I have seen the same slide yet again. It keeps following me on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. OK, not on Facebook, I have deleted my account. It says:  Old organization, new organization. Old power to new power. Power goes from hierarchical to distributed. Communication from silos to networks. Top down to bottom up. Top down to distributed. Command and control to empowerment. And another few more.

Have you seen that slide? If not, your Sabbatical sounds wonderful.

The beauty of this all-purpose-slide is that it will accept lots of labels: agile, future of work, change, transformation, and of course, digitalization. It is like a renewable energy product, a perfect idea recycling, multi-use, multi-purpose, prêt-à-porter  management.

This obligatory stop on ‘the new world that is coming to us ’ serves well as a tool for conversations . And this is good. The slight problem is that 90% of the talkers are proficient at talking but not many have a clue as to how on earth all that is going to be implemented. Small detail.

The talkers are fantastic at talking to each other as a global tribe. It’s mutually self-reinforcing. There will be workshops. There will be post-its (management development is the result of a conspiracy by 3M), there will be people on the floor arranging cards (why on the floor? It looks more tribal but it’s terrible for your back), wallpaper with arrows (change) and hexagons (design thinking). And all will be good. Biblical. They will look at everything they have made, and they will be very pleased.

There are however two problems

1. Nobody with real power to change in the organization listens or cares about the arrows, hexagons and the old power/new power stuff.
2. The Grand Designers design but have not a good idea of how this is going to be implemented in, say, a traditional medium to large organization. Will just go one day to leaders and say, ‘you people, stop being top-down, don’t you see this is démodé, embrace bottom-up!’ Change! You need to change! And be a good role model. People are looking at you! (No, they aren’t)

The ‘what’ (top down not good, bottom up good…) is well known by now. So well known that can be easily trivialised. The how is the trick. How to go from ‘that slide’ to changing 15000 people in the organization. How to actually change behaviours. You won’t find that in many powerpoint stacks from Big Consulting

When The Talkers venture into the how, they act as shoppers, not cooks. So they say, OK, we need more trust, a lot of accountability, and empowerment, and a lot, a lot, a lot of customer-centrism ( as if the customer cared about your post-its and Grand Designs) and, of course, leaders with vision who walk the talk. And let’s not forget Servant Leadership (why? I don’t know). Oh, I forgot resilience. Mary, could you text him to bring some resilience, before he leaves the supermarket?

I know about the shopping list but, excuse me, who is actually cooking?

Silence.

What do we do now? Well, when looking for recipes, that Talkers-Shoppers find them:  OK, a top down cascade of workshops to explain the  beauty of bottom up; an over inclusive training system to train how not to be over-inclusive;  the top 200 leaders attending Transformation Workshops (AKA pass the post-its)

And then what?

Still no cooks, no cooking, the kitchen is full of stuff. Leaders are bemused. No strategy of where to start, how to start, how to change, let alone how to scale.

We can do better. We must do better.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Our Feed Forward Webinar Series is now available to watch on demand.

Watch our webinar: High touch, high tech in the digitlization era ^[1]

 

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Suddenly the world has been ‘zooming’ in the way that Sherry Turkle pointed out many years ago in her book ‘Life on screen’. Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? This webinar will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

 

What attendees said:

‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’ 

 

WATCH NOW ^[1]

 

Clicktivism is a form of digital /online engagement that requires the extraordinary effort of one of your fingers, possibly the index, to associate yourself with something… err.. digital, or the digital representation or articulation of a cause or an idea or a Facebook friend’s ingenious joke.

Sorry, this is my definition. Harsh? OK, this is how it is defined in Techopedia:

Clicktivism refers to the use of social media and the Internet to advance social causes. It uses the metrics available through Web analytics to optimise Web pages, emails and online petitions. This optimisation is meant to increase user engagement and maximise a campaign’s page views.

Clicktivism is a controversial form of digital activism. Proponents believe that applying advertising principles such as A/B testing increases the impact of a message by leveraging the Internet to further its reach. Opponents believe that clicktivism reduces activism to a mere mouse click, yielding numbers with little or no real engagement or commitment to the cause.

There you are. Some people are on my side, others will think I am missing the point of the clicks.

I have no problem with clicking and ‘liking it’ on Facebook. But I cannot accept that it only has a good side. Serious engagement needs action beyond your index finger. There are multiple examples of great social causes that have accumulated six figure clicks/likes but that, when the cause has asked for a bit of money, they only get three figures, if they’re lucky. A click is a great alibi.

Do we have the same inside the organization? I am not talking about the real clicks/likes that an internal digital platform (enterprise social network of some sort) may have, but their equivalents in human interaction terms.

Yes we have. It is represented by the email with a significant number of people on the distribution list, that contains a reply such as ‘OK with me, Peter’. Or the ones of the type ‘I am not sure I understand’, with no reference to what needs to be understood or the specific questions to ask.

Monosyllabic, written checking-in is hardly human engagement. Yet, we all do some of this at some point.

