social – Page 2 – Simon Terry

Working Aloud: Try 3 Tiny Habits

Posted on 08/10/201306/02/2017 by simongterry in Collaboration, Working out loud

Working aloud requires new habits of work. 3 little habits will help you experiment with techniques and the benefits.

I’ve been reading about BJ Fogg’s tiny habits. In doing so, I realized the tiny habits reflect how I learned to practice new ways of working aloud using enterprise social networking.

How does a busy executive build a habit of working aloud?

Make a decision to build a new habit. Set yourself up with a login and the right apps. Then break your new working aloud habit down into common triggers and simple steps.

I have previously shared that checking in to a social network 3 times a day for 5-15 minutes easily creates the impression of continuous engagement. If there’s always something new from you when people check, then it looks like you are always there.

Here’s some triggers and habits I used to create a new working aloud habit:

Trigger1: First coffee, tea or other beverage
Habit1: Describe Describe one moment in your day ahead. Tell of something you are doing or starting, a visit, conversation or meeting. A post simply stating where you are can work. Everyone has something worth noting.

Trigger2: About to leave for lunch
Habit2: Interact. Like a post or answer a post. Interactions supporting others have great value. Your quick answer can make a difference.

Trigger3: Leaving for the day
Habit3: Recognition Recognise one person or team achievement. Every organisation needs more recognition and there’s something to recognize every day.

That’s it. The community will do the rest. You might not see a response immediately, but if you keep the habits up these posts will draw likes, questions and comments. Then people will ask you questions on other topics which you will answer in Habit2. Over time, people will engage you in the community and its concerns.

Repeat

Now repeat that process for a few weeks. As a busy executive that may be all the working aloud you will ever do. However, as the habit builds you might find yourself more willing to put time into the community and its rewards. When you are more confident with the habit and relationships in the community, you can swap to new topics and bigger challenges.

Don’t rush. Let the little habits grow from 5-15 minutes 3 times each day. If the benefits aren’t there, stop. However, don’t be surprised if over time the responses change how you work going forward.

Manage an ecosystem or it will manage you

Posted on 04/10/2013 by simongterry in Uncategorized

Traditional management focuses on an atomised view of the relationships in a business. Relationships with employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, partners and the community are treated as mutually exclusive, individual & discrete transactions. We put all our relationships into a simple hierarchical structure.

This convenient fiction is a classic example of organisational stupidity. Linear hierarchical choices are easier for us to use through than complex networks of relationships. Networks get messy quickly. We chose these simplistic view to make organisations easier to manage.

In this simple model, relationships beyond the bounds of the organisation and its interactions are rarely considered, except under the categories of risks. In our disruptive networked world, every organisation exists in an ecosystem of complex networked relationships. We all need to adjust to making decisions in that ecosystem. If we keep managing to fictions, the ecosystem will take our influence and decision rights away.

So where’s the networked ecosystem?

No organisation is an island. If you have one employee and one customer you have already begun to build a complex network in their relationships.

We are increasingly experiencing the dynamic of a networked ecosystem as a result of following principles:

All the agents are connected: customers, suppliers, employees and the community are all much more able to connect, share information and collaborate. Importantly, they will connect share and collaborate whether your organisation exists or not.
Any agent can play multiple roles: An employee can easily be a customer, a supplier, an influential member of the community and even potentially a competitor simultaneously. The same could be said for any other agent in your ecosystem. Traditional linear thinking struggles to manage this. Just look how many organisations attempt to stifle their employees’ ability to connect with each other or play a role as customer or community advocates.
The pace of innovation brings down barriers: Traditional barriers like control of information, power or resources that kept agents isolated are coming down with the accelerating pace of innovation. It is far easier to shift between roles than ever before or to get access to information or connections that you need. If your organisation depends on barriers for its success, there is a great chance someone is working now to circumvent them.
The tools of disruption help us see the system: increases in networking technologies, data analytical tools and communication technologies increasingly help all participants see and manage the system

