Author: JP

[Note: This is the sixth in a series of posts about the Social Enterprise and the Big Shift. The first post provided an introduction and overall context; the second looked specifically at collaboration, working together; the third looked at optimising performance, enjoying work, working more effectively. The fourth, Doing By Learning, looked at how work gets done in the enterprise, and provided the context in which such flows should be seen. The fifth delved into the subject of flows in detail, and introduced the concept of enterprise social objects. This post looks at such objects in detail. In my next post I will look at filtering and curation. The last three posts (in the series of ten) will then look at innovation, motivation and radical transformation.]

Jonathan Sacks has an interesting article in the Times today, headlined It Is The End of a Dangerous Experiment; sadly, it’s paywalled. Written in the wake of the LIBOR scandal, Sacks emphasises the importance of morality in markets, a reminder that ethics cannot be legislated for, that a shared moral code is needed. He reminds us of the inherent weakness in the Invisible Hand proposed by Adam Smith by making reference to Von Neumann, game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As he puts it “Two or more rational agents, each acting in their own self-interest, will produce an outcome that is bad for both, individually and collectively“, something the Invisible Hand theory does not allow for.

Sacks makes a critical point about market economies: they can be risk-based or trust-based. Regulatory frameworks work well in risk-based markets, but not in trust-based markets. What he said reminded me of a recent speech by Andrew Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, at the Bank of England, headlined Tails of the Unexpected. The original paper, written by Haldane along with his colleague Benjamin Nelson, is available for download using that link. Haldane makes a similar point about risk and uncertainty, how many of the processes prevalent in the financial sector are based on assumptions of normal distribution in modelling risk, rather than using assumptions of fat-tailed distributions in conditions of uncertainty. When I read the Sacks article, my immediate temptation was to mash the two together, to describe the market as being risk-based or uncertainty-based, leading to the assertion that risk-based markets work well under strong regulation, but uncertainty-based markets need something more, something based on a shared moral code.

Trust.

We live in uncertain times. We have always lived in uncertain times. And we will continue to live in uncertain times. One of the key theses of the Big Shift is that as digital infrastructures permeate all over the world, and as public policy shifts towards greater mobility of resources, the speed of change increases as does the level of uncertainty. The need to move from stocks to flows, from experience curves to collaboration curves, from past actions to continued learning, all this is predicated on the growing level of uncertainty within global markets.

Uncertainty-based markets require an underpinning of trust in order to function effectively.

I’ve said before that trust is hard to legislate for: it’s also hard to automate. Unlike regulation: rules can be automated. [An aside. I’m reminded of Sugata Mitra’s wonderful pronouncement on teachers: A teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer. Rules can be replaced by systems. Trust cannot.]

Trust is necessary for the efficient functioning of organisms in conditions of uncertainty. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent some time reading up on “incomplete contracts” in the context of firm theory. While I came across a number of papers on the subject at the time, the one that stood out for me was Erik Brynjolfsson’s December 1991 paper An Incomplete Contracts Theory of Information, Technology and Organisation. It allowed me to conceive of information assets differently; it made me think harder about the impact of designing information assets to be shareable, “flexible”; and it made me ponder over the consequences of having information assets controlled centrally. [An aside: Not surprisingly, that interest in firm-theory-meets-incomplete-contracts resulted in my meeting Erik a few years later, and, serendipitously, was given a further boost when I had the opportunity to spend time with Tom Malone soon after he’d written The Future of Work. Tom came to see me in hospital in San Francisco last week: Tom, if you’re reading this, much thanks.]

[While on the subject of hospitals — you may have noticed I’d gone quiet here for a while. It was because I’d somehow contracted a serious infection that needed urgent treatment in hospital, spent nearly a fortnight in hospital, and I’m still recovering. Many of you found ways of letting me know you cared, and I am immensely grateful for that. My salesforce.com colleagues were brilliant, they kept me in high spirits during what was a very painful and worrying episode in my life. Colleagues from my childhood, my early years and my more recent past also showed up, amazingly. Particular thanks also go out to Sheldon Renan, coming all the way from Portland, and to John Hagel and John Seely Brown, who found time to have a wonderful dinner with me the day before I was admitted to hospital. They helped provide grist to my mill as I lay supine for too long.]

