vmm – Page 7 – Simon Terry

Who Helps Creates Value in Your Organisation?

Posted on 25/07/201417/08/2016 by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Leadership

The difference between a network and community is a culture of collaboration. Collaboration doesn’t just happen. It is grown through the action of leaders.

Markets are Value Networks

The markets we use when we exchange financial value today are networks. Networks of connected agents exchange value in our stock exchanges, banks and risk markets. These networks did not arise simply because people connected. Financial markets are facilitated by practices that help transform connection into valuable interactions.

When the networks of merchants in coffee houses became stock exchanges, they relied on the role of brokers and market makers to help build a valuable marketplace. These roles helped people:

to build trust in the new market,
to create liquidity that enabled activity when demand and supply from participants was not perfectly matched,
to share information,
to develop new ways of working
to help the new markets to enforce the rules and standards of the exchange.

The same leadership work to build value, trust and new ways of working is found in the history of banking, insurance or other exchanges.

The value created in these networks did not occur because the network existed. It occurred because of the work of people to build a collaborative culture in the network. People need to build a sense of how to use these new exchanges and to build trust in that they would deliver more value than risk.

Your Network Needs Market Makers

Any collaborative network will need leaders to help facilitate the creation of value in the network. This leadership will be a combination of technical support from community managers and change leadership support from change champions in the organisation and the organisation’s senior management.

The Value Maturity Model highlights the way that collaboration’s market makers need to work to facilitate the value creation in your network:

Connecting relevant people to the network and into groups
Sharing information that may not have reached its necessary audience
Helping to solve issues by matching needs and capabilities, finding other resources or information and even holding a problem or information until there is a match of demand or supply.
Providing the systems and support to enable innovation experiments to be fostered until they are proven or fail.
Experiment and lead adoption of new ways of working
Helping lead the change in the culture of the organisation to allow the development of further cultural change.

To maximise the value of the networks in your organisation, you will need to develop the leadership capabilities that can take advantage of networks.

If you would like to create greater value in your enterprise social network or discuss how the Value Maturity Model applies to assist your organisation to create strategic value, please get in contact. I am available through @simongterry or Linkedin or www.simonterry.com

Integrate at Goals, not at Process

Posted on 16/06/201417/08/2016 by simongterry in Collaboration, Leadership, Strategy

How do you integrate open network conversations into closed linear processes? Integrate social conversations by integrating at the purposes and strategic goals. No organisation wants its collaboration constrained by processes or systems.

Organisations, vendors and analysts are touting the advantages of integration of enterprise social networking into legacy processes in organisations. Enterprise social networking needs to be come a part of the everyday work in organisations as it is another set of tools to foster conversations and collaborations that create value. Without connection to the daily work of individual employees, enterprise social conversations won’t deliver the value we need. However, far too many of our existing work processes aren’t set up to accommodate creative, agile and productive social conversations. Patterns of allowed conversation in a process based integration rarely changes that.

Don’t Integrate through the Current Process

Existing legacy processing systems are designed for efficiency. They constrain choice. They automate steps and narrow discretions. The goal is to simplify tasks, remove errors and ensure repeatable activities can be achieved with the minimum in investment in human talent.

These systems achieve significant efficiency gains with a cost of human potential, agility and effectiveness. However, they are not designed for conversation about work. One only has to reflect on everyday poor customer experiences to see that these systems gain efficiency by handling poorly the exceptional, unusual case or situations requiring a response to change. Conversations, change and collaboration do not fit the industrial model of work that these process systems are designed to fulfil. They are not designed to leverage the potential of talented knowledge working employees connected in networks.

Collaboration is not a layer that can be integrated into existing fixed processes designed for efficiency. Collaboration offers the opportunity to enable people to change and improve the process and the work. Collaboration creates choices with a view to increasing agility, improving effectiveness and realising human potential.

A conversation that must integrate into a process system will become a conversation about the constraints of the system at some point.

Integrate by Creating a Purpose-oriented Conversation

Offer people autonomy, purpose and an opportunity to develop mastery and you will offer them an ability to fulfil their potential. If you want to integrate social conversations into your work, integrate the conversations at this level. The key to reinforcing human potential is to offer people a way to discuss how their work aligns and creates value for the purpose and goals of the organisation, not its processes.

An employee who is challenged to integrate his or her work at the level of the goals of the organisation has an opportunity to stop, change or transform the process. That employee can respond to the situation before them, use their discretion and use the talents of their colleagues. The employee can look to deliver greater value than the current process allows. That liberty reinforces their accountability and validates the organisations confidence in the potential of the employee. A key barrier to engagement in many organisations is that an employee can struggle to find the connection between their work and the goals of the organisation. Goal-oriented conversations can play a critical role to surface that connection.

Another advantage of reinforcing a connection at the level of enterprise-wide purpose and goals is that it acts as a reminder that collaboration is an enterprise-wide experience in work. Collaboration is not constrained to the customer management systems or work process systems. A collaborative ecosystem and the social conversations that support it should reach throughout the organisation to achieve its goals and purpose.

Leverage human potential to help realise goals

Telling people what to do and shaping how they might be allowed to have a discussion seems easy and seems efficient. However, it comes at a significant cost of human potential. Leadership in networks demands more of employees, leaders and their organisations. To maximise the opportunities for networked ways of working, allow people the opportunity to find integration of their social conversations at the level of the organisations purposes and strategic goals, not constrained by its processes.

If you would like to create greater value in your enterprise social network or discuss how the Value Maturity Model applies to assist your organisation to create strategic value through enterprise social networking and other forms of collaboration, please get in contact. I am available through @simongterry or Linkedin or www.simonterry.com

Value is a fractal

Posted on 11/06/201417/08/2016 by simongterry in Collaboration

Enterprise social networks are made up of individuals who form their own groups and networks and the community is an aggregation of each of these components. We need to remember this structure when we start to think of value in enterprise social networks.

From Top-Down to Every Scale

One resulting characteristic of value in enterprise social networks is that they resemble a fractal, a mathematical shape that shows similar characteristics at any scale. Value in an enterprise social network does not only occur at the aggregate level.

Smaller scale activities are more important to sustain and grow the development of value across the whole network. There is less opportunity to order or impose value creation in a network than in traditional hierarchies where top down value is the priority and individual value is rarely considered.

Value For Users and Groups Makes a Network

Individual and group practices that create value are the underpinning of value for the whole network. Value comes from connection, sharing information, solving problems and innovating for an individual or the whole community. Without this value to the individual or group, no value creation at the network level will sustain itself.

Individuals and groups must understand and see the value being created to continue to work in new ways in the network. Developing the maturity of a network means building this sense of how value is created and how it aligns to strategic goals.

Create a Sense of Value at Every Scale

The power of the Value Maturity Model is that it is designed to take advantage of this characteristic. The method can be shared with users, with groups and with the whole community to help them make sense of how value is created for them and for the network.

Secret tools of community managers or organisational leaders won’t help individual users and groups find their own path forward to value. The power of value creation in an enterprise social network is the ability to leverage people’s potential to help

If you would like to create greater value in your enterprise social network or discuss how the Value Maturity Model applies to assist your organisation to create strategic value through enterprise social networking and collaboration, please get in contact. I am available through @simongterry or Linkedin or www.simonterry.com

Working Out Loud Creates Value

Posted on 25/05/201417/08/2016 by simongterry in Collaboration, Working out loud

Working Out Loud is one of the most crucial practices for value creation in an enterprise social network. For many, it is also the least comfortable. We need to work at this new practice to deliver value.

Working out loud is the core new practice as sharing grows in an enterprise social network. When the conversation moves from sharing personal information to sharing work, value for the individual and organisation rises dramatically. That sharing is critical to the maturity of value creation in an enterprise social network. Without sharing of work, you hold back the benefits from other forms of work collaboration.

Working out loud creates great value in a network because:

working out loud gives a work purpose to the connection that has been formed in the network
working out loud invites community to form around people and their work enabling others to help, share knowledge and make work easier.
working out loud is not natural to many in the traditional workplace, but when people overcome hesitation and practice it they start to see the benefits of new forms of collaboration, that it makes work much easier & the culture much richer – a core driver of personal adoption
working out loud is the transition point to much wider collaboration across the organisation and particularly collaborative sharing and problem solving – work that is open is work that can be made better
working out loud exposes the work which allows for better strategic alignment, reduced duplication and importantly recognition of the great work underway.
working out loud enables role modelling of transparency, vulnerability, learning, agility and experimentation.
working out loud by leaders can change the leadership dynamic from one based in control and expertise to one that leverages networks and collaboration.

Some great resources are available to help you with working out loud:

The best thing is just start with 3 tiny habits but also keep it up long enough to see benefit – how about a 99 day commitment with no self-promotion
Euan Semple wrote about embracing the scariness to learn
John Wenger has written a working out loud credo
Adopt a new mindset
Luis Suarez has documented many practitioners and resources
John Stepper recently wrote about working out loud circles as a way to support yourself in the process
If your organisation wants help building a culture of working out loud, Change Agents Worldwide is a great place to start as it is a team of practitioners who both practice and help others with working out loud.

