What it takes to get a job done
April 25, 2011
Physical tasks can normally be broken up in a reductionist way. Bigger tasks can be divided by assigning people to different smaller parts of the whole. For intellectual tasks, it is much harder to find parts that make for an efficient division of labour. Intellectual tasks are by default linked and complex. Reductionism does not work.
The machine metaphor led to the belief that if we only can arrange the parts in the right way, we optimize efficiency. When the image of work was the assembly line, work could be fragmented and individual performance goals could be set for each worker. The world was all about little boxes separated from one another.
The demands of work are different now: how efficient an organization is reflects the links people have with one another and the links they have to the contexts of value. How many handshakes separates them from one another and from the things that matter? We are beginning to see the world as relations.
When we talk about relations, we often take examples from nature: murmuration and bird flocks. The V shape of a bird flock does not result from one bird being selected as the leader, and the other birds lining up behind the leader. Instead, each bird’s behaviour is based on its position relative to nearby birds. Ornithologists say that the V shape is not planned or centrally determined; it emerges out of simple, and relatively few, rules of interaction. The bird flock demonstrates a striking feature of emergent phenomena. But the birds do not need to figure out the rules of flight that guide how they organize themselves. These rules are genetically hardwired. Nature provides this for the birds.
Birds then are not “free like birds”.
When it comes to people it is a different story. Mother nature does not provide deterministic rules for collaboration. We are free to choose, or not to choose, our own ways of doing things together. Accordingly we are ourselves responsible for formulating the principles we use to organize our life. Social systems are thus fundamentally different from natural mechanisms.
New architectures of work
We have examples of social architectures that redefine some basic beliefs about social systems.
The wiki is at the moment the best departure from division of labor and workflows. Wikis let people work digitally together the very same way they would work face-to-face. In a physical meeting, there are always more or less the wrong people present and the transaction costs are very high. Unlike email, which pushes copies of the same information to people to work or edit separately, a wiki pulls non co-located people together to work collaboratively, and with very low transaction costs. Email and physical meetings are excluding ways of doing things. They leave people out. A wiki (depending on the topic, the context) is always inviting and including. The goal is to enable groups to form around shared contexts without preset organizational walls, or rules of engagement.
Ward Cunningham described his invention in 1995 as the simplest online database that could possibly work. An important principle of the wiki is the conscious emphasis on using as little structure as possible to get the job done. A wiki does not force hierarchy on the people. In this case, less structure and less hierarchy mean less transaction costs. A wiki always starts out flat, with all the pages on the same level. This allows people to dynamically create the organization and hierarchy that makes most sense in the situation at hand to get the job done.
People work together to reach a balance of different viewpoints through interaction as they iterate the content of work. The wiki way of working is essentially the digital and more advanced version of a meeting or a workshop. It enables multiple people to inhabit the same space, see the same thing and participate freely. Some might just listen, some make comments or a small edits, while others might make more significant contributions and conclusions.
New work is about responsive, free and voluntary participation by people who contribute as little, or as much as they like, and who are motivated by something much more elusive than only money. The society has moved away from the era of boxes to the time of networks and linked individualism. Being connected to people – from elsewhere – is a cultural necessity and links, not boxes, are the new texture of value creation.
Organizations are their communicative performance.
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Thank you R. Keith Sawyer, Stewart Mader, Robert Cummings, Rod Collins, Doug Griffin, Kim Weckström, Richard Harper and Yochai Benkler
More on the subject: Center for Network Culture. The Agile Manifesto. About Ushahidis. Zen habits. Examples of wikis.
From information to conversation
January 14, 2011
People often need to act and make decisions in situations in which causality is poorly understood, where there is considerable uncertainty and people hold different beliefs and have personal biases. However, people very reluctantly acknowledge that they face ambiguity at work. Problems in organizations tend to get labeled as lack of information. It feels more professional to try to solve a knowledge management problem that is called lack of information than a problem that is called confusion.