Though some of you may dismiss it as “pop”, I liked the simple message in Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team. An absence of trust leads to a fear of conflict which in turn reduces commitment, which makes for an environment where people avoid accountability and thereby leads to poor execution.

Teams, like firms and markets, thrive on trust.

The Social Enterprise is about raising performance levels in uncertain environments. Which makes trust a must. But trust cannot be legislated or mandated. How then are we to engender trust?

Society has had mechanisms for engendering trust for aeons. Some of these are based on transparency, openness and the power of inspection. Look at me, my hands are empty, I bear no weapons — the origins of the handshake. Some of these are based instead on “trusted domains” doing the introducing — as in the passport — Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary. Yet others used badges of achievement or honour — as in the coats of armour or the diplomas of the medical and legal professions.

But all these were structured and explicit means of engendering trust. I think people are a whole lot more complicated than that, and that we all have a slew of tacit ways of giving and receiving trust. And my hunch is that Social Objects have key roles to play in this regard. [For more on the theory of Social Objects, you may want to refer to these three posts. ]

When you trust someone, you make yourself vulnerable. This is true whether the you in question is a person, a firm, a market, humanity. By making yourself vulnerable, you engender trust. Vulnerability is the essence of trust.

One of the ways you make yourself vulnerable is by sharing. I make myself vulnerable when I share my thoughts here; over the years, people have written some fairly disturbing comments publicly as well as privately. If I wasn’t prepared to be vulnerable, I shouldn’t have chosen to share my thoughts like this.

The act of sharing helps build trust. When you get together with your friends and you discuss the books you read, the films you saw, the meals you ate, the places you visited, the things you experienced, you’re sharing. The topics you speak about are social objects, things you have in common, things that encourage commentary and opinion to be expressed freely and openly. And after a while, the “social object” isn’t the important thing, what matters is the relationship that forms as a result of the comments, the advice, the observations.

What’s actually happening is that you’re building strong bonds as a result of the things you have in common, bonds that help you stay committed and loyal to each other when faced with things you don’t have in common, where you don’t see eye to eye. To me the interactions are tacit ways of establishing and building trust.

At work, these social objects take on different guises. They’re not just films and restaurants and holidays and TV shows and concerts any more; they’re documents and spreadsheets and presentations and photographs and videos. As people work together, they share these objects, build communities around them, grow the moss of commentary around the rolling stone of the object. In some ways I am reminded of Erik Brynjolfsson’s “information assets”, which can be designed for central control or for sharing: a decision that affects, deeply, the sense of ownership that workers experience, which then informs their later actions and behaviour, influences whether they act as “owners” or not.

Knowledge work involves the use of many digital information assets. Some of them are very structured and architected and form part of workflow, with formal steps and approval processes. For sure these are enterprise objects and they form a critical part of workflow. But they’re not social objects, and I’m not talking about workflow.

I’m talking about posting a draft for a talk and saying hey guys, could you tell me what you think of this? does it work for you? how can I improve it? I’m talking about reading a medical report and saying I really don’t like the look of this, there’s something not quite right about it, my sixth sense is on overdrive and I need your help. I’m talking about looking at a customer complaint and saying you know what, I think we’re barking up the wrong tree, I think this is not a router problem, it’s a credit problem, that’s why we’re not solving it. I’m talking about oops, I’ve got an unexpected opportunity to pitch to the ceo of an aerospace company about what we can do for them. but it’s in fifteen minutes. does anyone know of any work we’ve done in that sector? and when you get five different responses with attachments I’m talking about the comments that let you choose which one is best.

I’m talking about ways of sharing, of collaborating around information assets, ways that tacitly engender trust.

