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Andrew McAfee just completed keynote at the opening of KMWorld09 pointed out (the core example being Innocantive) the growing awareness of the high utility of getting lots of people involved in addressing issues and problems, via various forms of crowdsourcing.
Here’s a post I wrote a few months ago about why, in a networked age, it’s generally a good idea
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About three months ago Beth Kanter wrote about the Crowdsourcing of Vision at the Smithsonian Museum. In a comment I suggested that crowdsourcing for visioning purposes was reminiscent of the use of OD (organizational development) principles and methods often found in large-scale organizational or system change initiatives.
Beth asked me to elaborate.
Let’s look at why and where crowdsourcing can be useful when organizations (private, public or not-for-profit) are facing important new or emerging issues.
Crowdsourcing – Collective Wisdom and Collective IntelligenceCrowdsourcing – Collective Wisdom and Collective Intelligence
When considering crowdsourcing in the above context as a method for obtaining pertinent information and perspective from relatively large numbers of people, it is useful to differentiate between it and collective intelligence, a related concept.
Collective intelligence refers to the outcomes generated by pooling knowledge from diverse groups, using it to research and debate and then refining the resulting understanding into useful and actionable information.
Crowdsourcing collective wisdom refers to the aggregation of anonymously produced data from groups of independent, diverse and decentralized people (crowds). The information gathered is typically summarized into a collective judgment or perspective – the “wisdom” expressed by the crowd.
Crowdsourcing as a technique for gathering useful information stems from the concepts outlined in The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. With a nod to the definitions above, the practice of crowdsourcing can be useful for tapping into the attitudes, opinions and beliefs of the “crowd” represented by an organization’s employees, customers and other stakeholders.
Many nuances and constraints have been applied to Surowiecki’s original ideas, and examples advanced wherein the ideas work more or less effectively. Whether you agree or disagree with the concept, there’s a fundamental attraction, and empirical evidence, to its utility. A crowd made up of diverse people with as many perspectives as there are people can, when faced with a question, problem or idea, generate a coalescing of sense and thence a consensus.
Indeed, a number of processes for working with small or large groups stem from the same basic premise – organizational development, whole systems and socio-technical systems theory rest on significant input from a wide range of different actors. A crowd’s aggregated collective response to a question or challenge creates a perspective or a position. In Surowiecki’s terms this represents its collective wisdom.
Can Today’s Organizations Access The Collective Wisdom of Crowds?Can Today’s Organizations Access The Collective Wisdom of Crowds?
The workforce and other stakeholders of any given organization is a form of crowd. An organization’s crowd is likely to be more homogenous than a general crowd, to be sure. In the context of crowdsourcing, this relative homogeneity becomes important. It provides boundaries or constraints that complexity theory tells us are useful for bringing focus to the reasons for and expected results from the crowdsourcing.
For quite a few years now there have been sustained clarion calls for the development of learning organizations, more responsive and flexible cultures and for changes to fundamental assumptions and models of effective leadership and management. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars have been spent on visioning, strategic planning, culture change initiatives, coaching and more effective internal communications.
There are competency models galore, climate and culture surveys, and a wide range of other assessment, diagnostic and developmental tools and processes aimed at “harnessing the employees’ and the organization’s potential“.
However, the structure of most organizations is still clearly hierarchical and relies on learned command-and-control leadership and management techniques. Most leaders, executives and senior managers have been steeped in industrial-era management science assumptions. Their mental models began with these fundamental assumptions during their education and their first jobs. They have reached senior decision-making and leadership levels with the help of models that preceded today’s digital hyper-linked and networked environment with its wide, deep and rapid access to large numbers of people and vast amounts of information.
It is the rare “authentic” or natural leader that possesses or grows in him-or-herself the wisdom to bring humility, purpose, values, clarity and inclusive decision-making to creating and leading a responsive, adaptable and effective organization. Jim Collins codified these rare qualities in “Level Five Leadership“, a featured article in the Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Leadership issue. If you want to harness collective intelligence of the organizational crowd, you must have humility and good listening skills.
From Today to TomorrowFrom Today to Tomorrow
Enter social software .. blogs, Twitter, wikis and various widgets (like IM interfaces that help people connect, converse, swap ways of doing things and gather feedback from colleagues and customers). Using social software for purposeful activities tends to create gigantic, wide, always-coursing feedback loops that will not be stopped.
