February 2012
43 posts
Ways that companies get incentives horribly wrong
Incentivize workers to do things they feel they cannot do
…an executive will stand up and announce, with excitement in his or her voice, that the incentive paid to salespeople will double for each new customer they bring in.
The result: Passive astonishment and dismay. Why? People feel they are trying to sell stuff all day, and customers aren’t buying. The problem isn’t sales...
Evolution and ethics do not overlap
The idea that the purpose of our lives should be to pass on our genes is often attributed to Darwinists, but it’s not something you will learn in an evolutionary biology class. That’s because it’s not at all what the theory of evolution says.
Evolutionary theory offers a naturalistic explanation for the diversity of life. The theory of evolution is essentially that organisms adapt to their...
Giving away research instead of patenting it
What’s the problems you are trying to solve?
The way we hand out money, the way we reward scientists, the way we trade in students has created some sort of social structure for how science is done in biomedicine. And that sociology forces us to work on so-called hot areas of science. 90% of the research is on 10% of the genes. And the industry is relying on us to be innovative?…
...
Mind-reading can be improved with a dose of...
A study in the journal Biological Psychiatry shows that mind-reading can be improved with a dose of oxytocin—a brain chemical often called the ‘love hormone’ because of its role in trust, friendship and bonding.
Researchers at Rostock University, led by Gregor Domes, tested 30 males’ mind-reading ability—how well they could infer the mental state of another person—after either...
Genetically hardwired with pleasure releasing...
“If you know the panicked and disconnected feeling of leaving your mobile phone at home, you might be one of the many suffering from nomophobia…Do you have nomophobia? What tech item can’t you live without?”
- mashable
NOTES
I don’t think it’s about the phone…it’s the “connection” which our phone provides…we don’t live in...
Shift from a culture of 'control' to a 'Culture of...
We have successfully operated our businesses in a model based upon the hoarding of intellectual property. A model that says “Find a way to do something better, or know something the other guy doesn’t know and then build a fortress around it using either the law (patents, lawsuits, etc.) or secrecy”. We then leverage and monetize that advantage for as long as we can. Regardless...
We do not use the Internet, we live on the...
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’.The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present...
Create links to institutional decision-making
Grassroots efforts inside the enterprise tend to fizzle when it comes to doing something the traditional hierarchy tends to do. Sign a contract. Disburse funds. Make decisions that others will follow.
Think of all the innovation programs that wind up as glorified suggestion boxes. Lots of great ideas but not much ability to implement them.
The key is to identify links to the org chart – and to...
“…when you light your candle from the flame of my candle, my light is not...”
– David Johnston is the Governor-General of Canada
Innovation mistakes
1. Believe the numbers
If a CEO insists on hard numbers before the project is even started, it will by sheer definition kill off any truly innovative ones, simply because you cannot compute the size of a market that does not exist yet.
2. The success trap
We call it the “success trap”. When an organization becomes very good at something, it usually starts to focus on the thing (product,...
Beware of bells and whistles
I…see issues when IT is purchasing social software based on a laundry list of features without involving input from business end users. In this situation, IT buys a software platform with so many bells and whistles that business users lose productivity in trying to figure out how to use it for work and ultimately leave it alone.
This is why it takes two – both IT and business working in...
Where do you think human empathy came from?
Where everything started for me was maternal care. It’s advantageous for female mammals to be sensitive to the mood states of their offspring, so they react when their offspring are distressed or in danger. That also explains why empathy is more developed in females than males in many species, including humans. From there it spread to other areas of social life. It’s contagious: if you have a...
Innovation “success trap” - separating needs and...
…the easiest thing in the world is to fall into the trap of focusing on how customers are using your product. Product forms your relationship with customers. It’s how you know them. They will tell you about your product, and the features they want improved. You can’t not listen to that. Of course, you’re going to improve your product.
But don’t confuse that with understanding what your...
The calculus of cooperation
…cooperative behavior results from a rational calculus encoded as a behavior in our genetic makeup. It turns out that we can almost never be sure that someone might not be in a position to return the favor in the future, and we do not want to miss out on that possibility. The cost of losing out is greater than the cost of making the investment.
- beinghuman
The unpredictable vagaries...
Metaphors engage ancient sensory parts of our...