They involve social objects. But the objects aren’t important per se, what matters is the quality of the interactions that ensue as a result.

Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison speak of participants, interactions and environment as the key components of creation spaces. These participants need to trust each other. The environment helps them deal with explicit ways of building trust. You need the interactions in order to deal with the tacit ways of building trust.

When trust is formalised and structured and regulated it can be gamed. Identities can be victims of theft, so to say. [Although every time I hear that phrase, I am reminded of Mitchell and Webb’s wonderful skit on Identity Theft, a must-listen.

More and more, what we need is a more personal experience of trust, one that is tacit, one that is based on interactions and experience. But this is hard to scale. Unless we learn more about the value of digital social objects, information assets, in this context.

 

 

[Note: This is the fifth in a series of posts about the Social Enterprise and the Big Shift. The first post provided an introduction and overall context; the second looked specifically at collaboration, working together; the third looked at optimising performance, enjoying work, working more effectively. The fourth, Doing By Learning, looked at how work gets done in the enterprise, and provided the context in which such flows should be seen. This post delves into the subject of flows in detail, and introduces the concept of enterprise social objects. In later posts I will look at the social objects in detail, and then move on to filtering and curation. The last three posts (in the series of ten) will look at innovation, motivation and radical transformation.]

Introduction

This is not a post about workflow. We’ve had workflow. And, while everything was stable and predictable and change was glacial,workflow was enough: institutions focused on unit costs, they made use of scale within experience curves. Size mattered. First-mover advantages were high. And money begat money. Monopolies formed regularly; regulators formed to control those monopolies; the two went into standoff; and innovation died.

This is not a post about process either. We’ve had process. Again, process was great when change could be prevented. The day before yesterday, as part of the Alan Turing centenary celebrations organised by the ACM, Alan Kay appears to have reminded people about what he said four or five decades ago: The best way to predict the future is to invent it. He also appears to have referred to the amendment he made to that phrase much later, when he said: The best way to predict the future is to prevent it. It’s a sad truth but true. Standardised processes work best when there is no change.

There was a time when industry participants had such control over the market they could prevent change. Monopoly and complacency work together to militate against change. If you prevent change, you prevent invention. You prevent innovation. Sometimes you can pretend that change has taken place by using lipstick assiduously on those of porcine persuasion; sometimes that even works; but that’s not sustainable.

This is a post about collaborative flows, the flows that make up the Social Enterprise.

Implications of Doing by Learning

I wasn’t sure I should write this section; I know that a number of readers will object, and they may even stop reading this post, and perhaps even this blog, as a consequence. I mulled over it for quite some time: while there are shock jocks and trolls around, this blog has been about encouraging active engagement and participation. But, having thought hard about it, I have come to the conclusion that I must share these thoughts, that they are important and germane to the subject under discussion. You have been warned.

One of the key tenets of the Industrial Age (and of the theory-of-firm models that emerged as a result) is the division of labour. [As long as my readership in the UK and India exceeds that in the US and Canada, I can and will spell labour that way!]. The principles of division of labour were built on the concept of specialisation. And specialisation is a classic “knowledge stocks” concept. As we move from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows, from the experience curve to the collaboration curve, these principles will come under intense pressure.

This is not a new thing. We have been experiencing a blurring of lines between professions for some time now, driven by the move from stocks to flows. Professions used to be founded on a number of tenets: a code of honour, the values and ethics that bound the professionals together; the knowledge stocks that were gained during extended periods of formal study; and the experiences that augmented those knowledge stocks. We will still have professions in the future, but they are likely to be less dependent on the knowledge stocks — instead, my sense is that there will be a deepening, an enriching, of the codes — the values and ethics — that made that profession tick. I cannot help but feel that these professional codes have weakened over the past century, and that trust has been undermined as a result. This trust will have to be regained by the doctors, the lawyers, the financiers, the teachers, all of us who built our worth on knowledge stocks and experience curves while allowing some of the core values (upon which the professions were founded) to decay. Hippocratic oaths. Innocent until found guilty. Freedom of expression. Learning not teaching. Word is bond. That sort of thing.