So .. in this new electronic networked environment, how can today’s leaders go about developing vision, values, and a range of other elements of strategy and tactics.
We know from pre-Web experience that there is indeed something tangible, observable and useful in the knowledge and intelligence contained in and offered up by crowds when faced with an issue. Four or five decades of organizational development and organization change theory, practice and results have shown us that.
Many of us have been paying attention to the evolution of the Web’s impact on our lives and work for some time now. We tend to believe that the adroit, open and sincere use of social software to tap into and listen to a given organization’s crowd can materially help leaders and managers evolve into people who do not rely on charisma, positional power, coercion or dishonest political manipulation. Acknowledging and seeking ways to use the crowdsourced wisdom typically requires humility, listening and servant leadership to face and embrace the responsibilty to lead and manage effectively.
An important caveat … in spite of much work by many organizations towards inclusive engagement, it only takes a little bit of perceived ambiguity, loss of perceived control, shifts in markets or constituents for control-oriented hierarchy to reassert itself very quickly.
Notwithstanding the apprehension of many of today’s more traditional or conservative leaders and managers, the possibilities of crowdsourcing useful vision and wisdom from employees, constituents and markets has been made much easier with the capabilities of today’s interconnected and interlinked Web. And, just as importantly, increasingly people want AND expect that their voices will be heard.
The job of a leader in today’s hyperlinked and transparent organizational world is to instantiate the crowd’s intelligence and / or wisdom with a clearly-stated and purposeful mission and objective, and then listen ! This is where social software and methods like crowdsourcing can shine. They can and I believe will, eventually, replace or augment even the most sophisticated culture change initiative or surveys and diagnostics.
It can help leaders and managers learn to really listen, and to respond in intelligent and mature ways to the conversations that carry the collective wisdom of an organization’s ‘crowd’.
These days (and certainly tomorrow) it’s less and less about charisma, command and controlcharisma, command and control, and more and more about listening to conversations and championing, catalyzing and coordinatingchampioning, catalyzing and coordinating the collective wisdom of any given organizational crowd.
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“There are two groups of people, those who divide people into two groups and those who don’t.” –Robert Benchley
Years ago, when I was doing work in the field of AI, I came across one of those binary splits that continues to be useful for my thinking; the split between “neats” and “scruffies.” In the field of AI, the split differentiated between those favoring highly structured, logically precise approaches and those preferred something more along the lines of “whatever works.” Wikipedia offers a nice summary of the debate from that field.
Back in my school days, I think I was a neat (philosophically, not in terms of my room or study skills). When I first delve into new areas I am drawn to those who argue the neat case. As I get older and, I hope, more experienced, however, I find myself increasingly scruffy.
Much of the recent debate in the narrow field of knowledge management can be interpreted as one more recapitulation of the neats vs. scruffies argument. The technologies of blogs, wikis, and social media that collectively comprise the emerging notion of Enterprise 2.0 celebrate scruffiness as the essence of success in knowledge-intensive enterprises. The claim, backed by appropriately messy and sketchy anecdotal evidence, is that a loose set of simple technologies made available to the knowledge workers of an organization can provide an environment in which the organization and its knowledge workers can make more effective use of their collective and individual knowledge capital. Grass roots efforts will yield value where large-scale, centralized, knowledge management initiatives have failed.
Several implications flow from adopting a scruffy point of view. For one, “management” becomes a suspect term. If you can manage at all, you must do so at another level of abstraction. You aren’t managing knowledge; instead you are trying to manage the conditions under which knowledge work takes place and within which valuable knowledge might be created or put to use. At that point, it becomes more productive to think in terms of leadership rather than management; particularly if you subscribe to Colin Powell’s characterization of a leader as someone you’ll follow to discover where they’re going.
Second, you will need to deal with the problems that the neats have created in previous runs at knowledge management without alienating them at the same time. In most large organizations, knowledge management has been characterized as a technology problem or as a analog to financial management; placing it squarely within the purview of the organization’s neatest neats. This is a recipe for disappointment, if not outright failure.
