February 2007

There has been significant growth in the use of the term Enterprise 2.0, and there are now growing numbers of consultants offering advice to organizations and blogs devoted to chronicling its beginning movement through the enterprise world.

As both an observer and a participant in this area of activity, I am constantly drawn back to the half-century or more of management literature and the interesting experiences many organizations have had with respect to addressing major change, whether it has involved the design and implementation of ERP systems or other large integrated information systems, or the launch and ongoing work at developing the culture and dynamics of a learning organization.  Most of today’s major change initiatives involve the minds, work habits and motivations of knowledge workers, and will rely increasingly on participation, engagement and interaction.

I think it’s fair to say that much of the business / management literature has chronicled the major difficulties and frustrations many organizations have had with respect to the implementation of major change.  I would argue (as many have before and with me) that many of the problems have been socio-cultural and psychological in nature, and stem from dissonance between an organization’s structure, its decision-making and power dynamics and the nature of knowledge work and knowledge workers

With respect to my observations, a mental placeholder for me over the last year or so has been the article The New Organization, in The Economist of January 2006 (unfortunately, the article is now behind The Economist’s paywall).

The article references a McKinsey Quarterly article.

Last year, Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce, two of the firm’s consultants, argued that “today’s big companies do very little to enhance the productivity of their professionals. In fact, their vertically oriented organisational structures, retrofitted with ad hoc and matrix overlays, nearly always make professional work more complex and inefficient.”

In other words, 21st-century organisations are not fit for 21st-century workers.

This is echoed by Mercer Delta:

[Mercer Delta] recently observed that “the models and frameworks that shaped our leading organisations from the end of the second world war through the conclusion of the cold war are clearly obsolete in this new era of e-business, perpetual innovation and global competition.”

The design of today’s complex enterprises, says Mercer Delta, requires an entirely new way of thinking about organisations.

Given that many organizations have had less-than-stellar results when confronting and then undertaking major change, why would we expect anything other than much wrestling and gnashing-of-teeth when it comes to designing and implementing social software and web services directly aimed at improving personal productivity whilst also engaging in linking, sharing information, mashing up, getting together to do what works, etc.

The issue of empowerment and responsiveness has been on the table for a long time now, and it doesn’t go away.  But the issues of structural habituation to command-and-control proves an obstacle with enormous sticking power.

I would argue that almost all of the advice that is whirling around the emerging phenomenon of Enterprise 2.0 (or wikinomics, for that mater) could be relatively easily distilled down to something like this:

Just start practicing with this stuff !  It is not going away, and I suspect strongly that the presence of web services and social software will only intensify.  Practicing is good, and the productivity landscape it addresses will from now on involve more and more of the "sociology" engendered by personal cognitive and working styles interacting with others and with the larger integrated systems of an organization.

So, it’s a safe bet that it will take practice, and learning what works for a given context and different groups of networked people.

Choose one or several purposeful pilot projects.  Don’t fret endlessly about getting it right.  Get good advice, make good common sense decisions, and learn from the practice.

I’m willing to bet that a substantial number of organizations either try too hard to "get it right" right out of the box, or get really frustrated by the impacts of blogs and wikis on leadership and management styles and the organizational culture, or will experience regular waves of discomfort with the relative non-linearity of the dynamics of blogs, wikis and mashups.

Just practice. You will have the rest of the future to get it right, and the future keeps changing faster than we do.

(Jon Husband)

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Like very quickly poke fun publicly, around the world, at the fundamental bigotry recently displayed by the ex-NBA player Tim Hardaway.

Brilliant …

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… is one of the colloquial names for small short cans of stronger (6.0% alcohol) beer brewed in Canada.

Here are a couple of quick cold shots .. two brief quotes from the insightful and sobering Contemplations from the Cheap Beer Zone , in which Joe Bageant shakes his head in slow bemusement at the sheer madness of watching ourselves eat ourselves up, towards a media-driven death of consciousness.

"And our inaction bellows at the world, no matter how many Internet chat friends share our own personal shame and indignation."

Via today’s Globe and Mail

Viacom shuns YouTube for Joost
Associated Press

NEW YORK — Media conglomerate Viacom Inc. agreed Tuesday to license television shows and movies to Joost, the new online video distribution channel launched by the founders of Kazaa and Skype.

Under the deal, Viacom’s MTV, Nickelodeon and BET television networks and its Paramount studios will license shows and movies for the Joost Internet platform. This comes two weeks after Viacom pulled Comedy Central clips and other content from Google Inc.’s YouTube online video sharing service, citing copyright concerns.

Joost, founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, is still in testing. The service will allow free access to programs and channels in broadcast quality, supported by ads.

The Viacom arrangement marks the first big licensing deal for Joost, which promises to be a “piracy-proof” distributor of regular episodic content rather than the individual clips that tend to make up YouTube uploads.