If you’re interested in the implications for such professions, a good place to start is Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions, already approaching a quarter of a century in print.

The fundamental differences between workflow and collaboration flows

This is important. If there is one idea I want you to take away from this post, even if you stop reading it shortly, it is this: the way we work has changed fundamentally. Root and branch.

Let me try and explain. Workflow is like trains. Every company had its own train set. Little engines and carriages and cabooses; perfectly formed lines and switches and signalling; miniature stations and marshalling yards. The whole kit and caboodle. And trains “flowed” around the system. Always on the lines. Linear. Well-behaved. A system entire of itself. Isolated. But no matter, especially if you operate a monopoly or near-monopoly. What was important was that the trains ran on time. Safely. Sometimes.

Workflow worked exactly like the train sets. Formal fits and starts. A series of static pieces tightly coupled. Coupled only where coupling was possible. But always tightly coupled. Change was a nightmare and considered unnecessary. Faster horses.

Workflow tends to have clear start and end points. Timetables. Efficiency experts. Clipboards. Clocking in and out. Journeys with limited variability, limited choices. All rigorously controlled “for the sake of everyone’s safety”. You know what I mean. [No matter that we’ve had glorious failures in all these industries dominated by process. It couldn’t possibly be the fault of the rigid processes.]

Customers were important, but needed to know their place. The trains were in charge. In fact, if you looked carefully, you’d find that during the golden age of trains, the trains had more rights than the customers. Not that long ago, the laws and bye-laws of British Rail were patently clear:

• the ticket I bought did not guarantee me a seat
• the ticket I bought did not guarantee that the train would run on time
• the ticket I bought did not even guarantee that a train would run
• in fact, the ticket I bought wasn’t mine to keep, even that had to be given up on demand

Those were the days. Days when process was king, workflow worked. And people were kept in their place. It was possible to connect the different train sets up, if everyone used the same standards and protocols. This didn’t always happen, but proliferation was relatively low for the most part. Most of the workflow you see is like trains, relatively standardised, a challenge to integrate across systems, but not impossible. There were occasional failures at scale, akin to the design of electrical plugs and plug-points around the world. To think we consider ourselves to be civilised while living in adaptor hell.

Workflow, like trains, worked in well-defined, closed systems.

Enough about workflow. Collaboration flows, on the other hand, are like rivers and oceans. No rails to go on. No clear start and end points. Free to entry to all comers, regardless of the size of the vessel. Timetables existed, but they were looser. Boundaries existed, but much of the space was “public”. Of course there were regulations and laws, but they were more suited to a global environment, since the majority of the space was public.Vessels could and did come in all shapes and sizes and power and capacity. The barriers to entry were low. Regulations were more like the commons, designed to ensure that multitudes could participate without let or hindrance. The challenges were in dealing with blockages, with pollution, with selfish use, with the “tragedy of the commons”.

If you can imagine traditional workflow to be about trains and collaboration flows to be like rivers and oceans, I have succeeded. I will go to bed happy.

Rivers and oceans also work. They don’t need connecting up, they’re already connected up. People do make journeys on them, but the start and endpoints are infinite, granular.

Collaboration flows, like rivers, work in open, inclusive environments. A dammed river is called a lake, not a river. However you market it.

 Piracy

I thought I would just write a footnote on this originally, but decided to make this more prominent. The rivers versus trains analogy also allows a better understanding of safety and security.

There was a time when brigands and robbers and pirates abounded everywhere. People have been accosted by brigands on horseback. Wagons and stagecoaches have been plundered. Cars have been held up at gunpoint. There’s even been a Great Train Robbery. As long as people have used different forms of transport to go from A to B, and as long as the “cargo” they’ve transported has been perceived as valuable, there’s been a market for attacking the transport.

