Lessons from the early adopters of corporate social media
March 15, 2010
The mainstream approach to management places a heavy emphasis on the formulation of plans and intentions and then communicating them as actions to be implemented by the organization. The starting point for change involves conceiving a picture of the future that is somewhat different from the picture of the present. After the content side is taken care of, the focus is then on providing tools for the process of change.
The approach that is made possible through enterprise social media is very different. The question that is now asked is: “How can people participate in such a way that things develop and change over time?”
The strategic focus of the early adopters of corporate social media is an ongoing continuous movement that is open-ended, and always incomplete. The strategic logic has been temporal rather than spatial. When following a spatial metaphor, there is a territory that can be explored and understood, but here the territory is seen as being under continuous development and formation by the exploration itself. “It is impossible to map an area that changes with every step the explorer takes.” People inhabit a world of emergence, uncertainty and responsive change.
Themes such as communities, social network analysis and social graph underline a fairly strong sense of definable relationships and a sense of “us”. Our studies, however, show that social media create a dynamic and shifting sense of groups one belongs to. Conversations always follow from previous conversations and move on involving others, often as a result of responses from outside the corporate firewall. Work utilizing social media has much less clear and managed beginnings and endings. There is, typically, no pre-conceived design for the pattern of work: it evolves live.
Corporate life is improvising together
Physical meetings in organizations are often more or less orchestrated and planned in advance: “You should come prepared. There should be a clear goal for the meeting.” Following this thinking, there is no true sense of creating the future together. It is much more likely that people construct what they have always constructed. When people use social media to connect, they experience the potential inherent in communication, depending on how they express themselves, and how they respond. “Social media create the experience of acting into the unknown, creating the future together, improvising together.”
By linking improvisation to a group, like in theatrical improvisation, we get to what is in fact happening in social media. All of us with our differing intentions, hopes and fears, are acting in corporate plays that are very close to improvisational theater. We are self-organizing in shifting social configurations in the responsive interplay of different players.
We are fellow-improvisers in corporate ensembles constantly constructing the future, and our part in what is happening, in responsive interaction. The idea of improvisation is often associated with notions of unrehearsed, unintentional action. However, the more skilled we are, the better we can improvise. The better we have planned, the more flexible we can be. The more intensely we are present, the more responsive we can be.
The real time web is creating a real time company
The most important outcome is that social media focus attention more on what people are doing in the present than on what they intend to do in the future. The focus is on communicative interaction, the next tweet and the latest blog post.
The pattern of relating also becomes very clear: “We get to see who is talking and who is silent? Who is invited to join and who is excluded or opts out?” The focus of attention is on the processes of participation and the life stream as the narrative of progress.
A senior manager in a very large multinational corporation explained the impact of social media: “Since I moved away from thinking that what I do is manage the corporation through communicating with the whole corporation, I have started to pay attention to my own participation with the people I meet or should meet, and my responses in everyday interaction. Through asking different kinds of questions and through pointing to different kinds of issues, through changing my own participation, I have in fact changed my company.”
Thank you Keith Johnstone, Srikumar Rao, Patricia Shaw and Doug Griffin
On Apple and Nokia
February 14, 2010
The terms “knowledge worker” and “knowledge society” are around fifty years old. Peter Drucker and Fritz Machlup, a less known Princeton economist, coined them at roughly the same time around 1960.
Although the concepts have now been around for a long time, it seems that the implications for corporations are not clear yet and don’t show in the way competitive strategies are made. What is quite evident is that the emerging society is different in many ways from the industrial society.
There are some things we know about knowledge work.
Effective skills are always specialized, as regards both, successful companies and effective people. This means that highly knowledge-based companies are always, by definition, only a partial answer to the opportunities available. Michael Porter made us to think that the players in the game of business were (1) companies, (2) customers and (3) suppliers together with old and new (4) competitors coming with alternative (5) offerings. This was called the five forces model. The company was seen as an independent, self-contained unit of competition.
Seven years ago, Bill Gates spoke often of the pet project of his. It was going to change computing for millions of people. It was the touch screen tablet PC. The device is still on sale, but it never raised a fraction of the interest that the iPad is now generating. Was it because Microsoft did the project alone?