Metaphors enrich language; just think, would you rather listen to a singer with a “silky voice” or just a “pleasant voice”? In evoking the smooth feeling of silk, the phrase associates a physical texture with something that has none.
Because of this, scientists have speculated for some time whether the ability to understand a metaphor is rooted in the sensory parts of...
Do you see Enterprise 2.0 as having a corroding...
No, it’s not the death of the hierarchy, of the manager, of the org chart, of the job description, any of that stuff. Some of my colleagues who are interested in this phenomenon, I think take it a bit far, and they become zealots for the manager-free, hierarchy-free, gestalt organization. I don’t think that’s smart, and I don’t think it’s likely, and I don’t think it would be a good idea.
...
Beware of models in complex domains
In a complicated domain, the parameters of the problem can be known and several good practices can be hammered out, with largely knowable results. In the complex domain, the initial conditions are unknown and the results are unknown which is why small experiments designed to tell us more about what is going are very useful for creating emergent practice.
If you can show that you can make an...
From shareholder to stakeholder capitalism
Modern capitalist business firms often resemble Feudal aristocracies, with power being concentrated at the top and only the property owners (nowadays called shareholders) being allowed to have a voice (theoretically) in the organization’s government. Thus the term “shareholder capitalism.”
…Modern capitalists justify their property ownership claims on the risks they take...
The currency of trust
True, free enterprise and market competition has many virtues. It encourages innovation; it creates choices; it can motivate us to improve our performance (though intrinsic motivations are also important); and it provides a counterweight against the abuses that may occur when there is monopoly power in the market place.
But this is only part of the story. A so-called free market economy can...
Systems thinking, Systems being and Love
Love is the only emotion that expands intelligence, creativity and vision; it is the emotion that enables autonomy and responsibility.
Maturana defines love as “relational behaviors through which another (a person, being, or thing) arises as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself.”
Only in a context of safety, respect and freedom to be and create (that is, a context of love) can people...
Parenting - Authoritarian, Authoritative,...
Authoritative parents are both demanding and controlling, but they are also warm and receptive to their children’s needs…they have established rules and also listen to their children’s opinions about those rules. Children of authoritative parents tend to be self-reliant, self-controlled, and content.
…Authoritarian parents are demanding and highly controlling, but...
“Management will continue to use techniques that don’t work, instead of adopting...”
– Eric Bonabeau
Parenting and micromanaging
…children often move so slowly that impatience gets the best of us and we start putting on their shirts, their pants, and their shoes when they’re perfectly capable of doing it themselves. But just as often, it’s because we want to spare them difficulty. Our desire to do so, however, is clearly as misguided as it is understandable. How, after all, did we learn to succeed at...
Look at where Agile fits in Management and HR
Traditional annual performance appraisals use an older “waterfall” method – continuous feedback and recognition is an “agile” approach.
Traditional formal training and certification is a “waterfall” model – rapid e-learning and informal learning is an “agile” approach.
Top down cascading goals are a “waterfall” approach – rapidly updated “objectives and key results” (sometimes called OKR –...
Complexity vs a villain to blame
…during this election season, think about how much of the debate centered around figuring out who is to blame for each problem. Whose fault is it that the health care system is screwed up? Washington? The insurance companies? The lawyers? We must know! It has to be somebody, dammit. It can’t just be, you know, some kind of complex, chaotic system subject to a billion variables no one...
Can you really design the user experience?
The more I think on this the more I feel strongly that you can’t design what people popularly call ‘user-experience’. You can, though, account for the variables that contribute to an experience with some of these being easier to account for than others. In essence, this is because we can influence how someone is likely to feel when they experience our products and services but we can never hope...
KM is FUQed; and as a strategic movement has...
…its not that the proper subject of KM (decision support, innovation, learning etc.) is dead, but that knowledge management as a strategic movement has served its time and is now irretrievably seen as a sub-function of IT
I think more or less all solutions marketed as KM are a waste of time. New KM capability comes from social computing and developments in the decision support/research...
"Lean" towards complexity
A selection of slides from Jurgen Appelo’s brilliant presentation Complexity versus Lean
- see another post from the same presentation Complexity is different than systems thinking
This one is timely as I just snipped a post about social meets lean meets agile, and read the Dave Snowden is working on complexity meets lean meets agile.
Related
Window of...
Where compliance dictates specific procedures,...
