It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of what started in the consumer realm as social software, blogs, wikis and widgets, are finding their ways into the workplace.

Why wouldn’t they ?

After all they are showing us that people like and need to talk, share and do things together online. People offline have always learned through talking, arguing, pointing out other ideas, sources of information and ways to do things. Whether we like it or not, we are  passing from an industrial era, in which things were assumed to be controlled, deconstructed and then re-assembled.In that era and the mindsets it generated, processes are assumed to be clear, linear and always replicable.  That was never true and is even less true in today’s turbulent global business environment, with its fragmentation and connectedness across multiple geographical, professional and organisational boundaries.

Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergence of new communication technologies, new social structures, social practices, and the application of management science to business process analysis and control of operations.  These forces and factors are converging in contemporary workplaces, where a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception. It is useful if not essential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific constellations on an organization chart.

The management guru, Gary Hamel, asserts that there has been little or no innovation in management for quite some time. I would like to offer a nuanced disagreement. I think there has been innovation in how people and their work can be motivated and managed and that this innovation comes from the world of organizational development, in which principles and dynamics are closely aligned to Hamel’s suggestion that “activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery”.

We need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design and the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations, where the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making.  The argument is not that we need to replace hierarchy. Rather, the capabilities of information systems, combined with social computing capabilities, two decades of experience with team development and organizational development processes can permit centralization and hierarchy where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary.

Organizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 – 50 years represent a large and coherent body of work that stretches from Participative Work Design, through QWL and quality circles to socio-technical systems, through to self-managing teams and large-scale, strategic participative change methods. These principles enable dialogue and consensus building approaches to management (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.).  The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulled into place over the last several decades.

We live and work in networks as well as hierarchies. The emergent principles just described have allowed us to soften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchical work and organizational design. Knowledge work takes shape as projects or time-limited initiatives, requiring collaboration, discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can best be put to use. T

In that environment, the architectural challenge is to design work processes and the ways humans interact.  That means understanding the structure and dynamics of networks and the new influence of greater transparency; deciding what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved and why (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities are to be supervised.

Many examples of these factors and influences appeared on the management, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores, and have expanded rapidly during the past two decades.  The experimentation with inclusive, participative and democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the core dynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web. As similar dynamics begin to penetrate our workplaces, we will seek methods, practices and philosophies that lead to enquiry, exploration, sensemaking, negotiation and implementation of intractable issues and organizational complexity.

There is an important coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades.  Dave Pollard, a well-known knowledge management expert,  has often suggested that most traditional management methods are almost useless but are still in place as proxies for status and power, but that people keep on working by constantly developing and using work-arounds.

OD (organizational development) has suffered from being seen as “soft” and a “nice-to-have-time-to-do”, especially in the chaotic and ambiguous environment of the first decade of the 21st century.  While it is a maxim in the OD field that “the soft stuff is the hard stuff”, it can be and often is  brushed aside or put down by the hard-nosed management hard-asses, the “I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack” crowd.

Clearly we need objectives, metrics, and well-defined processes as well as enough slack and support to help people learn, adapt and work around ineffective or obsolete policies, practices and processes. Based on the accumulated knowledge and experience we have suggested exists in the OD field, I think there is a coherent and pertinent model available for working and managing effectively in Enterprise 2.0.

However it is not seen today as the dominant “management” model.

The dynamics generated by today’s networked knowledge workers using lightweight, easy-to-use social computing tools and web services welded together with existing integrated information systems are similar in reach, scope and pace to the the challenges explored by the field of organizational development.

If re-framed as a coherent management framework, perhaps the fundamental principles of organizational development and learning  represent the beginnings of the innovation in management Gary Hamel is suggesting we need.