Our point of view is that the rationale of scalable efficiency is becoming less and less compelling, and the alternative rationale is scalable learning. The reason we have institutions is because we can learn faster as part of an institution than we could alone.

This quote is taken from a great John Hagel interview by Stowe Boyd. The co-chairman of Deloitte Center for Edge innovation shares here a profound idea.

In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky suggests that the core purpose of organizations, as defined by Nobel prize Ronald Coase, (the cost of transaction) is no longer relevant in our networked economy. In order to demonstrate his statement, Shirky draws on complex distributed projects such as open source software or wikipedia. So this has left us wondering : what is the core purpose of institutions in the 21st century ?

John Hagel proposal is inspiring : it is to scale learning to the whole organization for faster individual learning and (I may add) to develop organization intelligence as the network of individual knowledge. Which brings us back to the Knowing-Doing Gap : once the company has accumulated learning and knowledge, how does it turn it back into action ?

Jacob Morgan is principal at The Chess Media Group and has been a very active promoter of Collaborative Software for the last few years.

I had the opportunity to meet him at a party at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Boston in 2011. I knew his work before that as I’ve read many of the case studies his company has shared through their blog. I was quite impressed by his enthusiasm and his sharp mind on the topic despite his rather young age (he was 28 back then). He told me then he was writing a book : I guess it is the first time I read a book that was introduced to me by his author prior to the publication so please forgive me for bragging about it.

The Collaborative Organization introduces itself as a Strategic guide to solving your internal business challenges using emerging social and collaborative tools. It is a truly useful book as it is clear, actionable, based on solid experience and many research studies. It allows to define a strategy suited to your own context with many tricks of the trade to tactically address the many issues such project implies.

Last but not least, the book contains insights from many thought leaders such as Don Tapscott (already quoted here), Gil Yehuda, Charles H Green, Oscar Berg or Andrew McAfee and, for each section, there is a testimony by a project leader of such initiative in many different industries : insurance, publishing, video game, health care, logistics, government, organisation …

This allows to multiply the perspectives and make it a genuine valuable and collaborative effort …

What is the problem ?

Jacob followed the wise adage and started with the problem. And the problem this book addresses is how to make organizations more productive, efficient and engaging thanks to new emergent technologies around collaboration ? Jacob very wisely avoids the buzzword trap (Social stuff) and concentrates more on this perspective : collaboration.

More often than not, collaborative platforms are deemed as solution looking for a problem. Actually, many implementations are only concentrating on the “bring the tool and they will fly in” and unfortunately this approach hardly succeeds.

The Collaborative Organization puts a strong effort in framing the problem and assess the consequences of a lack of collaboration in terms of multi-directional communication, knowledge transfer and sharing, team alignment, collective intelligence, trust or ideation.

The recommendation : identify business problem(s) you want to address using these tools and define them as use cases to see how these collaborative platforms will help in tackling them. All this work is based on solid data gathered through Jacob’s projects and / or extensive research. So the book draws on the story of different organizations such as universities (Pennsylvania State), telecom organizations (Telus), printing services (Océ), or consulting (FSG) to explain this problem based approach and the quantified results that were observed.

Risk Management

Such new tool implementation implies a proper project approach and just like any project, there is a need for risk management. Jacob’s book list all of them and split them in two parts : the risks of investing and the risk of NOT investing in these collaborative technologies.

Again, there usually is only one side of the risks being considered and it is the former : the latter is just as critical. In a view to being as actionable as possible, the risk of investing are listed and a response strategy is suggested : confidential information leak, inappropriate content, tools not used, loss of internal control, people taking over credit from shared information, information overload. This is for risk management during the project implementation.

The risk of NOT investing should be used instead to sell the approach : people not engaged, decreased productivity, lack of innovation context, lack of knowledge capture and sharing etc …

A very interesting part is the one on collaborative software as a double edge sword. The effect of reducing the “personalness” of interaction through this tool is seen by the author as an opportunity as it “lowers the risk of interacting with other people” : communication is down to the bare written word, is asynchronous and allows time to think before react, etc … That is an interesting perspective.

Building the Team

The chapter dedicated to the team in charge of the project probably is the one providing the least insight. Don’t get me wrong, it is still valuable to make the whole book consistant but, in all fairness, a team dedicated to this type of project implementation is pretty similar to any team in charge of deploying new enterprise software.

Framework and models

On the technology front, the book offers an evaluation framework for the strategy (build or buy), the vendor and the different types of collaborative technologies (blogs, RSS, forums, microblogs etc …) that will come in handy to gain a better understanding of the tech landscape Vs the organization specific context.

Another very useful framework is the one around maturity model. The Community Roundtable already set up one a few years back and Jacob’s one is pretty similar. It draws on the usual areas : goals and objectives, organizational culture, process, technology and governance.

I like how this type of tools makes visible the vision and what the organization wants to achieve but in all fairness, I’m not quite sure this is very actionable to follow-up on organization evolution. The one defining the organization maturity might be more telling in terms of value :

The last component of this maturity model allows to define the implementation strategy for the pilot phase depending of the scope and the duration, with 4 categories in the deployment quadrant : skeptical, reluctant, assertive, willing.

