Inside out

Unfortunately, this is the most common question I get asked. I say unfortunately because, in my view, the obsession with this question reflects the sorry state of business and government today - namely, if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. We are driving quality, innovation and creativity out of our businesses and institutions in favour of quantity. It has been shown again and again that our obsession with targets simply perverts activities to meet those targets at the expense of doing something useful or meaningful.

Anyway, rant over, back to the original question. If you’re expecting a neat answer to the ROI question, it’s probably best to quit here and go back to whatever you were doing two minutes ago - provided it was legal of course!

My rather messy and frustratingly incomplete answer to this question is:

• Don’t spend lots of money and people won’t harass you for pointless justifications - this stuff is cheap to do … if you’re not doing it cheaply then you’ve probably lost your way somewhere.
• If asked for financial ROI by some senior manager, I would ask them: Would you rather our employees were connected or disconnected? Would you rather we did things once and reused that effort or did it multiple times in different geographical locations? Would you rather know what our employees think and how they feel, or would you rather ignore them and let the grapevine and rumour-mill corrode employee engagement? Do you want the brightest young talent to join our organisation in the future, or would you rather they joined our competitors? Did we measure the ROI of our telephone system or e-mail or were the benefits so blatantly obvious we just deployed them!? etc. etc. etc.
• This is going to happen anyway … in fact, this is happening already (the BT Facebook network now has over 10,976 people in it and rising) … now is the time to decide if you want to be one step ahead, or one step behind.
• You can spend months arguing the toss over whether or not to try this out, or you can just give it a try … sometimes, ‘the only form of transportation is a leap of faith’!

My experience is that senior managers who are afraid of social software hide behind pointless ROI arguments. Senior managers who get it, make it happen without endless hoops and hurdles - if you’re faced with the former, then you’re probably talking to the wrong person. Try someone else …

If no one will listen, then just do it anyway … inspirational leaders be the change they want to see, they don’t wait for permission … did Muhammad Yunus give up on micro-credit because everyone told him the poor weren’t credit-worthy??

I know this isn’t the language of accountancy and I know this might seem a daunting prospect in your organisation … but you can try this very simply and cheaply and on a small scale and you will see benefits very quickly.

My last bit of advice is … take it one step at a time and proceed until apprehended!

Related post: Top tips for launching social media in the enterprise

Last week we launched a single internal blogging platform on the BT Intranet - based on WordPress technology. This is great for a number of reasons:

• BT management is prepared to allow its employees to express themselves and their opinions on ‘unregulated’, self-publishing platforms … something, perhaps, we take for granted at BT but which I know is pretty rare in other organisations - everyone can have their own blog internally or externally at BT
• as the content on BT blogs builds up, we’ll have an internal blogosphere, or body of informal content, from which huge value can be derived by everyone … until now we’ve had blogs on all sorts of different platforms so the content has been disconnected and the value limited
• a blogosphere could change completely the way we communicate and collaborate across the enterprise.

The image below is of our new Blog Central homepage.

For some time now, I’ve been evangelising the need for conversations within organisations facilitated by social media tools. While at some cellular level I knew this was the right thing to do, articulating the absolute necessity for these conversations has proved difficult … until now (thanks to Margaret Wheatley and Schumacher College for thought seeds)! So, here is my definitive reason (until the next one comes along!) why, without conversations, the only possible outcome is organisational incoherence …

If you stand two people in front of the same object, say a tree, only 20% of what they ’see’ will be shared between them - a shared experience. Eighty per cent of what they ’see’ will be personal perception based on their personal experiences and various memory triggers built up over the period of their lifetime.

Unfortunately, as human beings we tend to think that everyone ’sees’ everything in the same way that we do. Failure to recognise the importance, or even existence, of personal perception results in disconnection, incoherence and conflict.

The ONLY way to recognise personal perception is through conversation in which perceptions are aired and people can arrive at the concept of shared significance … i.e. we agree that something is significant without having to agree on a single shared meaning.

In an organisational context, we almost always deal with ‘certainties’ and very rarely, if ever, recognise that what we communicate to our employees may mean different things to each and every one of them. No wonder the dreadful statistics around employee engagement make such depressing reading. You cannot enter into a true conversation from a position of ‘certainty’ … entering a conversation with certainty rather than curiosity almost always leads to conflict. The only way to reach shared significance is to enter into a conversation with curiosity.

So, the only way I can make my perception open to others is through conversation and the only way I can consume other people’s perceptions is through curiosity. If we all get the chance to speak, if we all get the chance to be listened to, then we can agree on shared significance resulting in organisational coherence.

Without conversation we can’t be truly connected. Without curiosity, we can’t enter into a true conversation. And, curiosity creates community …

… well it makes sense to me!

And now for some light relief … an exercise in perception! Enjoy …

A tweet by @simonmcmanus quoting the Cluetrain Manifesto : ‘Org charts are written by the victors’ reminded me that I meant to post about the evils of organisational hierarchies a while ago to throw my weight behind the view that organisation charts are a physical manifestation of out-dated and ill-conceived command and control management.

In my view they stifle innovation and creativity, promote conformist thinking and ‘in-the-box’ leaders and leadership styles, encourage the creation of fiefdoms and create self-destructive organisational politics resulting in organisational incoherence.

It has long been recognised that, other than oiling the wheels of the corporate machine, nothing actually ever gets done through an organisational hierarchy. Things get done through networks. That’s what makes new social media collaborative tools and social networking such exciting propositions. Making networks visible to the organisation and to its people and allowing people to follow the energy through their network to connect and collaborate with colleagues, marks the beginning of the end for the organisation chart in my view - and not a moment too soon.