Let’s progress human evolution beyond clicking and liking, shall we?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

THIS THURSDAY – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET – join me and my team for our final webinar in the Feed Forward Series. ^[1]

 

Digitalization in the Covid era – High Touch and High Tech

 

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Suddenly the world has been ‘zooming’ in the way that Sherry Turkle pointed out many years ago in her book ‘Life on screen’. Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? This webinar will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

As this new world order sees digital taking the lead – with remote working, virtual events and more connectivity than ever before – are we truly collaborative and how do be maintain the human factor?

Bring your critical thinking brain switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun!

We hope you a can join us – register here ^[2]!

 

A book by ex-Microsoft researcher and now MIT prof Kentaro Toyama ^[3] (Geek Heresy, 20015) is not precisely novel on the topic of blindly accepting technology as the solution for all evils, but it is a refreshing account of what has been a personal journey.

Sent by Microsoft to India to solve social problems via technology, he ended up showing the shortcomings of the technology and the need to focus on the human side.

‘The only conclusion I could come to is that technology is secondary – ultimately the people and the institutions matter most’.

Which is the kind of statement that triggers from us a big ‘of course’, although we carry on as before ignoring its consequences and with zero behavioural change.

Amongst other things he points to the lack of critical thinking on this banking on technology and the urgent need to review our digital world.

In day-to-day management, more and more time is devoted to a digital system of communication and collaboration. Years ago we would have referred mainly to email, spending most of the time on Information Traffic Management, and management itself being a glorified form of Information Traffic Warden role. In places where email is now progressively taken over by digital chatting of some sort, perhaps via Enterprise Social Networks and other forms of collaborative systems, the new digital is now a form of, very useful, more appealing benign dictatorship.

Management remains an analogue affair. It’s human interaction, person-to-person, no screen to screen. If we lose analogue human social-ability in favour of the digitalization of our humanity, we will lose part of us and, in the process, the chance to involve the whole of our emotional and intellectual beings in that kind of activity that we call ‘work’.

Creativity manuals often suggest having two desks: the analogue, with no computers and the digital, with the screen in front of us. The trick is more than a clever suggestion. It actually transforms the way you work and interact. Most workstations, or offices, today look like places to hang a screen, often situated in front of us, not just ‘on the side’. The invitation to collaborate comes to us digitally. The shortcut and default is to email back, as opposed to, say, pick up the phone, let alone move your back side and visit the originator of the email down the corridor.

So, yes, have two desks. And force meetings with no devices in the room. I’m afraid that having them ‘in the room’ remains a problem: people will check, will use, will have it in silence and will continue to reply to emails.

Declare management interaction (discussion, debate, exploring of possibilities) a brain-to-brain affair with no digital intermediaries. The issue is not one of blaming the technology. The problem is our addiction to the instant messaging and the instant world.

Decouple digital and analogue. Each world is different. Protect both, protect their dedicated times, don’t mix them up. It works.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation….

High touch and high tech in the digitalization era

Join Leandro Herrero and his team for their free webinar with Q&A on 13th August, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET.  Register Now! ^[1]

 

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative?

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Suddenly the world has been ‘zooming’ in the way that Sherry Turkle pointed out many years ago in her book ‘Life on screen’. Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? This webinar will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

Register now! ^[1]

 

An indepth analysis of the world of ‘Digital Transformation’ shows two things. One is that there is no such thing as ‘Digital Transformation’ as a single domain or relatively well bordered area of expertise and action. In fact, you don’t have to look hard to realise that it is more difficult to find things that do not belong to ‘Digital Transformation’ than the ones that do. ‘Digital Transformation’ seems like a big supermarket with hundreds of shelves full of stuff.

It is unrealistic to expect a ‘single domain’ (area of expertise, and therefore expert) that can seriously contain: going paperless, better customer experience on websites, transforming customer experience, jobs done by software, artificial intelligence, analytics, robots doing human stuff, digital transactions, blockchain, digital/enterprise social networks, mobile technologies, self-service HR systems, real-time data, electronic documentation, social media, multi-channel services, more sophisticated CRM, automation, faster computing capacities, process (digital) re-engineering, and cloud services. And there are still many other supermarket shelves I have not named.

Calling all of these ‘Digital Transformation’ is the equivalent to calling ‘business’ to all you and I do. And finding ‘experts in business’. When clients tell me that they have appointed some people to lead ‘Digital Transformation’, I ask which one.

The other ‘finding’, shocking but not entirely unexpected, is the virtual lack of reference to behaviours. It’s not the first time that technology takes all the airtime and reduces behaviours to a by-product of what technology changes or will change. The mistake is a big one since behaviours are hardly a by-product. It is more the other way around, you need some behaviours in the system to support the digital transformation. These behaviours must be tailored to the objective (since the supermarket has hundreds of shelves) but at the very least they will have to deal with changes from audience (push, customer, information) to community (pull, engagement, reputation); speed; trust and risk (less people involved) and virtual collaboration. And, again, this is just the start. Just a few of the pillars. Each shelf has its own behavioural set.

The most efficient way to deal with that multi-targeted Digital Transformation is to look at the cultural and behavioural conditions that are needed, perhaps changed, ‘installed’, embedded and spread at a scale, to support it. The behavioural DNA (changeability vs change) will support/must support any of these digital shelves in change. Behaviours are not a by-product, an afterthought. They are the fabric, the tapestry on which everything else works. Starting with behaviours, is a smart move.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversations….