Because of specialized, narrow skill sets, a new role with a new role definition is needed in knowledge work. Nobody, not even Microsoft, can be successful without supporting contributions from network partners. The new role is a “complementor”. A complementor is not the same as a supplier. The connection is based on a non-hierarchic network relation, not the hierarchic value chain. Complementary contributions may be the most important explanation of business success today. What would the iPad or the iPhone be without the applications made by people outside Apple?
A classic example of complements is computer hardware and computer software. The greatest hardware engineers are in dire straits without the greatest software programmers, as Nokia has found out. Though the idea of complements is most apparent in ICT, the principle is universal: you can never have in-house all the specialized skills you need. A complement to an offering is another offering that makes it more attractive. People value hot dogs more when they have mustard. Because knowledge work is specialized, it never pays to try to make both.
The new strategic imperative is to identify complementors and to be inviting to them. To be competitive, is to be “selfishly” collaborative.
Thank you Barry Nalebuff
Enterprise 2.0
February 8, 2010
Corporations are the dominant mechanism by which economic activity is organized in our economies. How companies perform and what helps them to perform better are hence questions of huge importance. Corporations have such an enormous influence on our lives that corporate decision-making and actions might well deserve more attention right now than does discussing the new Enterprise 2.0 tools. Or, to put it in another way: what kind of changes in our corporate thinking would enable maximum benefits to be gained from social media?
One key question in corporate governance is, who should have the right to make what decisions, and why.
Instead of thinking that we already know the answer, let’s look at what is going on. Companies that focus on their share price, which is the business press doctrine, have the incentive to shut down, or move operations that are not generating the best possible profits for their shareholders, even though those operations are still generating substantial economic value in the area they are located in.
From the point of view of the people who are employed, and the society where those corporations are located, this is obviously not very efficient. I am not against globalization, quite the contrary, but it is doubtful whether maximizing the value of shares, maximizes social wealth. Can it be that the idea of companies’ “raison d étre” being the maximizing of shareholder value is a dangerously incomplete performance standard in post-industrial economies?
I am not suggesting at all that firms should serve all their stakeholders, or even society at large. I am certainly not talking about social responsibility here. What I am claiming is that there are other parties, other than shareholders, who have made an investment in the enterprise. In order to understand this, we should start by asking who is contributing to the enterprise, and what, and who is bearing what risk.
The question I am raising here is whether we can think of employees as labour any more. It matters in a very specific way who does what. The contributions of knowledge workers cannot be understood as fixed-wage generic inputs, but they can easily be understood as risk investments, in the very same way as we today understand shareholders’ financial contributions. We should ask whether the current social construct of allocating risks and rewards is inevitable for some reason, or whether it is an outdated industrial artefact that should be redesigned?
A large part of the economic surplus that a company creates is paid to the employees as wages. This is treated as an operating cost. Naturally, costs should be lowered. The picture would look somewhat different if we understood employees as being investors of human capital, and treated them accordingly. Our system of industrial management creates a systemic inefficiency in knowledge-based work. It can only be removed if the worker’s role included a more active (managerial) responsibility leading to responsive, agile practices. This cannot be achieved unless our mental construct of the employer employee relationship changes radically.
The change would mean that employees would explicitly bear the entrepreneurial accountability for the success or failure of the company, as they do any way and additionally benefit from any possible upside, just as shareholders do. From the point of view of corporate governance, it would mean that companies should be run in the interests of their employees, as much as in the interests of their owners.
To be honest, I don’t think that Enterprise 2.0 has that many employees, more contributors of different resources – mainly financial capital and human capital. Some investors invest for a long term, some for a very short term.
Thank you Gary Becker, Margaret Blair and Yochai Benkler
Knowledge management and lifestreams
January 31, 2010
Social sciences are concerned with understanding and representation of what is going on and what has happened.
Earlier, social scientists took great leaders, cultures and social structures as the topics to be explained. The contextual nature of those topics was a less interesting concern. More recent approaches to social phenomena can be summarized as trying to understand temporality and the process of becoming, a live movement in time that either gives rise to viability or makes us slowly, or rapidly, obsolete. How does this happen? How does continuity happen? How does change happen? What creates agility and vitality? The lifestream of individuals and corporations is the new focus area. Lifestreams are also called activity streams. These are voices against the corporate rhetoric stressing the need for continuous reinvention, without any need to respect the past or even know where you come from. Continuity is seen as just the dead form of the past and memories belonging to the private world of old sweethearts and childhood summers.