When we speak of piracy in the context of physical goods, the underlying assumption is that we’re talking about ocean-based piracy. And there is some, particularly off the coast of Somalia, but not restricted to that. Yet, despite the “dangers” of piracy on the high seas, if we take US overseas trade for example, over 99% of US overseas trade by volume, and over 64% of the trade by value, used ocean-going transport, according to the US Bureau of the Census.

So despite the perceived dangers of piracy on the high seas, ocean shipping remains the primary basis for trade. Why is this? Because people have understood the risks, know how to deal with them, how to mitigate them. How to cross the oceans safely and securely.

So it is with the internet. So it is with the public cloud. So it is with the flows of the Social Enterprise, based on the internet and the public cloud.

 What actually happens in the flows

I hope I’ve moved you some way from your prior conception of flows, since it would have been based on workflow. By now you would have just about started feeling comfortable with the view that workflow is static and linear and based on tightly coupled stocks of knowledge and division of labour, while collaboration flows are dynamic and nonlinear and based on loosely-coupled flows of knowledge with limited (and declining) division of labour. But you aren’t there yet, because I’ve worked at taking away a long-standing and faithful friend of yours without really explaining the replacement. So here goes.

As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. The oceans and rivers of collaboration flows include all these conversations. The conversations themselves are manifestations of relationships, some bilateral, some multilateral. Sometimes they lead to transactions, surfaced by the capability as seen in the context.

What are these conversations? There’s nothing special about them. Here’s a loose classification of the types of conversations one would see in the workplace:

• Questions needing answers (Hey, how do I do this? Here’s how. Where can I find this? Here it is. Who really knows this? Here’s who)
• Sharing of experiences (I just installed this app, and it was *useless*. Here’s why. I just read this book and it was *fantastic. Here’s why)
• Feedback (I really found your answer helpful. I couldn’t have done this without you.)
• Social filtering (I rate this answer more than the others. I think you should see this so I will +1 it or Like it or RT it.)
• Status reporting (I’m here doing this, I’m there doing that)
• Alerts potentially needing action (If THIS then THAT, coming from a litany of sources)

You get my drift. Normal everyday conversations; people asking each other about what and where and how and why. People sharing their experiences. People giving feedback. Alert and response systems. Normal everyday conversations.

These conversations have been going on for aeons. But there’s one major difference. And that is this: the conversations are recorded. Persisted. Archived. So they’re auditable. Searchable. Findable. Besides this, there are other significant differences:

• The conversations are made visible immediately , in real-time
• They come wrapped in context, auto date and time stamped, author identified, location mapped, topic tagged
• The context can be enriched by other participants
• They’re channel- and device-independent; conversations can start in one medium, move to another. They can start on blogs, move to twitter, move to synchronous sound.
• They’re time- and space-shiftable. Synchronous and asynchronous. Mobile in design.
• They work on “publish-subscribe” networked models rather than broadcast and hierarchy

By now you should be getting a flavour of what collaborations flows are. They’re how people learn: they consist of the questions and answers and feedback loops and pointers and alerts. Work is done as a result of that learning, as the enterprise builds and extends its capacity to learn, and to keep learning. The lessons used to be in the stocks of knowledge. Now the lessons themselves are in the flows of learning.

This learning tends to be manifested through instances that use digital objects that get embedded in the conversations. Documents. Presentations. Links to web sites and video and audio. Proposals and orders and bills and invoices and payments. Ideas. Complaints. Every one of these things is an “enterprise social object” around which learning takes place.

The social objects attract commentary. Comments, ratings, further links and references. The “hyperlinks that subvert hierarchy”, another Cluetrain classic. The rolling stones of the enterprise social objects gather the moss of commentary. The ability to gather the moss and make sense of it is part of the ability to learn.

I shall spend more time talking about the enterprise social objects next time round. In the meantime, this earlier post of mine, and the series in which it was placed, should help you chew on the idea.

Let me now close with a summary of the characteristics of collaborative flows.