Join Leandro Herrero and his team for their free webinar with Q&A on 13th August, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET. Register Now! ^[1]

High touch and high tech in the digitalization era

 

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative?

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Suddenly the world has been ‘zooming’ in the way that Sherry Turkle pointed out many years ago in her book ‘Life on screen’. Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? This webinar will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

Register Here! ^[1]

 

Model 1. The technology, for example in the form of digital platforms such as Enterprise Social Networks, ESN (Yammer type) speeds some interactions, facilitates communication, provides a key vehicle for collective framing and shared common understanding (usually from the top of the organization), creates some spontaneous or engineered groups of ‘common  interest’ but, above all, provides a single common brochure/repository/news feed for the company (traditional intranet for example). In this model, ‘Digital’ does not change the nature of the (cross) collaboration much, or the fundamental activity of the company and its groupings.

Model 2. The technology serves to connect otherwise unconnected, or poorly connected, groups, and, as such, creates new reasons for shared understanding and collective action. It creates proximity, otherwise perhaps in doubt, and an ability to share ideas, answer questions, help other groups (occasionally or more formally). In this model, ‘Digital’ is network building in its own merits and the real origin of (new) cross collaboration, for example, otherwise not planned or anticipated. It does not change much the nature of work in the networks or clusters connected, but changes their relationships and their learning opportunity, and also creates a possible, more cohesive shared sense of belonging.

Model 3. Technology is on purpose a ‘crowd-enabler’. ‘Digital’ allows and prompts everybody to possibly talk to anybody across borders and structures. It allows for example to launch ‘global challenges’ and incentivised, or not, semi-permanent Q&A sessions. In this model, ‘Digital’ is focused on the individual, not the clusters, networks or teams (which it had little control over it). ‘Digital’ here changes the nature of the cross-collaboration in the form of a permanent (if desired) ‘digital-face-to-face’. ‘Digital’ here is very much ‘core’, sitting above everything else, perhaps ‘the way we also work’.

These three models are useful to at least reflect upon what we may expect from ‘the adoption of an internal digital strategy’. Very often, a significant investment is made to install a global ESN, just to be followed by an also significant disappointment about its use and effectiveness. Technology is still today ‘installed’ in a way that seems to expect a following miracle in cross-collaboration or even (more naively) a fundamental change of ‘the nature of work’.

At the core of these issues are three things:

(1) The knowledge of what the technology can do (easy);
(2) The agreement on why the technology has been ‘installed’ (difficult: some may think it should be a sophisticated brochure, others a communication system, others an internal reproduction of a cosy Facebook; None of these are the same. Start with the ‘why’ before you look for the miracle);
(3) The pre-existing behavioural DNA (or the created one, e.g. via Viral Change ^[4]™) required to use the technology in a way that serves the declared purpose, the why in (2); this is a more difficult one.

For example in a very tribal, silo-like, fragmented enterprise, a model 3 type of crowd-enabled collaboration may completely fail; model 2 may have some effects, and model 1 may have no trouble, even if with very modest, if at all, effects on cross collaboration with perhaps little changes in the ‘ways of work’.

I have adapted for the organization these 3 models from the ones proposed at macro-level by Bennet & Segerberg in ‘The Logic of Connective Action; digital media and the personalization of contentious politics’ (2013). Model 1 is the equivalent of what the authors called ‘Organizational brokered collective action’; model (2) is ‘Organizational enabled connective action’, and model (3) is Crowed-enabled connective action.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

High touch & high tech in the digitalization era

 

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Pre-Covid we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? Join us for our final webinar in the Feed Forward Series – Thursday, 13th August. 18:00 BST/19:00 CET, Register Now! ^[1]

 

 

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Suddenly the world has been ‘zooming’ in the way that Sherry Turkle pointed out many years ago in her book ‘Life on screen’. Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? This webinar will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

 

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[5] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[5] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[6].

 

Social media is a colossal echo chamber.

Social media is a colossal echo chamber where all cognitive processes are surrendered to one single driver: confirmation bias. People read what they want to read. People hear what they want to hear. Preconceived ideas are confirmed. Common enemies become more common. The system increases mistrust of others outside the chamber, whilst reinforcing one single acceptable worldview. Homophily (bonding and binding with ‘people like me’) rises steeply. The population in that colossal echo chamber becomes more homogeneous and predictable all the time, so that social media algorithms become more robust and your targeted news and advertising reaches you safely and securely. It’s a wonderful life.

Social media is a colossal echo chamber where all cognitive processes are surrendered to one single driver: confirmation bias. The only solution is periodical rehab. Make yourself offline for a while. Read books with physical pages. Send handwritten letters to friends.

 

Computer screens are the new silos.

Stop complaining about silos between divisions. Computer screens are the new silos. If you amalgamate non-collaborating silo A with non-collaborating silo B with the hope of creating a collaborating non silo C, good luck. People will bring their screens with them anyway.

Stop complaining about silos between divisions. Computer screens are the new silos. Most structural solutions (amalgamation of divisions or groups) are a response to behavioural problems (e.g. lack of collaboration). Entire reorganizations, with hundreds of people disrupted, are triggered by very few people being the problem. The so-called Big Collaboration Problem between Marketing and Sales can actually be traced back to Peter, Head of Marketing, and Mary, Head of Sales. The rest have no problem but are forced to migrate with their screens. I believe that most silo problems have names and surnames.