Dealing with resistance

Implementing tools to improve collaboration may prove to be a big change in most of organisation. And whenever there is change, resistance has to be dealt with. Again, based on solid experience, The Collaborative Organization proposes many strategies depending on the type of change. Jacob has identified 3 main types : Manager, User and IT.

Most of these can be address in the way the roll out is carried out. For instance, not overwhelming users with too many features at once and introducing them gradually, each time measuring how it solves business problems is a good way to tackle these resistances.

A real strategy to foster adoption also is a way to indirectly deals with resistance. Jacob draws on successful initiatives to provide some elements to foster adoption, based on four stages :

• Initial features : SSO, Profiles, search, feeds
• additional features : project/task management, work spaces and groups, file creation storage and sharing
• System integration : HR, CRM, ERP …
• Best Practices and ideation

Actionable and valuable

This is an excellent book for anyone involved in such collaboration software implementation project. It provides the reader with pragmatic tools to pilot the project and gain a deep understanding of what these tools can bring to the business. To paraphrase Roderick Kramer :

“The willingness of individuals to cooperate collaborate with other members of an organization is one of the major determinants of organizational effectiveness and efficiency.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton are both professor of organizational behavior in Stanford University and this book, written in the late 90′s, remains as relevant as ever today.

In The Knowing-Doing Gap (How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action) they attempt to address one of the main root cause of the problems organizations face in 21st century economy : why the ideas that are widely known and proven to be useful remain unimplemented ? How to bridge this knowing-doing gap and what are the results of companies succeeding in doing so ? How to tackle the paradox of companies that know too much and do too little, and who fails in transforming knowledge into action (and action back into new knowledge) ?

This is one of the most powerful book I’ve read about management together with Toyota Kata by Mike Rother. Both books have this thing in common : these are proposing meta-processes to address systemic issues faced by companies today. The objective is to align thinking and action and, while doing so, it is to deeply transform organizations into dynamic entities able to tackle any new problem arising.

Another classic reviewed by #hypertextual and another very long post (+2000 words – 10 mns read) …

Quantify the problem

Each year, billion of dollars are spent on management consultants by organizations seeking advice – one estimate for 1996 was $US 43 billions. But that advice is seldom implemented.

While investigating these questions the authors found out that management system and practices are the main differences between company that succeed in bridging this gap and the one that fail in doing so.

They’ve studied this gap in many different industries : energy, services, retail, transport, catering. In the later they even conducted a survey to measure this knowing doing gap, asking managers and staffs restaurant chains about good practices : the ones they know and the ones they do, making visible a significant difference.

Why Knowledge Management systems do not help

According to the Stanford professors, Knowledge Management systems (it was all the rage back then) do not address this issue, as in their view these systems are often divorced from day-to-day activities, they are formal systems which can’t store knowledge that isn’t codified, treat knowledge as a static material and as such fail to capture the tacit knowledge. Most importantly, they can’t deal with a given work philosophy.

Doing Vs Talking

The first principle offered by Pfeffer and Sutton is to embed more of the process of acquiring new knowledge in the actual doing of the task and less in formal training programs. Sadly, talking, rationalizing and conceptualizing about ideas are the preferred options for many managers and these do not allow to acquire knowledge as it is an action stopper.

Many leaders think that just taking a decision will be enough for it be implemented. Others spend important amount of times in doing presentations or documents. These will enter the endless loop of review / update cycles (what we call the analysis paralysis in the Agile world), cycles during which action remains on hold. Last, other managers think mission statements or planning are more important than doing.

One reason for that is that it is much faster and easier to look smart and gain stature through smart talks than smart actions. Sutton and Pfeffer join Mintzberg (Managers not MBAs) while pretending that MBA type of education foster this type of belief and behaviors.

Ease of understanding Vs ease of implementation

Jeffrey Pfeffer

Another great idea brought forward by the authors is the one related to the simple Vs difficult paradigm. The basic concept is that simple ideas are like low hanging fruits : they already have been found and implemented by the market. So the objective is to design difficult ones at organisation level (so that they are not easily imitated) to achieve sustainable advantage. Jargonesque language is a direct consequence of this idea.

But there’s something wrong with this belief : what is difficult to be imitated is what is difficult to implement, not necessarily what is difficult to understand. But since managers are mostly dealing with ideas and talks rather than with actions, they get easily confused. Not only that complex ideas supported by jargonesque language makes transforming knowing into doing difficult, but in addition (as French sociologist Michel Crozier reported) leaders using such language fail to engage their teams.

Avoiding hollow talks and promoting actions

The authors promote the following actions to avoid this trap :

• Leading by example with leaders that do the work :  a striking example here is the IT industry with companies (unknown to them back then) such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and even Microsoft, companies developing software products and services and that are led by software developers.
• Valuing simplicity and avoiding unnecessary complexity. All along the book, the authors refer to Lean production system and in that example they mention the simplicity of NUMMI organisation compared to standard american car companies
• Language that mobilize action and follow-up decisions. The example here is the one of Jack Welsh and GE Work-Out process where the famous CEO fostered a culture of speed, simplicity and self-confidence.
• Moving from “why we can’t do it” to “how to overcome obstacles”

The trap of history

After the culture of talking Vs doing, a second obstacle identified by the author on bridging the Knowing-Doing gap is the one of the company history, the good old it will never work here. One of the main reason is the pressure to remain consistent with past decisions which result from reluctance to admitting mistakes. More often than not, decisions are taken based on implicit and untested inaccurate models of behaviors and practices. This defines the limits of what is possible.