The characteristics of collaborative flows

•  Inclusive rather than exclusive, low barriers to entry
• Nevertheless, associated clearly with identity, not anonymity
• Designed for sharing, for community
• Secure: full audit log, archived, persistent, searchable, retrievable
• Instant, real-time
• Yet shiftable in time and place, so that asynchronous work can be performed
• Carrying contextual metadata cheaply
• Embedded with enterprise social objects that themselves attract commentary and revision
• Able to operate in and across multiple channels
• Subscriber- rather than publisher-powered
• Built to internet and public cloud standards
• Transparent, inspectable
• Built to make use of communal ability to learn rather than individual stocks of knowledge

I hope, by the time you’ve read my next post, you’ve begun to get a real feel for collaborative flows within the social enterprise. [And I hope to have learnt where my thinking has gone astray via your comments and your criticisms)

Still trying to learn about how best to construct an unGoogleable question.

Today’s question is: Whose voice is this?

I don’t want the name of the character. I want the real name of the real person doing the reading.

Now if someone gets this in 30 seconds of Googling, I will have to go back to the drawing board all over again!

 

 

 

Most of you will know the Neverseconds story by now, it’s been top of the global Twitter trends for some time today. A story ostensibly not about brands or about money. But a lesson for brands and for money.

Neverseconds is a blog. Written by a 9 year old girl. She took photographs of her school meals and wrote about them. And what she wrote was largely positive.

Then a newspaper came along, wrote about her, criticised the dinner ladies, seemed to threaten their jobs. And all hell let loose.

The local council stepped in. Via the school, they banned the girl from posting photographs of school meals. So she said Goodbye in classic fashion, with a blog post.

And the twittersphere was aghast. They rallied. Argyll and Bute councillors had their fifteen minutes of fame.

And then the head of the council appeared on radio, undid the ban.

And if I wasn’t writing this now, I could probably follow some of the story on television. It’s already on Wikipedia, as a 21st century example of the Streisand Effect.

To top it all, one of Martha’s reasons for starting the blog was to collect money for charity: collected funds have grown tenfold since the council debacle. So there’s a silver lining or two.

You will see a million critiques of the whole incident, all more learned than mine. So that’s not what this post is about.

All I want to highlight is one aspect: the multichannel nature of the incident.

• Began on a blog.
• Grew via newspapers.
• Went viral on Twitter.
• Hit Wikipedia.
• [Probably] Hit TV and cable. If not now, soon
• Brought to a close (at least for this chapter) on radio.

And I didn’t even mention screens and devices and form factors.

Life happens. Life happens without regard for channels and devices and form factors.

We learn about life in stories. Stories that happen without regard for channels and devices and form factors.

Time-shifted. Place-shifted.

The #neverseconds story should be looked at by all who seek to “control” their customers through “channels”.

Neverseconds. A channel-hopper.

[Martha, hope your life returns to normal soon, and that you continue to enjoy life as a nine-year-old. And please keep with the blog]

 

[Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts about the Social Enterprise and the Big Shift. The first post provided an introduction and overall context; the second looked specifically at collaboration, working together; the third looked at optimising performance, enjoying work, working more effectively. This one deals with flows, how work gets done.]

[My thanks to Mike Agner for the wonderful shot of Puerto Princesa, Palawan above]

Background

In my last post, on enjoying work, I wrote:

In explaining the Big Shift, Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison spend time describing the changing environment caused by the introduction and evolution of digital infrastructure, augmented by public policy decisions on movement and migration. They describe a world where competition is more intense, where barriers to entry are lower, where the rate of change is high, where things are more interconnected and where there is greater uncertainty as a result.

Prior to that, when looking at collaboration, I’d written:

Experience curves were about the past; they containerised historical experience and explicitness and sought to extract value by repeating that experience in military fashion; and, in consequence, marginal utility diminished over time while marginal costs increased, and a classic diminishing-returns model ensued. Collaboration curves, on the other hand, are about the future; they seek to containerise tacit knowledge, the ability to learn,  to adapt, to evolve; value is created by making the company better at learning

These two statements, taken together, form the backdrop to the rest of this post.