Knowledge workers are often put in a position where they have to negotiate some understanding of what they face. The same event means different things to different people and just getting more information will not help them. What will help is a setting where they could negotiate and construct fresh ideas that would include their multiple interpretations of what they experience. The challenge is that managers often treat the existence of multiple views as a symptom of a weakness rather that as an accurate and needed barometer of uncertainty.
A mix of stimuli always surrounds people. The stimuli have no meaning apart from what the individuals make of it. In other words, the environment is a product of the persons, not something outside of them. People are selective in what they attend to in any situation and what is attended to become the environment. The reality is not an objective set of arrangements outside us, but is continually constructed in daily interaction.
If people want to create shared meaning, they need to talk about their experience in close proximity to its occurrence and have a common platform for conversation. They need to see their different views about the experience as richness and a prerequisite to learn what is going on.
Because any information can mean a variety of things, meaning cannot simply be discovered. Information does not help. We have to talk! Many meetings that are directed at the problems of ambiguity fail to handle it because potentially rich views are silenced by autocratic leadership, norms that encourage harmony or reluctance to admit that one has no idea what is going on.
A crucial property of creative work is that situations are progressively clarified in iterative interaction. Our reality is an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people together make sense of the situations in which they find themselves.
Therefore our own joint sense-making actions are the determinants of the meaning that situations have. They are the true contents of our learning and development. Quoting Max Planck: “When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.”
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Thank you Doug Griffin, Jeffrey Sachs, Karl Weick, Stowe Boyd and Ralph Stacey
Background: Does more information mean we know less?
Communication as crowdsourcing
October 6, 2010
Communication constitutes reality. Communication is said to be the primary process by which human life is experienced: how we communicate creates and forms our experiences. Accordingly social life consists of dynamic interaction processes rather than stable structures. Therefore the way we communicate is of great interest. Where then do our communication-related habits come from?
We saw communication as a process of senders and receivers. The mass audience was seen as passive receivers and easily influenced by the media. The audience today is very different. Individuals have access to modes of communication that, just a few years ago, were available only for people working inside media channels. Most importantly the mathematical theory of communication, the concept of senders and receivers is not only unhelpful, but has been proven to be plain wrong in human communication!
Private and public modes of communication
Two distinct modes of communication have emerged and spread since the invention of the telegraph. The first mode was private point-to-point communication that was meant to connect people. The original telegraph was the classic example. It’s more developed form, the telephone, made synchronous communication between individuals on a global scale one of the defining technologies of the modern society.
The second mode was the public broadcasting of content. These two approaches to communication were advanced significantly by a series of innovations resulting in media technologies being perhaps the most socially disruptive developments of the past century, but the basic division into the two modes of private point-to-point and public broadcasting has remained essentially the same until now.
Thomas Edison filed a patent claim in the autumn of 1888 for a device, which, according to him “does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” The kinetoscope as it was called, carried a long spiral of tiny images that could be viewed in a moving sequence by turning a crank and peering through a magnifying glass. Edison’s vision of this new technology was quite quickly taken over by people who saw motion pictures not as a personal experience but as a publicly broadcasted mass media.
In the US the primary financing for radio and TV broadcast stations came very quickly from airtime used for advertising. In other countries, different models emerged. In Europe radio/TV was funded largely through license fees paid by radio/TV set owners. This model was grounded in the belief that radio/TV is a political voice that should serve the interest of the “people” and not the interest of making a profit.
The broadcasting model of communication was now turned into the property of either advertisers or politicians.
This was because of the inherited way of thinking about people’s actions. We have two major ways of understanding why people behave the way they do. On the one hand, there is the causal explanation. People change because of external forces. People can be influenced, educated, motivated or even forced to change their behaviour. This is the causal thinking of mainstream management theory: I send you a message and you act. I steer you and your use of time.
Complex responsiveness
On the other hand, there is the assumption of agency based on response-ability and responsiveness. Instead of seeing the audience as an undifferentiated, passive mass, we understand the audience as a network of people, forming small groups and larger communities. The commercial and political interest to broadcasting was a result from the belief that the media can mold masses. In contrast to earlier thinking, the society is today seen to consist of numerous differentiated communities, each with own values and interests. All media content is interpreted within the community according to social sense making within the group. The individuals are influenced more by their peers than by media. Meaning is not in the message, but is produced in interaction. Different people will understand what they view and read in very different ways.
