Becoming a Social Business -- Beyond Culture Change

A paradigm shift occurs when prevailing mental model has so many egregious anomalies that it “breaks” and a new mental model of the world is perceived to be a better explanation of how the world works. ~Steve Denning

Our words define our worldview. We use the vocabulary available to us to describe and analyze our experiences and perceptions. The founder of the idea that language and worldview are inextricable is William von Humboldt, the Prussian philologist. The German word Weltanschauung—used to represent the mode of apprehending reality of a community—was first used by Kant and later popularized by Hegel. Weltanschauung represents the collective consciousness of a community of a certain experience.  

In this context, I had a bit of an epiphany. Over the past few years, the need to become a social business and to promote enterprise-wide collaboration have taken hold in many organizations. The usual approach is to launch an enterprise collaboration platform (technology first being easy to do) and hope that people will engage and contribute with a bit of cajoling and coercing. But a majority of these endeavors fail leading to skepticism and finger pointing. The usual culprits are the hapless organizational culture closely followed by hierarchy and leadership lethargy. We have become accustomed to blaming the culture of an organization for the failure of any initiative, and more so when the change calls for redefining and re-imagining how people work and interact. Before I proceed further, let me clarify that these culprits are not blameless. A fair number of mistakes can be attributed to them. I only want to say these do not invoke the complete picture. We have to dive deeper to understand why organizations across the world – from the Americas to Asia – are apparently making the same mistakes.

We have to take a step back and examine the metaphors and the discourse that organizations abide by and are described by. The crux of the problem lies in our inability to see how the culture of organizations stem from and is shaped by the very discourse of management that we have collectively subscribed to ever since the Industrial Revolution and the manufacturing era. No matter how hard we try to change the culture – and I do believe that leaders and managers are trying – the discourse we use lets us down. The words become reality. Currently, our management discourse is permeated by the language of two metaphors – the military and the manufacturing. The business model and operating principles in today’s organizations hinge on “making” profit through the deft use of limited resources in an organized manner. The military metaphor dominates the world of business – right from “staff”, “line”, “chain of command”, to “war for talent”, “competitive strategy”, and “line of fire”. The assumption is that doing business is akin to waging war and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Organizations thus begin to behave with an almost “military” mindset – valuing planning over innovation, dwelling on constraints over opportunities, giving in to enforcing over enabling, compliance over collaboration…

Underlying this military and manufacturing discourse is an insidious and difficult to pin down aspect – the scarcity mindset – be it of money, skills, information, time, talent, and so on. A world defined by scarcity is driven by the ethos of competition, hoarding, survival of the fittest, suspicion, exclusion, elimination of the other, and fear. These concepts are fundamentally opposed to the principle and values that support cooperation and collaboration – the pillars of social business and authentic communities. As long as our organizations are operating under the principle of scarcity, we will continue to struggle to get people engaged and motivated enough to collaborate. The words we use not only reflect but also reinforce and reproduce the reality. The words become reality.

Now, let’s look at the words that come to mind when we thing “community” which has its root in the Latin word “communitas” meaning things held in common. Community elicits in my mind words like commune, abundance, love, wholeness, trust, belonging, authenticity, creation, safety, inclusion… and other similar words. As anyone who has ever been or aspires to be a community manager, we know that these are the emotions that we have to inspire in our users for them to become engaged and collaborative community members. However, the discourse that defines community within organizations get subsumed under the larger discourse of the organization itself which, as I have already mentioned, is defined by scarcity and competition. When the two discourses clash, the larger one signifying the organization as a whole inevitably wins. The words become reality.

Let me make a disclaimer. This clash is not the fault of managers or leaders taking the organization forward – in most cases, it is done in good faith. Controls are put in place to prevent information from going to competitors; non-compliance is punished; transparency is censored to prevent general dissent. And we simplistically club all of these under the umbrella of an amorphous and ambiguous culture and dismiss it by saying that “the culture of the organization is not conducive to collaboration”. We have to identify the words that run counter to authenticity, trust and transparency and replace them with a different set of words when speaking about organizations. Words carry their own denotation and connotation and define our consciousness. It might seem like a trivial matter, but it truly has deep implications for the kind of transformation organizations need to go through in order to become authentic communities.

