pondering ever since for its implications for knowledge work and knowledge workers:

There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm…Second, there are the hard- working, intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard- working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent, lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.

General Erich Von Manstein (1887-1973) on the German Officer Corps

You can also map this quote into the following matrix representation:

Diligence vs. laziness

One implication certainly is that you want to keep the average IQ up in your organization (setting aside all the limits on accurately measuring or assessing something as complex as intelligence for the moment). My own theory is that it also suggests that you want to keep your organization relatively small to maintain some degree of control over that average IQ. You may also want to keep the distribution of IQ in your organization as tight as possible.

The laziness/diligence dimension is the more interesting of the two in the context of knowledge work organizations. Common organizational practice is biased in favor of diligence, while laziness doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Granted, the appearance of blogs such as Slacker Manager is a hopeful sign, as is the recent spate of activity and commentary around the importance of innovation and creative thinking for knowledge based organizations. But our Puritan/Calvinist heritage still dominates reward and evaluation systems. Regardless of the actual importance of thought and reflection to long-term organizational success, you are better off looking busy than looking like you are thinking. Even organizations that exist to promote reflective thought (e.g., universities, research institutes, think tanks) fall into the trap of encouraging diligence at the expense of reflection/laziness.

I don’t yet have a fully workable solution to the problem of carving out sufficient and appropriate time for thinking and reflection. More often than not, it gets relegated to plane-time, travel-time, and after-hours time; essentially bypassing the organizational problem. I’ve found that mind-mapping, either by hand on on the computer, is one form of thinking that can be done in public without triggering unwanted negative perceptions.  Setting aside time to maintain some form of journal (whether in the form of a blog or more private diary) is another thinking/reflecting discipline that is both productive and not immediately threatening to the activity police.

Here are some questions I think are worth exploring in this context.

  1. What alternate terms than diligence and laziness could we use to better frame the issue?
  2. How important is it to carve out times and places to engage in visible laziness within organizations?
  3. Is this a problem that needs to be solved at the organizational level? For which types of organization?
  4. What barriers to innovation, if any, does a bias toward diligence create?

Any takers?

 

Radio Archives

I started this blog in October of 2001 using Radio as my blogging tool. The blog has been hosted with its own domain from the beginning so the archives are already here. I am gradually porting them over to WordPress. In the meantime here are links to archived posts that have yet to be converted.
2002/12

2002/11

2002/10

2002/09

2002/08

2002/07

2002/06

2002/05

2002/04

2002/03

2002/02

2002/01

2001/12

2001/11

2001/10

About this blog

I started McGee’s Musings in October of 2001 when I was on the faculty at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management as a way to share thoughts with my students. While they sometimes struggled with the notion that I often had more questions than answers, that seemed to cause less concern to those who came here. Most of what I think and write about here has to do with knowledge work, knowledge workers, learning, design, and how organizations are dealing with changes triggered in large part by technology.

No one pays me to write this blog or to say particular things on it. I pay webhosting and bandwidth costs for this blog out of my own pocket. Recently (late 2005), posts here are picked up and reposted at Corante’s Web Hub; there is some hope and expectation that this might ultimately generate some modest revenues to me, although my primary objective there is greater visibility. I also happen to like the folks at Corante and think they are doing interesthing things. I do not run ads here and do not expect to.

My day job is as a consultant helping clients on issues related to the management and use of technology. I do not identify clients by name or in any way that would make them identifiable unless I have explicit permission (and generally not even then).

I’ve been an entrepreneur and I’ve been around the technology world for a while. I believe, and I have found, that transparency is a good thing. If I encounter a situation where my previous connections or other circumstances bear on what I write here, I disclose the pertinent details or find something else to talk about instead.

As David Weinberger suggests in his blog disclosure (which I cribbed from for this disclosure), I use my judgment. Since I am not a lawyer I choose to err in the direction of assuming that anyone reading here is also capable of exercising judgment.

If you have questions or concerns, feel free to contact me.

Going hands on to get your arms around Enterprise 2.0

I was not able to attend last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I wanted to pick up on something Andrew McAfee had to say during his keynote there, however. Here’s his set up:

I found myself in an uncomfortable position at the end of my short keynote speech during the Enterprise 2.0 conference yesterday. I got through my prepared material and still had about five minutes left in the alloted time. So I had to ad lib.

The idea that occurred to me (from no identifiable source) was to make Enterprise 2.0 personal. I compared where my thinking was a year ago to where it was today, and tried to convey how big a shift had taken place.

[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]

He goes on to share some of his observations about blogs, social networks, and how organizations are taking up the mix of technologies that fall under the Enterprise 2.0 rubric. For example:

I used to believe that blogs were primarily vehicles for blaring opinions, and that bloggers generally proved Kierkegaard’s great quote that “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” I now get a large percentage of my daily food for thought from blogs, and write one myself. It’s proved to be an unparalled vehicle for getting ideas out into the world, getting useful feedback on them, and meeting people who are interested in the same things I am.

[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]

What struck me was the particular importance of hands on knowledge in appreciating the importance of these technologies. The organizational value of these technologies is in how they change the possibilities for productivity and effectiveness of the managerial and executive core. You need to work with them in a substantive way to appreciate what they can do for you. That makes them different from so many other applications of technology in the organization. McAfee has made that investment and has become an effective spokesperson for them. How do we get others in similar positions to invest in the necessary learning?