It might possibly be an open question whether knowledge management can be eventually reduced to something as structured as accounting or library science. But it is a lousy place to start. Most organizations aren’t yet mature or sophisticated enough about knowledge work issues and questions to be obsessing about taxonomies or measurement and reward systems for knowledge work. But those are activities that are neat and specifiable and only superficially relevant. They lead to complex efforts to get to the right answer when we would be better served by simpler efforts to focus on productive questions.
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I recently developed this post for a high-profile blog that focuses on Enterprise 2.0 issues, but since I (and many others) believe that E2.0 will bring us a range of work design and culture change challenges (and perhaps changes to organizational structures) into which a revitalized KM would seem to squarely fit, I decided it would be worth the risk to post it here.
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These days there are incessant debates about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, tools and practices.
We’ve been here before … we just did not have the infrastructure or the tools, nor the awareness or skill levels of large numbers of people.
As information technology first began its relentless march into the daily lives of people in the areas of work (mainframes, early integrated systems, desktops computers in the workplace) and general information-seeking (early days of websites and the Web), thinkers and organizational development conultants began paying attention to the intersection of technology and sociology. Many of the grandfathers and grandmothers of the field of organizational development will find the material on socio-technical systems familiar, and perhaps refreshing in the context of networked workplaces.
The material outlined below comes from a comprehensive Wikipedia entry on Socio-technical Systems, and I have edited it for the purposes of this blog post.
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Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.
In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.
Sociotechnical systems theory is theory about the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of machines and technology. Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organisation. Sociotechnical theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of both excellence in technical performance and quality in people’s work lives.
Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimisation. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organisation, ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.
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It’s too intensive an experience to go into the deep details of STS here, but let me draw out a few of the core elements of socio-technical systems theory and principles. It should be self-evident that they are central to the examination and adoption of collaborative social computing in todays modern organizations
Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Sociotechnical theory is founded on two main principles:
- One is that the interaction of social and technical factors creates the conditions for successful (or unsuccessful) organizational performance. This interaction is comprised partly of linear ‘cause and effect’ relationships (the relationships that are normally ‘designed’) and partly from ‘non-linear’, complex, even unpredictable relationships (the good or bad relationships that are often unexpected).
- The corollary of this, and the second of the two main principles, is that optimisation of each aspect alone (socio or technical) tends to increase not only the quantity of unpredictable, ‘un-designed’ relationships, but those relationships that are injurious to the system’s performance.
Therefore sociotechnical theory is about joint optimisation.
Principles of Socio-technical Systems Theory
Some of the central principles of sociotechnical theory were elaborated in a seminal paper by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in 1951.
[ Snip ... ]
The key to responsible autonomy seems to be to design an organization possessing the characteristics of small groups whilst preventing the ‘silo-thinking’ and ‘stovepipe’ neologisms of contemporary management theory. In order to preserve “…intact the loyalties on which the small group [depend]…the system as a whole [needs to contain] its bad in a way that [does] not destroy its good”.
In practice this requires groups to be responsible for their own internal regulation and supervision, with the primary task of relating the group to the wider system falling explicitly to a group leader. This principle, therefore, describes a strategy for removing more traditional command hierarchies.
Adaptability
“…the organisation tries to deal with the external complexity by ‘reducing’ the internal control and coordination needs. …This option might be called the strategy of ‘simple organisations and complex jobs’”.
Many type of organisations are clearly motivated by the appealing ‘industrial age’, rational principles of ‘factory production’, a particular approach to dealing with complexity: “In the factory a comparatively high degree of control can be exercised over the complex and moving ‘figure’ of a production sequence, since it is possible to maintain the ‘ground’ in a comparatively passive and constant state”.
In Classic organisations problems with the moving ‘figure’ and moving ‘ground’ often become magnified through a much larger social space, one in which there is a far greater extent of hierarchical task interdependence. For this reason, the semi-autonomous group, and its ability to make a much more fine grained response to the ‘ground’ situation, can be regarded as ‘agile’.
Added to which, local problems that do arise need not propagate throughout the entire system (to affect the workload and quality of work of many others) because a complex organization doing simple tasks has been replaced by a simpler organization doing more complex tasks. The agility and internal regulation of the group allows problems to be solved locally without propagation through a larger social space, thus increasing tempo.