 Much like Skype and Kazaa — which enraged the music industry because it enabled free trading of content — Joost uses peer-to-peer technologies to distribute material. Joost also uses encryption and other methods to lock content down.

Viacom said some of the shows it will license include MTV’s “Real World” and “Beavis & Butthead,” and Comedy Central’s “Freak Show and Stella.” Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said Joost was chosen for its interactive user experience and its “business model that respects both content creators and consumers.”

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C’mon now, what’s the back end of that lyric couplet, from a song by the Dave Clark Five, circa mid-60’s ??

Hang on a sec .. Google ?

"Over and over and over again Dave Clark Five"

So …

"Over and over and over again … this dance is gonna be a drag"

I am not using the last half of this phrase as any indicator if what is to follow, other than to note  that in some important senses a type of conversation has been occurring and re-occurring related to the "social" in this new term and very vaguely defined term "social media".

Doc Searls summarizes some of his key observations during the course of a range of meetings and conferences he’s been attending, and participating in … concluding with a focus on participation,  engagement and interaction …

Anyway, the message I’ll be bringing is one I got from Steve. It’s about participation. Engagement. Seems to me that public broadcasting is way too long on policy and bureaucracy and way too short on engagement.

The WNYC spam Dave wrote about a couple days ago is a perfect example of a system that has no idea how to actually relate to customers. I listen to WNYC every morning — among a variety of other stations. And I hate the way the station insists on running a commercial message (usually from the New School) or pitching me on something-or-other as soon as I tune in. I pay WNYC not to be a commercial station, not to behave like its lessers on the radio dial.

I’ll be putting up some ideas about how to facilitate better participation. Like to hear yours too. I’ll pass them along.

This quote from Doc’s observations about the route he is traveling these days reminds me, once again, of the growing realization that many of the issues being encountered during this massive shift towards participation and interaction are essentially the same issues that have been on the table for the organizational development / learning organization field for the last 40 years or so … minus the hyperlinks, which have really just exacerbated, accelerated and made much more visible the ongoing pressure to make knowledge-work organizations more people-centric (a term I hate).  Another way of saying this (and an example of where context is so very important) is one of the basic principles of the Web’s impact on established institutions and practices … "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy".

The phrase begs much unpacking and interpretation, because each hierarchical situation wherein hyperlinks are potentially subversive represents a potential meeting point between the older, lacking-hyperlinks, vertically arranged information processing and decision making structure and the new, still-forming, dense networks of links between information and people.  The experience at each meeting point represents observable data about how the use of hyperlinks is being or eventual will be integrated into organized sets of activities where information is already flowing along in-forming routes.

Anyway. not to unpack or interpret too much …

It reminds me of conversations with Chris Corrigan, wherein we found ourselves in agreement that processes and meeting designs that incorporate Open Space principles, or knowledge cafe methods, or ways of creating containers for deep and probably-unsettling reflection (such as Future Search or Narrative Capture and Sensemaking) will become fundamental means groups of people that face the need to unpack and re-form complexity.

David Weinberger once said something along the lines for " …  the digital environment cuts out or eliminates opportunities for (human) slack that we are used to … " and in relation to Doc’s call for the facilitation of better participation, we will do well to remember an ever-present polarity from the OD field - that of "loose / tight".

The "loose / tight" polarity fits very well with the often observed "both / and" nature of our experience on the Web, and also lets us retrieve from organizational structure orthodoxy the usefulness of moving outside existing structures to stimulate possibilities for innovation.  Dave Snowden recently mentioned the ongoing mania in many organizations for the "lean six-sigmafication" of many business processes, and one naturally wonders how this loose / tight polarity can be effectively put to use in such an environment.  Presumably one does not look for innovation in a six-sigma site so much as lock down best practices and tighten the gaskets.

Maybe now that we are moving into an environment where the need for intelligent innovation is becoming constant, and essential … we will see a speeding up of something that’s been under way for a while … managers as coaches and facilitators, engaged in the wholesale adoption of techniques and core principles from the organizational development field.

While I clearly think that these forces for changing what management means are important, and that the responses that are emerging are overdue, I also can’t help grinning at all the images that come to mind from all the engagement I used to watch on the BBC’s brilliant The Office … Ricky facilitating and coaching Tim’s wavering engagement in this classic moment

Tags: Doc Searls, social media, engagment, facilitation, Open Space. David Weinberger, Chris Corrigan, Future search, organizational development, coaching, wirearchy

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I remember a clear feeling about what an educational experience it had been after I finished translating a Lexicon about terms in / for a networked age for Constellation W.

Constellation W introduces the Lexicon with a statement about the importance of helping to create clarity and a sound base from which to operate during periods of confusion and growth in language.