Private broadcasting that connects people
A new, third form of communication in the digital, networked world combines broadcasting and point-to-point. The means of broadcasting are today available for individual people. They are not only the property of institutions. The audience for this new form of private broadcasting is not a passive mass, but the emerging, active communities that the individual wants to reach and connect with.
In it’s most basic form, responsive communication involves a three-part relationship: an initial broadcasted gesture from one individual, leaving it free who in the audience acts on the gesture, a voluntary response to that gesture by another, and resulting crowdsourced activity. Meaning here does not reside solely in any one of these parts but in the relationship of all three.
The passive audience view suggested that people are easily influenced by the media. The active audience view thinks that people make active decisions about how to aggregate, and how to respond. The mass society theories subscribed to the passive conception of the audience and public broadcasting. It is time now to subscribe to an active, responsive notion of the audience and the possibility of private broadcasting.
A transformative, third mode of communication is here.
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Thank you Robert Friedel, Kenneth Gergen, Stephen Littlejohn, Stowe Boyd, Doug Griffin, Clay Shirky, Kim Weckström and Jeff Jarvis
More on this: confused of calcutta and Using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” (The New York Times). Changing communication patterns.
What Knowledge Management should do?
March 6, 2010
Organizational reality is often seen in terms of processes and actions that are based on plans and designs. Acting should thus be based on this knowledge. Thinking is understood as different from and preceding acting.
Databases and documents are usually thought of as stores of knowledge. From the mainstream Knowledge Management perspective, knowledge is understood to be created by individuals. It becomes the asset of an organization when it is extracted from those individual heads and stored in documents.
But the everyday experiences we have do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents. What has happened can seldom be understood from the Excel sheets explaining the results of our actions. What really takes place is very rarely a repetition of these documented practices or a realization of the plans we have made.
The actions always vary. As the people with whom we interact change, the context of the interaction always changes. In other words, there is variation in processes, routines and actions. Actions are thus never based on knowledge that is separate from those actions and contexts. Accordingly actions are not explainable through documentation. Knowledge, in this sense, cannot be seen as residing in databases and attempts to store it in documents of some kind will capture only partial aspects of it.
Knowing cannot be separated from acting.
Interaction is the process of knowing!
From the point of view taken here, knowledge is always a process of responsive contextual, live interaction as Doug Griffin points out. It cannot simply be located in an individual head to be extracted as an organizational asset and then shared.
Knowledge is neither a stock nor a flow!
Knowledge is the act of interacting and new knowledge is created when ways of interaction, and therefore patterns of relationship change. The knowledge assets of an organization are the patterns of interaction between its members and knowledge is destroyed when relationships are missing or are destroyed, as is happening widely in the corporate world today. Key corporate assets are lost!
Organizational change, learning and knowledge creation are the same as changes in communication. Enabling new habits of communication and improving the quality of the conversation are the most important processes of knowledge management.
It is about bridging the gap between knowing and acting.
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Productivity and mobile devices
February 24, 2010
Lenovo unveiled their new tablet-capable business laptop last Monday. The company made a conscious decision not to bring out an iPad like tablet PC. They said customers don’t want it. “The feedback was that for our customers it would not work because of the need to have a physical keyboard.”
The discussion around a virtual or physical keyboard caught my attention. The purpose of a keyboard is fairly straightforward: to get words onto the recording medium. The ability to capture a symbolic representation of spoken language for storage or transfer frees information from the limits of individual memory or location. But do we need a physical keyboard for that?
The patent for the typewriter was awarded in 1868 to Christopher Sholes. An early problem of the typewriter was the jamming of the type bars when certain combinations of keys were struck in a very close sequence. As a solution to the problem, Sholes arranged his keyboard in such a way that the keys most likely to be struck in close succession were approaching the type point from opposite sides of the machine. The keyboard is actually configured to minimize speed of input. At the time, reducing the speed of the typewriter was the best way to prevent it from jamming. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to accomplish a now obsolete mechanical requirement. It can be claimed that it is very unproductive to use a keyboard as an interface to productivity tools. The situation would of course be different if we all used ten fingers and did not need to look at the keyboard as we type.
