Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: Toyotomi Hideyoshi returning to the scene of his army’s victory

It’s that time of year when I get asked to make predictions for the year ahead, particularly in the context of enterprise software. It’s that time of year when I tend not to do anything as a result.

But this year’s different. This year I think we’re on the verge of something sufficiently different to warrant my writing about it. Something that’s been spoken about for over a decade. Something that’s been bubbling under for much of that time. Something that’s happening now; something that will dominate the year to come, perhaps the decade to come.

Max de Pree, one of my favourite writers on leadership, once said:

In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch—that is, who should be listened to and when.

In 2012, the customer holds the conch. And for years to come, the customer’s going to keep that conch. It’s not just about broken guitars. Or retracted debit card fees. Or shelved plans to break up services. Or even, for that matter, Occupy movements or Arab Springs. 

It’s about all of them. So, with that as context, here are my predictions for the world of enterprise software in 2012.

Prediction 1: The customer will insist on being listened to

Hank Ketcham, the creator of Dennis The Menace, once said, I think via Dennis: Just because I didn’t do what you told me, doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening to you. That’s what companies have been doing, not listening. They’ve spent a long time often pretending to listen to the customer, then doing what they intended to anyway. Listening is going to become more important than ever before. And if you want to listen to the customer, then you’re going to have to go to where the customer is. In the social networks. The hierarchical broadcast model of advertising will get replaced by a networked distributed listening model, something that has already begun to happen. More and more, the use of focus groups and sample surveys will recede, as companies learn that listening at scale is more accurate than the randomness of sampling. The skills required to structure the surveys will still be needed, but the surveys will operate across the customer base rather than concentrate on a select few. Customers are sharing where they are, what they did, what they’re doing and what they’d like to do. They’re sharing who they were with, who they are with and who they’d like to be with. They’re sharing what they liked, what they like and what they would like. Customers are sharing their personal and individual preferences, plans and intentions, and they expect to be listened to. Personalisation and customisation will stop being buzzwords and become business as usual.

Prediction 2: Customers will insist on being listened to

Listening to the customer is not going to be enough. Companies are going to have to learn to listen to customers in groups as well as as individuals, severally as well as jointly. Obfuscation of price and discount and service availability and service quality is going to become more and more difficult, as connected customers learn how to use their power to obtain and sustain transparency; the perfect market that companies have dreamed about will start becoming reality….. for customers. Trust between customers and companies will increasingly come to depend on this transparency. Think Groupon meets Priceline, but on steroids. As a result, companies will have to be able to design services at speed, to listen at speed and to adapt their offerings at speed, responding to customer sentiment, learning by doing. Feedback loops will become more and more important. Customers will also increase the way they listen to each other, as they recognise the value of their social networks not just as recommenders but as filterers.

Prediction 3: Customers will insist on true freedom of choice

Historically, there have been many markets where customer choice has been restricted by companies focused on vertical integration; the ability to mix and match components or ingredients was denied on the basis that vertically integrated end-to-end solutions were cheaper to acquire and easier to use. Over time, this became part of the customer psyche, perhaps akin to Stockholm Syndrome. As customers learn about their power as individuals and as a collective, they will insist on true choice, and continuing choice. Products will be seen as belonging to families and ecosystems, with increasing choice between components of the ecosystem and between ecosystems. Interoperability will become more important.

Prediction 4: The enterprise software landscape will be transformed as a result

Companies will need tools to help them listen to their customers, individually and collectively; to understand what they’re saying; to build, alter and refine their offerings based on customer feedback; to work with other companies in an open and federated manner; to make their products and services work with competitive products and services; to give their customers choice, and to expect their customers to exercise that choice.

Driven by this freedom of choice, the end-to-end control historically enjoyed by many companies will disappear. Process automation will look different, as companies spend more and more time dealing with exceptions rather than norms; a plethora of small, lightweight processes will emerge, to replace the traditional high volume highly repeatable form.

Service transparency will become a mandatory requirement across systems, 24×7, accessible across the web. Customers will choose to shift time and shift place at will. They will expect services to be delivered independent of device or location or operating system; they will expect services to be migrated between device and location and operating system.

The cost of change will finally begin to matter, as companies realise that monolithic vertically-integrated systems appear to provide lower operating costs, but only in a steady-state world. The outsourcing industry will come under immense pressure as a result, as their customers realise the importance of open flexible frameworks with low cost of change by design rather than accident.