There’s an inherent tension between "correctly or precisely defined" in the first paragraph below, and  (at least in the sense of how we understand or judge correctness (usually validation by experts), and the concluding paragraph …  "you can participate in further refining the definitions in this glossary by sending us your suggestions and comments."

Lexicon

The knowledge-based society is a relatively new area or domain of exploration and study, and as such it is natural to to find therein numerous words and terms which are not correctly or precisely defined, as well as any number of tangentially related terms. In addition, many of these buzz words are appearing first in English, and many people (French, Spanish speaking… ) are abusing them without really knowing what they mean or signify.

These new concepts are important because they are signs of the tangible evolution of our current situations : they will not become true tools unless the choice and use of these terms are better defined with respect to this new environment which we are calling the post-industrial society. Actually, language is betraying our difficulties in understanding these real and present socio-economic and technological ruptures.

As actors in this new environment, you can participate in further refining the definitions in this glossary by sending us your suggestions and comments.

A
agents, research (intelligent agent, information agent, robot, bot, spiders, wanderers, Web worm)
An electronic assistant that can be calibrated, and so can be personalized. Research agents are softwares which accomplish a certain number of repetitive tasks based on functional rules that define its architecture. They can watch themes through different filters and from different sources, communicate with other agents, observe environments which the watcher tells it to explore, etc. Several levels of research exist :

• General research – a first pass at looking for things ;
• Advanced research – a more refined observation ;
• Research into specialized sectors ;
• Alerts-driven research : searching for new things.

alliance
(see mega-corporations)

americanization
The process by which the American culture tends to make more uniform its competitors, by holding down the power of information and technology.

alter-globalization
A social movement which demands that democracy, the autonomy of peoples, fundamental human rights, environmental protection and economic justice are essential components of the economic model rather than the reign of the free market. It requires a globalization which is mastered and operates in solidarity, its slogan being « Another world is possible ».
attention economy
Putting into place the means necessary to attract or capture the attention of Internet users, which is constrained by the flows of information which move more quickly than the time which is available to attend to them, and the development of strategies to discover, retain and use what is pertinent.

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Are technology, economics and societal change all inextricably woven together as our future rushes backwards to meet us ?

Michel Cartier and others have explored the evolution of the three areas from 1970 to the present, and offer a useful resource base for data and other reference material about how these areas of focus have grown and spread through the last three and one-half decades.

Tags: Michel Cartier, Constellation W, concept maps, knowledge society, wirearchy

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A re-publishing of Blogging Meets Organizational Design and Development, originally published in December 2004 …

Please bear in mind as you read it that the examples cited from the fall of 2004 are basically early weak signals that when combined with context and previous knowledge lead to what might be called well-informed guesses

… found in a comments section.

This is what the mainstream media is up against, and my guess is that now it is firmly an uphill struggle.

"Blogs help unfilter news.

Ever since the first reporter asked his boss ‘what’s my angle?’ the news you hear has resembled less the events that happened and more a dialogue that TPTB wanted to have.. When the news started throwing out bs crazy ideas that had no basis in fact but needed to be mentioned because ’somebody heard it’ they died for me.

People used to have enough inside them to form opinions with the facts they were presented before modern education started taking it’s toll. Now you get the biggest truth/lie weaver calling his show ‘no spin zone’ just to emphasize his honesty..

It really is fascinating watching media evolve before our eyes. The news dinousaurs made sure they would be left behind by changing nary a thing because they were comfortable with the scam they’d created. The electronic towne hall we now have has poisoned the old media and they can’t save themselves by telling people the web isn’t cool."

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For just a moment I don’t give a fig about how socially isolating computing may be, or whether or not I might spend too much time behind a screen and not helping my neighbours.

I like that screen, and I like fast powerful software that will let me do what the fellow in the video clip is doing.

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I ran across this initiative whilst browsing .. looks like bottoms-up access in many local communities and spaces.

There are Living Stories from around the globe.

Telecentre.org

telecentre.org is a collaborative initiative that supports and strengthens the telecentre movement. We believe that information and communication technology, used locally, can empower individuals and communities. Our vision is to build a knowledge society from the ground up.

telecentre.org is both a social investment program and a global community:

- Social investment program — We support networks, services, and workshops that benefit people working in local telecentres. Our investments are designed to improve the capacity of telecentres to deliver more and better services to their communities.
- Global community — telecentre.org is a network of people and organizations committed to creating a vibrant telecentre movement. We connect — online and offline — to exchange ideas, share resources, and support each other.

A telecentre is a public place where people can access computers, the Internet, and other technologies that help them gather information and communicate with others at the same time as they develop digital skills.