___________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation.

Find out more about our free webinar, High touch and high tech in the digitalization era ^[1], on 13th August, with Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects.

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Suddenly the world has been ‘zooming’ in the way that Sherry Turkle pointed out many years ago in her book ‘Life on screen’. Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? This webinar will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Out Now! – The Flipping Point ^[5] – Deprogramming Management by Leandro Herrero – his new booking challenging the trend for adopting absurd management ideas. Management needs deprogramming. This book of 200, tweet-sized, vignettes, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin. It asks us to use more rigour and critical thinking in how we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.

New units:

• Certificate of existence = 280 characters (Twitter)
• Presentation of ideas, maximum attention span = 18 mins (TED)
• Digital reading, maximum attention space = 1 or 2 max smartphone screens. (Not a long time ago we used something called ‘one page’, as in, ‘I’ll send you a one-page summary’. It was a unit in its own right. This is now a smartphone screen with the exceptional allowance of a bit of scrolling down).
• Business time unit = a quarter (long time in existence substituting the Gregorian calendar)
• A dialogue = a digital chat (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Text message, etc)
• Business reality: whatever can fit on a PowerPoint slide and bullet-pointed (like this text, of course).
• A book page = a kindle screen.
• Busy-ness score = number of emails in my inbox.
• What your boss needs to know = Executive summary (most likely she will never read the 30 pages behind it).

Disruptive Innovations coming up strong:

• The book (hardback is more innovation-disruptive)
• A physical letter (handwritten even more disruptive; try to write one to your children, it’s a perfect start)
• A face-to-face conversation (incredibly disruptive, if with a loved one and a bottle of wine, but also works with colleagues at work, loved or not)
• A briefing document with no Executive Summary
• Presentation with no slides (this disruptive innovation has been in the making for years, but it has not quite made it yet)
• Bookshop and library browsing
• Silence (included in my ‘Border Diet ^[7]’)
• Banning the word ‘Basically’ at the start of a sentence.

(Sorry, I am running out of screen…)

Your big leadership choice for 2017 is between being the guardian of what has already happened, or the prophet of what Big and Courageous may be next.

In many respects, the year’s global events seem to follow a ‘Forward to the Past’ strategy. Whether it’s making countries ‘great again’, exiting a club of nations, reinforcement of fundamentalisms and populisms, or the nationalistic rising for the ‘protection of identities’, all share surprisingly similar drives: forward to the past.

My Daily Thoughts, sent fresh at 08:00 GMT, are focused on the organization, on the beauty and possibilities of ‘organizing ourselves’. I am not a political commentator, yet, during 2016, I have found myself making lots of political comments. For it is impossible to talk about ‘the organization’ in abstract, in the absence of references to people’s engagement in world events. Doing so would be reinforcing the mistake, which I have referred to ad nauseam, and with despair, that pretends that the organization life, the business life, is somehow shielded from the macro human dynamics as seen on TV. That 9 to 5 or 24/7 organizational life, follows a peculiarly isolated set of laws as taught in business schools and deployed by Human Resources or Organisational Development professionals.

It is a tragic mistake, for example, to talk about Employee Engagement as a unique ‘business organization’ phenomenon, with zero reference to how people are engaged, or disengaged, in collective action at a scale. Anywhere. In the firm and outside the firm. Yet, that HR/OD/Management area still behaves as Martian-managed, carrying on and on, oblivious to external references on how people engage or not at a scale.

The healthiest New Year resolution that your organization could make , whether you lead the entire firm, a division, a group or  consulting services,  is the rejection of its own ‘Forward to the Past’ version of strategy.

Two Forward to the Past examples:

• Continue to refine an old set of skills and competencies, whether individual or collective, which suited well in the past, with no deep questioning of its suitability to the future. Example, the simple extrapolation behind we need mre analytic skills, more team collaboration, more of the same but adjusted.
• Carrying on with increasing the complexity of internal processes and systems without deep questioning about how to inject simplicity in the water supply of the entire thing. Self-inflicted dysfunctional complexity is your enemy, yet we keep inviting complexity to the table. We seem to like it, be proud of it, like a body builder showing off his biceps.

It would take some serious thinking and reflection, and perhaps some dose of humility, to seriously question whether what is articulated in that Strategic or Business Plan of yours, contains in fact the past, not the future.

May be it is even conveniently recycled, and with new make-up, and, who knows, wearing the Christmas new pyjamas to give a sense of aesthetic progress. If it smells the past in new pyjamas, it is the past.

Paraphrasing Mark Lilla writing in the sociopolitical context, (‘The reckless mind’, ‘The shipwrecked mind’) the big leadership choice for 2017 may be the one between being the guardians of what actually has already happened or the prophets of what may be.

It may be too early in the year for a murder case, but when you look again at your about-to-debut Business Plan, test whether you need a rear mirror or a telescope o read it.

 

There is an anecdote in a recent piece by Noemi Klein’s in The Guardian. A young girl had some kind of operation and she remembers waking up and not saying ‘mum!’ or ‘nurse!’ but ‘my iPhone!’