The discourse of communities doesn’t and cannot hinge on and around scarcity. We need to redefine and reimagine the very description of an organization itself. What if we were to define an organization like a community: “Self-organized network of people with common agenda, cause, or interest, who collaborate by sharing ideas, information, and other resources...” (Wikipedia). We have to shift from the old ways of working that was driven by extrinsic motivation – bonus, salary hike, promotion, and other tangible rewards to one that is driven from the heart, that engages people intrinsically by giving them the autonomy, providing the purpose and creating a sense a belonging. Jeremy Scrivens writes in his post, The Future of Work is Social Business at Scale, “…authenticity is not only the foundation of collaboration and innovation, it is the very experience of being well - being who you really are - Being! not just doing.”

Tangible rewards are limited, and hence automatically lead to competition and fight for survival. In contrast, intrinsic motivation, authenticity, trust, and kindness stem from a deeper source of abundance. Organizations need to shift their paradigms and transform at a far deeper level than we are currently addressing. To see real impact, and deep and lasting transformation, we have to attack the root, and reimagine the organizational metaphor.

Social Technology, Community Management and Organizational Development

I have been reading a spate of articles and posts related to the need for a change in the way organizations function. The diagram below by Dion Hinchcliffe is a succinct illustration of how digital technology has been and will continue to play a key role in bringing about this change.

The diagram traces the evolution of different social technology and their potential to enforce and enable a deep change in how organizations function and their structure. With digital technology growing exponentially, the speed of change is going to be faster than any we have encountered before. And there will be no escaping this digital onslaught. A bid to ignore or sidestep it will only result in a quicker path to redundancy as is evident from cases like Kodak. The safest path is to embrace the change and assess its impact on the specific industry. It's also worthwhile noting that digital evolution is not only for the IT department to worry about. This evolution is heralding far-reaching and yet-unimagined impact in all spheres of life. Organizations and the corporate world will require deep and fundamental transformations in business practices including leadership, governance, processes, customer orientation, etc. Read the post, How Social Technology has Emerged as an Enterprise Management Model, for an in-depth understanding. I am not going to tread into management theory or organizational structures in this post. I wanted to set the premise for what is to come in the months and years ahead...and where do we come in as learning and organizational development specialists. 

Given that the shifts and turmoil will continue to exponentially increase as digital technology evolves at an hitherto unimagined pace, organizations will be left with no choice but to transform themselves. Superficial tweaks and process re-engineering will no longer serve the purpose. It is time for deep and fundamental transformation of all organizational and management principles practised with such astounding success over the past many decades. Standardization, efficiency, processes, supervisory management, planning, etc., were the tools and levers of the Industrial Age that brought us comfort, wealth and urbanization. The advent of digital technology has suddenly and with remarkable speed turned the world upside down in more ways than one. The diagram below taken from The Second Machine Age (a must read book) by Andrew McAfee, et al., shows the inflection point when the gradual pace of change shows a sudden shift, and the graph becomes almost perpendicular. And this happened around 2000.

Against this backdrop, we have organizations struggling with outdated platforms, old management practices, fossilized bureaucracy, dissatisfied customers and ever shifting market needs while the evolution is wreaking havoc in the old order of things. The solution is literally to begin from scratch. Transform and reinvent the organizational practices. Create organizations that are nimble, constantly learning, conversing and listening. 

For OD and L&D practitioners, this is a time of intense challenge as well as exhilarating possibilities. The digital world requires a set of digital skills and mindsets that most organizations are struggling with. The leaders at the helm of most organizations (start-ups are exceptions) come from B-schools that taught the skills predominantly required by the Industrial Era. The entire landscape of communication is changing with social technology, instantaneous chats, and forms like videos and podcasts entering the scene. Today's mobile phone has more computing and processing power than a laptop had 5 years ago. And one cannot ignore the power of SoLoMo, i.e., social, local and mobile coming together. However, these are not just technology changes but require uprooting of fundamental beliefs and behaviours that spelled success and power in the past. 