Memories do matter. Memories are representations of the past that are manifested in the present, sometimes unconsciously, and carried forward into the future. Accordingly, what is happening as we live on, is forgetting. There are many things and lessons learned that we should not forget. Taking an extreme example: There have been many instances in political history where powerful people have tried to erase the memory of what has happened. This was the case with the Nazis and the case with Stalin re-writing history. In both cases it led to a determined attempt to remember, as a protest, and as means to ensure that such things could never happen again.
In business and management studies, the questions of becoming, remembering and forgetting are not only new concerns. They are the essence of modern knowledge management.
Corporations are outsourcing their activities and downsizing at the same time as the baby boomer generation reaches retirement. The growing concern is what is lost as a consequence? The statement arousing fear was: “People are walking out of the door and taking their knowledge with them.” The solution to this problem then was: “Let’s extract knowledge from the people and put it in databases. This way the individual knowledge is transformed into corporate knowledge.” This never really worked. It was the doomed dream of the IT-school of knowledge management.
Lifestream is the visualization of progress
There is fear about memory loss in business, but there is also the opposite fear that memory produces practices in the present that should best be forgotten. Anthropologists claim that reproduction of the past is easier than change. This often leads us into situations where the past is no longer an adequate guide in the present, leading to a situation where the knowledge asset turns into a liability.
The location of these assets in the corporate world has been databases and the process of knowledge management has been the production, maintenance and retrieval of written documents. These documents and databases then are the main resources for reflection and re-use. However, “remembering” does not happen until the documents are actually worked with. Files are assets only when used. A book is just a pile of paper before it is opened. Knowledge related practices should therefore be much more in the focus than the form and location of data storage.
Knowledge intensive work takes place in communication. The process of knowing is the process of communication. The most important knowledge management challenge is to understand what takes place in that interaction: what is being discussed? What is not discussed, what is silenced? Who is included in the conversation, who is excluded? The most important measurements are how the common narrative develops, how fast, and where to? An organization should be seen as a pattern in time, a lifestream, a continuing story without beginnings. Everything we do is built on what has happened before.
New people join this narrative and people leave. Work is dynamic participation and influencing how the story develops towards the future. Without understanding where we come from, our history, it is impossible to know whether we move at all, whether the flurry of daily activities is actually keeping us stuck in repetitive patterns without any progress. The same people having the same conversation again and again, as seems to be the case in politics today.
Our past, together with our intentions for the future are present in the daily, mundane actions and interactions that often pass without notice. Lifestream is the ongoing storyline.
Lifestream is the means for pattern recognition to help create the future we truly desire.
Thanks @chrismessina for your thoughts.
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Networked knowledge and the process of knowing
January 21, 2010
Most of the information on the Internet is worthless to the majority of people. This obscures the transformative change going on at the moment. People are storing less and less information “inside”, inside computers, in private folders or in their memory because there is a new, better alternative: in the always on, always connected world, information is available “outside” on the Internet, more easily and more cheaply, with considerably smaller search costs. This is causing a fundamental shift in the way we manage information, use our ICT tools, or understand the competencies needed in the knowledge-intensive economy.
Before the Internet and efficient mobile communication devices, most professional occupations required individual competencies that in most cases had accumulated over years. This experience base, often called tacit knowledge, was used to retrieve answers from memory and to independently solve situations arising at work. Knowledge was situated in the individual. In order to help individuals cope with the challenges of everyday life, individual competencies needed to be developed. Our whole education system is still very largely based on independent individual learning and knowing.
The cognitive load of work has increased as a result of manufacturing giving way to knowledge-intensive work. As a consequence, the content of work is changing from generic, repetitive practices to contextual, creative practices. This makes the individual experience base, by default, too narrow a starting point for efficient work. Experiences can be a huge asset but experiences can also be a liability, creating recurrence where there should be innovation. Knowledge work is not performed by independent individuals but by interdependent people in interaction. A new way to understanding work and competencies is unfolding: many knowledge workers claim that today they can know, on demand, by communicating with their network and retrieving answers from the Internet, more easily than from their own “inside” sources.
