Nov 26, 2012 | Change, Collaboration, Leadership, Social Media
What you do, say and think is no longer private. Our lives are opening up to scrutiny as our previously private data moves into the public domain at geometric speed. Much of being human depends on our ability to forge relationships with a few people based on dreams, problems, challenges, and attitudes that are shared with a small group, often only one person.
Radical transparency is the new reality of privacy where the notions of privacy as they have applied in the past to individuals and institutions are simply no longer relevant. It seems absurd to me that we still have regulated privacy in situations where there is a clear benefit to that community to remove it, such as in the case of contagious medical conditions, and whilst we shake our heads at the photos our kids (grandkids?) put up on facebook, that is the new reality.
This change happening around us is emerging as one of the most radical social revolutions in history. How are we, and our institutions going to deal with the absolute ubiquity of information?
Over the last decade, we have effectively given away the assumption of privacy as we understood it, surely the challenge now is to figure out how to manage the new transparency rather than doing a “Canute” about it.
This notion is engaging greater minds than mine. Part one of an email conversation between a couple of the real thinkers in this area, Clay Shirky and Don Tapscott, appeared recently in the Atlantic. It deals forces of change unleashed by the collective intelligence of the net, the 4 broad principals of the internet age, Collaboration, Transparency, Sharing, and Empowerment, as outlined by Don in his June 12 TED talk.
Part two of that conversation examines the impact of the information revolution on the Arab Spring, and its wider implications, demonstrating again, the 4 principals at work .
Radical transparency is a part of our world now, it cannot be undone, so our corporations, institutions, and every individual need to respond to this new reality.
Nov 21, 2012 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“The harder I work the luckier I get”
I’m not sure who said that first, but it is certainly widely agreed, absolutely true, and therefore almost a cliché.
The more ideas, the more the variation in the background, training, and attitudes of those exposed and asked to think about problems and opportunities, the greater the chance someone will see something new. It makes sense therefore to increase the diversity of people thinking about any problem or challenge, as their diversity brings different experience, perspective and understanding to bear, and can create connections not seen by others.
Discussion needs to be stimulated and encouraged, curated if you like, a hothouse for ideas and experiments, where every trial that does not work is one more way that we know does not work. “Edison’s law.”
The new collaboration tools of the web are fantastic, a breakthrough for innovation, but they still do not come close to the potential of motivated individuals exchanging ideas and views in a relaxing, but stimulating face to face environment.
Serendipity happens after the work has been put in, not before.
Nov 2, 2012 | Change, Collaboration, Social Media
I have a new email address, one that allows me access to an enterprise social network, run off the “Yammer” platform that has been deployed by an occasional client.
This is an innovation that will turn the time people spend on their social networks into hugely productive time for employers.
The client concerned has a far flung empire, not big, but very spread, delivering a specialised service. Last week they urgently needed someone with an unusual skill to address a crisis in a client factory, a skill that up to now may have taken weeks to identify, if it was around. Instead, the engineering manager stuck the request on their yammer network, and it took minutes for a young engineer in Perth to respond, he had skill required, developed with a previous employer.
The opportunity to use internal social media, Yammer, Chatter, the Salesforce.com equivalent, and others, is opening a door to collaborative work such that we have brely dreamed about before. Forget the complicated, time consuming, and mostly wasted project update meetings every second day, replace it with a daily SM update, create forums to address problems and spread news and ideas.
This is not just socialising business, this is a revolution in cross functional/geographic collaborative management.
That’ll scare some folks!
Aug 18, 2012 | Collaboration, Management
Management lessons abound in the great win by Australia’s K4 crew in London.
- Co-ordination maximises the effect of input. For 1000 meters, the crew was absolutely co-ordinated, any minor deviation by any individual would have had a profound impact on the performance of the whole.
- Focus. Just watch the faces during the race, (if you can find a video, I can’t) focused is an apt description.
- The power of a team is greater than the individual power of its participants. The four here are no doubt amongst the best, and fittest of athletes in the competition, but it is highly unlikely they are the four fittest and best individually, they have combined beautifully to make the best team.
- Visualising the result. Each of the individuals trained enormously hard when not together, and they trained as a team very hard, but each time they did a training run over the Olympic distance, according to one of the interviews I heard, they did it as if it was the Olympic final, so when it came to the real thing, they had already done it thousands of times.
- When faced with disappointment, as several were in Beijing, instead of throwing in the towel, they analysed what went wrong, and set about fixing the problems.
- Control what you can control, and do not stress about what you cannot. The Aussies had a race plan that they executed, knowing what they had to do to win, but during the race, their focus was on their own performance, not that of their opposition. It was only after the line was crossed that they were sure the gold was theirs.
- Planning a support processes are vital. The four in the boat were only a part of the team that made the win possible. The short race was the culmination of years of planning, training, and refining, a classic continuous improvement case study.
Aug 1, 2012 | Collaboration, Strategy
Ever thought “how do we get anything done with all these meetings”?
It is a paradox, as the evolving recognition that meetings are essential to successful collaborative activity, and the growth of collaboration as a strategy grows rapidly, so does the propensity for meetings.
However, many meetings are just an excuse for idle people to fill up the time available, and make it seem worthwhile and useful.
Meetings are not a substitute for thinking, they are one of two things:
- A forum to communicate face to face when the issue is sufficiently complicated, or important that other forms of communication are insufficient in their depth of engagement to be as effective, so the meeting its worth the cost, or,
- A forum to throw away the shackles of hierarchy, functional silos, and culture, and address a problem/opportunity as a 5 year old would, with delight, and no inhibitions.
All other reasons for a meeting are just an excuse, and beware of the evils of “groupthink”.
Which of these two did your last meeting fall into?
How is your organisation managing the paradox?
May 21, 2012 | Collaboration, Innovation, Strategy
Another paradox surfaced by the emerging business networked models is that of ownership of IP.
In the old days, just a few years ago, ownership of IP was top of mind in many if not most development situations, but then along came digital collaboration.
Linux is now the dominant operating system installed on large servers, a loose collaboration of nerds has significantly outperformed Microsoft, one of the smartest companies of all time, with access to the most and best resources, and a dominant starting position. How can this be?
Nobody owns the Linux IP, it is a common license,
Toyota for years has encouraged, perhaps demanded, innovation from its tier 1 suppliers, often using non quantified descriptions of outcome as a substitute for detailed specifications, and Boeing, in the design and construction of the 787, set out to “co-innovate” with its suppliers, as they recognised the development task was simply too complicated to do alone. Despite huge problems, the exercise has yielded technology advances that Boeing believes will give them a big advantage for many years.
The key in building a network business model is the recognition that IP is no longer the end game, simply a means to an end. Businesses are now prepared to own some, share it, give it away, and have others generate it, just to ensure that the benefit from the knowledge flows through to the product.
I recently completed a business plan for a client which called for a high degree of collaboration with other complementary institutions, all of whom have at their core, a reverence for IP. In considering the drivers of success, and writing a plan to harness them, ownership of IP was always going to be a big stumbling block, it turned out to be a terminal one. However, the plan did get a few people thinking, so perhaps down the track a bit the benefits of a networked model may be seen to outweigh the C20 preoccupation with IP ownership, after all, it is how the IP is leveraged, not who owns it, that counts.