Hence, a plug-on social platform used to conduct business the old way will only yield frustration and cynicism. Individuals looking to follow processes and predefined rules to conduct their work will find themselves replaced by machines and robots. Organizations will find that only complex and creative work requiring skills like problem solving, pattern sensing, analysing, and such are left for the human workforce - the same workforce that through years of command and control has been reduced to order-following machines. And those individuals will suddenly find themselves facing the threat of redundancy. Scary? Yes! The same individuals now have to get back to using those faculties that humans are best at - analysing, empathising, collaborating. The "human" will perhaps finally come back to the corporate world! Today's landscape will require organizations to think beyond automation when designing workflow and business processes.And it's time for L&D and OD practitioners to play a key role in envisioning the strategy and laying the roadmap in collaboration with business heads. IMHO, its finally time for L&D to become integrated with business and take a seat at the table. 

While I cannot profess that L&D/OD specialists can change the nature of management, I can say that well-informed and skilled professionals from this field can enable an organization to empower its employees and management to acquire those skills that will get them to use the social technologies with greater efficacy. Sometimes, small actions repeated over a period of time can bring about behavioural change. Fogg's Behavioural Change method of instilling Tiny Habits could be a way, which I'll explore in a later post. Manifested behaviour-no matter how small-thoughtfully supported and encouraged over a period of time can bring about long term change. This primarily happens because individuals begin to see the impact of their repeated actions and the organization begins to reap the benefits. However, it takes time, commitment, skilled facilitators and a clear direction at a strategic level. 

And this is where L&D and OD professionals can intervene with support from the organizational leaders. This support is of paramount importance if the organization wishes to transform itself and become a truly "digital enterprise". Certain management practices which have become conflated with how the corporate world functions have to be dismantled and possibly discarded. Steve Denning quoting Hamel in this brilliant article "Why Bureaucracy Must Die" calls out the ills of bureaucracy, one of the detractors of social business: 

Bureaucracy is gripped by “the ideology of controlism” and “worships at the altar of conformance.” It’s hostile to “the irregular people with irregular ideas who create the irregular business models that generate the irregular returns,” and so “cripples organizational vitality.”  It “shrinks our incentive to dream, imagine and contribute.” It causes our organizations to “remain incompetent at their core.” 

I brought this up primarily to highlight that a truly digital organization enabled by social technologies and empowered employees and management are at the golden cusp of listening to those "irregular ideas". It is in these ideas that leap over processes and old ways of doing things that the salvation of organizations and the future of the corporate world lie. I have written before about the perils of having social as a bolt on strategy and of automation taking over complicated, process-based work. What will be left will be the complex challenges in need of creative solutions from "irregular people" unafraid to try their irregular ideas. 

To facilitate this exchange of "irregular conversations," organizations have to think like communities, to think of Workplace Learning in a World "Beyond Automation". Community Directors/Managers/Facilitators will become a key role in developing a successful social business. In an earlier post, I had emphasized the importance of L&D to don the mantle of community management. It's still not widely understood skill and traditional L&D departments used to conducting training needs analysis, skill-competency mapping, intervention design and delivery, and such are hard pressed to wrap their head around this critical skill. 

What role will communities play in transforming the way an organization functions? 

It is important to attempt an answer to this question if we are to fully comprehend the importance of community management. An organization does not become a social business or a digital enterprise just by installing a few social collaboration platforms and subscribing to an app marketplace. It requires a fundamental behavioural change at all levels and shifts in mindset. I have discussed this in earlier posts here and here. A community manager's role is to help the organization to cut across the hierarchies and foster open conversations. It's a strategic role requiring a rigorous understanding of various fields including organizational analysis and development, change management, management theories and practices, and human psychology and social behaviour. S/he may have other community facilitators to actively manage the online and offline activities that are so crucial to the success of social business. But the key role lies at a strategic and business level. IMHO, an organizational community manager--Chief Collaboration Officer??--will be as important as a CFO or CMO and of equal strategic importance in a digital enterprise. It's a role that is yet to be delineated and recognized but it's time has come. I have jotted down some thoughts around what this role could do to help an organization become a digital enterprise. 