Mobile phones are still mainly associated with communication, not productivity software. As a result a knowledge worker needs two devices: a laptop and a mobile phone.
No mobile phone has created as much of a buzz as the Google Nexus One since Apple launched the iPhone. As in other Android-based mobile devices, there is no physical keyboard. Text input relies on a virtual keyboard. But there is also a voice-to-text input functionality. We could use our voice and video instead of a keyboard! And additionally the camera is paving the way towards augmented reality!
The third device category is tablets: bigger than mobile phones but smaller than laptops – and often without a physical keyboard. The critiques claim that tablets like the iPad are just laptops without keyboards, while others are really mobile phones with proper-sized keyboards, without any definition of a real market need. At least the Lenovo customers don’t want them. Hopefully the Lenovo case is not a matter of history repeating itself, as when Ken Olsen was explaining that DEC customers didn’t want PC’s.
The question here is not only how we think about the means of input. In the corporate context, it is even more about how we think about productivity and what kind of software can be called productivity software.
Productivity is a function of interaction
Instead of thinking about productivity as if it were associated with certain types of documents, it is closer to experience to think that productivity emerges or does not, in people’s interaction with each other and in interaction with the devices we use. Productivity is a function of interaction. Interaction is the content of social media! Therefore, it may not be a very good idea to bring the old document-based productivity software to mobile phones, or use Lilliputian keyboards.
The key productivity focus should be on widening and deepening interaction and reflection. This leads to a new perspective on information-related practices and productivity tools. Rising productivity requires changes in the way we communicate. Can there be a richer and easier way to use our devices? This, by the way, is the main sales argument behind the iPad.
The fastest immediate increase in productivity comes from either learning touch typing or using voice and video as means of input. Perhaps the keyboard of the future is speech combined with transcription? Anyway, the productivity software of tomorrow needs to be interaction-based. The most efficient productivity suit of tomorrow may well be a combination of Twitter, blogs and Facebook.
You only need one mobile device! The decision as to whether the device you need is a mobile phone, a tablet or a laptop may not be the most important one what comes to the quality of interaction. An artist friend of mine said that when he paints, he does not interact with the canvas, “the recording medium”. He interacts with the world beyond the canvas.
Thank you Kuutti Lavonen
Background
Cognitive and social presence
February 22, 2010
Have you ever wondered why you don’t see anyone reading a book when you visit companies? We associate reading with finding information and learning, but we also involve qualities such as contemplation, solitude and mental privacy when we think about books.
There is a mental framework that is used when dealing with books, and another distinct mental framework regarding information related practices in the corporate world. Basically, you are not allowed to read a book but you can read a document.
Documents and word processing are part of the mental framework of management today. Documents were born from the needs of a hierarchical, systemic approach to management. Information flowed down from the top in the form of PowerPoint slide decks containing vision statements, Excel sheets with goals and Word documents explaining corporate procedures. Information, which flowed up from the bottom, was used mainly to provide reports and data for managers, helping them to keep their employees accountable and to ensure the smooth operation of the business process.
The framework of computerized word processing is associated with terms like information flows and the sharing of information. This is not something you normally talk about when discussing a book. While a book provides a view of the contemplative mind, documents create a view of controlled content. Do you still ask why you can read a document but you are not allowed to use Facebook?
Instead of predictive process flows, knowledge work in practice follows a very different logic. A senior executive in one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world explained what was going on:
- There may be a triggering event that needs to be explored.
- The exploration is performed most efficiently through transparency, wide area engagement and a communal process of distributing the cognitive load of the case.
- People don’t perform job roles. People participate in tasks. You don’t delegate, you invite!
- People from the whole community should participate through voluntary self-organization as widely as possible at the same time, not sequentially.