In order to build an organisation which “resist mindless actions”, the authors identifies 2 best practices from the AES corporation : decentralization and encouraging people to take on new activities within the organization. One passage from the 1997 company annual report reads as follows :

One of the delightful side effects of a fun workplace where individuals closest to the action make business decision is rapid learning. (…) Their responsibility is to get themselves educated before making a decision.

Back then CEO Dennis Bakke says that the better and the more competent central staff functions ares (IT, HR, etc ..) and the worst it is for the organisation. The better the centralized staff, the less responsibility people closest to where the work is done take for that work.

The opposite approach, implemented at AES helped in fostering a learning culture where people become keen on learning new things and getting into new positions.

Fear

There has been a strong bias for fear culture in the 80s and 90s, in particular with such CEOs as “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap in Sunbeam or Andrew Grove (who wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive) of Intel.

Chainsaw Al was very famous for tearing most of the management team apart as he would join a company. “I rarely see any good in what came before”. And the ones that remain are publicly humiliated by the big man. His story at Sunbeam ended bitterly with the stock price going down 80% during his 2 years at the helm of the company.

As for the fear culture Andrew Grove instilled in Intel, there are many stories available online on the web site FACE-Intel to document the company management transgressions.

Bob Sutton

Fear has many bad consequences. It destroys trust, fosters competition between different business units and professionals. This creates what psychologists call the MUM effect where people distance themselves from bad news and avoid reporting such bad news and problems. And ignoring problems prevent from transforming knowledge (there is a problem) into action (let’s fix it and build knowledge out of this action). In such a setting, there is no reason for people to work together for collective benefit and lots of reasons for them to undermine each other’s work and reputations.

Based on stories from SAS or PSS/World Medical, the authors observe that fear can be driven out of organisations with the following actions. (What’s remarkable here is that we find here principle which are the ones identified by Gary Hamel in Future of Management as basic principles to foster innovation. Most of them also are core principles of Lean Management the authors mention quite often in their book).

1. Praise people who deliver bad news to their bosses
2. Treat failure to act as the only true failure ; punish inaction, not unsuccessful actions
3. Encourage leaders to talk about their failure and what they have learned from them
4. Encourage open communication
5. Give people second and third chances
6. Banish people especially leaders that humiliate others (refer to the No-Asshole rule Sutton has written a few years after this one)
7. Learn from mistakes when trying something new
8. Don’t punish people from trying new thing

A stunning example is the one of Analog Devices which, within 2 years following layoffs, went from #1 top supplier of HP to #2 in worst suppliers black list.

Another interesting list of principles is the one the author give to drive out fear during hard times. If you ask me, these are principles that are relevant in any change initiative and echoes the SCARF model (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) :

• Prediction : give people as much information as possible about what and when it will happen
• Understanding : explain why these actions are taken
• Control : give people as much influence as possible over what, when and the way things happen.
• Compassion : convey sympathy and concern for disruption and emotional distress

Measurements

Together with fear, history, talking and complexity, the authors identify in measurements another obstacle for organization to turn knowledge into action. Their recommendation is to :

1. keep measurement global in scope, focussing on factors critical to organizational success (systemic indicators as in Lean).
2. focus on process and less on final outcomes : this allows to guide action ans decision-making.
3. have measurement aligned on company culture – which means to balance values measurement with cost-accounting
4. measurement system can always be improved – dynamic culture of continuous improvement
5. few metrics : the more the metrics, the more complex and the more the attention of people in the organisation is diluted in trivial issues
6. measurement close the loop, auditing what the organisation is doing.

Amongst the barriers in implementing these measurements, authors see conventional accounting and standard measurement practices.

Internal competition

Last obstacle identified by the authors is the one of internal competition. The main issue with internal competition is that it turns people into two groups : winners and losers. The belief is that internal competition is good for performance. It is mostly embedded by leaders who have built their success on winning in their studies, professional career etc …

But the invalid assumption is that winning is better than doing well. What is observed (ever since Deming) is that it does more harm than good as it gives incentives to people for not sharing information and best practices. It even encourages people to undermine other people’s work.  great example is the one of tablet-PC at Microsoft. The counter example of Men’s Wearhouse to foster team spirit and eradicate internal competition between sales people is telling.

They quote Roderick Kramer essay “Cooperation and Organizational identification” : the willingness of individuals to cooperate with other members of an organization is one of the major determinants of organizational effectiveness and efficiency.

Eight guidelines for action

Very interesting to see that Pfeffer and Sutton choose the BP case of implementing collaborative online software as their first example of companies succeeding in bridging the knowing-doing gap. Anyway : these are the authors recommendation to turn knowledge into action :

1. Why before how. Their basic idea is to start with why. Simon Sinek made a great speech to defend this approach, I can’t recommend you enough to check it out.
2. Knowing comes from doing and teaching others how. This is what Chris Argyris calls the double loop learning. This is also one of the pillars of Lean management.
3. Action counts more than elegant plans and concepts
4. There’s no doing without mistakes. What is the company response ?
5. Fear fosters knowing-doing gap so drive out fear (another strong Deming principle)
6. Beware of false analogies : false the competition not each other within the organization
7. Measure what matters and what can help turning knowledge into action
8. What leaders do matters

A strongly recommended read that remain relevant as ever in the 21st century.