Knowledge used to be understood as the internal property of an individual. Today knowledge should be seen as networked communication. This requires us to learn new ways of talking about education, competencies and work itself. What is also needed is to unlearn the reductionist organizing principles that are still the mainstream. Work is communication and the network is the amplifier of knowledge.
The process of communication is the process of knowing. You can only know what you are doing in conversation. If we want to influence the process of knowing we need to develop new habits of participation and new habits of communication. This is what the new interaction technologies and tools allow us to do. This is also where agile practices impact on knowledge work in a similar way to that in which lean practices impacted on manufacturing. The creation of new habits of agile participation and new habits of communication is the primary focus of my research and my practice.
Thank you Doug Griffin for thinking and working on this with me.
The agile organization
January 14, 2010
The management approach to getting something done is to create an organization. If something new and different needs to be done, a new and different kind of organizational form needs to be put into effect. Changing the lines of accountability and reporting is the epitome of change in firms. When a new manager enters the picture, the organizational outline is very often changed into a “new” organization. But does changing the organization really change what is done? Does the change actually change anything?
An organization is metaphorically a picture of walls defining who is inside and who is outside a particular box. Who is included and who is excluded. Who we are and who they are. This way of thinking was fine in repetitive work where it was relatively easy to define what needed to be done and by whom as a definition of the quantity of labour and quality of capabilities. As a result, communication design created two things: the process chart and reporting lines.
In creative, knowledge based work it is increasingly difficult to know the best mix of capabilities and tasks in advance. In many firms reporting routines are the least important part of communication. Much more flexibility than the process maps allow is needed. Interdependence between peers involves, almost by default, crossing boundaries. The walls seem to be in the wrong position or in the way making work harder to do. What then is the use of the organizational theatre when it is literally impossible to define the “organization” before we actually do something?
What if the organization really should be an ongoing process of emergent self-organizing? Instead of thinking about the organization let’s think about organizing. If we take this view we don’t think about walls but we think about what we do and how groups are formed around what is actually going on or what should be going on. The role of management is then to define tasks and outcomes but not to say who does what. The new task for managers is to make possible a very easy and very fast emergent formation of groups and to make it as easy as possible for the best contributions from the whole network to find the applicable tasks, without knowing beforehand who knows.
The focal point in organizing is not the organizational entity one belongs to, or the manager one reports to, but the reason that brings people together. What activities and tasks unite us? What is the cause for interdependence and group formation? My friend Jyri Engeström calls this a social object. My understanding of “social object” as an idea is more derived from the work of George Herbert Mead and my friend and mentor Doug Griffin. Because of this different background, a social object, in my vocabulary, is more often called a context or even an attractor. Although the word attractor has a different and very specific meaning in the sciences of complexity, I like the picture of an organization without walls, rather like magnetic fields defined by gradually fading rings of attraction.
These contexts create transparent, permeable boundaries between them, not walls. Instead of the topology or organizational boxes that are often the visual representation of work, the architecture of work is a live social graph of interdependence and accountability. Our thinking about organizations is very much based on the old expensive and low-quality communication. The reality today is very different. Communication as the key driver in organizing is both high-quality and cheap. One of the biggest promises of social media is easy and efficient group formation! It is just our thinking that is in the way of bringing down the walls.
The individual and the social on the social web
December 26, 2009
There are two distinctly different approaches to understanding the individual and the social on the social web. Mainstream thinking sees the social as a platform or a community, on a different level from the individuals who form it. The social is separate from the individuals. A totally different approach to social media sees individuals as social. Both the individual and the social are then about interaction, where the individual is interaction “inside” and the social is interaction “outside”. The interaction inside is silent and private, while the interaction outside is vocal and more public. The main difference from the first approach is that the inside and outside cannot be separated or understood separately. Here I repeat my friend, Professor Ralph Stacey, and his work which builds on that of Norbert Elias and George Herbert Mead: here both the individual and the social are sides of the same process of communication. The individual is the singular of interdependence while the social is the plural.