 Prediction 5: People will realise that all these predictions could have come true years ago, and start asking what took them so long

None of this is particularly new. I could have written these predictions five years ago, ten years ago. There’s nothing I’ve said that wasn’t already in the Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999. Yet a dozen years have passed. What’s changed? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I’m all wrong, and the tipping point hasn’t arrived yet. Perhaps Arab Spring will be reversed; perhaps Occupy will come to nothing; perhaps the customer, having tasted true power, will meekly hand it back to the incumbents who’ve shaped the last five decades between them.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps the time has come, and the changes we’re seeing are irreversible. After all, as Hugh Macleod pointed out in the “Hughtrain”:

So that’s it. I’m done with predictions for next year, even if it is that time of year.

Incidentally. It is that time of year. If you read this far, perhaps you’re a fan of this blog. In which case please consider voting for the blog here. And if you’re in voting mood, try this.

 Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory

In my late teens, living in Calcutta, I used to play a lot of duplicate bridge. Or at the very least, contract bridge, if eight players could not be found. This was in the mid 1970s, when sophisticated artificial bidding systems were all the rage. [For those who are interested, I used to play a modified Precision Club system with a strong club, four card majors, weak no-trump, Stayman asking for majors, a “splinter 2 diamonds“, weak pre-emptive 3s and Blackwood asking for aces.]

The particular system I was using is not relevant. What is relevant is that it was a complex way of collecting and signalling data: the bidding process in bridge, the conventions used, these are but tools to tell your playing partner something about the cards you hold.

There was this one time when my playing partner and I were playing against my brother and his playing partner. At the time they weren’t particularly serious about the game. Novices. So we did our Precision mumbo-jumbo rocket-science bidding. And they used an Acol-based “natural” bidding system, no frills. And they beat us. And kept beating us.

This was not good.

After all, we had the superior bidding system, the maturity, the experience, the everything. They shouldn’t be beating us.

And they weren’t just beating us. They seemed to know everything about the deal.

Because they did.

Having thrashed us comprehensively, amidst hoots of laughter, they told us what they’d been doing. Which was simple.

While we were knotted-browed in concentration using the most esoteric signalling systems to describe the cards we held, they were using a somewhat more effective one: they were showing each other their cards. Not within the rules, but done to teach us a lesson.

And the lesson was this: remember why you’re doing something, don’t get lost in the what and how.

In bridge, the purpose of bidding is to let your partner know what cards you have. The systems and conventions are meant to help you do that. But the purpose is to signal the cards you hold.

When I talk about engaging with customers, I try and draw on this analogy. Focus groups and surveys are not an end in themselves. They are way, inefficient ways, to find out what the customer wants to do, ways to discover customer preferences and intent. Today, the customer tells you what she wants, what she intends.

And so it is within the enterprise.

Which is the nub of this post: how the capacity for organisational memory has increased dramatically over the past decade or so (through tools like Chatter) and why it matters. [Disclosure: I work for Salesforce.com, the company behind Chatter].

There was a time when it was normal for a person to spend her whole life at one firm. The contract between employee and employer was trust-based. meaningful and long-term, there was security of tenure, and staff turnover was low. Teamwork was high.

There was a reason why teamwork was high. The institution had memory.

Teamwork involves sacrifice. Sacrifice requires humility. Teams work because people allow themselves to be vulnerable in front of each other.

This sacrifice, this willingness to be humble, this acceptance of vulnerability, all this is underpinned by trust, and in turn creates trust.

Huge dollops of trust. Trust enabled by the characteristics mentioned earlier: meaningful contracts between employer and employee,  the security that comes from tenure, the familiarity that comes from low turnover. The feeling of being amongst family.

In such an environment, teamwork excels at least in part because of organisational memory. When you “took a bullet” for the team, your colleagues and your boss remembered that. When you agreed to hold on to your misgivings and go with what some of the other team members wanted to do, you did so in the knowledge that your “sacrifice” would be noted. Now this was not in some manipulative calculated fashion, it was more of the everyday give-and-take that characterises interactions between people in relationship.

The organisation remembered. Because the organisation was stable, attrition was low.

As job mobility increased, and with it attrition, the memory of the organisation began to suffer. And at least one of the incentives to collaborate, to share, weakened as a result.

As the incentives weakened, so did the reality. People worked less as teams, people worked less in teams. The willingness to sacrifice receded, as did the willingness to make oneself vulnerable. If you took a bullet for the team, but the team wasn’t going to be there to remember that taking-of-bullet, what was the point?

An I-Told-You-So culture was born, a precursor to the full-fledged Blame Culture.