A social and natural ecosystem too

When we start to look beyond our traditional linear categories of relationships we can see a wider ecosystem around our organisations. This broader view of relationships helps us see the ecosystem in a fuller light:

We can see that our connections and our organisations contribute to social goals
We start to see the positive and negative environmental & social impacts of our organisation and its relationships
We see new ways to contribute
We can look to the relationships that occur beyond our traditional thinking and wonder what contribution our organisation can make or how we might leverage these relationships to add new value

Start Leveraging the ecosystem

With a new more complex view of the ecosystem around your business start asking new questions:

How does the wider view refine your organisation’s purpose?
What should you do more, better or differently?
How do you go faster if you leverage others?
What changes in the wider system benefit or harm you? What can you do with other players to have more of the good or less of the harm?
How do customers, suppliers, employees and others help you grow your business?
Where are the sources of value, the conversations, connections and opportunities in the system that you have been missing?

If you don’t ask these questions, somebody in the ecosystem else will. There’s a good chance you won’t like their answers.

Assembly Line of Knowledge Revisited: More Human & More Social

Posted on 17/09/2013 by simongterry in Uncategorized

The future is here.

We are at a time of innovation in the future of work. We have choices as to the criteria by which we judge success. Let’s make the future of work more human and more social.

Some time ago, I suggested that we were approaching innovation in the way we work with knowledge (‘knowledge work’) that was of equivalent significance to the introduction of the innovation of the assembly line for industrial work. Roger Martin in HBR recently described changes at Proctor and Gamble that begin to treat knowledge work as a ‘decision factory’: focusing on project management of knowledge workers and leveraging algorithms to guide decisions. To paraphrase William Gibson, the future of knowledge work is here, it is just not widely distributed yet.

Many knowledge workers recoil when you suggest the future of their work may resemble that of industrial work, even by analogy. Often they dispute that the work can be the subject of these kinds of innovation. However, we know dedicated entrepreneurs will find a way and that this disruptive innovation has begun already.

At the heart of many of these objections is a concern that a focus on innovation will shift the focus of knowledge work from effectiveness into a focus on efficiency. In that change, people perceive real risks to the financial and social rewards of knowledge work, to the skills that will be demanded in future and the potential for change to wider society. Many knowledge workers have benefited from traditional characteristics of human motivation, like autonomy, mastery and purpose. Losing those roles solely for efficiency may well be a great loss.

Assembly lines – more human and more social

Curiously enough, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line innovations to his plants the changes were not solely about manufacturing process. Henry Ford realised that for the assembly line process to succeed he needed wider social change. At the same time as Ford introduced the assembly line, he introduced a suite of social changes that were an attempt to build more complex social system around his organisation. There are arguments today as to what Ford’s purpose was in these changes, whether they were truly implemented or effective and the extent to which they may have just been clever marketing. Still, Ford introduced to its workers:

a $5 day a day wage that was a huge lift in income potential for workers and shared a small part of the profits of the new processes
a sociological department that explicitly sought to assess employee fitness across a range of social characteristics including family, thrift & home life and address social ills, like gambling and drinking.
a newspaper, education & language classes, medical treatment, parks and playgrounds and even a band
new workspaces that were models of light and open space at the time
a vision of buying the product that they made as Ford disrupted the luxury car market by making cheaper cars at scale

Today, we struggle to understand the Victorian values of these social changes. We would not want Ford’s near feudal power over his team. Also, we can lack context and understanding of the diverse nature of industrial workplaces before the birth of the modern factory system. However, Ford was seeking to make social changes an explicit part of the system of changes in his production system. Those changes were as radical then as many of the working models proposed by start-ups and other innovative companies are today. Ford’s wider social innovations, whether successful or not, suggested that he understood and saw the need to engage with the wider social role of work.

Work plays a larger social role than a source of income and a source of profit. Work sustains communities and families. Work provides personal satisfaction, gives rewards for our time and underpins our complex webs of relationships. Lack of satisfying work correlates with all kinds of social ills. Each of these effects flows back to the workplace and influences outcomes.