Identities form in interaction
If we subscribe to the second approach, the main importance of social media is in the formation of who we are. An individual recognizes herself, as a self, in the recognition of those she follows and who follow her on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook etc. In this way of thinking, we leave behind the notion of the self-governing, independent individual for a different notion, of interdependent people whose identities are established in interaction with each other as Doug Griffin, my dear friend and teacher has put it. From this perspective, individual change cannot be separated from changes in the groups to which an individual belongs. And changes in the groups don’t take place without the individuals changing. We form our groups and our followerships and they form us at the same time, all the time. Identity is a pattern in time.
Patterns of communication predict viability
People in companies are often stuck in narrow, repetitive patterns of conversation that provide them with numbing, repressive and even neurotic experiences. We should look at communication as the most predictive group activity there is in forecasting viability and agility. The opportunity provided by social media lies in the widening and deepening of communication as the result of emergent organizing, leading to new voices taking part and new conversations that cross siloed organizational units and stale process charts.
The promise of social media is as much in connecting people inside the company with people outside, the buyers, the users, the customers in a rich variety of situations. Richer, more challenging, more exploratory conversations leave people feeling more alive, more inspired and capable of far more creative action. The challenge is that these conversations typically don’t take place on company sites or inside firewalls but on the social web.
A key management challenge today is to understand that the only way to guarantee an agile corporate identity is to actively and widely participate in the conversations that matter.
Thank you Doug Griffin and Ralph Stacey. I have followed you since 1996 and I always will!
Digitaalinen työ, tietoverkot ja johtaminen
December 8, 2009
Liikkeenjohdossa ei yleensä puhuta siitä mitä tapahtuu, vaan siitä mitä pitäisi tapahtua tai mitä on tapahtunut. Sille, mitä juuri nyt tapahtuu ei tavallisesti anneta aikaa. Mutta mitä jos juuri ajalla ja paikalla onkin huomattavasti enemmän merkitystä kuin olemme ymmärtäneet? Mitä jos toiminnan tuloksellisuus onkin merkittävällä tavalla kiinni intensiivisestä läsnäolosta juuri siinä tilanteessa missä ollaan? Mitä jos kontekstiherkkyys ja siitä nouseva ketteryys ovatkin liikkeenjohtamisessa huomattavasti tärkeämpiä asioita kuin aika- ja paikkariippumattomat yleistykset menestykseen johtavista kausaliteeteista? Mitä jos toiminnalla on aina parasta ennen päiväys? Mitä jos jälkikäteen tapahtuvalla mittamisella ei voi ymmärtää sitä mitä tapahtui, puhumattakaan siitä, että toimintaa voisi tehokkasti ohjata mittareilla? Mitä jos tärkeintä on intensiivisempi osallistuminen tilannetta rikastavalla tavalla?
Organisaatioiden toiminta on toisistaan riippuvaisten ihmisten vuorovaikutusta. Vuorovaikutus on aina kontekstisidonnaista. Se tapahtuu aina ajassa ja paikassa, kontekstissa. Tässä vuorovaikutuksessa ihmiset sekä mahdollistavat asioita toisilleen että rajoittavat toisiaan. Samaten kontekstisidonnaisesti kutsumme ihmisiä mukaan, mahdollistamme osallistumisen tai jätämme ihmisiä ulkopuolelle, suljemme pois. Vallankäyttö verkostoissa perustuu juuri näihin muuttujiin: mahdollistamiseen – rajoittamiseen sekä mukaan kutsumiseen – pois sulkemiseen.
Johtaminen on vaikuttamista, joka tapahtuu kommunikaatiossa. Tämän johdosta johtajaa ei voi nähdä erillisenä, ulkopuolisena vuorovaikutuksen arkkitehtina, suunnittelijana. Ainoa mahdollisuus vaikuttaa on kommunikaation kautta – siihen osallistumalla. Johtajan tapa osallistua vuorovaikutukseen selittääkin merkittävällä tavalla organisaation menestystä tai menestymättömyyttä tänään. Johtaja on erityisen näkyvä ja arvovaltainen osallistuja kommunikaatiossa. Johtajalla on myös erityisen suuret valtuudet mahdollistaa asioita, jotka eivät muuten olisi mahdollisia tai kutsua mukaan vuorovaikutukseen tavalla, joka ei olisi kaikille mahdollista. Käänteisesti voimme kuvitella johtamisotteen, joka pelkästään rajoittaa tai estää osallistumista.
