Updated: 04/06/2003; 11:13:47 PM.
The Work Place
What is it about traditional work places that is so stifling to the creative? Is reform possible? What are the alternatives?
        

Saturday, May 10, 2003

Articles about Social Capital [Blogging Alone]

A superb resource


2:06:08 PM    comment []

Trust, security, and organization design.

Security doesn't create trust [SATN]

Humans gain trust by interacting and "getting to know" people. Transparent technologies that make it easy to see what people and companies are up to (in a sense the opposite of firewalls) are what help me trust. I like Reagan's saying: "trust, but verify". It implies that trust requires means for openness, not firewalls and secretiveness

More wise words from David Reed.

We spend time in the summers on Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island. There's a little vegetable stand that runs on an honor system; you pick out the fresh vegetable you want and leave your money in a little cash box. It works in that environment.

Anonymity and large scale make those kinds of processes hard. But solutions based on protecting yourself against the risks of anonymity and scale aggravate the problem instead of alleviating it. There is risk associated with opening yourself up either metaphorically or technologically. I think a portion of the answer lies in working from the grassroots up. Inside organizations most of the real work gets done by small groups of people who've learned how to trust one another. But how much of their work is overhead generated by having to work around well-intentioned but ultimately fear based rules, regulations, and processes?

One reference worth checking out in this regard is Shoshanna Zuboff's  The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, which I've mentioned before.

There's quite a lot going on in this realm right now. Chad Dickerson just ran this interesting column in Infoworld on "the battle for decentralization." All of the current ferment around Social Software.

There's an interesting book about organizations published a few years back called Seeing Organizational Patterns : A New Theory and Language of Organizational Design by Bob Keidel. In it he offers the following diagram for understanding the tradeoffs that must be managed in designing organizations. Typically we tend to think only in terms of the tradeoff between control and autonomy. His, richer, model introduces a third point of cooperation and suggests that organization design problems can be treated as looking for a spot somewhere inside the triangle instead of somewhere along one of its edges. The trend has been northward towards more recognition of cooperation and, hopefully, away from stale debates about control or autonomy.

 

[McGee's Musings]

As we look deeply into traditional organizations, they work to reduce trust. Long lists of rules etc. At one of my clients we are trying the following.

The problem is how to improve financial accountability and hence the speed of decision making without losing control of the money. Today, Managers feel oppressed by the VP Finance who treats them as children and who uses the "rule" to keep them as children. Getting approval to spend money that has already be approved in the budget is a slow and painful process. The VP is concerned that the managers cannot be trusted. They find him a tyrant.

Our experiment? To set up a series of individual personal contracts between the manager and the VP . In the contract each as equals set out how they will work with each other to make the system work. The rule book goes out the window. The interaction creates trust - we hope!!! I will let you know more in time.


2:01:50 PM    comment []

I have spent most of last week in meetings with two very different clients but I have had one huge aha from both. One client is a national restaurant franchise. The other is the Health ministry for PEI.

Why is KM not working? Maybe a block is that when we talk about learning and knowledge, we assume that the pathway is through words. My sense is that we are going to see a revolution in learning as we shift from an exchange of words to an exchange of experience.

Recall the opening  scene in Saving Private Ryan. The Captain, and the audience, is overwhelmed at first by the experience of being under fire. But then he comes out of his daze and uses his experience at Kassereine and Anzio to help him "see" what has to be done. No amount of training in the classroom. No amount of reading the manual could have helped him. Only his "procedural memory", hardwired by experience, could enable him to decide and act in time. (OODA) It is the same with driving. Recall when you were a learner - how hard it is to "think" through changing gears and to drive safely at the same time. When confronted with events there is not enough time to logically think your way through. You have to dip into your procedural memory (Intuition)

So why is this important for organizational life? Most training or KM relies on an exchange of words. It also tends to focus on the core process rather than what is really going on. What do I mean by this?  In the restaurant we have been looking at how best to train the staff. In the traditional model, we focus on the steps in the process set out by the manual. You meet the customer and the follow the following steps that get the order to the kitchen, the food to the table and the customer out having paid. All chains rely of this idea of a mechanical process.

But we are starting to ask the deeper question of why the customer is really there in the first place? This implies that we need to train to deliver on a series of situations rather than merely the core process of delivering a standard quality of food in a timely manner. We suspect that the meal maybe only the starting point. If you go out with a date - the meal is a background to your romance and your learning more about each other. If you go out with the softball team, you are having a different experience - you are having a tribal celebration If you go out with a client, you have a business agenda and a relationship experience and so on.What the client expects is a social experience not just a meal. The social experience is actually paramount. So merely focusing on the delivering the food is to miss the entire point. The wait staff need to understand what experience the client needs that night and to deliver it deliberately. They have to be able to identify this need immediately and react in a nanosecond. This assessment and reaction can not be obtained from a book or by words alone.

In addition to doing the real job, we have to recognize that while you are trying to create the ideal experience for the diner, you can be sure that things will be going wrong. What is also not taught in the business world is that predictable things go wrong all the time. We expect that things go well. When things go wrong, if you are not prepared, you will panic or freeze as green troops do in combat. The Army understand this. The #1 lesson is that no plan lasts beyond the contact with the enemy or even beyond the start line. The Army therefore trains in the expectation that things will go wrong. The good news is that many bad events can be predicted and experienced. Airline pilots use the simulator so that when they lose all four engines, they don't spend time thinking about what to do - they go into a drilled sequence of steps.

What can go wrong that we can predict in a restaurant? Some of the key staff will not turn up. There will be a fire in the kitchen, a group of drunks will hassle a woman. There is a huge line up for a table and so on. You must experience these things to get above them. We are thinking then of doing what the army does. Developing an NCO cadre, from the key staff, who will train by drilling and simulating core experiences in a restaurant. We hope that the result will be that no matter what happens we can deliver the experience that you want.

How do we do this? We use the best staff who do this anyway, the veterans, to create the operational doctrine and then we use them as trainers and experts and simulation to recreate the experiences for new staff. We use our restaurants off line as simulators where we teach, do , refine do refine etc until the knowledge is "embodied" How do we build on this? We use weblogs and Groove to link the experts between the restaurants across the country so that new situations are brought into the events that we teach from.

In my meeting with the health folks our topic was how poorly we tend to parent today. Again in earlier times we learnt to parent well by doing it and or watching others. No manual, book, video will "teach" us how to deal with the myriad of events that occur with an infant. You have to experience it. So we are thinking of starting a "tupperware" process where expert mums will teach mums with their babies in hand.We will train the session leaders who will then create experiences for the other mums. We will link them with weblogs or Groove so that they can share experiences outside the room and then have access to material that will enhance their experiential learning. As with a restaurant, an issue is time. When you are uncertain about what to do with your baby, you do not have the time or the hands free to go to a book. You have to "know" immediately how to best react.

As we work our way through this I will post more

 


12:19:38 PM    comment []

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