a blog about information
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.
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:
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:
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.
[Note: This is the third in a series of posts looking at the Social Enterprise in the context of the Big Shift. The first two posts were: Thinking about the Big Shift and the Social Enterprise and On Collaboration. This one focuses on the concept of flow, and how that relates to the Social Enterprise and the Big Shift].
Enjoying work is not a crime.
But sometimes it can feel that way. In some companies the visible manifestation of enjoyment — a smile, a laugh — is frowned upon. Heigh-ho-ing and singing on your way to work is considered not done.
For the past thirty-odd years, I’ve been lucky enough to be at places where I’ve been allowed to enjoy my work. Initially I was content to luxuriate in my enjoyment, taking that state of affairs for granted. I’d read about work being drudgery but hadn’t really experienced: somewhere deep inside me, I reasoned it away as an attractive consequence of knowledge work, “tertiary-sector” as it were, a consequence that was harder to obtain in agricultural or industrial work. As I grew older I realised that hypothesis was false. Some people enjoyed work, and others didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter whether they worked in primary or secondary or tertiary sectors: I saw gardeners really enjoy what they did, and do it well; I saw car mechanics excel at their job while smiling and whistling; it didn’t seem to matter which company they worked for: some people enjoyed work, others patently didn’t.
Then, in 1990, I came across Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on the subject, initially via his seminal book Flow, later by gently backtracking through the rest of his oeuvre while keeping pace with his newer publications.
I found his work fascinating. Not because I was surprised by the conditions he listed for achieving that state of in-the-zone-ness: I wasn’t. After all, who could find fault with a list along the lines of:
His assertion was that as you worked under these conditions, you were more likely to “lose yourself” in your work and thereby reach significantly higher performance levels. Now I’m really oversimplifying things here, please do read his book (and those that followed). You will find it immensely rewarding and worthwhile. A good place to start is this TED video.
As I said before, that list didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was how rare it was to see those conditions met at work. Role and goal clarity could not be assumed. Skill levels were not that easy to measure; and even if they had been, attempts to do that measuring were rare. Matching of skills to task complexity was therefore not common either. Feedback loops were often short, infrequent and poorly executed: annual, perfunctory, subjective were the words that often came to mind.
The people who enjoyed themselves at work were therefore the exceptions, and these exceptions came in many guises. Some actually worked in companies where the flow conditions were met; 0thers managed to create environments where they acquired those conditions despite their paucity; and yet others managed to achieve their state of flow without actually having those conditions present. There appeared to be nothing systematic, predictable or repeatable about all this; I began to feel immensely privileged at the regularity with which I worked in places where enjoying work was (a) possible (b) encouraged (c) prevalent. But I couldn’t let it go at that.
More recently, as I thought about the Social Enterprise (particularly against the backdrop of the Big Shift), I started seeing something potentially quite exciting: that the principles of the Social Enterprise could actually be consistent with Csikszentmihalyi’s conditions for flow. Which sort of made sense, in some sort of corollary logic, circular as it may sound: The Social Enterprise is consistent with the Shift Index and the Big Shift; The Shift Index measures transformational performance improvement; Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow is about achieving optimal performance. Quod erat demonstrandum.
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.
Those pressures in turn have their effect on every one of us as workers: faced with such uncertainty, complexity and speed, we try harder to find meaning in what we do, how we do it, why we do it. We try harder to find things to do that make us feel good just by doing them, where the rewards are intrinsic to the tasks performed. We look for ways to clarify our roles and goals, to understand how our actions fit into the larger context; we get attracted to tasks that make us achieve a sense of belonging, that allow us to participate actively; we push for active and frequent feedback loops, often from peers; task and resource allocation become more peer-to-peer (as opposed to hierarchical) and as a result, the skill/challenge tensions become creative and valuable.
We start looking for the Social Enterprise. A place where people are networked together, where role clarity is enhanced via openness and transparency; where feedback loops are quick, meaningful and frequent; where the ability to match skill to task is an outcome of empowerment and reduced costs of discovery.
We start looking for the Social Enterprise. A construct where collaboration happens as a result of connectedness and a sense of belonging; where trust is allowed to establish roots and to grow; where the pursuit of institutional innovation allows people to develop their potential and to exceed it.
We start looking for the Social Enterprise. An environment where performance is lifted through the power of partnership and the collective, both within the firm as well as beyond the firm. An environment where respect is earned and given, openly, mutually.
Cloud-cuckoo-land? Not really. Connected people, using common bases of understanding, empowered to act. That’s the basis of the Social Enterprise. Nohria and Lawrence, in Driven, speak of human beings having four drivers: the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to learn and the drive to defend. A Social Enterprise, properly implemented, provides an environment where these drivers can be met consistently and repeatably. With the resultant uplift in performance levels.
So far I’ve been talking about flow, as in the state of optimal performance. Serendipitously, perhaps coincidentally, many of the ways we achieve the conditions of flow are by understanding what we mean by institutional flows, as opposed to institutional stocks.
My next post will look at those flows in detail. What they are, how they come about, what happens in them and because of them.
In the meantime, comments welcome as always.
Continuing with my weekly series on questions for which you cannot google the answers.
What one word connects the following:
As usual I shall wait a few days before giving you any clues.