The future of knowledge work – more human and more social

Knowledge work is going to get more efficient. Even today there is still too much drudgery that can be innovated, automated or analysed away. Some organisations will focus solely on the efficiency opportunity of innovation in knowledge work. They will reduce their knowledge worker populations and streamline processes to realise profit.

These same organisations will likely find that they will struggle to recruit and retain talented people. Designing and maintaining their new systems will require even more expensive knowledge workers. The lack of engagement and innovation in their businesses will require expensive external consultants. More importantly, the broader society outside of the organisation will continue to question the relentless focus on efficiency and profit, query the negative externalities on society and demand a social dividend. Solving this issue transactionally will mean even more expensive marketing and corporate social responsibility activity.

We get to choose the success criteria for our innovations in the future of knowledge work. Profit does not have to be the sole motive.

We have the opportunity to ask of our innovators in work that they design for social changes and consider the broader social aspects of work. We can ask that work is more social. We can ask that it take account of criteria like sustainability, natural value, social value and ability to deliver benefits for a wider community of stakeholders. We can ask that work is more human and that better delivers autonomy, mastery and purpose for all workers. My experience is that innovations improve when we take this broader systemic frame and when we are more demanding in our measures of success. Great innovations involve constraints and stretch. We will only deliver significant social benefits from this innovation if we leverage design thinking and adaptive innovation to deliver changes in work.

An assembly line or decision factory for knowledge work does not have to be a race to the bottom. Employees in workplaces across the globe will get to shape and debate the changes being made inside and outside their organisations. As community members, they are a part of a public debate on the standards that organisations should meet. We all can leave organisations that do not respond well and entrepreneurs will start organisations to leverage the best innovations and new opportunities to realise value.

Potentially, it could be the birth of a new golden age of human and social growth.

We get to choose.

PS: Obviously, innovation and consideration of a broader social frame is something that will benefit industrial work too. However, because industrial organisations are much more competitive and more directly impacted by social pressures around environment, many leading industrial employers have already begun to look into new models that leverage wider social value and engage and empowering their employees to add new value. Toyota’s work on waste and the Toyota Management System are examples.

Notes: my limited understanding of Henry Ford comes largely from Steven Watt’s ‘The People’s Tycoon’, wikipedia and The Henry Ford Museum.

Assembly Line of Knowledge Revisited: More Human & More Social

Posted on 17/09/2013 by simongterry in Uncategorized

The future is here.

We are at a time of innovation in the future of work. We have choices as to the criteria by which we judge success. Let’s make the future of work more human and more social.

Assembly lines – more human and more social

a $5 day a day wage that was a huge lift in income potential for workers and shared a small part of the profits of the new processes
a sociological department that explicitly sought to assess employee fitness across a range of social characteristics including family, thrift & home life and address social ills, like gambling and drinking.
a newspaper, education & language classes, medical treatment, parks and playgrounds and even a band
new workspaces that were models of light and open space at the time
a vision of buying the product that they made as Ford disrupted the luxury car market by making cheaper cars at scale

The future of knowledge work – more human and more social

We get to choose the success criteria for our innovations in the future of knowledge work. Profit does not have to be the sole motive.

Potentially, it could be the birth of a new golden age of human and social growth.

We get to choose.

Notes: my limited understanding of Henry Ford comes largely from Steven Watt’s ‘The People’s Tycoon’, wikipedia and The Henry Ford Museum.

Be prepared for social change

Posted on 22/08/2013 by simongterry in Uncategorized

Our mental models of how things work are often a barrier to our adaptation to new capabilities. Digital disruption will stretch our thinking in many new ways.

When railroads were first invented they were designed to be a powered form of wagon for bulk goods. Only later did people develop the potential for railway travel, changes in communications and accelerate the distribution of fresh foods and other consumer goods. The introduction of railway travel created significant social change, demands for new resources and infrastructure, and ultimately innovation in business & society. After a start as a powered wagon, innovators changed the mental model of a railway developing its potential and its impact on society as a whole.