Additionally, as it is now universally accepted that organisational change is a constant, the last thing an organisation needs is a rigid hierarchy - apart from anything else, change never happens through command and control management but through networks - the stronger the personal bonds in a network and the more fluid those networks are, the easier change becomes for everyone.

I’m convinced that, as social networks are adopted within enterprises, the organisational hierarchy will become increasingly irrelevant to the point where it withers and dies completely.

The notion that I could somehow blog each day about this course was WAY off the mark. The intensity of the community and the sheer quantity of new and exciting knowledge zipping about Schumacher College has made it impossible for me to even begin to process how I feel about the experience, what I’ve learned and how I can apply it in my life and in my work. As I do begin this jounrey, I will blog about what I discover … however, this may take a bit of time!

If you ever get an opportunity to do a course at Schumacher TAKE IT!

Anyone who thinks this is about spending money on tools doesn’t get it … in my humble opinion.

Day 1 was all about getting used to Schumacher College and its philosophy of participative community - including cooking, cleaning, gardening etc. and getting to know the other participants. The other attendees come from all around the world (from Australia to Canada) are very interesting and friendly and it seems like I’ve been here for weeks rather than 24 hours. The philosophy of the college is that the most valuable learning happens during the interactions in the group tasks/household chores and not in the lecture room … they assured us that they could afford sous chefs, gardeners, cleaners etc. if they wanted!

We had an introductory session in the evening with Margaret Wheatley (to be known as Meg from now on!). It was really a scene setting presentation so was lots of sound bites diagnosing the current situation in which we find ourselves with wholesale system failure on a global scale.

Some of the soundbites I found most interesting are below (apologies to Meg for misquotes, misinterpretation etc):

• “A leader is anyone who is willing to help.”
• In terms of ideas, we should be: “… midwife to the new; hospice for the old”.
• “Curiosity is dead.”
• “The future is being created by our day-to-day choices.”
• “The world has more than enough good ideas - we have to be the change to make them happen.”
• “Political correctness is one of the most oppressive things we have ever created.”
• “America is over.”

These soundbites don’t really do justice to the richness of the conversations we had, but I’m not good at doing two things at once … more about Day 2 later!

I’m on a course next week (21-25 Apr) called Inspired leadership: seeing organisations as living systems at Schumacher College in Devon facilitated by Margaret Wheatley. I’m REALLY looking forward to it and hope to find time and an internet connection to blog about it. Failing that, I should be able to Tweet my thoughts.

A week into using Twitter and my experience so far has been overwhelmingly positive. It takes some getting used to and was very disruptive at first. Relying on just the web interface makes it significantly less integrated into my way of working and requires you to keep going back to the web site and refreshing the page. This wouldn’t have worked for me in the long run and it would have slipped from my mind and into none-use. Downloading Twhirl - a desktop client that works a bit like e-mail - really transformed my experience.

Following some advice from my colleague and Web 2.0 tool guru Steve Ellwood (@steveellwood in Twitter), I’ve set up a private Twitter group for my team in BT (using Grouptweet) - the team being highly dispersed and made up of mainly homeworkers - so that we can bond and share on an ongoing basis. I’m sure this will have a really positive effect on team dynamics … I’ll let you know how we get on!

I think this is a really good example of how the intranet has become more than just web pages behind a firewall.

A tweet from Steve Ellwood pointing out an article about IBM and the relationship between social media and KM on KnowledgeBoard reminded me of a paper I wrote on the subject in March last year. I re-read it and have included some extracts below …

It is possible to divide knowledge management practice into ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ activities. Formal activities are often the tangible deliverables associated with an articulated knowledge management strategy, and might include such things as evaluation of business processes to ensure that knowledge is injected into those processes at the decision points along it.

Informal activities are associated with the more intangible enablers of knowledge sharing, typically associated with culture and behaviour and, being hard to define and deliver, often appear as ‘platitudes’ in a knowledge management strategy with no clear actions and no obvious deliverables. A further complication associated with these more informal activities is that they are not obviously ‘owned’ within the business and, being enterprise wide, are normally beyond the scope of an individual area of strategic focus.

Social media tools have the capacity to address these intangible enablers without the need for formal organisational ‘ownership’ by allowing ‘community’ ownership of information, networks and channels.

Participation by users in a social media-rich environment both engender, and rely upon, environmental factors such as:

• communication through conversation rather than monologue
• participation at an individual level, not an organisational level
• a flow of information which is predominantly ‘pull’ not ‘push’
• distributed rather than central ownership and control
• correct balance between managerial trust and personal responsibility.

The converse of these environmental factors has traditionally been a significant barrier to the facilitation of effective knowledge management. The fact that social media tools can break them down is key to their contribution to the knowledge management challenge.

A key barrier to the successful implementation of enterprise knowledge sharing and management has been a mix of ‘intangible’ factors which could be categorised under the headings of culture and behaviours. The enormity of the perceived task in transforming these factors favourably and the lack of enterprise-wide ownership of that task has paralysed knowledge management practitioners for many years.

The advent of social media tools and their ability to facilitate a seismic cultural shift in the relationship between individuals within an organisation, and with the organisation itself, is a huge opportunity to dismantle those barriers and move a significant step towards enterprise knowledge sharing and management.

The paper also included the diagram I published in this post.

I agree entirely with Luis Suarez that the focus of KM has been far too much on tools and process, but don’t think social media is the ‘death’ of KM … rather, it is the missing link that can address some of the tricky ‘intangibles’ to which KM has traditionally paid lip-service while busily delivering new KM tools and re-engineering processes.