Some people noticed that institutional memory was failing, and sought to prevent it by instilling the practice of recording what was discussed at meetings, what was agreed, who was meant to do what. The process of taking minutes grew as a result, but no longer to provide a record of what happened. More often than not, it became a negotiated set of statements, truths, half-truths and sometimes outright lies, as the participants in the meeting sought to reflect their disparate positions “on the record”.

Minute-taking became an art form; in many enterprises, she who takes the minutes rules the crown. Because the minutes defined reality. An alternate reality, sometimes a false reality, but nevertheless what was perceived as reality.

And the Blame Culture was in full swing.

Dark days.

Days we can leave behind. Because of the power of streams of information at work. Now, it is possible for the “record” to show everything that was discussed, not just one person’s summary of a set of negotiations as to what to put down on the record.

Activity streams capture the flow, the conversations, the commentaries and the comments around the digital social objects in the enterprise: proposals, orders, bills, complaints, whatever: presentations and documents and tables of one form or other.

Collaboration is not what happens in the presentation, document or spreadsheet; it is what happens around these objects.

Collaboration does not happen because of a presentation, document or spreadsheet; it is what happens despite these objects.

Collaboration is not in what is captured in static documents, but in the flow of conversation around those documents. A flow that is dynamic, live and continuing.

This flow, represented by the conversations and comments, in conjunction with the “enterprise social objects”, is what is persisted in activity streams by services like Chatter.

And it is in this flow that the organisation recovers its ability to remember.

And it is in this ability to remember that the organisation recovers its ability to trust; it is in this trust that teamwork proliferates. The work of teams characterised by a vulnerability, an openness, a humility, a willingness to sacrifice for the good of the collective.

There are many other aspects of knowledge management that are made possible by enterprise activity streams, as we learn to move from past-tense analysis to present- and future-tense approaches. Aspects to do with discovery, with Rumsfeldian (or more correctly Polanyi-like) unknown unknowns, with the capacity of the organisation to record, replay and learn from the replays. Aspects to do with serendipity and with providing avenues to soak up the Shirkyist cognitive surplus inherent in knowledge work. Aspects to do with understanding the actors and their roles within the organisation, in Gladwellian salesmen/connector/maven ways. Aspects to do with nonlinear work and asynchronous work. Aspects to do with induction and training and coaching and mentoring.

I’ve written about all these before, and I will write about all of them again.

Because we live in exciting times.

The organisation can find its memory again.

So.

When you build and implement systems of collaboration, ask yourself whether you’re investing enough in persisting and understanding the flow. The documents and spreadsheets and presentations are necessary but not sufficient.

Here’s another smattering of open tabs, stuff I’m looking into, stuff I’m thinking about. Incidentally, I considered moving the Smorgasbord tab sweep series on to tumblr, then decided to keep it here for now. What do you think?

1. Jim Rokos Design: A truly bizarre set of design projects, some mesmerising, some not-safe-for-drinking-coffee-while-reading (in case you do yourself an injury). I came across Jim’s work as part of my research into sharing by design. Here’s a classic example of his work, wineglasses where two people have to cooperate in order for either to be able to drink. Check his site out. I’m particularly bemused by Leaping Rabbit.

2. xkcd. No real introduction needed for Randall Munroe’s brilliance. Even if you’re a hardened and blase fan, he still has the capacity to delight. We live in Occupy times. So his recent poster on money is apposite and a stupendous piece of work. Please go to his site and take a look, it’s worth it.

3. Streaming news: Not a good time to be selling pepper spray. Witness the reviewer comments on this product.

4. Calcutta 1945: The University of Pennsylvania’s wonderful collection of Clyde Waddell photographs of Calcutta around the end of World War II. Here’s a sample, showing what open outcry really meant at the Calcutta Stock Exchange. Intriguingly, everyone wore white.

The first album I can remember holding in my hands was a Beatles album: A Hard Day’s Night. Until then, my musical upbringing was largely Western classical, jazz through the ages, fifties musicals and crooners. Not surprising, given that I was born in 1957 and lived in India.

It was a good upbringing to have, as far as Western music was concerned: Perry Como and Pat Boone, My Fair Lady and South Pacific, all interspersed amongst the Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and accentuated by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mussorgsky and Ravel. It wasn’t a question of choosing either: we listened to what our parents listened to, and that was that. It didn’t occur to us that some people thought musical taste was an individual thing; music, like food, like reading, like life itself, was a social thing, enjoyed best in the company of others.

