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Today was the first public gettogether of Yritys 2.0 (enterprise 2.0) book project. About 20 people showed up and I had to honor to provide a presentation and lead a conversation on knowledge, learning and innovation in organizations.
The event was in the evening, it was open for anyone and it was marketed only on Jaiku and a few blogs so the resulting crowd was guaranteed to be interested in the topic. My usual presentation is 30 minutes but this one lasted for 1 hour 20 minutes because of the conversation between the slides. I like it that way, although some thought the setting was still a bit too structured to be fully 2.0. Old habits die hard.
The reportage (in finnish) is here, kudos to Mari Koo for blogging about it.
My slides are here.
The illustration that got most attention is below, describing how different tools play part in the anatomy of an Organization gone 2.0 (click the picture for full image). This provides a framework to understand the relationship between different social technologies within an organization:
The underlying theory here is based on David Kolb’s and Donald Schön’s theories on the importance of reflective practice in learning among others (like transactive memory by Daniel Wegner), so the analogy has some merits when we want to create organizations capable of learning, innovation and change.
Skeleton
In order for an organization to function, it needs a skeleton consisting of automated real-time processes. Operative technologies are designed to run certain tasks or parts of business processes to remove friction from organizational functions. These can be seen as systems like shared calendars, ERPs, bug repositories, CRMs and other operative systems designed for managing certain business processes. Janne Korhonen has a lot of useful ideas to say about this.
Senses
Because nowadays an organization needs to work outside-in rather than inside-out to align the business with markets, you need a way to sense what’s going on outside of your immediate vicinity. As an organization your ability to turn information and weak signals into actionable knowledge is directly proportional to the ability of your employees to make sense what’s going on. Various tools provide a place for reflection in and on action. You need some kind of tools to draw ideas into your organization from the fringes. Tools like blogs, microblogs, presence tools , social bookmarking etc. provide you ways to create meaningful stories that are relevant to your organization.
Nervous system
Now that you have something to sense about, you also need to get the signals flowing inside your organization. You need digital tools that connect various resources, services and information together and enable personalization on individual basis. RSS feeds, various search functions and interfaces like APIs provide means for plugging in the nervous system of your organization. Each department, individual, project etc. needs to have some access point to tap into.
Brain
Now that you have a fully functioning network signaling ideas from the trenches, you need a way to sort out the meaningful stuff, remix various resources and crystallize new ideas. Tools like wikis, tagging, data mining, qualitative analysis etc. provide a rich collective breeding ground for a fully working organizational brain. It’s based on an associative network structure, rather than a tree structure. Just like the human brain, your organization has information that is evolving all the time. Ideas are connecting and blending with new information, the network structure gets denser in certain parts over time and weakens in others. Your organizational memory is the primary place for synthesizing reflections.
Blood system
A fully working body is useless without a life force. That’s why you need to get the blood flowing and making sure that your organization is not getting any heart attacks or blood clots. This is obviously based on human interaction and making sure that the conversation is flowing all the time in various different ways. You can optimize the interaction flow by utilizing social networking tools and real-time communications. This includes semi-synchronic (e.g. chat) and synchronic communication tools (e.g. instant messaging and virtual conferencing). You can use social network analysis tools to discover and fix architectural problems in your human network.
Muscles
One thing that was left out is muscles. Ilkka Kakko in the audience noted that muscles is money. Small companies can have small muscles and be very agile and fast. Large enterprises have huge muscles but are slow and cumbersome. Another analogy could be fuel for the body, like food or water. You obviously need some way to address this resource allocation issue.
The discussion bursted out into a conversation on motivation and reason for various people to take part in online communities, sometimes producing value for very different motivators than money. I noted that in the commons people contribute resources as long as they get more value out of the commons than what they put in. As an example, you upload videos to Youtube for free, because it enables you to discover other great videos, have a free storage for your videos and save time in converting the videos in a format that someone else can watch easily. Monetization is enabled through indirect channels.
Juhani Anttila noted, that one thing that might be wrong in the picture is the title about organization. This kind of system is more like an organism having self-organizing capabilities, rather than being something like a controlled mechanical robot. Before and organism you have an orgasm and after the organism you have death. All organizations have different life cycles. Some are even eaten alive by predators.