Johtaminen verkoston suhteiden ominaisuutena
Yhtä lailla kuin puhumme johtajasta vuorovaikutuksessa, meidän tulisi nähdä, että mahdollistamme ja rajoitamme toisiamme kaikissa suhteissa koko ajan. Johtaminen onkin suhteiden ja vuorovaikutuksen ominaisuus verkostossa yhtä lailla tai jopa enemmän kuin (johtaja)yksilön ominaisuus asemalähtöisesti.
Johtamista tuleekin tarkastella verkoston toiminnassa yhtä paljon tai jopa ensisijaisesti kun pyrimme ymmärtämään johtamista tänään. Vaikuttaminen ei ole vain aseman kautta syntyvä mahdollisuus. Verkostossa tapahtuukin aina paljon enemmän johtamista, ja harhaanjohtamista, kuin mihin esimies voi tai ehtii osallistua. Mielipiteet, joille annetaan arvoa, vaikuttavat samalla tavalla kuin mihin vaikuttaja asemastaan käsin pystyy.
Johtaminen vaikuttamisena syntyy samanaikaisesti johtajan suhteena alaiseen ja alaisen suhteena johtajaan. Esimiehen arvostus alaista kohtaan ja alaisen arvostus esimiestä kohtaan tarvitaan samanaikaisesti. Alainen tekee johtajan hyvin samalla tavalla kuin olemme ajatelleet johtajan tekevän alaisen. Esimies ei voi enää olla esimies ilman, että alainen haluaa olla alainen. Kielenkäyttömme liittyen vaikuttamiseen verkostossa on kuitenkin liian kapea ja stereotyyppinen. Kuvittelemme, että siinä on vain kahdenlaisia toimijoita: esimiehiä ja alaisia. Meiltä puuttuu sanoja, jotka paremmin selittäisivät verkoston toimintaa ja siinä tapahtuvaa vaikuttamista, johtamista ohi esimies – alaissuhteen.
Vuorovaikutuksen laatu
Kun ymmärrämme organisaatiot toisiaan tarvitsevien ihmisten vuorovaikutuksena kääntyy huomio vuorovaikutuksen laatuun. Johtamisessa korostuu tänään luovuuden ihanne. Vuorovaikutuksessa se tarkoittaa, että ihmiset hakeutuvat kohti niitä, jotka pystyvät luomaan merkityksiä syntyville, vielä epäselville, nouseville, uusille teemoille. Johtaja on silloin henkilö joka pystyy artikuloimaan sen, millä ei ole vielä hahmoa muiden mielessä. Käyttäessäni sanaa johtaja tarkoitan sekä mahdollisuutta vaikuttaa asemavallasta käsin että mahdollisuutta hajautettuun, emergenttiin vaikuttamiseen. Johtaja luovassa työssä on vastaavasti hän joka pystyy kestämään epävarmuutta kauemmin kuin muut ja hän joka mahdollistaa suuremman riskinoton luottamusta lisäämällä kuin muut.
Johtaminen tarkoittaa myös toistuviksi ja kapeiksi muuttuneiden aiheiden uudelleen määrittelyä vuorovaikutuksessa. Kaikki ihmisten välinen toiminta on kommunikaatiota. Johtaminen parhaimmillaan syventää, laajentaa ja rikastaa vuorovaikutusta. Tämä on erityisen tärkeää organisaation pyrkiessä parantamaan tuottavuutta, tai tilanteessa jossa vanhentuneet, liian kauan jatkuneet toimintamallit ovat kriisiytyneet. Tarkasteltaessa kriisiytynyttä tilannetta, on hyvin tavallista huomata, että vuorovaikutus on joko loppunut, sitä ei ole ollutkaan, tai se on kapeaa, samoja asioita neuroottisesti toistavaa ja samaa kehää kiertävää uudelleen ja uudelleen. Dominoiva osallistuja myös vaientaa helposti keskustelun ja siten jumiuttaa organisaation paikalleen. Johtajan tärkeä tehtävä on saada paikalleen juuttunut tilanne liikkeelle tuomalla vuorovaikutukseen uusia elementtejä tai kutsumalla mukaan uusia näkökulmia.