Introduction: Doing by learning

There’s always been a close association between the concept of learning and that of doing. It is reasonable to suppose that there’s been a similar close association between the concept of doing and that of working, even though there is occasional evidence to the contrary.

Life used to be so simple. People learnt their trades, usually as apprentices to those who’d mastered some particular skill or skills,  and then went off to apply what they’d learnt, to ply their trade. As apprentices, they learnt in a number of ways: they received instruction; they observed; they imitated; they practised; they received feedback; they improved. They learnt. And by learning they achieved mastery in a skill or set of skills.

Instruction was meaningful for things that could be explained, that could be articulated clearly. Explicit things. Observation and imitation were more relevant when it came to things that were harder to put into words or even pictures, where the learnt skill was more deeply embedded. Tacit things. And as long as it was constructive, criticism was a valuable component of the learning process. If someone could observe you while you did something, they could notice things you would find harder to notice at the time. Some sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle prevailed: your attempt at observing your actions while performing them tended to affect the action.

All this described the world that was, and not the world that is, much less the world that is to be. We used to live in a world where what you’d learnt could be stored, canned, repeated at will, “scaled”. That was the world that Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison described as based on “experience curves”, where past experience could be used to control markets. But they describe the post-Big-Shift world differently, as one based on collaboration curves, where value is created by making the company better at learning.

I love Peter Drucker, and have no qualms in quoting him repeatedly. And one of my favourite Drucker quotes is this: the purpose of business is to create a customer. In similar vein, it is reasonable to assert that work is about creating value. So, if value is created by learning, then learning is work. And work is learning.

How work takes place

If work is learning, then work takes place when a person learns. As inferred earlier, people learn in a multitude of ways:

• by receiving instruction
• by observing
• by imitating
• by doing, under supervision
• by doing while being observed, so that feedback is available
• by assimilating and responding to feedback

Esther Dyson, someone I regard as a mentor, tends to sign off her messages with the phrase “always make new mistakes”. For learning to have taken place, something must be new. Something must have changed. And, quite possibly, something must have been unlearnt, discarded.

Learning is about flows, not stocks. We live in times when change and speed are abundances while certainty and predictability are scarcities. And we need to adapt to those times. To be successful one needs to allow for the new abundances and the new scarcities. The firm that does-by-learning will prosper, but only for a short time: competitive intensity is high, barriers to entry are low. So in order to sustain that prosperity, firms will have to learn how to keep learning, and how to do that at speed. Continuous and quick learning.

These statements are all little more than soundbites — PowerPoint fodder, nothing more — unless we can really understand what they mean within the enterprise. So what do they mean?

My assertion is that to understand what they really mean, we have to understand in a more granular way how all this takes place. Which leads me nicely on to one of my pet subjects.

Flows. Information flows. Conversation flows. Which is what the next part of this post is all about.

An introduction to flows

Last week I wrote:

Flows are part of networks, not hierarchies. Places where network effects can be obtained, where increasing-returns models can be seen to apply. The core of the Social Enterprise is in the network, the connectivity, the connections. Connections that extend beyond the enterprise, into the supply chain, through the distribution networks, all the way to the customers and the products. Networks across which conversations flow, cutting across the silos of the organisation, straddling the boundaries, allowing the tacit knowledge at the edge to be exposed. Here are some of the characteristics of flows:

• Flows are not transactions. They can and do include transactions, but they represent far more than that. Transactions are just one type of object that can be embedded within the flows.
• Flows are conversational. Start and end points are imprecise, sometimes absent. There is no simple linearity to flows.
• Flows transcend “channels”, a concept born of hierarchies and control. A conversation may start in one medium, stall, restart in a second and different medium. Bilateral conversations may morph into multilateral ones and vice versa.
• A flow represents a continuum from past to present to future; they involve transactions (the past), activity streams (the present) and intention signals (the future). But these are all just objects embedded within the flow.
• These embedded objects are valuable in themselves, but gain their prominence from network effects: the power of inspection; recommendations and votes; the application of cognitive surpluses; the opportunity to “save” and “replay” activities in detail, and to have “freeze-frames”.