I have been quite intrigued by the intersection of neurosciences and management / leadership lately. It all started on the Organizations Change Practitioners community on LinkedIn.

No disrespect for the other groups I’ve joined, but it probably is the one I find the most inspiring amongst the ones I’ve joined. Luc Galoppin, Bill Braun and Jennifer Frahm are making a fantastic job moderating it. Jen twitted this article about Neuroscience and Change Management that got my attention. A link leading to another, I’ve ended up discovering the SCARF model by David Rock and this has opened my eyes to the topic. I have also been reading and viewing other related materials. This article comes as some sorts of wrap-up of this research work.

I have been discussing about Social Business Vs Social Status lately, looking for solutions. Well, Social Neurosciences may just prove to bring the required tools to address this.

If you are interested in bringing conscious awareness to otherwise non conscious processes, then read further (be warned it’s a long one) …

NeuroLeadership in action

David Rock is the CEO of Results Coaching Intl, a consulting company based in Australia. He coined the term ‘NeuroLeadership’ and co-founded the NeuroLeadership Institute, a global initiative bringing neuroscientists and leadership experts together to build a new science for leadership development.

The massive contribution of people such as David Rock is to bring real neuroscience works and studies to the table of  management and leadership.

Not only does the author provides popularization of complex studies but he also package those into an easy to understand (and to apply !) model. In other word : David Rock contributes to transforming management and leadership from business disciplines to proper sciences through actionable principles. This is an  invaluable contribution.

As John Barbuto states in his article about Change Management Neuroscience :

Haven’t people who’ve been doing organizational change been using science, such as science from psychology?  Yes.  There is science to psychology.  That science proceeds based on using scientific tools to look at behavior itself.  What is new is that we are now looking at the origins of behavior in the brain.

Neurosciences for dummies

The SCARF paper (first published in 2008) draws on extensive social neuroscience studies to propose a simple framework. In a nutshell, social neuroscience studies how and which parts of the brain react to different types of stimuli related to social interactions. At the very heart there are two overarching principles. First, our motivation driving social behavior is governed by the will to minimize threat and maximize reward. Second, social needs are treated in much the same way in the brain as the primary needs such as food and water.

The triune brain

This is an obsolete model of the brain but as Marty Rossman said in this fascinating presentation (at 29 mins) it is good enough for non-scientists to understand the basic structure of the human brain and the structural consequences on social neurosciences. This model splits the brain in three parts.

The first is the reptilian part. It is the primary one and is in charge of survival instinct : eat, sleep, reproduce : as Sue Langley notices in this engaging presentation, this is why life is so simple for crocodiles, they only have three things to think about.

The second part is the limbic system which is home of emotions. It arose early in mammalian evolution (hence referred to as “paleomammalian”). The third part is the neo-cortex, the cerebral part related to analytic mind, language, abstraction, planning etc …

Amydala Highjack

What I understood in a nutshell : any stimulus goes through all parts starting from the most primary (reptilian) upward to the most advanced (neo-cortex). There is a simple reason for that : whenever our life is threatened we want to have instant reaction – not going through the analytic mind.  The most primary the part of the brain, the less complex information treatment is carried oud but the faster the response.

The result is that some information may be processed at some level and generate responses without even reach the neo-cortex analytic part. This is the typical overwhelming emotional reaction (sometimes referred to the Amygdala Highjack) which provokes a disproportionate response. The Amygdala is part of the limbic system and is overly vigilant, more tuned to threats than to rewards. As David Rock puts it :

Limbic network process threat and reward cues within a fifth of a second providing you with ongoing non-conscious intuition of what is meaningful to you in your daily life.

Five domains of SCARF

All models are wrong but some are useful (Georges EP Box).

The SCARF model involves five domains of human experience. This is how David Rock introduces it :

Status is about relative importance to others. Certainty concerns being able to predict the future. Autonomy provides a sense of control over events. Relatedness is a sense of safety with others and Fairness is a perception of fair exchanges between people.

The idea is to use this model to design interactions so that to minimize threats and maximise rewards in each of these five domains. In a second step, the objective is to activate reward response to motivate people more effectively using internal rewards. In the context of Knowledge Workers, we know ever since Edward Deci work or more recently Dan Pink or behavioral economist Dan Ariely how intrinsic motivation is of paramount importance. However, so far we didn’t have any scientific explanations of the inner brain mechanisms proving this. Now we do.

SCARF : Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness

The objective here is not to go through each of the domain in details – I believe the paper is excellent enough to require rewriting and I won’t recommend you enough to take the 30 minutes required to read it. Rather, the objective is to propose a summary table of each of the domain together with the typical threats and rewards and the related brain area.

Just a comment : it might be worth noticing some analogies between social neuroscience definition of Certainty such as this statement :

Without prediction, the brain must use dramatically more resources , involving the more energy-intensive prefrontal cortex, to process moment to moment experience

With Nobel prize Daniel Kahnemann definition of System 1 / System 2 in Thinking Fast, and Slow :

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attentions to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.

