“The myth of a destination that experts can guide you to is an illusion. Instead let’s understand that there is your Enterprise 2.0. Every organization is on a path – somewhere. And “2.0″ implies improvement and evolution. The Enterprise 2.0 vision implies that organizations are benefiting from new tools and behaviors inspired by new ways we create and share information using social-channels and emergent platforms.” — Gil Yehuda
If you’re a middle manager who essentially views your job as one of gate keeping or refereeing information flows, you should be pretty frightened by these technologies, because they’re going to greatly reduce your ability to do that. They’re going to reduce your ability to filter what goes up in the organization and what comes down in the organization. And they’re going to greatly reduce your ability to curtail who your people can interact with, talk with, and receive information from. So if you’re inherently a gatekeeper, this is a real problem for you.
If you’re someone who sees your job as managing people and fundamentally getting the human elements right that will lead your part of the organization to succeed, these technologies are not at all harmful to you. One of the things that we’ve learned is that there’s no technology—even these great new social technologies—that’s a substitute for face time, a substitute for understanding the human situation in your organization and trying to mold that situation to the best advantage. So if you’re fundamentally a human-centric manager, these tools are not going to put you out of a job, are not going to reduce your influence at all.
If you have another view of yourself, which is that you’re someone who’s responsible for output, you’re someone who’s responsible for making good things happen in your team, then these tools should be your best friend. Because all the evidence we have suggests that Enterprise 2.0 helps you turn out more and better products and actually is not a vehicle for time wasting or for chipping away at what you’re supposed to be doing throughout the day.
- Andrew McAfee
Mckinsey Quarterly How Web 2.0 is changing the way we work: An interview with MIT’s Andrew McAfee
“From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong. People aren’t really designed to do one thing, like a cog in a watch. They have various relationships with other people, and through these relationships they have influence on the work going on all around them.” — Stowe Boyd
“It’s becoming clear that to constrict a person’s capabilities into rigid, set roles that limit creativity and innovation just doesn’t make sense. Diving talent into silos is an outdated paradigm. Rather, we should be encouraging the facilitation of diverse groups of people working together on common problems.” — Venessa Miemis
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We live in a world where people are more likely to engage with affinity-based networks and groups than formal structures based on reporting lines. This is how things get done in the real world. Trust is cheaper than control, if you can achieve it.
Co-ordination, rather than top-down management, is often a better way of influencing outcomes in complex systems, and requires its own special leadership skills.
” — Lee Bryant“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, and seek to close it. This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the “learning organization”. Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered.” — Dave Snowden
“firms come into being in order to enable human beings to achieve collaboratively what they could not achieve alone. If one accepts this as the true purpose of any organization, then the main focus of executives’ attention should be on how to foster collaboration within their companies.” — Hansen and Nohria 2004
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On the ROI of Social Computing
Do you know of any organisation that has tried to and succeeded in measuring how it performs at building market intelligence? Or that has succeeded in measuring how efficient and effective the communication within a project team is? For example, do they measure how much communication it takes and how long time it takes to delegate a task to a team member? Do they measure the effectiveness of this communication - if the right decision was made or the right task was carried out in the right time?
I’m all ears.
” — Oscar Berg“
“No business case will sell social software to a firm that doesn’t already value collaboration in its culture…If the ROI is needed to convince an organisation that collaboration is a good thing - then ROI is the least of your problems…”
Larry Hawes
”“The higher in the hierarchy, the more complex the organization as a whole seems to function. If you are high in the organization, you’re aware of the size of the organization, and therefore aware of the variety of actors. How they all interact, is difficult to grasp. The lower in the hierarchy, the less you are aware of all the other players that exist in the organization, and the more focussed you are on your tasks which are relatively not complex at all.” — Complex Adaptive Systems, my understanding « Bas Reus’ quest on self-organization and online collaborative spaces
Think about the relationship between two people, A and B. This relationship actually consists of two relationships – AB = A’s perspective of the relationship and BA = B’s perspective of the relationship. In the world of mathematics AB=BA, but not in the human world.
“Success stories are subjective and not easily replicated. I’m glad it can’t. If success can be replicated, success loses its value. It becomes a commodity. That’s not realistic.”
Bas Reus talking about Ricardo Semler
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Why people are different from ants
1. We never make decision based on rational grounds
2. Human beings have multiple identities
3. Free will
“What I learned as a psychologist is that ‘resistance’ doesn’t exist. It is the therapist/leader/facilitator who doesn’t know how to relate with where the person really is, how the other really feels…
- Ria Baeck”
— Change Management Blog: Do people resist change?
“…organisations are not systems at all -not living systems, not emergent systems, not soft systems or any other kind of system. This is because systems thinking has been developed for the natural world but does not apply to the social world. Unlike the parts of systems, humans have consciousness and will, and they do not act like the parts of systems because of that consciousness and free will. That’s why I say that complexity science offers little apart from some limited analogies when it comes to understanding social phenomena like organisations. We find ourselves talking about systems because much of the thinking about complexity in organisations simply adds complexity on top of systems thinking. I am arguing…that it makes sense to stop thinking of organisations as systems, because they do not behave like systems. People in organisations use systems and other tools to help them do their work. But the organisations themselves are not systems.” —
Stephen Billing said, on August 27, 2009 at 13:34
Self-organization defined « Bas Reus’ quest on self-organization and online collaborative spaces