Are we all screenagers who need to be rescued in analogue?

If so, the analogue rescuers are strange things such as face to face, doing stuff together, sharing person-to-person, no screen to screen.

Oh! One screen is not enough. Multi-tasking and multi-screening is the new normal. Did you know that you can be on Face Time with somebody, play x-Box at the same time, and have an iPad on the side with some un-finished YouTube, not counting streamed music from somewhere in cyberspace? And doing homework. Of course you do. You have scr(t)eeenagers at home. Or your neighbours.

Some teenagers rooms look today more like a command and control centre for a movie set, something to lend to Homeland producers, or the Spooks people. And some teenagers rooms have more updated technology than the Organizational Development department.

When I started working in the pharmaceutical industry, after clinical practice, and before my current consulting companies The Chalfont Project and Viral Change LLP, companies had more technology than homes. I was the proud home owner of a fax machine and was well ahead of the game. Then, at some point of the digital evolution, the inversion took place. There are more apps and digital stuff in our hands ‘outside work’ than at work. Your home broadband is very good, and the intranet in the office still so slow.

I attended a Digital conference last week. One of the presenters asked the audience if checking their iPhone (universal proxy for smartphone) was the last thing they did before going to sleep. Overwhelming hands up. If checking their iPhone was the first thing they did when they woke up. Same. There were no teenagers in the room. All screenagers.

We talk about these tings as if they were curious anecdotes, findings worth an ethnographic entry in a field book by an alien anthropologist. But this is us today. There are not Digital Natives as opposed to the non digital. We are all colonised.

By the way, that piece in The Guardian ended with assertions about the loneliness of the generation Z, who follows the Millennial generation (those Millennial are getting older!) and how hard is for them to break away from it. Some of them apparently said things such as ‘Life for us is hard. A struggle’.

The comments section of any digital article is often more interesting that the article itself. Here is a comment from an older reader:

Laughing my head off! Life for every generation was a struggle.
I mean…people were dropping bombs on our heads, or the only factory in town was closing down or we only had a pair of short trousers to wear on the below freezing walk to school or every year we suffered debilitating asthma because of the mould and damp on the bedroom wall where we slept.
The only difference between this generation or previous ones….is that no-one ever asked us how we felt about it…because no-one really cared.

But now we have screens. And you reading this on one.

Is that singularity ^[8] that near?

 

 

 

 

Ah, the customer is back, some people in management and consulting say, as if the customer had been in a Sabbatical in the Bahamas or Mars. Some of the renewed music on customer-centrism is plain desperation from people who have had a relatively easy time just playing lip services.

Why is it that every time that a management ‘next thing’ appears is usually a bit behind already.

Customer centrism 2016 version includes the 2015 version and the 2014 and… But it also must include the global, digitalized, borderless, ruthless, scary, often dangerous, certainly powerful population of netroots. The term is used mainly as for ‘activism in the net’. It has taken the word from the model of ‘grassroots’. The grass is nor green anymore but clouded. In the net.

(If everything is now in the cloud, isn’t it funny that the expression ‘having the head in the clouds’ means not having a clue of what is going on? )

Many so called digital strategies in corporations of some size are still a website strategy, plus a chat, plus a mother of all portals, plus we will tell you what is good for you. Many of those are still mistakenly ‘building an audience’ as opposed to building a community. They swap the traditional bombardment channels (TV, print, for example) for social media, digital presence and ‘digital real state’. Many of those digital strategists sitting in 11^th floor of headquarters, perhaps next to, or, dare I say ‘integrated’ into the marketing department, may have not even heard of the word ‘netroots’. Well, I suggest you drop the Harvard MBA marketing module and learn political/social/net/cloud activism, because this is where the power of large scale adoption, large scale love, large scale trust or large scale war resides.

So, yes, customer centrism renewal without understanding how netizens organise netroots will be again a catching up that does not quite catches anything. We need to unbundle customer-centrism in 2016 to perhaps repackage it in different words. Suddenly, the new market may be ‘the cloud’. And then what?

I believe that whether you are a leader in a vaccine business, or transportation, local government or multinational all things operations, to say ‘I know my costumers’ (you know the ones to be costumer centric) is a risky statement. There are the obvious, the less obvious, the invisible influencers and then the ones in the cloud (potentially) organised in netroots. You customer next door, even the one that pays the bill, my love you, congratulations. Your reputation however may be hanging in the cloud. For once, sticking your head there, may make a lot of sense.

By the way, hire somebody with digital activism/cloud/netroots organizer/campaigner experience who knows nothing about your business and a lot about digital-enabled social movements.

Model 1. The technology, for example in the form of digital platforms such as Enterprise Social Networks, ESN (Yammer type) speeds some interactions, facilitates communication, provides a key vehicle for collective framing and shared common understanding (usually from the top of the organization), creates some spontaneous or engineered groups of ‘common  interest’ but, above all, provides a single common brochure/repository/news feed for the company (traditional intranet for example). In this model, ‘Digital’ does not change much the nature of the (cross) collaboration, or the fundamental activity of the company and its groupings.