I must have been around 10 when we bought ourselves a new gramophone player for the house, and shortly after that a few albums emerged that were different from the others. Peter, Paul and Mary’s seminal In The Wind. The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out. And of all things, Edmundo Ros’s Bongos From The South.

And the Beatles, with A Hard Day’s Night. The start of a wonderful trip through the music of the age.

Over the next ten years, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of albums flowed through the house. No sense of ownership. We bought some; traded some; some were parked there by friends, loaned indefinitely; some just turned up, forgotten leavings.

We were eclectic in our listening; if there was a bias, it was towards singer-songwriter folk rock, but it went a lot further than that, starting with the Beatles (together and solo) and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan. Simon and Garfunkel. The Grateful Dead. Traffic. Cream. John Mayall. Jethro Tull. Joan Baez. Dave Mason. Crosby Stills Nash and Young, together and separate. Buffalo Springfield. The Who. Emerson Lake and Palmer. Yes. Neil Diamond. America. Janis Joplin. Kris Kristofferson. Joe Cocker. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Santana. Donovan. Don McLean. Clapton. Hendrix. Jim Croce. Cat Stevens. Leonard Cohen. Allman Brothers. Elton John. Lindisfarne. Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones. The Doobie Brothers. Joni Mitchell. James Taylor. Carole King. The Band. Jose Feliciano. Melanie. Seals and Croft. Loggins and Messina. The Doors. The Eagles. Steely Dan. Poco. New Riders of the Purple Sage. Ten Years After. Deep Purple. The Kings. Herman’s Hermits. Iron Butterfly. King Crimson. Pentangle. Queen. Police. Elvis. Stevie Wonder. The Temptations. The Jackson Five. The Moody Blues. Pink Floyd. John Martyn. Gordon Lightfoot. Chicago. Blood Sweat and Tears. Van Morrison. Harry Nilsson.

You get my drift. One paragraph. My pantheon from 1967-1980. Not that much into heavy metal. Not that much into pure pop. Deeply into rock, but mostly based around a folk-rock foundation. Usually singer-songwriter, usually able to play an instrument or two, usually in harmony.

I just loved the music. Really really loved it. At the time I felt like there were a couple of hundred albums that were all I ever needed to listen to, with songs that were full of life and stories and joy and sadness and melody and poetry. And memories.

That’s how I used to think, in my teens and early twenties. I felt rich in the music I knew and loved, and felt no real reason to step out beyond that area.

Guess what? It’s largely stayed that way. Thirty, forty years on, that’s pretty much all I listen to. And I’ve been very privileged, able to watch many of my childhood idols live since then. In fact, tonight, I’m off to see Bob Dylan at the Hammersmith Apollo, and already holding tickets for Jethro Tull next April. I was always sure I’d spend most of my life listening to Sixties and Seventies music. I hadn’t quite considered that it would mean going to concerts where the musicians were in their sixties and seventies!

To all of them, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, for filling so much of my life with pleasure, with joy, with delight.

Thank you Sixties and Seventies musicians. Particularly those who believe that music is a performance art, not something to can once and exploit forever.

I must have been around 13 when I had my first pizza, courtesy of my neighbours, a warm and friendly Sephardic Jewish family; Flower Silliman, the mother of the family, was, and continues to be, an incredible cook; I took the family to India for a reunion last year, and we had Christmas lunch (!) at her home. (One of her daughters would later become my first ever girlfriend).

And what a pizza it was. The bread was flat, round and unleavened, gently golden. There was a light yet generous tomato sauce, lots of cheese, soft in the middle, a little crisping at the edge; some onion, some garlic, amazing fresh herbs. I keep imagining there was the hint of chilli, but that may just be me…. I like imagining things with chilli. And everything was cooked to perfection. Even today I salivate thinking about it.

It looked a bit like this photo from foodporndaily:

Now my memory’s not what it used to be. Perhaps there were other ingredients in the pizza. Perhaps I was 14 not 13 when it happened. Perhaps I’d already started going out with Flower’s daughter Michal. As I said, my memory’s not what it used to be.

But I still remember what a pizza was. And I still know what a pizza is.

A pizza is not a vegetable.

Apparently this is not a universal truth. According to the Huffington Post, in a story carried last Wednesday, Congress decided that pizza is a vegetable. Confused? Don’t worry. The Gothamist story illustration, reproduced below, may help you:

I read the story, and I was more saddened than surprised. Because I’d seen pizza masquerading as vegetable before.

The recipe seems to run a bit like this:

1. Take a data centre.
2. Add two spoons of tomato sauce.
3. Decorate with the words “private” and “cloud”
4. Serve