Category: Organization

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]

Busy People or Productive Organization

Here’s an interesting distinction to meditate on. The biggest challenge lies in the slipperiness of defining what it is we want “out of” either people or organizations. When that is as hard as it frequently is in the realm of knowledge worker, it takes an immense amount of trust to let the knowledge workers in your organization figure it out for themselves.

Busy People or Productive Organization. Busy People or Productive Organization — What is the distinction between…

“We need to get the most out of our people?”

and

“We need to get the most out of our organization?”

…other than the fact that the former leads one to the idea of keeping everyone busy and the latter, if taken seriously, leads one to making sure that they aren’t. Just something to think about. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

Organizational silence and its costs

Speak freely. Jevon MacDonald on organizational silence and its costs.

[Seb’s Open Research]

Key graf:

Organizational communications are at the mercy of corporate culture. The more top-down our methods (newsletters, presidents reports, corporate newspapers) of communicating and directing, the more we formalize (by implication) our less structured interpersonal communications. Even the validity of our consensus building exercises comes in to question when we realize that our corporate culture may be fostering silence within the hierarchy.

Very thought provoking piece. One of the frustrating aspects of organizational silence is how easy it is to provoke even when senior executives are desperately in need of more open communication and would welcome it if they got it. What they tend not to see is how they contribute to silence instead of voice. It’s hard in the midst of all the more obvious pressures they face.

Storylines in a new organizational narrative

10) Tools Rule.

Jay Rosen‘s latest is Nine Story Lines in a New Campaign Narrative. Excellent, as usual. It should be required reading for candidates preparing to mix it up as the political season gets into full swing.

I wouldn’t be a techblogger if I didn’t add one more story line, without which the other nine wouldn’t mean squat.

We’ve only begun to see what can be done with tech tools as instruments of applied democracy.

More later, after I get some sleep.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

While Jay and Doc are focused on the political process, their analyses also apply to organizations more generally. Both political campaigns and organizations are instruments for acquiring and deploying power (in the sense of the ability to accomplish work) effectively. The Dean campaign is a case study in progress of what can happen if you start with different premises. That case study is worth tracking on both levels – for what it portends for our political leadership and for what it suggests for leadership and management in general.

I’d also recommend looking at Ed Cone’s excellent case study of the Dean Campaign in Base Line magazine, “The Marketing of the President 2004.”

Finally, let me suggest that all of this can be fruitfully thought of in terms of the late Donella Meadow’s advice on places to intervene in a system.

Some empirical support for the magic number 150

Two things:In the paper Co-evolution of….

Two things:

  1. In the paper Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans, Robin Dunbar predicts that the maximum group size that humans can maintain as a cohesive social unit, based on the ratio of neocortex volume to brain volume, is 147.8 (100.2-231.1 at 95% confidence). Consulting the literature, he finds that there’s a trimodal distribution of group sizes: bands at 30-50 people, tribes at 1000-2000, and an intermediate one. The mean size of the intermediate level group societies is 148.4.
  2. The AOL Instant Messenger servers impose a hard limit on the number of people you’re allowed to put in your buddylist: 150.

(For more, and a better summary of Dunbar’s paper, read The Magic of 150. Malcolm Gladwell also refers to the number 150 in his book The Tipping Point.)

[Interconnected]

I’ve been looking for a good link to this paper from 1993. Although there is a wide variation around the magic number 150 it is a really interesting conjecture. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle’s Weblog]

Good to have a link to some empirical support for notion that certain group scales are hard-wired.

Windley on Event Driven Business

Event Driven Business. In an event driven business, products are built to order, not built to stock, reducing inventory carrying costs and allowing greater customer satisfaction as a result of customization. This article from ebizQ has a great analogy: [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

If you want the train to move over one foot, you have to do an immense amount of work tearing up and re-laying tracks. On the other hand, all you need to do to turn the more agile truck is move the steering wheel.

This is a useful analogy. I also agree with Phil that the following observation provides a very useful classification of data in organizational information systems:

[E]vent-driven, service-oriented architectures integrate three kinds of data: reference data, such as the number of trucks in a fleet; state data, such as the number of trucks under repair; and event data, such as a delivery being completed.

Worth checking out the full article.