SCARF and Change Management

The obvious field of application of this model is Leadership in general and Change Management in particular. Hence the NeuroLeadership concept (and the Journal) defined by David Rock.  Leadership is about inspiring and motivating people so that they, well, follow the leader.

Change Management is part of leadership duty (according to John Kotter it even is its main responsibility). So how do we practically apply these principles to change management ? John Barbuto provides us with an answer in arguably one of the best articles I have ever read on change management, article published on his blog Limbic Zen.

John is an active contributor to the Organizational Change practitioner group and he happens to be both a neurologist and an organizational change manager. An ideal profile to provide a relevant perspective on that subject. I can’t recommend you enough to read this article in which John focusses on initial communication introducing the change projet : it should come from “my group” and be supportive of relationships (Relatedness), should be sensitive to current culture and habits (Certainty), should imply competence to change (Autonomy) and should be sensitive to coming status change (Status). The conclusion is amazing :

A goal of good change management is therefore to orchestrate delivery of change information such that emotional reactions within staff do not subvert the change effort.  This goal is promoted in its first instance by delivering information about change that is both powerful (leading to attention) and constructive (providing a path toward positive resolution).  (…) Correctly orchestrated, engagement is the first step in the process toward effective change.

Neuroleadership and manipulation

Obviously with such powerful tools come questions regarding ethics : is it fair to use such tools within a business context with people ignoring these tools are used to influence them ? Well, as David Rock puts it in his article : Successful educators, trainers and facilitators intuitively use the SCARF model. So this is not new. People have been using it for ages – the very people we identify as showing emotional intelligence.

Besides, such influencing principles appear in super-classic books such as the How To Influence People and Make Friends by Dale Carnegie from 1937. The main difference here is that these recommendations are now based on observable measurable experiments on human brains that help to explain why so many behaviors observed in business are often not “rational” and how to deal with those.

Immanuel Kant said that if you want to find out if something is ethical, try to imagine what would happen if everybody would be doing it. Well, if everybody in a profesionnal context would consider people Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness contexts while engaging with them and would try to minimize threats and maximize rewards, I tend to think that our organizations would somehow benefit from it : better places to work, more engaging and more productive.

Last comment : I notice a strong community around this subject in Australia : David Rock, Sue Langley, Jennifer Frahm. Would Australia becoming the Silicon Valley of 21st century Leadership ? We’ll see …

Resources

[A] Article / [PDF] / [B] Book / [V] Video

• Neuroscience and change management : the neu black (Jennifer Frahm) [A]
• SCARF model : a brain based model for collaborating with and influencing others (David Rock) [PDF]
• Change Management Neuroscience - Limbic Zen (John Barbuto) [A]
• Engagement, emotions and change management – Limbic Zen (John Barbuto) [A]
• The Pain and pleasure of social life – (Dr Matthew Liebermann & Dr Naomi Eisenberg) [PDF]
• Thinking Fast, and Slow (Daniel Kahnemann) [B]
• Promoting motivation, health and excellence (Edward Deci) [V]
• What makes us feel good about our work (Dan Ariely) [V]
• The Puzzle of motivation (Dan Pink) [V]
• How your brain can turn anxiety into calmness (Marty Rossman) [V]
• The emotionaly intelligent brain (Sue Langley) [V]
• How To Influence People and Make Friends (Dale Carnegie) [B]

The bad news is ignoring the work of people is almost as bad as shredding the result of their work in front of their eyes. The good news is simply looking at what somebody has done and scanning it and say “aha” that seems quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivation.

Dan Ariely is an Israeli American professor of psychology and behavioral economics. He teaches at Duke University and is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight. He describes in this TED talks some experiments that have been carried out to investigate the inner mechanics of personal motivation. Thnaks to Vincent Ehrhart for sharing this.

Cet article est tiré de #hyperchange – petit guide de la conduite du changement dans l’économie de la connaissance, e-book publié par #hypertextual le 13 Mars 2013.

Il s’agit ici de la synthèse du livre, synthèse qui propose un plan d’actions suivant 4 phases (vision, élaboration, mise en oeuvre et pérennisation) qui correspondent à 4 axes : leadership, stratégie, management et culture.

Les Références sont des ouvrages, chroniqués ou pas par #hypertextual : le lien vous guidera vers l’article ou l’ouvrage sur Amazon. Dans la colonne Action, vous trouverez  quelques liens vers les articles correspondants d’#hypertextual. Les autres éléments sont développés dans l’ouvrage …

Vision et Leadership

Durant cette phase, on construit la vision à partir du problème que l’on veut régler et de l’état que l’on souhaite atteindre.

La communication a pour simple but ici d’inciter les équipes à se mettre en mouvement pour remettre en cause le système actuel.

Elaboration de la stratégie

Durant cette phase, on élabore le projet. On entame de nombreuses études sur l’organisation et on définit plus clairement les différentes tactiques que l’on va mettre en œuvre à travers des actions précises.

Il est souhaitable que l’équipe projet soit définie à ce stade (cf. le point #2 de Kotter). Ce qui est très important est que l’on aligne cette équipe sur des principes clairs que ce soit en termes d’actions, de communication ou de la tactique de gestion des cas difficiles. D’où l’importance de la phase précédente qui va définir ces principes.