Tietoverkko mahdollistaa jatkuvan organisoitumisen ajassa
Toisiaan tarvitsevien ihmisten vuorovaikutus on yhä useammin perinteisiä rajoja ylittävää. Toisiaan tarvitsevuus ei ole ainoastaan fyysisesti paikallista. Tietoverkkopohjainen vuorovaikutus määrittelee uudelleen aikaisemmin fyysisesti paikallisen vuorovaikutuksen digitaalisesti kontekstuaaliseksi ja sitä kautta määrittelee myös uudelleen sen mistä puhutaan, kun puhutaan kilpailukykyisestä toimijasta globaalissa kilpailussa. Ei ole välttämättä hedelmällistä nähdä maata kilpailemassa muita maita vastaan, tai puhua monoliittisesta yrityksestä kilpailemassa muita yrityksiä vastaan. Vaihtoehtona voisi olla kilpailun ja yhteistyöverkostojen jatkuva dynaaminen, ketterä muodostuminen. Tavoitteena olisi nähdä elinvoimainen toiminta jatkuvana, joustavana organisoitumisena ajassa, jossa vuorovaikutukseen osallistuvat muodostavat koko ajan muuttuvia, eläviä ryhmiä digitaalisessa verkossa ja sitä kautta koko ajan muuttuvan ja kehittyvän hahmon ja elinvoimaisen, dynaamisen identiteetin.
Miltä liikkeenjohtaminen näyttäisi jos se keksittäisiin tänään?
December 7, 2009
Liikkeenjohdon tematiikka, leadership/management, niin kuin me sen tunnemme tänään yritysten ja organisaatioiden maailmassa, syntyi 1800-luvun lopulla ja 1900-luvun alussa. Liikkeenjohto uutena tieteenä haki olemassa ololleen validiteetin tuon ajanjakson tieteellisestä paradigmasta. Erityisesti luonnontieteissä aika oli voimakkaasti kiinni valistuksen ajan ihanteissa ja Newtonilaisessa fysiikassa. Elettiin insinööritieteiden kulta-aikaa. Todellisuus ymmärrettiin objektiiviseksi, todeksi todennettavaksi maailmaksi havaitsijan ulkopuolella. Jos käytettiin oikeita havaitsemisvälineitä ja ajattelua, tuo, joskus hyvinkin monimutkainen maailma voitiin mallintaa ja siinä voitiin havaita rationaalisia syy- seuraussuhteita, jotka antoivat mahdollisuuden löytää oikeat tavat vaikuttaa.
Johtaja on tässä maailmassa rationaalinen toimija ja päätöksentekijä, jonka tehtävänä on tietää mitkä kausaliteettien ketjut tuovat organisaatiolle sen tavoitteleman menestyksen. Samalla tavalla kuin reduktionistinen tiede toimi, organisaatiot voitiin parhaiten ymmärtää niiden osittamisen kautta. Erilliset osat muodostivat puolestaan mekanistisen, systeemisen aktiviteettien kokonaisuuden, joka toimi johdon suunnittelemalla tavalla. Huomio johtamisessa tuli tämän ajattelutavan mukaisesti kohdistaa niihin olemassa oleviin ja tarvittaviin syy – seuraussuhteisiin, jotka toteuttavat organisaation menestyksen parhaalla mahdollisella tavalla.
Yhtä tärkeää oli motivoida mukana olevat ihmiset yhteisiin, johdon luomiin tavoitteisiin, sekä prosessien säätelemään vuorovaikutukseen. Organisaatioihanne jäljitteli konetta vaihdettavine osineen. Koneen toiminta taasen perustui tehokkaisiin input – output suhteisiin, joissa resurssit muuttuivat suoritteiksi. Työtä tekevät yksilöt olivat tässä maailmassa yksi resurssi muiden resurssien joukossa.
Organisaation rakenne ja prosessit kuvattiin tässä lähestymistavassa tavallisimmin yleistyksinä. Yleistäminen tarkoittaa, että rakenteet ja (vuorovaikutus)prosessit eivät ole tilanteesta, kontekstista, riippuvaisia, vaan yleisesti päteviä aikariippumattomalla ja tilanneriippumattomalla tavalla. Kontekstilla ei ole merkitystä. Yleistävästä ajattelusta seuraa myös, että tavallisesti voidaan löytää, usein organisaation ulkopuolelta uusi, paras tapa tehdä joku asia. Tämä uusi tapa voidaan sitten siirtää tilanteesta toiseen ilman, että historiasta tai paikasta tarvitsee välittää.