Model 2. The technology serves to connect otherwise unconnected, or poorly connected, groups, and, as such, creates new reasons for shared understanding and collective action. It creates proximity, otherwise perhaps in doubt, and an ability to share ideas, answer questions, help other groups (occasionally or more formally). In this model, ‘Digital’ is network building in its own merits and the real origin of (new) cross collaboration, for example, otherwise not planned or anticipated. It does not change much the nature of work in the networks or clusters connected, but changes their relationships and their learning opportunity,  and also creates a possible, more cohesive shared sense of belonging.

Model 3. Technology is on purpose ‘crowd-enabler’. ‘Digital’ allows and prompts everybody to possibly talk to anybody across borders and structures. It allows for example to launch ‘global challenges’ and incentivized, or not, semi-permanent Q&A sessions. In this model, ‘Digital’ is focused on the individual, not the clusters, networks or teams (which had no much control over it). ‘Digital’ here changes the nature of the cross-collaboration in the form of a permanent (if desired) ‘digital-face-to-face’. ‘Digital’ here is very much ‘core’, sitting above everything else, perhaps  ‘the way we also work’.

These three models are useful to at least reflect upon what we may expect from ‘the adoption of an internal digital strategy’. Very often, a significant investment is made to install a global ESN, just to be followed by an also significant disappointment about its use and effectiveness. Technology is still today ‘installed’ in a way that seems to expect a following miracle in cross-collaboration or even (more naively) a fundamental change of ‘the nature of work’.

At the core if these issues are three things

(1) The knowledge of what the technology can do (easy);
(2) The agreement on why the technology has been ‘installed’ (difficult: some may think it should be a sophisticated brochure, others a communication system, others an internal reproduction of a cosy Facebook; Nothing of these are the same. Stop in the ‘why’ before you look for the miracle)
(3) The pre-existing behavioural DNA (or the created one, e.g. via Viral Change™ ^[9] ) required to use the technology in a way that serves the declared purpose, the why in (2); this a more difficult one.

For example in a very tribal, silo-like, fragmented enterprise, a model 3 type of crowd-enabled collaboration may completely fail; model 2 may have some effects, and model 1 may have no trouble, even if with very modest, if at all, effects on cross collaboration with perhaps little changes in the ‘ways of work’

I have adapted for the organization these 3 models from the ones proposed at macro-level by Bennet & Segerberg in ‘The Logic of Connective Action; digital media and the personalization of contentious politics’ (2013). Model 1 is the equivalent of what the authors called ‘Organizational brokered collective action’; model (2) is ‘Organizational enabled connective action’, and model (3) is Crowed-enabled connective action.

Peter Drucker put it in his own style:

‘No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary human beings perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each one’s strength to help all the others perform. The purpose of an organization is to enable common people to do uncommon things.’

The collective, the ‘social organism’, the organization, is a beautiful vehicle to gain the social advantage. If you follow this principle, organizations can be small and big, physical and virtual. And the keyword is ‘enabling’.

No big deal here? Sometimes I feel that we may be taking for granted the collective brain. If ‘the organization’ does not emphasize enough that ‘total that is bigger than the sum’ of the pieces, we will loose the essence. When we do that, then, ‘organization’ becomes ‘structure’.

When we talk about being organized in this or that manner, or needing a reorganization, the structural design (which reductionist version is who reports to whom, and an organization chart) takes over. And in this takeover (mentally, often unconscious) we loose sight of the social, multiplying purpose and function.

It is possible for common people to do uncommon things together, if they use the collective brain. But some organizations seem to be composed by hundreds of freelancers occasionally glued by some managers. Sometimes, one smells the individuality, the juxtaposition of people, the almost individual task (owner) sitting next to another one. And when you add digital, and people wear their headsets, you get an environment of pilots piloting in their cockpits.

I suppose a simple Drucker-ian test would be to asses if we really see the ‘uncommon things’ coming out from common people working together. Zero innovation and zero improvement dwell well in ‘the commons doing just common’, the managingb of the inevitable, the ‘work as task’.

And for that, the days are counted. A technological solution is already at the door.

In a study conducted with Fortune 100 companies, and quoted in Sherry Turkle’s new book ‘Reclaiming Conversations ^[10]’, the following statistics about what people do during conference calls are revealing, if not a confirmation of what you have always suspected: 65% of people are doing other work at the same time; 63% do emails; 55% are eating or cooking; 47% go to the bathroom and 6% are also in another call.

I do not have these statistics in my case, but, in the conference calls I participate with clients, I have always suspected that the number of people emailing was higher. It’s a relief to know that 37% are not. Also, I think that close to 50% are taking a nap. I also suspect that a percentage, to be defined by sophisticated research I will undertake at some point when I don’t have so many conference calls, are in the wrong meeting and/or have dialled the wrong number.

Some clients have a default solution on ‘a conference call every week’. When the team is small and they know each other well, this works very well. It could be a refreshing way of not just updating each other but ‘checking in’ the collective tribe. Connectivity, communication and collaboration works well here. But when digital connectivity has been imposed as a structural solution for collaboration with lots of people who are not a tribe ( a group, a team, a collective with a purpose) the risk is that you fool yourself. Sure, something good will come up, but at a cost.