In today’s increasingly dynamic business environment, organizations must continuously adapt to survive. Ironically, change management has become a major bottleneck. Inefficient offline reviews are disconnected from daily operations and unresponsive to evolving requirements. Organizations’ need a practical mechanism for managing controlled variance and change in-flight to break the logjam.
...
Complexity is different than systems thinking
A selection of slides from Jurgen Appelo’s brilliant presentation Complexity versus Lean
- see another post from the same presentation “Lean” towards Complexity
Related
In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present,...
Characteristics of "a system"
• A system is an integrated whole, comprising interconnected and interdependent parts or sub-systems.
• A system is bounded – i.e. it has a clearly defined ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
• “System” is therefore a spatial concept (as opposed to “process”, which expresses the notions of movement and time).
• A system which has a permeable boundary between itself and its (‘external’) environment is...
Gauge your culture - look at the way decisions are...
Do you run into your culture every day? Does it inspire you, or smack you in the face and get in your way, slowing and wearing you down? Is it overpowering or does it inspire you to overcome challenges? It’s important to understand what is driving your culture. Is it power and ego that people react to, and try to gain power, or a culture of encouragement and empowerment? Is it driven from...
Corporate Epistemology
SOURCE: Joe Firestone http://www.dkms.com/papers/corporateepistemologyandkm.pdf
Performance in business is nothing more than knowledge in use
What passes for knowledge is therefore of enormous importance – outcomes depend on its quality
Knowledge can be seen as beliefs or claims that we regard as true
First some background…
CRITICALISM: A view of inquiry which holds that all human...
Capacity is a horrible measure of throughput
SOURCE:Can’t remember where I found this
KM - a balance of extractionism and connectivism
There is an “extractionist” school of thought out there which focuses on separating knowledge from an individual, then combining, distilling and packaging in into a convenient and accessible products.
And there’s a “connectivist” school of thought which seeks to turn information into an advertisement for a conversation with the source.
I think the best knowledge assets combine these...
The kids who had played together, worked better...
We put groups of twenty or so kids in this almost empty room. Empty except for three piles of scrap masonite and recycled computer paper, and a big, one-way mirror.
We asked them to build a city for us. “Could you build a city out of this stuff?” we asked, and then we added, “we’ll come back in a while to see what you made.”
The test groups had spent a couple of hours a week over the last...
Three aspects of an emergent property
When a property of a system cannot be traced back to any of the individual parts in the system, it is called an emergent property.
Your personality is an emergent property of your brain. It cannot be traced back to individual neurons. Likewise, fluidity is an emergent property of water, and culture is an emergent property of a group of people.
Three aspects are important for a property to be...
Constraints in the unknowable
About patterns persisting but not being eternal, I rather like Ralph Stacey’s saying that the ‘the future is unknowable but not unrecognisable’. Along the same lines, Nicholas Nassim Taleb points out that the unknowability of a roulette wheel (highly constrained) is very different from the unknowability of a complex system (much more flexible in terms of evolving boundaries and interactions) –...
Window of viability : resilience vs efficiency
- Greg Fisher
Related
Efficiency destroys resilience
Leadership: From diagnosis to dialogue; from...
…seven possible shifts in the ways that we conventionally make sense of leadership in organizations
1. From elite practice to emergent property
Leadership would be recognized as an emergent property of people in relationship, not as an elite practice confined to individuals at senior levels in organizations…
2. From individual dynamism to interactional dynamics
The approaches to...
The criticality of initial conditions
The critical importance of initial conditions to the outcomes that emerge is another central tenet of non-linear dynamics and the complexity sciences. In discussing the patterning process of the brain, de Bono similarly points out that simply changing the entry point to a pattern can lead to a totally different outcome. The crucial effect that the sequence and timing of arrival of pieces of...
Polarization from categorisation
A critical dynamic of organization from a complex responsive process perspective is polarization. Stacey argues that the act of naming or categorizing an experience places it into one category rather than another. This identifies and accentuates the similarities that exist with other experiences placed in that same category and, at the same time, emphasizes the differences from experiences that...
Complex systems include patterns, randomness does...
Among the people I talk to about complex systems, a common point made is that the future is inherently uncertain or “unknowable”…it results from the concept of emergence “breaking” determinism (as well as from quantum uncertainty)…
…it’s important to distinguish between randomness and complex systems because the latter includes patterns whereas the former does not;...