- The industrial process was long, sequential and divided. The knowledge based process is short, parallel and interactive.
- As many people as possible with applicable skills should contribute, each spending as little time as possible.
- Finally, the contributions and comments that are received should integrate into a modular solution than can be iterated.
Knowledge work is about a community-based cognitive presence. But cognition is just part of the answer. Work today is even more about social presence. To manage is to participate in the live conversations.
There cannot be management without a social presence.
A dramatic shift is needed in the mental framework of information, communication and work. Without this changing mindset, no efficient implementation of social media can be made in the corporate world. Work is communication. Conversations and narratives are the new documents. Conversations cannot be controlled. The only way to influence conversations is to take part in them. The most meaningful conversations are the ones where customers voice their views. Those conversations take place outside of the firewall in the new world of mass communication.
As much as we need to associate Facebook with work, we need moments of slower pace. We need to combine the qualities of contemplation, solitude and mental privacy with work.
Thank you Walter Ong. The photo is of an interior detail of the Alvar Aalto architecture in the Academic Bookstore in Helsinki
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
Economic value added and Tag Clouds
January 23, 2010
It is not uncommon to think that thinking is something which goes on in the brain. Yet the evidence that it is really so is not quite clear. Some scientists have expressed doubts. The mind, they have argued, is not a thing to which a place can be allocated. Intellectual life is essentially social and interactive, they say. Life is carried on through speech and writing between people: in one-to-one and in many-to-many communication. And beyond that, there are various forms of one-to-many publications. These researchers claim, that encounters in communication are not secondary by-products of thinking. They are the primary sites of that activity.
Economic growth is about value added. In manufacturing it was adding value as a transformation process from physical raw materials to physical goods. Economic growth today is still about value added. The difference is that the generic, homogeneous raw materials of the industrial era, are unique ideas in the knowledge economy. The transformation process is also a very different kind of a process than in the past. In creative work, it is an iterative, unpredictable, non-linear movement, rather than a linear, sequential chain of predictable acts.
The worlds of manufacturing-based added value and knowledge-based added value require very different skills. In the knowledge-based world we live in today, it is not about reductionist job roles and narrow responsibilities any more. Everybody needs to to take part in the onward movement of thinking. You have to know what the live, future-creating ideas are and how to take part in the conversation in a value-adding way. This is independent of what you do, or the organizational unit you belong to.
Economic success in knowledge work is the result of the inspiration and interest you create, the wow factor; to fail is to find no one interested and following you. Successful ideas and arguments are the one’s that capture people’s attention. Paradoxically you always need people who agree, but equally, you need people who don’t think like you. Thinking develops best through friction and argumentation.
Knowledge-based value added is a movement of thought that is always based on working with differences. The requirement for efficient work is thus not necessarily to have common goals or to reach agreements. Additonally, thinking always clusters, in synchronous groups, but more importantly, asynchronously, over time. A person with an idea worth pursuing will give rise to an “interaction chain” of followers and disciples in time, held together in comparable chains of supporters and opponents. The management task is to understand (1) what is being discussed, (2) the quality and wow factor of that conversation, and (3) how ideas develop as a result of the development of thinking in the whole network that crosses organizational and geographic borders. Thinking does not take place inside independent people but in rich, continuous interaction. The richer the interaction, the more economic value added is created.
Groups are formed and networked links initiated around exciting new thoughts. The onward movement of thinking occupies the most limited and important things there is: our focus. What we focus on, is called our attention space. The attention space is visualized as a Tag Cloud. The Tag Cloud may actually be the best metaphor we have for a “place of the mind”. It is an expression of our focus and the live movement of our thinking. For a company, it is always the most important real-time measurement of what is actually going on. The driving force behind power and change is competition for room in this space. The number one management role in the era of knowledge-based added value and social media is to participate in and influence the conversations occupying the attention space, the mind of the organization. The other key role is to enhance the speed of the interactive movement of thought, expressed as the entrepreneurial capacity for transforming ideas into customer value.
Thank you Sari Baldauf for being the inspiration for this post.