Management et mise en œuvre

Dans cette phase, alors que les équipes apprennent la nouvelle façon d’opérer, le management met tout en œuvre pour leur faciliter la tâche et soulager l’anxiété. Le rôle du management est alors primordial pour ce qui est de l’accompagnement.

Pérennisation de la culture

Cette phase est celle du changement sur la durée. On s’assure qu’on ne laisse pas d’espace pour que les anciennes mauvaises habitudes se réinstallent. C’est le point #8 de Kotter mais c’est aussi l’essentiel de l’ouvrage Staying Lean [L19] qui s’applique au Lean mais présente des solutions génériques.

(Cet article est tiré de l’ouvrage #hyperchange – petit guide de la conduite du changement dans l’économie de la connaissance)

J’utilise quotidiennement le management visuel depuis plusieurs années et je ne cesse d’y trouver de nouvelles vertus. Il rend le processus actionnable et permet de rendre visible les modes de fonctionnement et les interactions. En cela, il redescend la ligne de flottaison des élements explicites de la culture de l’organisation (cf éléments de la culture des organisations selon Schein [EN]). Ainsi, il contribue à la transparence et, par voie de conséquence, à la confiance au sein de l’entreprise. Enfin il permet de rendre visibles les problèmes, de les traiter et de garantir une adéquation entre les activités des équipes et la réalité opérationnelle.

Ce qu’on sait moins, et que nous a rapporté Pierre Masai le CTO Europe de Toyota Motors, c’est que le management visuel apporte une approche cognitive différente qui permet une relation plus efficace entre le manager et le collaborateur. Il s’agit d’un élement essentiel dans la conduite du changement.

Dans le travail de la connaissance

Dans le contexte du travail de la connaissance, et tout particulièrement en informatique, le management visuel apporte un élément supplémentaire : il permet de dé-virtualiser le travail.

Christophe Dejours, philosophe qui a beaucoup étudié le sens du travail, définit celui-ci comme la confrontation de l’homme avec la nature. L’humain éprouve de la satisfaction de son travail à travers le spectacle de la transformation de cette nature. Lorsque le produit sur lequel on travaille est virtuel, il est difficile de faire sens de sa contribution en ce qu’on ne voit plus le monde transformé par sa propre œuvre, comme le note Matthew Crawford qui rejoint l’approche de Dejours.

Le fait de rendre le travail visible permet de voir sa contribution dans le monde réel à travers l’avancement d’artefacts visibles tels que des post-its par exemple. Il s’agit là d’un élement important que j’ai observé dans la conduite d’équipes de développement logiciel travaillant en mode Scrum (une méthode Agile). Déplacer les étiquettes sur le tableau représentant le processus procure ainsi une sensation d’accomplissement pour les développeurs, accomplissement partagé avec le reste de l’équipe. Cette objectivation de l’avancée du projet contribue à son tour aux motivation et mobilisation de l’équipe.

Transparence

Dans une initiative de changement, le management visuel permet de rendre visible les transformations en cours. Cela contribue à la transparence de l’approche. En rendant le nouveau mode de fonctionnement visible, cela contribue aussi à réduire l’anxiété d’apprentissage en mettant à la disposition de tous, accessible, ce que l’on veut mettre en place.

Les méthodes de développement Agiles (telles Scrum) ou encore le procédé de VSM (Value Stream Map qui illustre le flux de valeur client) dans le Lean sont de bons exemples de management visuel. Et comme le rappelle Pierre Masai, il s’agit aussi de supports sur lesquels peuvent s’appuyer les managers lors de leur visite du Gemba, pour discuter des problèmes rencontrés, échanger avec les équipes et s’assurer que celles-ci sont alignées avec la stratégie de l’entreprise. S’appuyer sur ces artefacts lors de ces conversations favorise une discussion et une réflexion plus profondes.

Malléabilité

Par ailleurs, alors que l’on met en œuvre de nouvelles façons de travailler, que l’on est dans la Neutral Zone, telle que la définit William Bridges, la grande plasticité du management visuel permet de changer le processus si nécessaire.

Cela confère à l’ensemble une grande résilience et une grande malléabilité, tout à fait appropriées pour ces périodes de transition. Le processus a besoin d’être modifié ? Qu’à cela ne tienne il suffit juste de permuter 2 étiquettes et de changer 2 codes couleurs. Henrik Kniberg explique très bien cette dimension résiliente du management visuel dans son ouvrage Lean From The Trenches. Si le processus est figé dans un logiciel maintenu par la DSI, modifier celui-ci sera nécessairement plus long, coûteux et pénible. 

Empowerment

Enfin, et c’est un élément important, cette grande malléabilité offerte par le management visuel permet aux équipes de s’approprier plus volontiers le processus. Elles peuvent contribuer activement à son élaboration, essayer de nouvelles variantees et ainsi participer activement à son amélioration continue. Dans le Lean et les méthodes Agiles, il s’agit là d’un des éléments de base de la responsabilisation des équipes dans leur façon de travailler et de s’améliorer. On parle souvent d’empowerment à travers de grandes théories : en voici une application simple et concrète. Voir à  ce sujet l’entretien avec Christophe Riboulet, le PDG de Proditec.

