Grains of Gold

Knowledge sharing is an essential component in the process of innovation. When we look back at the history of great innovations, we nearly always find that innovations do not come from a lone genius locked away from the world. Instead, they come from people who find ways to connect with other people and their different ideas. These people are able to take concepts, often in disparate fields, and combine them to form a new idea that is better than its individual parts. Google the history of the ice cream cone, the airplane, the cell phone, Velcro, the moving assembly line, and, of course, the Post-it, and you will find that all those innovations were created as a result of melding ideas from different sources.

The greatest danger leaders can face is isolation and an inability to keep learning. Most leaders agree with this in concept but, upon reflection, realize they are more isolated than they thought. For example, as you become more senior, your people are less likely to give you bad news or criticize you for your shortcomings. In fact, most of your colleagues are subordinates who are more concerned with making a good impression on you than trying to give you coaching. As a result of this, leaders need to work harder to seek advice and encourage debate and disagreement. In addition, they have to work harder to see clients as well as solicit advice and constructive criticism from those who observe them. In short they have to work harder to fight isolation and they have to make a conscious effort to keep learning.

The indus­tri­al model broke down work into its sim­plest ele­ments and linked it togeth­er in com­plex process­es. The knowl­edge com­po­nent was removed from work­ers and reserved for man­age­ment, while work­ers were pro­vid­ed with just enough knowl­edge to “do their job”…..

Break­ing down that model and restor­ing the knowl­edge cre­ation and shar­ing func­tion to all employ­ees requires exec­u­tive com­mit­ment to reex­am­ine busi­ness process­es, HR poli­cies, and IT infrastructure.

Social / Open Busi­ness Adop­tion is hard. Well, it should well be. If not, what is the point? What’s the chal­lenge? Where is your vision? Where is the busi­ness value? What are your goals? Think of it, if social / open busi­ness adop­tion would have been real­ly easy most of us would have got­ten pret­ty much bored right from the start and would have moved else­where already. Whether we like it or not, we, social / open busi­ness evan­ge­lists live on the lag­gards, the crit­ics, the skep­tics. They are the ones who keep feed­ing us with their neg­a­tiv­i­ty, who make us stronger by putting up a good fight, the ones who makes us think whether what we do is worth while or not. In short, they are the ones who will make your adop­tion efforts a real suc­cess or just anoth­er IT project fail­ure.

The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation. And it’s a philosophy that has begun to change how we think about creativity itself.

The ethos of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, to innovate, to program, without asking permission. No one can know the whole of the network, and by design it cannot be centrally controlled. This network was intended to be decentralized, its assets widely distributed. Today most innovation springs from small groups at its “edges.”

A man­ag­er recent­ly voiced his con­cerns: “Most employ­ees pre­fer being told what to do. They are will­ing to accept being treat­ed like chil­dren in exchange for reduced stress. They are also will­ing to obey author­i­ty in exchange for job security.” That is the way we have seen it: man­agers inspire, moti­vate and con­trol employ­ees who need to be inspired, moti­vat­ed and con­trolled. These dynam­ics cre­ate the sys­tem of man­age­ment and jus­ti­fy its con­tin­u­a­tion.

If we want to meet the chal­lenges of the post-industrial world, this rela­tion­ship needs to change. The work­ers chang­ing their role are often seen as a mat­ter of the extent to which the man­agers are will­ing to allow it and give up respon­si­bil­i­ty. In real­i­ty it is as much a mat­ter of how much the work­ers are will­ing to grow their (man­age­ment) capac­i­ty and take more and wider respon­si­bil­i­ty.

Social Busi­ness has no doubt seen suc­cess in pock­ets. But most­ly, Social Busi­ness to date is like a Salmon swim­ming upstream. We all know how that movie ends. It’s time to see how you can lever­age social com­put­ing to enable the orga­ni­za­tion to swim in the direc­tion of the incen­tive cur­rents and help them col­lab­o­rate more effec­tive­ly where its appar­ent­ly need­ed. And iden­ti­fy which tech­nol­o­gy puts flip­pers on your employ­ees feet.

Employees who want to game the system are going to do so inside or outside the office. Supervising them more closely is costly, enervating, and it’s ultimately a losing game. As for highly motivated employees who’ve been working from home, all they’re likely to feel about being called back to the office is resentful — and more inclined to look for new jobs.

The tension between ‘business’ and IT has been around forever, but instead of getting better, it has gotten worse in the last couple of years. The reason is that digital has become ’normality’, and almost everyone now feels at ease with digital technology. In other words, the natural knowledge advantage of the IT department has eroded. To put it bluntly, since everyone and their dog started carrying around iPads, the IT department really lost their advantage on the ‘frontier of technology’.

Working in a world of extended collaboration asks individuals to contribute through a different and, in many ways, more complex set of activities. Workers must deal with rich content that flows through infinite links. Individuals must make intelligent, well-informed decisions about what to share with whom (and what not to) with less guidance from the hierarchy to simplify the patterns of interaction. And they must dig deep within themselves to form innovative ideas and put their best thinking forward.

To a large extent, the conduct of these activities is not something managers can prescribe or even monitor. Unlike process-based work, in which the goal is to perform synchronized tasks consistently and reliably, extended collaboration occurs asynchronously and is often aimed at discovering or developing something new. Rather than requiring everyone to be in the same place at the same time, extended collaboration can occur virtually. In process-based work, quality can be assured through in-process inspection and performance judged on conformity to process specifications, while the quality of collaborative work can typically be assessed only by the results achieved.