What is interesting is that in my unofficial, unscientific statistics, 90% of those attending these swarmed conference calls, feel very frustrated with the experience. But we keep doing it.

Sherry Turkle ‘reclaiming conversation’ theme, the latest in a series of her publications ^[11] about the digitalization of the self and other changes in our humanity, is a reminder of the need to go deeper and find ways to achieve that ‘conversation’: home, family, kids, the office, the Strategic Business Unit. That may or may not entail a digital flash mob in the form of massive conference calls.

Digital collaboration will get more and more sophisticated, and technology will offer more and more sophisticated forms. We all will be tempted to use, and will be users. But the more we go in that direction, the more we need to ask ourselves if what we are achieving is digital connectivity or human collaboration. They may or may not go together.

The topic is far from peripheral. It impacts on our human nature that is progressively reshaped. Turkle, MIT professor, trained psychoanalyst, serious social researcher and writer, is very worried. Others, and there is a legion, would say that she misses the point and that the extraordinary connectivity and its potential is short of evolutionary Darwinism achievement. The origin of the Species now contains a chapter on Facebook.

My own view is that Turkle is right, in a minority, and may lose the argument. But my day to day organizational work sees the struggle between the illusion of collaboration and the ubiquitous connectivity, the fallacy of a technological solution for behavioural problems, and the corrosion of the conversation on behalf of the bullet points.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A recent book by ex-Microsoft researcher and now MIT prof Kentaro Toyama (Geek Heresy, 20015) is not precisely novel on the topic of blindly accepting technology as the solution for all evils, but it is a refreshing account of what has been a personal journey.

Sent by Microsoft to India to solve social problems via technology, he ended up showing the shortcomings of the technology and the need to focus on the human side.

‘The only conclusion I could come to is that technology is secondary – ultimately the people and the institutions matter most’.

Which is the kind of statement that triggers on us a big ‘of course’, although we carry on as before ignoring its consequences and with zero behavioural change.

Amongst other things he points to the lack of critical thinking on this banking on technology and the urgent need to review our digital world.

In day to day management, more and more time is devoted to a digital system of communication and collaboration. Years ago we would have referred mainly to email, spending most of the time on Information Traffic Management, and management itself being a glorified form of Information Traffic Warden role. In places where email is now progressively taken over by digital chatting of some sort, perhaps via Enterprise Social Networks and other forms of collaborative systems, the new digital is now a form of, very useful, more appealing benign dictatorship.

Management remains an analogue affair. It’s human interaction, person to person, no scree to screen. If we lose analogue human social-ability in favour of the digitalization of our humanity, we will loose part of us and, in the process, the chance to involve the whole of our emotional and intellectual beings in that kind of activity that we call ‘work’.

Creativity manuals often suggest having two desks: the analogue, with no computers and the digital, with the screen in front of us. The trick is more than a clever suggestion. It actually transforms the way you work and interact. Most workstations, or offices, today look like places to hang a screen, often situated in front of us, not just ‘on the side’. The invitation to collaborate comes to us digital. The shortcut and default is to email back, as opposed to, say, pick up the phone, let alone move your back side and visit the originator of the email down the corridor.

So, yes, have two desks. And force meetings with no devices in the room. I’m afraid that having them ‘in the room’ remains a problem: people will check, will use, will have it in silence and will continue to reply to emails.

Declare management interaction (discussion, debate, exploring of possibilities) a brain-to-brain affair with no digital intermediaries. The issue is not one of blaming the technology. The problem is our addiction to the instant messaging and the instant world.

Decouple digital and analogue. Each world is different. Protect both, protect their dedicated times, don’t mix them up. It works.

(A system problem prevented the Daily Thought from being published yesterday)

Photo TrisMarie/Morguefile

Clicktivism is a form of digital /online engagement that requires the extraordinary effort of one of your fingers, possibly the index, to associate yourself with something… err.. digital, or the digital representation or articulation of a cause or an idea or a Facebook friend ingenious joke.

Sorry, this is my definition. Harsh? OK, this is how it is defined in Techopedia:

Clicktivism refers to the use of social media and the Internet to advance social causes. It uses the metrics available through Web analytics to optimize Web pages, emails and online petitions. This optimization is meant to increase user engagement and maximize a campaign’s page views.

Clicktivism is a controversial form of digital activism. Proponents believe that applying advertising principles such as A/B testing increases the impact of a message by leveraging the Internet to further its reach. Opponents believe that clicktivism reduces activism to a mere mouse-click, yielding numbers with little or no real engagement or commitment to the cause.

There you are. Some people are on my side, others will think I am missing the point of the clicks.

I have no problem with clicking and ‘liking it’ in Facebook. But I cannot accept that it only has a good side. Serious engagement needs action beyond your index finger. There are multiple examples of great social causes that have accumulated six figure clicks/likes but that, when the cause has asked for a bit of money, they only get three figure, if lucky. A click is a great alibi.

Do we have the same inside the organization? I am not talking about the real clicks/likes that an internal digital platform (enterprise social network of some sort) may have, but their equivalents in human interaction terms.

Yes we have. It is represented by the email with significant number of people in the distribution list, that contains a reply such as ‘OK with me, Peter’. Or the ones of the type ‘I am not sure I understand’, with not reference to what needs to be understood or the specific questions to ask.