Dans un monde qui change de façon brutale et rapide, l’adaptabilité des équipes est étroitement liée à l’autonomie dont ils jouissent pour régler leurs problèmes opérationnels : c’est un des gages de la réussite des entreprises d’aujourd’hui. C’est ce dernier élément qui me porte à croire que le post-it est probablement le concurrent le plus sérieux aux logiciels d’entreprise qui implémentent les processus de l’organisation. Des tableaux de post-it physiques et des réseaux sociaux d’entreprise pour fluidifier l’information : voilà le SI de l’organisation du 21ème siècle.

Rather than an information age, it’ more appropriate to speak of an age of networked intelligence in which we can collaborate with others on a global basis at the speed of light. This is why collaboration has become probably the hottest topic in business today.

This is taken from the foreword Don Tapscott wrote for the very actionable essay by Jacob Morgan The Collaborative Organization. We will get back on this smart book very soon – watch this space and in the meantime, give some thoughts to Don Tapscott quote above. Happy Easter people !

As part of the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week in Paris there was a Management Hackathon, addressing 2 topics : organization of the 21st century and Leadership and Management principles. 2 teams were competing to tackle each subject.

We built a team around the second topic and this is what we came out with :

The objective

45 minutes to build collaboratively a list of principles for the Leadership and Management of the 21st century organization.

The teams

I love these moments full of potential energy, when in these collaborative games people hesitate (should I participate ? which team should I join ? where should I seat ? how should I position myself ?). After a few minutes, people sat and the team settled. I’ve tried to refrain my natural drive and not stand too quickly to make our team more dynamic but I could only do so for so long (errm … less than a couple of minutes).

Soon, each person introduce her/himself and people started to feel comfortable talking to each other and contributing to the discussion. So here was our team :

• Fabrice
• Boutaina
• Harald
• Judith
• Diane
• Elodie
• Cecil (in case you are in doubt : it’s me)

Later joined by :

• Anthony
• Mark

Needless to say : our team rocks big time. And we gave it a cool name (at the last second, though) : TheEdgeExperimenters.

The Definitions

OK so how do we start ? Elodie asked an excellent question : “Does everybody share the same definition of what we are talking about”. This is an excellent way to start such collaborative session. It allows to align the team and make sure we talk about the same thing. So we started with definitions : principles, leadership and management. I can’t remember if it’s Lao-Tse or Confucius who said something in the vicinity of “Where you are surrounded with Chaos, the thing you need the most is a dictionary”. It was not really chaos, though just the energy of something starting.

We defined Principles as key drivers, aiming to help people take the right decision, something they have to do hundreds of time a day. We agree to define these principles as verbs (OK I pushed quite a bit toward that direction, inspired by the beautiful 7 principles of Lean Software Development by Tom & Mary Poppendieck). I did my best to keep values away – values are nouns and often sound hollow and plastic.

The discussion around the distinction between Leadership and Management has been quite thrilling. We all agree that Leadership had more to do with the Why (refer to Simon Sinek Classic TED talk on the subject) while Management had more to do with the How. As anticipated, I failed to suppress my desire to quote Kotter (Management deals with operational complexity while Leadership deals with change) or Drucker (Leadership is doing the right thing and management is doing the thing right) – which get Anthony rightly upset.

The principles

I kind of succeeded in not influencing the team with both my 10 principles of Enterprise 2.0 explained to Managers or Schein’s 10 dimension of the learning organisation. Midway through, as the dynamics of the teams were taking off, I backed off a bit and Harald took the lead. Gradually, the team contribution was becoming more intense. I just love these moments of collaborative creativity : it is just magical.

So here are the six principles we came out with (as verbs) :

1. Empower and develop people : Foster High Trust/Low Fear culture by dealing with organizational culture toward problem (opportunity to learn as opposed to chance to blame) so that people feel empowered. We don’t believe in manager-free organisations, we believe still have a role in particular in removing obstacles and grow/develop the people
2. Walk the Talk : we believe in leadership by example (especially Harald ! though it’s Anthony who formulated it if I recall correctly). It was really nice seeing the team converging on this very strong principle. No more corporate BS day-in day-out, please stick to reality and if you want to relate to reality, well, eat your own dog food.
3. Make it simple : The idea here is to shield the team from global complexity to help them focus on the task at hand. The idea is not to remove the complexity which is inherent to today’s business but rather to help people concentrate on the things to do by removing unnecessary complexity. Wish it was my idea (but it wasn’t) as this resonated vividly for me with this great Scott Berkun essay : the Simplifiers and the Complexifiers (available in the awesome Mindfire book, by the way). Warning : Simple requires deep thought, discipline and patience,  as 37signals stated.
4. Drive soft and social skills : We all agree that Managers and Leaders of the 21st century organization foster extended social collaboration between the employees and between the teams. This require to work on soft and social skills. John Hagel and #hypertextual elaborated upon the importance of feminine soft skills to succeed in today’s economy. A simple hint to promote soft skills in your organisation : promote female worker whenever in doubt.
5. Challenge the vision against permanent change : We wanted here again to express that leaders need to confront to reality not only on the shop floor but also in executives committees. The world is changing, fast, with an amplitude we’ve never witnessed before. We need our managers and leaders to make sure they take this into account when defining and assessing and implementing the vision.
6. Experiment at the edge : one of my favorite ones, from Mark. We had many ideas converging towards the idea of fostering innovation (cross-cultural, collaboration, open environment) and we didn’t want something such as pushing the limits of thinking outside the box. Experimenting on the edge not only makes it actionable but it also proves to be a great place to innovate. We loved it so much, we named our team out of it.