Today I want to spend a little more time looking at enterprise flows in the context of the Social Enterprise. I’m going to share what I think they are, and hope that, with your help and comments, I can improve my understanding as well as yours.

Social Enterprise flows

The concept of flows has been around for a very long time. Scientific management and assembly lines and work flows and process flows and all that jazz. Industrial age stuff. And if what you embed those flows into the Social Enterprise, you probably deserve what you end up with. A footnote in history, somewhat earlier than you’d anticipated. Michael Hammer, when talking about re-engineering the corporation, stressed the importance of avoiding “paving the cowpaths”. The whole point of the Social Enterprise, as articulated within the Big Shift, is that the flows are different. In fact prior flows were staccato, fragmented, fossilised in comparison; they were daisy-chains of stocks, lacking fluidity, lacking adaptiveness, lacking evolutionary capability, lacking life.

Strong words? Perhaps. And if I’ve offended you, my apologies. My intention was not to shock, but to express the seriousness of this change. Historical flows were processes that dealt with the creation, passage and transfer of explicit information. They were therefore themselves easy to codify, to standardise, to repeat. And scale was obtained as a result of this codification of process.

As against this, Social Enterprise flows are about surfacing tacit knowledge. Information that is hard to codify, standardise or share. How is tacit knowledge surfaced? Through the sharing of experiences, as Michael Polanyi pointed out all those years ago. Shared experiences are not that easy to come by: they tend to require “synchronous” participation. Which limits the ability to scale.

To combat this, Social Enterprise flows are persisted: they’re archived, searchable, retrievable. The transactions, activities and intentions that make up the flows are recorded. For them to be valuable, they need to be replayed at will. And that’s easier said than done, since the persisted flows resemble firehoses. Which limits their usefulness.

As a result, Social Enterprise flows contain rich metadata: they’re auto-date-and-time-stamped, they’re geo-located, they contain information about the identities of the people involved; they’re enriched using folksonomies that avoid the traditional limiting constraints of topic classification trees. But surely all we’re doing is paving the cowpaths, playing at semantics, pretending that the stocks of yesterday are replaced by the flows of today, while really continuing to do the very same things? These flows represent a point in time, they’re recorded, archived, fossilised. So what’s changed?

The change happens because Social Enterprise flows are participative: people can copy, amend, re-use, correct, augment, enrich them. They’re flows. They move. They have life. As Doc Searls used to say for open source, the NEA principle holds: nobody owns them, everyone can use them, anyone can improve them. But even that is not enough, not unless people can learn about the changes, and learn quickly about the changes.

Which is why Social Enterprise flows are about publish-subscribe: the learning has to be shareable; and it must be beneficiary-led. Broadcast and hierarchy do not scale, the learning withers and dies.

What happens in the flows

People ask questions, and share answers. They share learning. They observe, and share observations, provide feedback. They list and rank and rate, and share their valuations. They inspect and correct and share the corrections. They represent different points of view, they challenge, they debate. And they share their reasoning.

People move information around. And share their perceptions and views and valuations and ratings about that information.

People learn, and continue to learn. They do this at speed, adapting to internal as well as external stimuli.

Conclusion

People talk to people. People relate to people. People learn from people, people teach people. People buy from people, people sell to people. In the end it’s all about people. In the past, we didn’t have the ability to connect everyone up affordably and efficiently; we couldn’t record and replay transactions, activities, intentions; we couldn’t review, rate or provide feedback; we couldn’t correct, repair, enhance, enrich.

We couldn’t scale our ability to share our tacit knowledge, and to keep sharing our tacit knowledge.

We couldn’t scale our ability to learn, and to keep learning.

A coda. When we converse with each other, we tend to embed our conversations with  social objects, the rolling stones that gather the moss of learning. My next post will look more closely at the role of social objects within the Social Enterprise.