Rethinking economics with doughnuts
A great podcast with Kate Raworth discussing the need for new economic models for the 21st century and a proposed approach: doughnut economics.
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Micro-scale and Smart Cities
Micro-scaling products and services is becoming not only possible, but is perhaps the optimal solution for smart sustainable cities Read More
What makes a city smart?
Use of the phrase ‘Smart City’ has been dominated by technology companies designing city-wide systems with embedded sensors capturing and adapting to real-time feedback. But what really makes a city smart?
New versus change
The arrival of new technology leading to new ways of working can lead to assumptions that something is being created versus the invisible becoming visible, the unknowns becoming knowns…
Degrees of Social Capital
To be a responsive and productive organisation increasingly requires faster and more effective communications between people, leading to the rise of the enterprise social network
Brains are for making and moving
Now that information is widely accessible is it time to replace public libraries with public workshops? To make things instead of reading about them?
‘Bring Your Own Profile’ to work
Summary: ‘Bring your own device’ has transformed mobile access to corporate information thanks to new consumer devices being adopted faster than their corporate equivalents. Could ‘Bring your own profile’ do the same for corporate knowledge by leveraging consumer social networks?
The adoption of enterprise social software continues to grow. Social media command centres are becoming more commonplace, certainly for recognisable brands. Conversation hubs to facilitate knowledge-sharing are replacing older groupware tools and email discussion lists. Sentiment analysis is a relatively new form of analytics, tapping into current moods and trends visible through user-generated content that are less predictable than your traditional statistics but can prove invaluable to enabling smarter decisions and actions. And internet-connected mobile devices are granting access anytime anywhere, putting the individual at the centre of anything and everything he/she/it chooses to participate in.
But in the world of work, there is one aspect that is already proving tiresome. The need to recreate your profile in a multitude of different enterprise social networks. Uploading a photo, adding a description, declaring skills and interests. Signing up for groups, duplicating opinions across platforms. Change company frequently (increasingly likely in the current era), or live life as a freelancer (also increasingly likely), and it becomes a regular chore.
What if, as has occurred with mobile devices, you could bring your own profile to work? Simply grant permission to your current employer to recognise your online career profile as an employee, and former employers to include your profile in their Alumni network. With a history of contributions that would enable the network to auto-suggest what company groups you are likely to want to affiliate with, and could recommend when you are likely to be able to contribute to something the organisation is seeking help with.
Whilst there are plenty of technical details to overcome, there are benefits for both the individual and the organisation in terms of skills recognition and knowledge transfer. The individual is able to integrate more quickly into the corporate social network. The company has a constantly maintained employee directory that can be easily expanded beyond organisation boundaries to include alumni, associates and other interested or relevant parties. And accurate recognisable photos in most cases too!
To do so would mean integrating one of the online consumer social networks. I’m guessing Facebook is an unlikely candidate. Most people observe a separation that means Facebook is kept for family and friends, hobbies and informal events. Of the others, in English-speaking countries, the likely candidates are LinkedIn and Google+. LinkedIn has the weight of maturity and a thriving group system that includes algorithms to suggest what you might want to participate in. People are used to crafting and maintaining their profile for career development. It also offers the potential to integrate with the existing company pages and recruitment services. Google+ has the breadth of coverage, plugging individual profiles into a global search index that enables also sorts of SocialRank based possibilities. As well as social networking tools already popular within some organisations, the Google Hangouts. But it has some work to do still – few people maintain well-populated profiles there (in my experience). Others? About.me is interesting but just a static profile page for now, like an online business card but without the value of context.
I’ve deliberately ignored the enterprise social networking tools such as Jive, Yammer, Kenexa and SocialCast because, for all their newness, they still represent the traditional world of enterprise software. Focused on the needs of the organisation first and foremost. The future of work is about networked individuals with careers, interests and expertise spanning far beyond traditional organisational boundaries. The tools and services demonstrating the most agility to adapt to this new world of work are online and consumer-based.
Featured image: ‘Selfie’ kindly shared on Flickr by Tim Ellis
We can all shape the world now…
Another year, another Davos conference where the global super-elite gather to meet to discuss the worlds’ problems. Or at least do some great networking… Because how much innovation truly originates from those at the top?
In the UK, a controversially-titled TV show is dominating local headlines – Benefits Street – examining the lives of residents living on one street in Birmingham, the majority of which are dependent on benefits.
Paul Taylor has an excellent article – 3 lessons we should all learn from Benefits Street – highlighting the more positive aspects of the programme. Like Paul, I watched an episode out of curiosity given the news coverage and agree with his perspective. The show shines a spotlight on just how difficult it is to get out of the trap once you fall into it. And Paul highlights the flaw in much of our government systems focused on welfare (emphasis his):
One of the problems across the social sector is there’s too much top down innovation and an over reliance on tech based solutions.
We need to listen to communities , seed fund some grass roots projects and get out of the way.
Time and again, systems that grow bottom-up out perform those that are designed top-down. Top-down priorities are beneficial when you are looking to scale out a successful solution. But finding a solution in the first place is demonstrably easier when starting small: experiment, fail fast, learn and try again. You can’t do that when investing billions on a single enterprise-scale scheme.