We also discussed to find out which principles were relevant to leadership and which to management. We eventually agreed that they were all appropriate for both.

We made sure at the end we took an extra couple of minutes to clearly write down these principles so that during the presentation our proposal is clear. This is so exciting to bring together 10 people or so and having them work on a topic for an hour and having out of the blue a result at the end which is not quite the finished article but not far.

A close result

Some people in the team asked me to present the result. In all fairness, they didn’t really have to insist. It was great introducing the work of everybody in front of the crowd. The other team (with Céline and Hans-Juergen) did a great job as well. I am not aligned with their manager-free organisation but I liked their distributed leadership proposal – in particular their proposal on how to deal with introspects which I thought was very relevant and echoed Susan Cain TED presentation The Power of Introspects).

Judging by the vote of audience it was very close but for some reasons, Master of Ceremony Bjoern decided we were the winners. You can have a more objective perspective on the whole thing from Emanuele Quintarelli’s blog or Jon Ingham’s.

Yet again, Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2013 has been a great opportunity to touch base with the #socbiz evangelists community and to get a clear idea of the status of the 21st century organization evolution.

Beyond the actual conference, I actually feel frustrated about a few questions I had that has not been properly answered, or at least in an actionable manner.

Here’s one : we’re talking about Social Business, Social Customer Relationship, Social Learning, Social Revolution, Social Talent Management, Social YouNameIt etc … Still, there is one thing that is not addressed : Social Status. Believe it or not, this is something people are far more interested in than any of the other social xxx mentioned above. I’m just as sad as every Enterprise 2.0 evangelist about his but, hey : this is the tough reality and we don’t want to BS ourselves away from reality, do we ?

The 2 in Enterprise 2.0

In my view, the major shift (the why of the 2.0 in Enterprise 2.0 if you will) while implementing social collaborative software behind and over the firewall, is the transformation from a mere hierarchical/vertical organization into more of a networked one. This causes a massive change of power dynamics : we move from granted power (status given by the hierarchy and the job description) to acquired power (status given by influence, leadership and contribution).

Or more precisely, we move from sole granted power to a mix of granted power AND acquired power : as Jon Husband mentioned in his keynote, we are not getting rid of hierarchies while implementing Enterprise 2.0, we mix both hierarchical and networked structures. Which happens to be a very virtuous and Druckerian shift if you ask me. Yet, don’t expect some people to be keen in engaging in a change that questions their power. And, Yes : I’m talking about middle managers. No wonder why Sandy Carter reported in her keynote that only 22% of this population is prepared to use social technology in their work.

Disappointing Answers

So where do we go from here ? Well, I have asked this question a few times throughout the conference and I’m afraid I haven’t got any satisfactory answer. Prof. Richard Collin recommended to talk with these people to explain them what we will get out of this networked organization. I did. Maaaaaaaany times. Doesn’t work but it could well be I haven’t found the right words. However, discussing with some colleagues activists it didn’t look like it worked out for them either.

Luis Suarez has a more radical approach, quite Gandhiesque : ignore them and they will eventually join when they see the change is actually moving forward. I don’t buy into that either. The reason : you’ll end up with teams torn between executives vision (“become social”) and managers governance (“don’t mess-up my well-oiled processes with you latest 2.0 fad”). Some people call this paradoxical injunction and this is one of the main cause of disengagement. I’m not sure you want your teams to get into these swampy waters while getting familiar with this new collaborative way of solving problems.

A Leadership + Management Change Management Program

If you want to make your managers comfortable with this new power model, you will have to see this project as a Leadership and Management Change Management project. This is what Hans-Juergen Sturm and Elodie Kolasniewski from Amadeus reminded us : Enterprise 2.0 projects are 20% IT and 80% Change Management.

Which echoes what Jason Falls wrote in his controversy post “Social Business is Bullshit” :

What “social business” really is, is the digital-first world’s version of change management. (…) You’re transitioning from the way marketing and communications did work, to the way it works better now.

Loss and Compensation

William Bridges told us that prior to actually implement a change management program you first have to identify the loss people will have to go through while leaving the former system, and help them to go through the Letting Go, this phase during which they acknowledge their loss. And the one we are talking about here is a big one : a perceived Social Status based on control and authority. So my recommendation would be to take managers on board, think about the types of compensation you can offer them while they’re getting ready to a more networked organization.

In all fairness, I don’t believe in the manager-free enterprise fad. Probably my Lean culture where managers are of paramount importance. There are still many responsibilities for the manager in the 21st century organisation. Remove obstacles, develop and grow people, coach them, keep people in line with the vision and provide them with a system perspective to prevent sub-optimization, offer listening space to relieve change induced anxiety, put people in the best context for them to perform etc …

This is the compensation to discuss with managers and this is how we can help them letting go the pure hierarchical role and status. Make the destination a sexy place where their role is still critical. It is just that their objective has drifted away from pure control and have moved toward more leadership, servant leadership.

How do you think we should deal with middle managers to help them integrate social collaborative tools and transition to the 21st century networked organization ?