Feb 20, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Social Media
Things have changed, the tools of web 2.0 make collaboration, at least theoretically, really easy, so why it is so hard to get done?
Outside the web, where Wikipedia, Linux, Ideo and a few others have rewritten the rules, and boomed as a result, the output from new collaboration tools appears far more limited. Most businesses I deal with are struggling with co-ordinating a video conference, and that is about the end of the tools that they are using.
In a fundamental way, they need to consider the architecture of their collaborative efforts. What works for a co-located team, even if it has a few “fly-ins” will not work for a truly distributed team, or one that is working on a complex development, even when co-located. It seems a few rusted on practices need to be revisited:
- Responsibility for the outcome should be clear, along with budgets and timelines. It is the group that holds responsibility collectively, not individuals, and individual performance is measured by their contribution to the groups achievement of the outcome.
- The “how to” get the job done is left to the team.
- The team should be able to co-opt and manage outside skills as necessary to get the job done with relative freedom.
Feb 16, 2011 | Collaboration, Social Media
Forming and directing groups has become pretty easy with the advent of email, mobile phones and photography, face book, and other forms of mobile, instant technology applications.
This reality is simply that the new tools have removed the transaction costs that previously existed that prevented simple, cheap and spontaneous communication of one to many.
It is inconceivable that the spontaneous riots that occurred in 2005 in Cronulla would have happened without the coordinating tools of mobile text and established networks of connected and like-minded individuals. Everybody was surprised at the speed, size, and emotion of the mobs that formed, and then the emotion expended, the groups dissipated just as quickly.
The recent QLD floods have seen social media play a pivotal role in the communication of the events as they happened, directing the official response to the points of most need, and creating the networks that resulted in thousands having the information necessary to offer and deliver their assistance with the clean-up as it progresses.
These tools have become integral to the way we behave in a decade, an astonishingly quick behavior adaptation that goes to the heart of they way all our institutions need to be managed to engage effectively with their stakeholders.
Feb 15, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Innovation, Social Media
Finding professionals to develop stuff for you is getting easier by the day. A whole range of services are evolving to meet short term needs, by matching the booming IT capabilities in emerging nations prepared to work for what in a developed economy is peanuts, to the needs of individual projects.
In addition, on line services like surveys can be done quickly, and simply to test hypotheses before significant expenditure is committed.
Agility does not equal poor planning, so long as it is in the context of an overall objective to be achieved, rather it reflects a humility necessary to recognise you do not have all the answers, and a willingness to adapt simply reflects the reality of complicated, fragmented, and rapidly changing circumstances combined with the edge of the envelope moving at increasing speed.
Feb 14, 2011 | Collaboration, Social Media
Access to information, rather than being for abstract analysis, is a call to action which in the past has been to the individual, but now can be across huge numbers who have no connection apart from the cause.
As the analysis of the dynamics of the changes occurring in Egypt emerges, it will be fascinating to watch the extent to which the analysis of the power of social tools as argued by Clay Shirky in “Here comes Everybody” are confirmed.
Shirky’s book, published 4 or 5 years ago does a great job of putting words around what we now see every day, people who do not know each other organising with the assistance of social tools. This can be as simple as two people meeting for the first time, using a phone to identify each other in a crowded café, to something more co-ordinated like the student protests at the behavior of HSBC , to the hundreds of thousands that gathered in Cairo’s main square demanding change.
Others who hold power by exercising autocratic control must be watching the revolution in Egypt, and carefully considering their Swiss bank accounts.
Feb 13, 2011 | Collaboration, Leadership
These terms are often used as synonyms, as managers seek to evolve a culture of inclusion and shared responsibility, but they are markedly different.
Collaboration is essential, and now so much easier given digital the tools to hand, and increased understanding of what motivates and engages individuals, but does not necessarily lead to consensus. Successful enterprises are rarely democracies, but they are very good at nurturing diversity, and hearing all points of view before making decisions, then gaining support for action, even from dissenters, by ensuring “due process” has been followed, which requires an understanding of the purpose of the collaboration, and a buy in to the outcomes.
Feb 8, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Lean, Operations
Typically, we see things in an “either/or” context, you can do one thing at the expense of another, take your choice!. You can have line efficiency, or line flexibility, not both, advertising reach or frequency against a narrow target, but not both in the advertising budget, covering inventory requirements of A, or B by the end of the week , but not both. Happens very day.
This trade-off is programmed into us, but has the unintended consequence of “allowing” shallow problem analysis, facilitating our “jump” to a conclusion, rather than going through the hard work of real problem articulation, consideration of many possible solution options, and the testing and recalibration of hypotheses that should occur and re-iterate to identify where more data is needed, more ambiguity dissolved, and more responsibility taken.
When was the last time you acted too soon, and laid all your bets on a single obvious solution being the right one, only to find the siren song of “easy and obvious” led you astray?
I first came across this phenomena in the late 80’s (to my younger readers, some of us were working then) when my then employer was running “Ski” yoghurt down a new form/fill/seal machine designed for long runs to meet the demand in France, where the machinery was made. Run raspberry yoghurt for a few days, and it worked wonderfully, great in France, but for us it would have been a years stock, so we had to change flavors after little more than what would have been a changeover run in France, in many cases, less than an hour, with the attendant changeover times and start-up/finish-run inefficiencies, which the French engineers assured us were “absolutement” unavoidable.
Over a period of time, in a structured and progressive way, our fitters and operators who ran this piece of French engineering revenge on the rest of the world, using what would now be described as a PDCA continuous improvement cycle, made that machine do what its makers said was impossible, and we got both efficiency and flexibility out of it.
Either/or was not good enough, progressively, with many small steps, a great deal of experimentation, and recognition that the operators often had a better view of the intricacies than an engineer working off a plan, it evolved it into a “both/and” machine.
As a result, we made pots of money, because we had very low inventory levels, almost 100% order fulfillment , and an increasing market share because our customer service to big retailers was better than our opposition, and the consumers loved the product. Truly a lean virtuous circle!