The role will have to:

1. Study the current organizational culture (this requires an OD background)
2. Analyse the existing gaps/silos as well as the formal and informal channels of communication 
3. Understand the broad business goals, processes and nature of the business
4. Evaluate the current digital skills of employees, managers and leaders
5. Create a framework and roadmap for the organization to help them:
• Understand the social business journey and it's maturity model (Ref: Community Round-table report)
• Acquire the necessary digital skills to participate in a collaborative environment with ease 
• Build trust-based relationships to facilitate sharing of tacit knowledge, co-creation of new knowledge and innovate
• Enable diverse kinds of communication from informing and sharing content to connecting, soliciting input, collaborating, and solving problems  

The individual will not only require a solid understanding of business processes but also of human behaviour. They will have to be the kind of individual who can demonstrate digital leadership in both words and deeds. They'll not only work with business heads across different verticals and product lines but will liaise with the executive team to define the strategy that will bring about the change. Their most important task may be to change the way an organization communicates - internally as well as externally. Today's L&D team may need to evolve into a Enterprise Collaboration and Workplace Learning team and report into the Chief Collaboration Officer.  

I will explore this role in greater detail in subsequent posts. I feel the time has come for organizations to move beyond implementing collaboration platforms to integrating a collaborative and cooperative mindset at the strategic level. It's a move that calls for a shift from the tactical to the strategic and must be supported at the highest level for any organization to reap the benefits of the digital evolution. Else, the same evolution will continue to wreak havoc. 

Trust, Tacit Knowledge and Social Business

As I read the post on Resolving the Trust Paradox by John Hagel, I was reminded of two things—the talk on the power of vulnerability by Brene Brown and what Morten Hansen says about tacit knowledge sharing in his book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results. I had written about the latter in my post Molotov cocktail = Weak ties x complicated knowledge.

Hansen explains Molotov cocktail in the context of network building and explains how weak ties can be detrimental to the transfer of tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge (by definition knowledge that is un-codified, not visible and sometimes, not “articulatable” in very black and white terms) requires strong ties to be shared. Strong ties—as we know—are based on trust.

With complexity, chaos and constant change taking over and becoming the norm, we can expect codified knowledge stocks to have a shorter shelf-life. A constant state of flux will give rise to ambiguity, uncertainties and questions—all of which will exist in the form of tacit knowledge in the minds of people as they encounter real world challenges, device innovative ways to deal with those, make mistakes and learn from them. We have moved from an age of best practices to emerging practices and no one can be intelligent on their own any more, as rightly quoted by Michele Martin in her post Learning Together. I loved the quote so I have pasted it in its entirety below:

(Socrates) introduced the idea that individuals could not be intelligent on their own, that they need someone else to stimulate them. . . His brilliant idea was that if two unsure individuals were put together, they could achieve what they could not do separately; they could discover the truth, their own truth, for themselves.  ~Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity

The complexity is further compounded by the nature of distributed organizations. In today’s model of a global organization, teams are often scattered, employees work onsite or from home, road warriors are always “on the road”—in short, the concept of teams working shoulder to shoulder every day, literally and metaphorically standing by each other, talking over problems and challenges at their desks are slowly being replaced by virtual teams who interact via social tools and platforms, use Webex for meetings, get into teleconferences to talk over issues and update each other via emails. In this context, how do we build trust? Given that knowledge sharing and knowledge building are much more than an exchange of information and updates and involves the realm of tacit knowledge, it is critical that we build trust first.

Enter social business! Emergent social platforms made communication and knowledge sharing easy even among people residing on opposite corners of the planet, total strangers to each other. We suddenly had access to all the experts whose books and posts we had read with admiration. Twitter changed it all. Seeing how individuals adopted the entry of e2.0 for personal growth and development, organizations decided to jump onto this bandwagon, and with good reason. Adopt, adapt or be annihilated!

But very soon organizations treading the path of social business realize that a “platform does not well-knit organization build”. What is required is a move toward a trust-based, dialogue-driven culture that will facilitate the evolution of new ideas, reshaping of the old and the spread of the new. Collaboration in an enterprise is very different from collaborating with individuals for one’s personal goals. As Hansen explains in Collaboration, organizational collaboration is meant to achieve certain goals—whether it is to resolve a tenacious problem, come up with a new product line, or to make a breakthrough discovery.  However, matters become sticky here. All of these situations require the sharing of tacit knowledge, a willingness to express half-formed thoughts, safety belts that allow people to make mistakes publicly and learn from each other. And the overarching quality that can make this happen is trust.

And in the context of a distributed workforce with workers who have in all probability never met each other, how easy or challenging is it to build trust? Can we engage in meaningful conversations via a social platform with someone we have never met before and share those half-formed thoughts?

Even as organizations invest in social platforms to conduct their day to day to business, online communities are taking over real world teams. This does not automatically make the former more efficient, it is just the way it is going to be. We can no more fight it than we can prevent the sun from rising. And this is where I think one of the biggest behaviour changes is needed. As John Hegel says in the post, “It turns out that the very practices that helped us to build trust in the past are now contributing to the erosion of trust.” If we continue with practices that helped us to foster trust in an environment where we met each other face to face almost daily, those practices are not going to be very effective in an environment driven by activity streams, social tools and apps, and conference calls.

When the very premise of communication has changed, we have to re-think and re-imagine our efforts at building at trust. It will require a great deal more courage to come forth and express our fumbling ideas on a social platform for all and sundry to see and comment on than it did to express it within the safety of a room with five other people of one’s team. 

Related articles

• John Tropea: 2 aspects in tacit knowledge (johntropea.tumblr.com)
• John Tropea: Trust is the medium and knowledge the message (johntropea.tumblr.com)
• David Gurteen: Sense-making through conversation (jarche.com)
• The ineffable, the inexpiable & the inexpicable (cognitive-edge.com)

50 Posts and Articles that Made Me Think in 2011

Inspired by Jane Hart’s Top 100 Articles of 2011, I thought I should put down at least the top 50 that has made me reflect and ponder in the past one year, has changed the way I do things and shaped quite a bit of my work-life decisions. Not all the posts have been written in 2011, but since I either stumbled across them in 2011 or read them with greater appreciation this year, I thought it fair to include these in the list. In the past one year, I have made a career shift or should I say expanded my work portfolio (and I have described the move here), and these posts and articles have been instrumental in helping me make sense of the move and impart some value to the work I do.

I have divided them across five categories for easy reference. From the categories, you will be able to see what has influenced me the most in the past one year. At times, I have also had difficulty in “slotting” an article under a specific category. Many of the articles span groups and are interlinked. I have listed them in some sort of reading order or the way they made sense to me…

Social Business

1. The future is podular by Dave Gray
2. Putting Enterprise 2.0 into Context by Andrew McAfee
3. Factories: the original social businesses by Anne Marie McEwan
4. The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business: The Early Adoption Phase by Dion Hinchcliffe
5. Moving Beyond Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement by Dion Hinchcliffe
6. Seven Lessons Learned on Social Business by Dion Hinchcliffe
7. Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions by Riitta Raesmaa
8. From social intranets to collaboration ecosystems by Fred Cavazza
9. What is a social intranet or an intranet 2.0 ? by Bertrand Duperrin
10. How Digital Business Will Evolve in 2012: 6 Big Ideas by Dion Hinchcliffe
11. Why social business is different - Part 1: Reusing stored collaboration by Dion Hinchcliffe
12. Social networks are becoming your personal operating system by Brian Solis
13. Five Emergent Strategies for Improving Social Business Performance by Dion Hinchcliffe
14. Open Work: Using Social Software To Make Our Work Visible Again by Dion Hinchcliffe
15. Why E2.0 and Social Business Initiatives Are Likely to Remain Difficult by Jon Husband

Community Management

1. Community Management: The Strategic New IT-Enabled Business Capability by Dion Hinchcliffe
2. Community management: The 'essential' capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts by Dion Hinchcliffe
3. How to Build an Online Community by Vanessa DiMauro
4. 11 Social Media Yodas Define Community Management “Passion”by Baochi Nguyen
5. Who's To Blame For A Failed Community? by Claire Flanagan
6. Social Software Is Not Enough by Rachel Happe
7. Community Managers are Human Experience (HX) Professionals by Rachel Happe
8. Top 15 Ways to Kills an Online Community -- Again by Vanessa DiMauro
9. Community Managers’ Reading List: 27 Books fromQuiip
10. Why You Need to Foster Community at Work by Shawn Murphy

Content Strategy and Curation

1. Capitalizing On Curation: Why The New Curators Are Beating The Old by Drew Neisser
2. Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future? by Rohit Bhargava
3. Return of the Editor: Why Human Filters are the Future of the Web by  Karyn Campbell
4. Are curators the missing thing in enterprise 2.0 approaches? by Bertrand Duperrin
5. The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators by Robert Scoble
6. Curation in the Enterprise: Actionable information by JP Rangaswami
7. Curation and the enterprise: part 2 by JP Rangaswami
8. Curation and amplification will become much more sophisticated in 2012 by Vadim Lavrusik
9. The Future Of Journalism – By Ross Dawson
10. ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web  by Nick Bilton

Complexity and the changing face of 21^st C Workplace

1. Moving Beyond “Work as Usual” in a Complex World by Thierry de Baillon
2. Why Is Knowledge Sharing Important? A Matter of Survival by Luis Suarez
3. Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival: Part I: Pattern Recognition by Venessa Miemis
4. Connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets by Gordon Ross
5. Diversity, complexity, chaos and working smarter by Harold Jarche
6. The Satir Change Model by Steven M. Smith
7. Connecting Agile Business with Social Business by Dion Hinchcliffe
8. Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity? by Julie Hunt
9. The Collapse of Complex Business Models by Clay Shirky
10. The connected company by Dave Gray

Workplace Learning

1. Social Learning and Exception Handling
2. Disrupt Yourself by Whitney Johnson
3. The Five Failures of Workplace Learning Professionals by Will Thalheimer
4. Social Learning is NOT a new training trend by Jane Hart
5. Jobs, work and technology by Harold Jarche

There are plenty more but in the interest of keeping the list manageable, I have limited it to 50 articles. I have not included posts around learning and instructional design or elearning —still my first love—and will add a separate post with the links to resources I have found useful.

The Six Hats of a Community Manager

In my previous post, I wrote about the tenets of communitymanagement based on my learnings from the past 6 months. In this post, I want to talk about the different hats that we need to don as community managers. This was well put in the diagram by Andy Wibbels which you can see in this post called Inside the Mind of a Community Manager.It graphically represents a number of things a community manager needs to be aware of in her/his role.

In my post, I want to explore all the "hats" a community manager needs to wear to execute her role. The premise of this post is that when an organisation makes a conscious effort to move towards a more social way of doing business, it usually begins with the introduction of an enterprise collaboration platform. Employees, who have been using emails and, perhaps, mailing lists and google groups till then as their mode of communication and collaboration, are now expected to use the collaboration platform for their day to day business. This shift calls for some intense community management and community building, and the post focuses on the different roles a community manager needs to play during this time.

The hat of a Change Agent

When an organization moves to a different mode of communication, it calls for a huge amount of change management. What we are asking for is a behaviour change. Conceptually, the change may appear to be a very simple one--move from emails to a more open mode of communication on a collaboration platform. However, living in the inbox is a deep-rooted habit for most 21st century workers. And to be honest, email is the most frictionless, asynchronous mode of communication today. Why then will people bother to make the shift?

As change agents, we have to make two things very simple for them -- the act of making the shift and the reason behind the shift. Let's take Amazon as an example. I end up buying books on my Kindle not only because I want those books but also because Amazon makes it incredibly simple for me to buy them. It has changed my reading and buying habits tremendously. And I have changed without appearing to have made any conscious effort to do so.

Similarly, we have to remove obstacles from the path of change. We have to be obsessed with making the shift to the new collaboration platform easy. This of course is easier said than done. There will be umpteenth obstacles beyond the control of a community manager ranging from the constraints posed by the platform itself to enterprise security policies that impact how users access the platform. Make a platform difficult to access--this means anything more than two clicks--and users will exit. Moreover, the steps needed to be taken to make the shift have to be crystal clear including what the expected outcome will be. Dan and Chip Heath says in Switch, "What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity." Ambiguity will doom any change effort. And they will go back to the default behavior--in this case email. While emails may be a sub-optimal medium of collaboration, human beings will default to known behavior in the absence of clear and easy path to change.

The hat of a Trainer

All new platforms-- no matter how intuitive it may seem--require some training. This can be in the form of simple how-to documents, screencasts, videos, webex sessions, and anything else that you can think of. What is important to remember perhaps is that designing and creating these training materials is not enough. We need to ensure they reach the users. This could mean creating a Training/Help Center on the platform that can be a one-stop shop for users. Reaching out to users proactively to find out if they need help is also recommended. Keeping the training materials crisp and to the point is critical. Mapping the training to typical use cases is also important. Providing generic, platform related information is not too useful. Instead, the training material needs to focus on what are the typical ways users are likely to interact on the platform and why would they need to do so. Shaping the guidelines, screencasts and videos around these use cases can help onboard users quickly to the platform.

The hat of a Content Curator

As people begin to access the platform, get comfortable with the functionalities and features, what comes next is a proliferation of content. At least in an organisation like ThoughtWorks, that is the trend. With the proliferation comes chaos. The activity stream turns into an overwhelming flood and people lose control of their information flow. It is the job of the community manager to go through this flood, pick out content of interest and value for the community and aggregate that in a manner that makes consumption easy. Each platform will have its own functionalities and features that allow a community manager to curate and aggregate. Jive SBS--the platform we use--has certain useful widgets that let us do so. However, the curation part is manual. Moreover, to be a trustworthy and respected content curator, it is important to know the interests, needs and passions of the community. This requires constant engagement with the community, listening to the community and having an eye for detail. I will write more about what makes for a good content curator in a later post.

The hat of a Connector

Collaboration platforms are all about connections--between contet and people, between expertise and need, between skill-sets and projects, between people and people. As community managers, we need to set in place a system that enables findability and accessibility. This could mean anything from inculcating practices like tagging for searchability, helping users to fill out their profiles for findabilty, to manually connecting the nodes. Since community managers have a bird's eye view of their community, they are often best placed to spot a need and a corresponding solution--be it for a certain expertise, content or skillset. The role of a connector is crucial in creating business value for the organisation and is a skill all community managers need to hone.

The hat of a Brand Ambassador 

Needless to say, we need to be cheerleaders for our community. There is no replacement for enthusiasm and passion. Marketing the platform--albeit subtly--is one of the tasks of a community manager. Telling stories of successful use cases, collecting examples of how collaboration is positively impacting workflow, business and innovation and narrating these stories-- all help in branding the community as well as in getting the skeptics on-board. It is important to find the evangelists and believers and encourage them to share their stories.

The hat of a Consultant

This is perhaps the most frequently donned hat and covers a gamut of skills including needs analysis, solution designing, influencing, facilitating, and negotiating. This calls for a post by itself but I will touch upon the key points here. Typically, in an organisation/enterprise, a single community of all employees will not be an effective means of collaboration. They will split into teams and groups driven by many factors from functional areas and interests to roles and projects. These teams will form their own communities with their specific and unique goals and objectives. It's our job to help the teams articulate their objectives and enable them to design their community experience in a manner that supports their objectives. It also entails sharing best practices around collaboration--where collaboration implies fruitful comings together to achieve common objectives. 

User Profiles: Spanning Structural Holes

Mark Granovetter wrote the paper The Strength of Weak Ties in 1973. This is probably one of the most oft cited paper in the industry of sociology, education, psychology, sociometry, network analysis and other related fields and sub-fields that study human behavior. As far back as 1973, he spoke about how interaction in small groups aggregate to form large-scale patterns, in short, the theory of emergence that every complex system—organism or organization—display. His other notable research was on ties—the premise of this post. He claimed that strong ties—ties between close friends and colleagues—do not lead to problem-solving or import unfamiliar ideas. Each knows what the others also know or practice. Let’s see how this plays out in an organizational setting.    

What has Granovetter got to do with User Profiles and Structural Holes?

Scenario #1

Here’s a scenario. While hypothetical, I believe it is entirely plausible. Alex and Sam work in the same organization. They are based out of different countries but know each other having met once at the Away Day event.  Months have passed after that meeting. One day, Alex is suddenly required to work on a project that necessitates the use of a technology he is only vaguely familiar with. As he and the team rack their brains for solution, Alex suddenly recalls Sam, whom he had met all those months back. Sam had mentioned this as one of his key areas of interest. Presto! Maybe, Sam can help…And indeed, Sam can! You can probably predict the rest now. 

Study the above image for a second. You can see that because Alex has a weak tie (they are acquaintances who met only once) with Sam, both Alex’s and Sam’s group of close ties become potential ties for each other. They can become aware of the existence of the other and reach out for help when needed due to the connection between Sam and Alex. The possibilities of converting these potential ties into actual ones reap tremendous benefits for an organization.

Granovetter also had an interesting claim that I have paraphrased here: Weak ties are not merely trivial acquaintance ties but rather a crucial bridge between two clumps of close friends (strong ties). Bridges help to solve problems, gather information and import unfamiliar ideas. 

 

Scenario #2

The scenario remains the same as above. The only difference in this case is that Alex and Sam did not meet at the Away Day. They don’t know about the existence of the other. Alex and the team rack their brains to come up with a solution. The proposal must be sent out within a week. They send out a mail requesting for help. But with no specific person to direct the mail to, they are unsure about the response. This is a classic case of a structural hole. Ronald Burt, in his book Structural Holes (1992), defines it “as a separation between non-redundant contacts”. 

Of course, real-world situations are always much more complex, with multiple cause-and-effect relationships playing out in tandem. But my point is not complexity in this post but the importance of spanning structural holes to help an organization become more responsive, adaptive, and innovative. 

Let’s carry on with the above scenario for a bit. How can we ensure that Alex and Sam (and others like them) do not remain unaware of each other’s existence? This unawareness does not bode well for an organization. A huge amount of organizational knowledge and innovation are lost because we fail to span structural holes or leave it to chance. Leaving something as crucial as this to chance meetings at social events can no longer be an option if organizations want to remain sustainable. 

Enterprise Collaboration Platforms and User Profiles

Fast forward to the 21^st Century! An increasing number of organizations are distributed across regions and countries. The probability of disconnect is high. Hand in hand with this phenomenon is the massive growth of information, rapid-fire pace of change, and complexities in work situations that defy all known practices— best or good—irrespective. All of these necessitate an increasing amount of collaboration and tapping into the collective knowledge of an organization. This means spanning structural holes—consciously and deliberately—as an organizational strategy to face the challenges of the 21^st Century.

Many forward looking organizations have already embraced the idea of social business (I will leave that for another post) and invested in high-potential enterprise collaboration and learning platforms. What makes these platforms so powerful is the ability to find each other, locate expertise at the point of need and the opportunities for serendipitous learning. One of the key features such platforms offer is User Profiles. While this may seem totally innocuous and negligible, it is not. 

User profiles help to bridge structural holes. Let’s go back to Alex. Imagine that Alex never met Sam, and he (Alex) is stuck in this dilemma of writing a proposal with a looming deadline on something he is clueless about. He can search for the specific expertise on an enterprise platform—and if the expertise exists in the organization***—the profile of the person who is tagged with the expertise or has mentioned it as one of her/his areas of knowledge will show up. In this case, let’s assume Sam. Without having ever met Sam, Alex has one concrete person he can immediately reach out to. In the process of the search, Alex may also find documents or reports on the topic. It is an easy matter to check who created those, and reach out to those folks as well. 

It is fairly easy to see how the User Profiles feature of an enterprise platform is a powerful tool for locating potential ties that need to be converted into actual ones to keep the organizational knowledge flowing and maintain that sustainable edge. Filling out one’s user profile in as much detail as possible thus serves the organization and the individual well. Who doesn’t want to be recognized as an expert? Who doesn’t want to reach out and extend help to those who need it? 

***In case, the expertise does not exist, it’s time to leverage one’s personal learning network. Bring knowledge in from the outside.  That calls for another post.