Monosyllabic, written checking-in is hardly human engagement. Yet, we all do some of this at some point.

Let’s progress human evolution beyond clicking and liking, shall we?

 

If my IT people did not have Google handy, and the ability to ‘ask the forum’, I would not have half of my issues solved. The answer is always there. Somewhere. They don’t consult a manual, they Google a question.

‘I am going to do a bit of research’ does not mean anymore a trip to the University library, but half an hour on your laptop with a late.

Google is now a verb. Re-Google and Development is a new function.

The guys who ‘want to organize the world information’ and their servers have answers to your questions, even the ones you did not have yet. ‘It’s all there’.

I am told that physicians in some places will Google for answers. I am not saying they will tap into a particular web-based medical database, but, ‘Google it’.

There is a new type of Research which consists in re-search, which means largely re-Google.

In the Old Analogue World, one book took you to another, you took notes, perhaps you went back to Ms Smith, the lovely librarian, who could also point you into the direction of other books. It was not research. It was a long and eventful intellectual pilgrimage.

In the digital world, when you type a few initial letters of your question, Mr Google knows what you want and completes the search for you. Not only that, it lets you know how fast he knew. I have just Googled myself and I’ve got, Mr Google says, 18900 results on me, in 0.47 seconds. 0.47 seconds to find me! Wow! Considering that supercalifragilisticexpialidocious took 0.42 seconds and Barack Obama 0.53, I am not doing that bad.

I bet Ms Smith could never beat these

If this is how it is, how education is (my teenagers do homework in school- compulsory iPad), how we get to things, we must learn how to think critically. In the Old Analogue World, a key skill was ‘how to find’. In the Digital World, a key skill must surely be ‘how to filter’.

After filtering, distinguishing between noise and signal, and deciding that the information basket is full, and a new re-search (sorry, a new re-Google) does not lead to anything new, the next skill is Sense Making,

In the Old Analogue World, one of the risks of intellectual shortcut was to rely on ‘one book’. Thomas Aquinas knew this: ‘hominem unius libri timeo“, that is ‘I fear the man of a single book’. I suppose, Aquinas would say today ‘hominem unius Google timeo’. To take Google answers as a face value is the equivalent to the ‘one book person’.

Rambling? Not really, it’s all out of fear and restlessness about the progression towards ‘not thinking’. I can’t help it. I see it more and more anywhere. Automatic pilot everywhere. Homo Googlin is Sapiens with an iPhone.

Whilst the British Army creates its 77^th Brigade of digital warriors, many corporations still think of social media as a necessary evil.

A piece of news on the UK newspaper The Guardian, similar to one in  many other platforms, announces:

 ‘The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age. The 77th Brigade, to be based in Hermitage, near Newbury, in Berkshire, will be about 1,500-strong and formed of units drawn from across the army. It will formally come into being in April. The brigade will be responsible for what is described as non-lethal warfare. Both the Israeli and US army already engage heavily in psychological operations. Against a background of 24-hour news, smartphones and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, the force will attempt to control the narrative’.

The brigade is being named ‘the 77t’h in tribute to a ‘unorthodox’ guerrilla force against the Japanese during World War II.

I have met many clients in recent years, big and small, entrepreneurial and mature, that think of digital strategy as having some Facebook pages and, of course, a few active tweeter accounts. They still think brand in terms of ‘brochure’, of owned digital real estate with lots of messages to tell.

Digital Real Estate per se, is hardly the answer. Pharmaceutical companies for example have websites for physicians and (mostly for legal reasons) others for patients. Many of them are windows with uni-directional messaging. In many companies with some sort of digital (marketing) strategy, listening is minimal, telling is tsunami type, two way engagement often simply non existing. Anybody of the millennial generation will see this as archaic as the land line telephone as the sole ‘sophisticated’ channel.

Digital strategy is engagement, or it isn’t a strategy, it’s just a museum of words. Engagement means conversations, good and bad, the praising and thankful ones, and the other type.

External and Internal Communications departments are still struggling with the balance between telling and listening/engaging. My rule of thumb is that for each 10 people who I know in these corporate functions,  8 ‘get it’, but only 2 or 3 are actually reinventing themselves.

The message, and the analogy of the British Army 77^th Brigade, is that the Army plans to have a significant critical mass of people totally dedicated. Whilst the average company’s Communication Department does not deal with terrorist threat or insurgence, there is a lot that can be done in the digital plaza. Does anybody need to be convinced? However, these functions are often populated by very few people,  who spend their time writing newsletters, preparing investor reports and refurbishing or cleaning up websites. A rolling tweeter feed is often as much of ‘dynamics’ as one can see.

My experience within this corporate function is frustrating. I find excellent, capable people in their ranks, but very often with not enough guts to create a proper 77^th Brigade. Resources? Of course this is an issue. But in many function and corporate areas, an element of ‘resourcing’ is driven by internal selling. Perhaps some Communications people are not doing a good enough job to convince the top that the world is different, and that ‘the website’ is a landing, small piece or real state with no value of its own.

This is an area of serious corporate reinvention, which time has arrived, yesterday in fact. If the Army can do it…