We are in the midst of digital mobile and social revolution that is so new and widereaching we can face the same challenges in adapting our mental models. Yesterday I attended the New Economy Conference in Melbourne. The audience and speakers who had chosen to attend the event were very aware of the digital & social transformations beginning to be realised.

A key theme of the day was the impact of digital, mobile and social processes in creating dramatic improvements in connection and speed of information sharing. This has major ramifications for markets and for corporations as they see their offerings atomised to services, boundaries becoming porous and competition expanding in speed and global reach. Even consumers are getting into the act of being producers through collaborative consumption. These ideas resonated strongly because they connect directly with the short-term transactional focus of our industrial age mental models of production, markets and competition. They involve the exploration of relatively simple changes to current models (who, where, what, volume or speed).

Harder for everyone to grasp are the changes to social systems which come with these new technologies and the need for new physical, legal and social infrastructure. To run their cross-continental networks, railroads needed and inspired new social infrastructure. An example was that railroads required society to adopt a precise concepts of time to manage their schedules. Railroads determined the implementation of the continental United States four time zones and largely became the arbiter of time in the communities that they connected.

There is already evidence that these broader social changes are being created. Work is shifting rapidly towards creative knowledge work in many parts of the world with new demands for leadership and organisation. The acceleration of social activism was discussed on the day and the consequences of eBay, the many task allocation and collaborative consumption organisations in changing natures of trust & work. We also discussed the social infrastructure required to measure value creation and waste in a broader more human way than just dollars (and the odd bit of avoided carbon). We need to innovate as hard in this social infrastructure as in that to support the transactions.

As much as we create new ways of transacting, we also need to create new forms of community to supply the social infrastructure to support the transactions. We need to support the short term interaction with a social fabric that can supply a longer human relationship. Just as the railroads need a precise sense of time, our new economy demands new precision in ideas like collaboration, work, trust, community and value.

When we think of the future of digital disruption, we need to allow both for how it will change the mental models we use every day but also how it may demand of us entirely new models, such as new concepts of organisations, jobs, reputation, social relationships and new measures of success. Success in the new digital era will take both adaptation to a new transactional environment but also adaptation of a new infrastructure of community, trust and long term relationships. New models of leadership and new social innovations will be required to achieve both.

Enterprise Social fosters Social Enterprise

Posted on 03/07/201306/02/2017 by simongterry in Collaboration

Two new trends are on the rise in business at the moment and they both use the words social and enterprise. Importantly these trends are often more closely connected than many realise. The trends are:

– Enterprise Social Media, the use of social media to foster connection and collaboration inside an organisation; and
– Social Enterprises, an organisation which exists to fulfil a social purpose by leveraging the approaches of the business world

Enterprise social media drives a more social outlook in any organisation where the culture will allow it. At the heart of the connection is that these trends force us to reflect on human concerns like purpose, community and our legacy – enterprise social media simply makes us social.

Enterprise Social Media fosters Purpose

Enabling your employees and other partners to connect and share their stories and experiences will quickly surface the themes of your purpose. Discussing and sharing these examples helps build a stronger sense of community in an organisation and deepens engagement. Importantly, the social network will also offer a forum to discuss, clarify and resolve of the conflicts of purpose that organisations face. Purpose is not a statement issued by management. Purpose is an ongoing dialogue with everyone in the organisation and it’s stakeholders.

Enterprise Social Media fosters Openness

Enabling your people to share their passions, interest, experiences and concerns is going to bring the surrounding community into your organisation. People now have a tool to collaborate on community and social issues. This can range from awareness building to forming groups of like minded employees to organising volunteering and activism. The more open your organisation the better it will be at responding to social needs and feedback.