Epävarmuuden maailma
Arkikokemuksissamme korostuvat yllätykset, muutokset ja kehityskulut, joita ei ole voitu ennustaa tai joita ei ole edes suunniteltu kenenkään toimesta. Epävarmuus on elimellinen osa yritystoimintaa ja osa elämää. Epävarmuus ei liity pelkästään siihen mitä tapahtuu seuraavaksi, vaan myös siihen mitä juuri nyt tapahtuu tai hyvinkin erilaisiin tulkintoihin siitä mitä on tapahtunut. Yhteisten, ”ylempää annettujen” tavoitteiden ohella yksilöiden omat tavoitteet, omat agendat, arvot, tulkinnat ja suunnitelmat ohjaavat ennakoimattomalla tavalla sitä mitä tapahtuu. Rationaalisuuden ohella tunteet ja poliittiset päämäärät ohjaavat toimintaa ja päätöksiä. Väärinymmärrykset ja väärät tulkinnat vaikuttavat yhtä paljon kuin oikeatkin. Suunnitelmat toteutuvat hyvin harvoin juuri niin kuin oli tarkoitus tai kuten oli suunniteltu.
Johtamisen taustalla olevan rationaalisen, lineaarisen kausaliteetin ihanne on hyvin kaukana siitä arkitodellisuudesta, jonka tunnistamme. Näyttäisikö liikkeenjohtaminen erilaiselta jos se ottaisi lähtökohdaksi toimimisen epävarmuudessa ja jos sen tieteellinen maailmankuva päivittyisi tämän päivän tasolle?
Johtaminen kompleksisessa ympäristössä
Yritystoiminta on aina toisiaan tarvitsevien ihmisten vuorovaikutusta. Miltä johtaminen näyttäisi, jos lähtökohta olisi, että ihmisten välisessä vuorovaikutuksessa kausaalisuhteet ovat aina ei-lineaarisia: osittain tiedämme mitä tapahtuu seuraavaksi, osittain emme. Osittain voimme ennustaa, osittain emme. Toiminnassa on aina mukana epävarmuus, jota ei voida poistaa. Johtaja voi suunnitella mitä itse tekee seuraavaksi, mutta ei voi koskaan täysin tietää mitä muut tekevät seuraavaksi. Johtajan pyrkimykset kohtaavat kaikkien muiden, aina osittain samanlaiset, osittain erilaiset pyrkimykset. Mitä tapahtuu, on seurausta kaikista näistä toisiinsa vaikuttavista erilaisista pyrkimyksistä. Se, mikä on tulema kun erilaisten ihmisten erilaiset tulkinnat, pyrkimykset ja toiminta vaikuttavat toisiinsa on aina enemmän tai vähemmän piilossa ja epävarmaa. Kukaan yksittäinen toimija ei voi kontrolloida sitä, mitä lopulta tapahtuu, vaikka siihen voikin vaikuttaa.
Tästä seuraa että emme voi enää pitää erillään, eri vaiheina suunnittelua ja tekemistä, ajattelua ja ajattelun ”jalkautusta”. Suunnittelu ja toteutus eivät ole käsitteellisesti kaksi erillistä vaihetta ajassa, vaan saman asian kaksi puolta samanaikaisesti. Suunnitelma on suunnitelma, vain siinä määrin kuin se toteutuu. Tämä johtaa tilanteeseen, jossa suunnittelu on ehdottoman tärkeää, mutta joustavuutta vähentävät suunnitelmat eivät. Paradoksaalisesti, mitä paremmin suunnittelemme, sen paremmin voimme tarvittaessa toimia ketterästi muuttuneissa tilanteissa. Mitä paremmin osaamme ja tiedämme sen paremmin voimme improvisoida.
Koska emme voi perustaa toimiamme ja päätöksiämme täydelliseen tietämiseen, pitäisikö meidän paremmin ymmärtää miten toimimme silloin kun emme tiedä? Vaikka emme voi poistaa epävarmuutta, voimme varmuudella tietää miten toimimme, kun pyrimme elämään epävarmuudessa.
Jatkuu postissa: digitaalinen työ, tietoverkot ja johtaminen