Beyond Adoption to Value Creation

Posted on 21/05/201404/04/2017 by simongterry in Collaboration

A great deal of attention in enterprise social networking has gone into ‘driving adoption’. A focus on adoption can distract organisations from the real challenge of any business activity, creating value in fulfilment of the organisation’s strategy.

Adoption is an intermediate goal

Adoption is a means to an end. Adoption is a tool of value creation. It is not the result. The desired outcome is the value created by an engaged community that allows for the fulfilment of a strategic goal through outcomes like better alignment, innovation, adaptation, better customer & community focus, greater agility or improved efficiency.

The desire to move beyond adoption is growing. Luis Suarez recently argued that the language of driving adoption is missing the mark. Joachim Stroh has also highlighted ways in which we need to move beyond traditional adoption.

The logical next step from adoption is the end goal of work. Business and people work to create value in line with a strategy. We need our use of enterprise social networking to create value for each users and for the business as a whole.

Adoption as a goal alone can lead us astray

Our focus on adoption is often reflected with concerns from our traditional hierarchical ways of working. For example I have been asked the following questions about adoption that indicate something is going astray:

If we don’t have universal adoption, how will people get our messages?: If you are focused on one-way communication, there’s a good chance they don’t listen to your messages already.
Can’t we just mandate adoption? You can, but it rarely works to create an engaged & valuable community. Incentives may be a transitional tool to help people engage with the solution but take care that they don’t make participation an end in itself.
Won’t our people resist adopting this new solution? If the solution offers no value or is seen as a distraction from real work, they should resist. If it creates value for users and they see its value to the organisational strategy then this is an issue that we will overcome.
What’s the right number of users to adopt a social network? There is no magic number. The right answer is enough of the organisation to create enough valuable conversations for users and the organisation. That can be a surprisingly small percentage of the organisation, provided they are well connected into the larger organisation.
We have lots of users. Nobody knows what to use it for. What do we do now? You have users but it is likely you don’t have a community that understands how to do things together to create value for your strategy.

Most importantly of all, enterprise social networks are infrastructure, not tools. Employees need to make sense of a new enterprise social network and integrate it into their work. There is no pre-ordained usage that people can adopt like many other technology systems. Adopting a network as another conversation tool may be interesting but rapidly loses relevance in a busy workplace with many high volume channels for communication. The best guide to employees is to direct their sense-making into how it will create value for their work and strategic value for the organisation.

Often adoption drives demand a lot of overhead and effort. They are pushing something into a community. Where this effort goes to creating niche use cases with easy adoption, selling a uniqueness event in an enterprise social network or investing all the time in unusual campaign activities it can backfire. Employees who come to think of the enterprise social network as being used only for a special activities may not consider the opportunities for every day value creation. In these networks, there is a dramatic difference in utilisation between when adoption is being driven and every day use limiting the potential of the platform. Use caution that your efforts to drive use reinforce the connection to value in daily work and strategy.

Importantly adoption is rarely a goal that makes sense to the managers and leaders whose support is needed to foster a collaborative culture and role model usage. Conversations advocating adoption of social collaboration and other future of work practices can seem abstract and a side issue to the work of the organisation to many managers. Managers are looking for how enterprise social networks contribute to value creation.

Personal and Strategic Value

Value is different for every organisation as organisation’s purpose, strategies and goals differ. Value need not be a hard dollar return on investment. ROI can rarely be calculated in the abstract for infrastructure. From an organisation’s perspective defining a contribution to a strategic goal is often more effective.

Value is different for each individual depending on their goals, their role, their work preferences and their needs. Individuals will need to change their work practices in ways that make sense to them. Role modelling and storytelling will assist this journey but they will make their own sense of value.

There are 5 key elements of the work to moving the focus of enterprise social networking to value creation:

Create Strategic Alignment: Make explicit the connection between social collaboration and the strategic goals of the organisation. At a minimum, these conversations will educate your employees on the purpose, strategy and goals.
Guide Personal Value Creation: Guide employees to understand how the enterprise social network creates value in their work. In my work with organisations, I use a Value Maturity Methodology based on users maturity through 4 stages Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate.
Experiment & Learn: Create an environment for employees and the organisation where the enterprise social network fosters experimentation to create new forms of value in work. Encourage sharing and solving challenges.
Foster A Learning Community: An engaged and aligned community of employees working together for business goals is the greatest opportunity for value creation in organisations. Focus on how community accelerates value creation and the key roles required in any community. Understanding the roles of champions and leaders is critical.
Discuss Value Creation: Social networking accelerates double loop learning. Discuss value creation in the network as the work conversations occur. Celebrate lessons and successes. Back innovations with corporate muscle. Use these new learning conversation to foster alignment with strategic goals and encourage people to find new personal value.