Enterprise Social Media fosters Accountability

A highly engaged community can become a conscience for Purpose. If employees have a concern about delivery to Purpose or the wider social impacts, they have a forum to discuss and seek action. Importantly this is a public and transparent forum where they may have like minded colleagues. These conversations build accountability in managers across the organisation to explain the connection of their decisions to Purpose, to the creation of social value and to broader community impacts

Enterprise Social Media fosters Leadership

Organisations are full of people who have leadership potential but lack the impetus and a first follower. Social media offers a low risk environment for these first time leaders to connect with their personal purposes and to attract followers. It also offers an environment where leadership for the commmunity can be recognized by the community. Building the leadership voice, action & reward for leadership in your organisation will enable social value.

Enterprise Social Media fosters Innovation

Social value can be created in many traditional commercial organisations through adding a little innovation to everyday activities. Enabling your employees to make suggestions and work together to realise these ideas using enterprise social media can accelerate that process by bouncing unconventional ideas off traditional processes. Employee ideas can add social value by suggesting new challenges to tackle, a change in sourcing, to better ways to leverage waste and even debating where an organisation creates value for customers and the broader community.

Purpose+Openness+Accountability+Leadership+Innovation=More Social Enterprise

People crave purpose and to make a meaningful contribution to society. My experience suggests that given the chance people will leverage enterprise social media to seek to create additional social value in and through their colleagues and organisation. These conversations can generate deep pride and engagement.

The main barrier to this effect is a culture unwilling to allow the challenging conversations required. Our work in fostering more social enterprise is to get out of the way of our people, embrace the growing potential for more social value and do what we can to build stronger purpose and social impact.

The social enterprise must be social

Posted on 29/01/201317/08/2016 by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

A rush of social enterprise technologies is happening led by start-ups and major technology vendors. Everyone is racing to capitalise on the application of social technology into their application or process. Businesses are starting to realise the opportunity of social business processes with their people, customers and other stakeholders. Suddenly ‘social business’, the ‘social enterprise’ and ‘the future of work’ are hot topics.

In this hype and rush, one thing might just get lost – the creation of real community. The social enterprise must be social.

If you think this is an exaggerated concern, remember that technology does not create value. The value comes from how we use it. I have spent a lot of my time working with customer relationship management systems. In too many cases around the world, these projects are often cited as classic examples of failed technology implementations. Why? Most customer relationship management implementations have little relevance to customers and customer relationship employees. The efforts of vendors and businesses to wrap customers in process, data, leads and insight misses the opportunity to manage customers in a real vibrant profitable relationship. Business objectives get in the way of customer objectives and these systems fail their objectives and their users.

So how do we ensure that the social enterprise remains social?

Here are three thoughts:

Encourage real interaction: Questions and answers, back chat, push back, small talk, sports conversation, rapport building, jokes, laughter, entertainment, cynicism and mischief making are all part of the interactions that we have every day. Attempts to build systems or encourage use that exclude this ‘noise’ will fail to engage users. This ‘waste’ often has a real social purpose of creating engagement, enhancing productivity, building trust, sharing insight into others and deepening relationships. These are the gains that most vendors and businesses are looking to achieve by adding social features to their applications.
Embrace community (that means culture, two-way communication, creativity, concerns and occasional chaos): Successful social technologies are built on real community. Successful community is what draws in users and allows the sytem to create value. The community will reflect the common culture of the organisation, the common ways of interacting and doing things. Working with community and culture demands that communication is two-way, creativity in the users is encouraged, community concerns are promptly addressed and the community embraces diversity and occasional chaos. You can treat people like children and lock-out these things with features, policy and tight control. However you will get a community culture that is sterile, users who follow orders and the productivity & engagement of a dictatorship. It is far more powerful to treat the community as adults and guide the culture of your organisation to the benefit of the business and community.
Be part of society and social concerns: The best & most engaging social activity connects to a broader purpose. We all live and work in a broader society that makes decisions on what they think of us and our business. One of the powers of social enterprise solutions is the ability to bring that conversation into the workplace. Make the social enterprise one that can deliver social value beyond the bottom line. The employees, customers and other stakeholders who use the system are looking for this opportunity.

Social enterprise solutions will need to deliver to business goals to have a continuing role in business. However, ensuring that these solutions create community by remaining human and social is critical to their success.