Each telecentre is different, but the common focus is on the use of technologies to support community and social development:

Reducing isolation
Bridging the digital divide
Promoting health issues
Creating economic opportunities
Reaching out to youth

Telecentres exist in almost every country, although they sometimes go by different names — village knowledge centres, infocentres, community technology centres, community multimedia centres, information kiosks, or school-based telecentres.

Read our book — From the Ground Up: the evolution of the telecentre movement — to get a quick picture of how community technology contributes to social and economic development.

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What you’ll have going into your head and out of your mouth (and fingers) is likely to involve electronic media .. and you in interaction with it .. in some way or other.

Even without a TV, and choosing your own path through sources of information, it’s more and more likely you will be woven into and onto the Web.  Rob looks at the fundamental dynamic in a post titled "My Story Or Theirs ?", that focuses on the radio.  But the point is applicable elsewhere.  I hear more and more reports and anecdotes about people tailoring the way they gather, glean and gauge the news they take in with the help of people they trust (often in online networks).

Rob points to Watts Wacker of FirstMatter, who looks into this in a interview titled "Radio’s Future - The Disruption is Ready to Happen".  I published a piece titled "The Medium Is The Meaning We Consume and Create" last year or so that covers the same ground though without the specific focus on radio.

Wacker notes:

One of the most significant trends is what I call “self- selecting social organization.” People are looking to find people like themselves and coming together in almost a neo-tribal orientation of living.

And there’s a tremendous opportunity for all media, particularly broadcast media, to facilitate these people finding “themselves” in the easiest possible way. And it would also result in a lot of new business models for radio.

There’s a significant downside to all this "self-selecting social organization" (aside from the oft-noted and IMO easy to avoid "echo chamber" phenomenon), which is the degree to which your ability to stay connected to yourself, who you are and what you believe, what you stand for, becomes more difficult to manage all the time … whether because of the transparency of your activities online or the degree to which you will decide who, how and with what will you interact, and most importantly why ?

How will you use your critical thinking skills, and from where comes the primary context in which you are using them ?

I think that for many it becomes more difficult to stay connected because of necessity it becomes more of an active and dynamic process, based on what you take in and what you put back out as opposed to your role and status in a community, an organization or a network.  Paradoxically, when you’re practiced at it and feel comfortable with asking for information and clarification, or contributing to a discussion or argument, I’d argue that over time your voice - and your judgment - gets clearer, firmer and thus often quieter

His argument "we are now using media consumption ..  to explain who we are" is a short hand way to say what many others have noted (Ideant, JOHO, Improprieties, Wealth Bondage and many others, with varying degrees of relation to the tension between non-commercial and commercial forces).

Wacker uses Second Life as an example, as does everyone else.  I do not think it will be the last word in initiatives that help people develop artificial worlds where trading takes place … of what and how will be the experiments for the next while.

What do we think this might mean for workers in organization ten years hence, when some of the promise (and no doubt some of the pain) of what is being called Enterprise 2.0 will have been unpacked, wrestled with and either integrated or rejected..  Will we see, for example a return to the late ’80’s dalliance with self-directed teams, or will organizational storytellers be working their fingers to the bone online making sure everyone’s gotten the write story from the boss ?

Check out the full interview.

Perhaps the biggest trend that I would pay attention to in the short run is that while consuming is never going to go away, consuming as the defining criteria for individuals is. We are now using our media consumption as opposed to our physical consumption to explain who we are.

So you don’t go to a party anymore and say, you know, "Where’d you go to college? What kind of car do you drive? Where do you live?" Now you say "What do you blog? What websites do you surf? Have you read the article in Vanity Fair on terrorism in South America? Are you an Imus or a Stern person? Have you seen The Departed?

Whatever it is, we are revealing ourselves through our media. We are becoming focused in life around ourselves as media.

So today, "I am the medium."

You can see this play out in the creation of synthetic economies, where people are literally making a quarter of a million dollars in Second Life, which is a very popular emerging metaverse. They’’re making a quarter of a million dollars in the virtual world and downloading it onto their ATM card in this world.

And when that happens, suddenly you want to be in the broadcast industry and the content business, not just in the physical world, but also in the virtual world.

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Sometimes this Web thing combined with social context really amazes me.

.. in Taboo, taste and tittilation, in which he contrapuntally sets out the point of the Mean Kids latest pranks.

All of this transgressive behavior has a purpose. The person of conscience, the writer, the blogger, the creative spirit expands the envelope of normative behavior, ferrets out truth, tears down the walls of taboo and stands firm in defense of freedom. But would I go to jail to protect the Mean Kids’ right to post titillating pictures?

Fuck… maybe. It’s three hots and a cot and it’s at least as interesting as my current gig. Beth would be pretty pissed though.

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Noticed in a blog comments thread …

Logic courtesy of colloquial saying "what’s good for the goose is good for the gander".

"Maybe Iran should strike US pre-emptively.