Davos may be a great deal of fun and intellectual exercise for the global super-elite. But the mindset invariably focuses on top-down solutions. Attendance is mostly limited to those benefitting from the current systems in the world. Cue Machiavelli:
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.
To shape the world in a different way is more likely to happen by the actions of those least likely to attend events like Davos. And in this new globally connected age, the balance of power is shifting. Whilst there have always been people across the generations who would rather see a fairer world, the Internet has connected those voices on a far bigger scale in recent years. More and more individuals talk about their desire for meaning and purpose over wealth. For a more collaborative networked culture over one dominated by command-and-control hierarchies.
The following is just one presentation (but a rather good one by Joyce Hostyn) demonstrating this shift:
The theme at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year was ‘Shaping the world’. That’s something we can all now participate in. The smartest people will never all be in one room.
References
- 3 things we should all learn from Benefits Street – Paul Taylor, January 2014
- Can we design organisations for beauty? – Joyce Hostyn, January 2014
- Machiavelli’s quote taken from The Prince, published 1532
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Flickr image – Peter Brabeck-Letmathe and Michael S. Dell at WEF 2009, Davos – shared by the World Economic Forum
Groups versus Individuals
To be effective and productive in the modern world, organisations should not rely solely on hierarchical organisation charts to explain how work gets done. Networks help highlight individual contributions
The image above is a classic traditional organisational hierarchy. A manager responsible for making the decisions, supported by supervisors, each leading a team of people tasked with carrying out the decisions.
One of the biggest flaws within hierarchies is the tendency to treat all individuals at the each level as identical. In the example above, we have a decision maker, a group of supervisors: the blue dots A, B and C), and a group of do-ers: the red dots 1 to 9. (Yes I’m back with the pictures of dots again – goes with the name…) There are all sorts of challenges to the effectiveness of this system, not least trying to operate in an environment that doesn’t observe the rules of hierarchies and let’s everyone make decisions. But that’s for another post… This one is exploring how a network makes it easier to identify individual contributions and raise productivity.
Let’s rearrange our dots as the actual network that functions within this organisation:
The numbers and letters represent the order in which each individual was hired. The organisation chart does not tell us anything is different between the first person hired or the last. But the social network does.
Teams A and B are highly inter-connected. Team C is not. Supervisor C has barely any connections out of his/her reporting line and team. And we could guess that hires 7 ad 8 were made by C. All have come from outside the organisation and have yet to build up their network. The most useful member of Team C is no.9 because they have direct connections into both other teams and can more easily tap into their knowledge and expertise. But most interestingly, they have a connection with their manager’s manager. I’d guess No. 9 is heir-apparent to C’s job. C should be planning their next career move.
No. 1 is the longest-serving hire and well connected but not as well-connected as newer employees. Looking at the connections, the manager (purple dot) must be a more recent hire than no.1 because they have made connections with No. 4 and No.6 so they are not averse to communicating direct with team members yet do not interact with no.1. No. 1 is on the way out. Their career at this organisation has peaked.
No. 6’s career is on the up. Connected with people in all three teams, connected to all three supervisors and connected to the manager. Even if No. 6 knows nothing, they have access to everyone who knows something. The alternative scenario is that they are the person who knows everything, and everyone seeks them out when they need help. Either way, 6 is highly valuable to this organisation. Yet the organisation chart would suggest they are just a junior role.
Organisation charts make it far too easy to lump everybody into a single group – the level they are currently placed at within a hierarchy. And if you are near the bottom, you are expendable because the larger number of people at your level, the bigger the assumption that you are easy to replace. Imagine the company needs to reduce headcount due to financial difficulties? The common method in large organisations is to simply require all teams to reduce their headcount by the same amount. So teams A, B and C each lose a person, facing demoralising uncertainty and disruption in the process. The more productive approach would be to eliminate Team C, but keep no.9 and move them into one of the other teams. You’ve reduced the headcount by the same number, saved a bit more money because Supervisor C would likely have been on a higher salary and not impacted the two higher-performing teams in the process.
The image above visualises both approaches. On the left, the lowest performer from each team is removed. Look how sparse the connections now appear between the three teams. On the right, the lowest performing team is removed but the highest performer from within it is retained, and that isn’t the supervisor. The connections between the remaining individuals is much tighter, across the two teams. How much likelier is it that they will be able to support one another? None of this would have been evident by just studying an org chart that treats everyone at each level equally.
Of course this is a vast simplification of just one of the differences between networks and hierarchies. Hierarchies do have their benefits. They help us organise large volumes of information in ways that are simple to understand, making sense out of what would otherwise seem chaotic. But they do tend to create inequalities – it’s easier to reward the few at the top than acknowledge the many below – and their weakness is in failing to appreciate the messy realities about what is really going on. We are beginning to develop the tools to better understand and work within networks, enabling us to make sense out of the chaos without having to create a hierarchy in the process. Organisation’s that tap into this new found capability will out perform those that don’t.
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How the economy works…
Embedded below is a great 30-minute video walking through the basics of how a capitalist economy works, how they can go wrong and what (ought to) work best to get them back on track, acknowledging that boom and bust cycles are somewhat inevitable…
[ba-youtubeflex videoid=”PHe0bXAIuk0″]
Joining Dots 