Business | Skilful Minds

Institutional Innovation and Podular Design

January 31, 2013

Podulation -- From Dave Gray's Connected Company

Podular Design — From Dave Gray’s Connected Company

In Social is the plural of personal JP Rangaswami contends that institutional innovation is required to achieve the potential that social software offers organizations in general, and for-profit companies in particular. JP’s voice is one of several important contributions to current thinking about innovation. For another example consider the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program. It produced a series of roundtables with the Deloitte Center for the Edge over the past few years. Until the 2011 session the focus was largely on talent development. However, in the most recent session, Institutional Innovation: Oxymoron or Imperative?, the focus was on institutional innovation. It is an interesting change in terminology largely because much of the attention in the learning and development world today is on talent management along with employee engagement as cutting edge concerns. However, as Richard Adler the Rapporteur for the Aspen sessions, explains,

If institutions developed in and optimized for the previous generation of infrastructure are no longer working, then where innovation is most urgently needed is not in product development but in the design of institutions themselves.

Let me just say, I don’t challenge the idea that product innovation cycles are shorter due to globalization, nor that product innovation cycles are important to companies today. The whole focus of customer experience management emphasizes learning from customers while they learn from you, whether through ethnographic research , traditional surveys, or social media analytics, but always with the intent to better fit product/service experiences with the customer’s needs.

My point is that the most important innovation challenges are now in fact institutional in nature. Many companies employ senior executives and managers who use social networks in their personal lives but are either reluctant or stymied about how to integrate similar patterns of communication into their work. This point is reinforced by the recent finding of Stanford University and the Conference Board from a survey of 180 senior executives and corporate directors of North American public and private companies. The lead researcher concluded that, “We know that executives and board members are using social media. However, familiarity with social media is just not translating into systemic use at their companies.”

We continue to see organizational ambivalence over how social relationships contribute to business outcomes. For instance, a recent IBM study reported that only 22% of CIOs surveyed think managers are prepared to incorporate social media into their work. Managers generally fail to acknowledge that social networks contribute to business outcomes and that enabling human connections between stakeholders (employees, business partners, customers) adds value to the company when employees share a substantive understanding of the business purposes served by the enterprise’s organization. How to facilitate that substantive understanding is the biggest question facing anyone considering collaboration and innovation in today’s companies.

As my recent post, Revisiting the Great Innovation Debate contended, it is essential for people working in distant places, whether down the block, across the state, or on the other side of the world, to have a sense of a shared office to develop adaptive capabilities. Indeed, recent research on distributed work by Hinds and Cramton contends that knowing who one is collaborating with is a crucial part of the know how, the practical, institutional knowledge, that enables the adaptive capability organizations widely recognize they need to innovate, as well as deal with exceptions to process through informal and social learning.

The point isn’t totally new, nor is it passe’. As many social software vendors acknowledge, it is important to integrate collaboration tools into the flow of work for them to succeed as useful tools. However, as a previous post noted, Social Software, Community, and Organization, that doesn’t mean the social communication afforded by particular tools is more effective if it supports only formal workplace, i.e. functional, goals. Social software must afford the capability for those using it to develop shared experiences of one another as people, not just corporate role players.

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Leave a Comment » | Change Management, Collaboration, Experience Design, Innovation, Social Business Design, Social Media, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Business, business exceptions, Conference Board, connected company, Deloitte, great innovation debate, IBM, informal learning, institutional social media, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, JP Rangaswami, know how, knowing who, Knowledge Creation, Knowledge Management, pods, podular design, Richard Adler, social learning, social media institution, social software | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Social Flow and the Paradox of Exception Handling in ACM

September 28, 2011

: Compliments of Dave Gray’s photostream

There is nothing like an exception to the way things are done to highlight the need to increase knowledge sharing, especially if the exception is one instance of a pattern that results in bad experiences for customers. As Jay Cross recently noted, people learning at work rely on social, or informal learning, around 80% of the time. Interestingly, I noted in a former post, Social Learning and Exception Handling, that John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contend that “as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management is spent on exception handling.” It is not coincidence that the two numbers are aligned.

Social Learning and Exception Handling, discussed the organizational challenges involved in dealing with exceptions to business process and their relationship to the shared experience of people working together saying,

The most basic point to remember is that exceptions to formal business processes require efforts to design a scalable learning architecture that supports content co-creation needed to adapt to emergent challenges and manage the flow of that adaptation through an enterprise’s ecosystem. Whether judging an adaptation successful requires it to result in new formal learning content, i.e. content co-creation, or a new business process, i.e. organizational innovation, or both, remains an open question.

Informal, social learning is key to exception handling since both make up most of what people do in organizing work in enterprises. We know people face difficulty when drawing from shared experience, especially in distributed teams because fewer points of common reference exist. Leadership and management consultants often contend a common organizational culture pulls teams together, even though distributed teams frequently span national, regional, and global locations. However, the mere challenge of everyone on a team knowing who else is a member can prove daunting as enterprises grow.

One of the promises of social business is the capability to embed social networks into human relationships to organize business enterprise in a way that people can act together without centralized command and control. The discussions linking the capability involved with its organizational implications for group performance are far fewer. Dave Gray’s discussion of pods in The Connected Company is one notable effort in that direction. In my conception of it, the key challenge is one of organizing businesses for social flow.

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4 Comments | Change Management, Collaboration, Customer Experience | Tagged: ACM, adaptive case management, Business, Business process management, exception handling, informal learning, Performance management, shared experience, social flow, social learning | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Don’t Gamify Wild Bill

April 26, 2011

: Courtesy of eschipul photostream on flickr.

There is a lot, actually a whole lot, of buzz over the past year about the gamification of business, specifically marketing, training, customer service. The discussion too often overlooks the simple point that it is the experience with it, the playfulness of it, that makes a game. Not the scoring system, or the rewards, or anything else can make up for a game that participants (customers or employees) don’t experience as play. I’m not saying that incorporating game mechanics into relationships cannot create a motivating dynamic, at least over the short run. It certainly can.

Jesse Schell offered the point earlier this year that a game is a problem solving situation people enter into because they want to. He went on to say that if you can make a task feel like a situation people enter into because they want to then you’ve made it a game. Additionally, in her presentation “We Don’t Need No Stinkin Badges” Jane McGonical observes that gameful experience requires that participants experience the spirit of gaming rather than simply the mechanics, in other words that the rewards of playing a game people want to continue playing are intrinsic rather than extrensic.

The point of this post is to note that gamifying business to engage customers is one thing. Customers can almost always walk away from a commercial relationship if they want to, except perhaps in dealings with health insurance companies and utilities. Gamifying business to motivate employees is entirely another type of design challenge.

Using gamification to elicit patterns of action that enable employees to work together, such as knowledge sharing, easily slips into involuntary play and reinforces the type of competition that currently sustains siloed organizations. I’ll add to this point in a subsequent post on gameful collaboration where I contend gamification in social business aiming to increase collaboration must design for emergence, not just competition and cooperation, as guiding design principles for play. However, for now, let me just flesh out the point about gamifying employee relationships with an example from the construction industry and personal experience.

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4 Comments | Collaboration, Experience Design, Gameful Design, Learning Experience, Social Media | Tagged: Business, EBay, emergence, Game mechanics, Gamification, Gartner, intrinsic rewards, Jesse Schell, knowledge sharing, Maryland, Virginia Beach | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons