Just read a good post by Peter Bregman, consultant and author, Point B: A Short Guide to Leading a Big Change.  He gives a great example about changing the culture of an organization with stories.  And for more tips on storytelling check out Steve Denning’s site.  At KMWorld 2009 you will be able to experience the power of stories by participating in our capstone event – Social Discovery of Knowledge Management which will be led by Dave Snowden.  Watch this space and the new KMWorld 2009 conference wiki for more details.

This is not an analytic blog post, nor a theoretical blog post.

I am merely passing on Dave Snowden’s observations based on his long experience of what was, what is, and what is increasingly being structured to fit with the prevailing management mindsets about productivity.

The theme of this post, and the extract below from Dave’s recent blog post, also for me resonate with Euan Semple’s The Price of Pomposity.

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KCUK09 – conference blog 1

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We then moved on to Richard McDermott who I’ve know for years, populariser of Communities of Practice (CoP) and it’s still his main theme. A Warwick University sponsored research programme underpins his presentation. He argues that every organisation has to balance operations, customer focus and learning. CoPs own learning and this contribute to the firm.

He is really going back to basics (or rather the 90s) here. Suggesting that back then we thought that it was the informal nature of these which worked. Argues that things have now changed, or so his research shows. Originally information connectivity was novel, now people are subject to data glut and its difficult to know where you are or what you should pay attention to.

His theme now is all about people being overwealmed so their participation in communities fell off because it was voluntary. Using the tragedy of the commons and a focus on individual learning now to make a point. I suspect he’s working towards a corporatist perspective. Moves on to suggest five questions that should be asked: (i) does the community matter, (ii) who is minding the store, (iii) staff have to be pressurised to participate, (iv) CoPs should be integrated to the organisation and (v) Communities should have a formal function, such as saving money etc.

One of the things that always worries be about KM research is that it is context free. Now the above are conclusions from current research, at the end of the KM life cycle. Organisations still running CoPs are likely to have formalised them into complements to process, and as those are the only ones to survive its nor surprising that the above conclusions are made – this is especially true if you interview the KM function. I’d be interested to see some field ethnography here. If you give people targets and appraisals that make them participate in communities, then they will. We had the same in IBM, but the real knowledge transfer took place in informal networks, the formal systems had (with some honourable exceptions) lots of compliance and the KM practice reported success to researchers and executives alike. The reality was very different.

With the odd exception the whole thing seems to be going back to the 1990s, its about information management (with KM as a subset), search engines, automation, very traditional and formal approaches to CoPs.

None of this stuff worked back then, do people really think that doing it again and harder will achieve the result?

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My note in conclusion …  I do not think Dave is arguing for free-form willy-nilly anarchic exchanges, but as in any initiative involving flows and exchanges of information and knowledge, that purposeful boundaries and constraints are offered by context and objectives. 

If I am wrong and he reads this, I’ll be glad to be corrected.

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Much of what the average knowledge worker of today sees as “work”  is the daily communion with the computer screen on her or his desk. They access the software with which they work and communicate with other employees through portals, on the company’s infrastructure of applications, or (increasingly) via the Web tools and services.

As we have learned more about how to integrate  software-based capability into our daily work lives, we have seen various forms of employee portals, partnership portals, project management portals and, more recently, comprehensive real-time enterprise computing applications take root and grow in many organizations. The IT infrastructures of organizations, coupled with ongoing growth in the scope and use of smart software, will create a type of integrated nervous system, providing top management and workers with an improvement-and-learning focused feedback loop.

When software connects customers directly to business processes, and employees have “line-of-sight” responsibility for making a clear contribution or directly impacting business results – when most of an organization’s strategy and value proposition is directly coded into its CRM, ERM and B2B applications, will the types of supervision and management we learned in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s continue to be effective?

There’s a very real issue here that is helping to create a sort of conundrum – the more that work activities are encoded and embedded into integrated systems, the more the human will and spirit needs to surface, assert itself.  This polarity is, I think, here to stay and is behind much of the ongoing discussion of conversation, collaboration and social computing.

The proliferation of information technology, business process re-engineering and wrenching changes to established business models created by the rapid development of the Internet is exerting significant pressure on long-standing business hierarchies. Top-down command-and-control management structures and dynamics struggle to maintain effectiveness in the face of free-flowing streams of content-rich information, coming from all directions.  Nevertheless, it’s highly likely that hierarchical structures are here to stay … but it’s equally likely that the exercise of hierarchical power and control will be transformed over time.

The dynamics of how people relate – to work, to markets, to bosses and to each other – are changing. A new organizing principle posited on network dynamics – “wirearchy” – a dynamic flow of power and authority based on connections and conversations, may be emerging as a structural principle and a social dynamic for managing organized activities in  both business and society.

Wirearchy is an informal but pervasive emerging structure of governance, strategy, decision-making and control based on knowledge, trust, meaning and credibility. Things get done and results are achieved through the interplay of vision, values, connections and conversation. Wirearchy is generated by an open architecture of information, knowledge and focus, enabled by connected and converging technologies.  It suggests a fundamental change in the dynamics of human interaction in – and with – organizations of all sizes, shapes and purposes, and represents an evolution of hierarchy as an organizing principle and dynamic.

Wirearchy will not render hierarchy obsolete, nor the need for direction and control; rather, it will render them more necessary. However, it will change the meaning of those terms and how they are used and experienced.

Many people won’t accept authority easily any more. While old-guard keepers-of-the-keys cling to authority and power, the older models of how to lead and follow are unravelling. Organization charts are still useful, but only if and as they become more fluid (for example, when supplemented by Organizational Network Analysis and a deeper understanding of information and knowledge flows, or streams.  Certainly, organization charts are beginning to appear in a much wider range of shapes than before, and often convey new messages about power, status and control.  An example: “Organigraphs,” or pictures of the ways organizations flow and operate, are clearly more pertinent, accurate and useful in many instances when an organization’s activities are more transparent and porous to the external environment, according to strategy and organizational structure guru Henry Mintzberg.  They maintain a focus on the flow of an organization’s activities and processes, as opposed to the identification and location of decision-making power.

How do today’s leaders and senior managers respond to these forces? Clues are evident in initiatives emerging in the fields of customer and employee relationship management, organizational development, human resources management and organizational change: The use of techniques such as scenario planning, dialogue, open space, 360 degree feedback, emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring have all grown significantly over the past several years. Together, these soften the rigidity of outmoded structures, and help people respond and adapt.

Most organizations carry out ongoing initiatives to create, clarify and improve capabilities in each of these emerging areas. Indeed, a large percentage of the global consulting industry is focused on diagnosing, developing and implementing strategies for these goals.

Wirearchy is significantly different.  While it insists that purpose and a focus on results towards that purpose is a core structural component, it also focuses on the structural and psychosocial dynamics generated by interconnectivity and access to knowledge. From the touchstone of purpose and objectives, it addresses not only with what’s happening at the top, but also what’s happening in the roots and branches of an organization. Where hierarchy created focus and meaning through the control of knowledge, wirearchy implies that the use and control of knowledge acknowledges and involves a much wider range of stakeholders..

Yesterday’s success factors involved secrecy and control, size, role clarity, functional specialization and power. Today’s emerging factors are openness, speed, flexibility, integration and innovation. The concept of wirearchy allows readers to develop a strategy for creating, implementing these factors in ways that respond with value to continuously changing conditions. Its core components are:

* a crystal clear vision and values
* a strategically designed and integrated technology infrastructure
* comprehensive, clear and completely open communications
* pertinent objectives and focused measurement
* characteristics of culture that create, support and enable responsiveness, adaptability and fluidity
* leadership that is clear, focused, open, authentic and shared

It will take time, experience and intelligent customizable metrics in this new era to know what “success” and “effectiveness” mean and look like. In such an era,  where there is literal meaning in the phrase, “everything is connected to everything else,” we will have to watch, learn and imagine how to lead and manage in ways that foster continuous developments in the effectiveness of individual workers, small working groups, the organizations with which they work and the societies in which we all live.

Clay Shirky is a well-know Internet / Web expert who published a book titled “Here Comes Everybody” last year.  While it does not focus exclusively on the workplace, it’s a decent bet that the concepts and dynamics Shirky addresses will have major impact on the future of work. 

As the forces he describes continue to spread throughout society and grow in impact, this organizing principle – Wirearchy — is likely to impact the design of collaborative software, the structure(s) of organizations and the ways work and workers are managed in ways that we have not yet encountered.

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It will be interesting to see if Google Wave, a new tool released to developers, will assist in knowledge sharing and collaboration activities.  Check out the video and sneak peek and a good article from CIO magazine.  “Google’s newly unveiled Wave may be called a communication and collaboration tool, but it’s much more than that. Wave combines key trends that we’ve seen the last couple years on the Web into one elegant application. And it may make today’s enterprise tools such as Microsoft SharePoint look ridiculously complicated.”  It “mixes old technologies like e-mail, IM and online documents in a unified, socially-oriented view, could break down the traditional ways in which we compartmentalize and separate information — both as consumers and businesspeople.”  Looking forward to hearing how this tool might affect knowledge management practices at KMWorld 2009, Nov 17-19, in San Jose CA.