Whole tasks
Another concept in sociotechnical theory is the ‘whole task’. A whole task “has the advantage of placing responsibility for the task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership.” The sociotechnical embodiment of this principle is the notion of minimal critical specification. This principle states that, “While it may be necessary to be quite precise about what has to be done, it is rarely necessary to be precise about how it is done”
The key factor in minimally critically specifying tasks is the responsible autonomy of the group to decide, based on local conditions, how best to undertake the task in a flexible adaptive manner.
This principle is isomorphic with ideas like Effects Based Operations (EBO). EBO asks the question of what goal is it that we want to achieve, what objective is it that we need to reach rather than what tasks have to be undertaken, when and how. The EBO concept enables the managers to “…manipulate and decompose high level effects. They must then assign lesser effects as objectives for subordinates to achieve. The intention is that subordinates’ actions will cumulatively achieve the overall effects desired”
Meaningfulness of tasks
Effects Based Operations and the notion of a ‘whole task’, combined with adaptability and responsible autonomy, have additional advantages for those at work in the organization. This is because “for each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure” as well as the requirement to deploy a multiplicity of skills and to have the responsible autonomy in order to select when and how to do so.
This is clearly hinting at a relaxation of the myriad control mechanisms found in the more classically designed organizations.
In classic organisations the ‘wholeness’ of a task is often diminished by multiple group integration and spatiotemporal disintegration.
The group based form of organization design proposed by sociotechnical theory combined with new technological possibilities (such as the internet) provide a response to this often forgotten issue, one that contributes significantly to joint optimisation.
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I’ve done a significant amount of editing above (by chopping out significant-but-complicated-and-jargon-laden parts of the extract from Wikipedia). Suffice it for now to say that socio-technical systems theory and principles anticipated the dynamic tension between the (potential) every-which-wayness of hyperlinked human activity while maintaining a fierce focus on the need for concentration ofn setting and achieving meaningful objectives that drive organizational performance.
It seems clear to me that as organizations explore and take action regarding the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, knowledge work will need to be designed differently .. away from the linear ’cause-and-effect’ and sequential thinking evident in today’s job descriptions and organizational charts, towards adaptability, autonomy, whole tasks and individuals taking responsibility for the effectiveness of the networks in which they are engaged that address the organization’s objectives.
The socio-technical systems approach involves complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces, as a subset or mirror of the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behavior.
The elements of the approach brought to a specific organization are:
Job enrichment – giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties.
Job enlargement – increasing the scope and reach of a job’s duties and responsibilities. This argues against over-specialisation and the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is performed repetitively by an individual worker.
Job rotation - an approach to employee and management development. A schedule of varying assignments gives people a breadth of exposure to large parts of or the entire operation.
Motivation – stimulating and enhancing the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of positive and constructive behaviors, or more simply increasing the desire and willingness to do something.
Process improvement – actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. ‘Process’ in a networked environment is an emerging area of study, as the linear BPR that has dominated the past two decades will be impacted, sometimes dramatically, by the dynamics of purposeful network activity.
Task analysis – how tasks are accomplished - information which can be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design and automation. Again, the notion of ‘tasks’ will sometimes (often ?) see dramatic impact as networked activity around an objectives increases.
Work design – the application of sociotechnical systems principles and techniques to the humanization of work. The aims of work design to improved job satisfaction, to improved through-put, to improved quality and to reduced employee problems, e.g., grievances, absenteeism.
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Many thinkers and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space are recognizing and discussing the need to re-design knowledge work and the small and large structural elements of organizations, due to the growing pervasiveness of today’s information-flow infrastructure.
The principles and elements of socio-technical systems theory, and offshoots like Emery and Trist’s Participative Work Design (on which I have written before), are in my opinion very useful and practical sources for thinking through and implementing some of the changes … in mental models and in practices … that I believe will be necessary to obtain the latent potential available in purposeful social computing aimed at an organization’s objectives for better and more responsive performance.
I’ll be glad to learn what you think.
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I’m pleased to introduce to the KMWorld community a guest blogger, my friend and colleague Harold Jarche. Harold is a globally-recognized thought leader and practitioner in the field of social learning, which has grown out of the more traditional field of e-Learning (feels funny to call it ‘traditional, but there you have it.
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PKM
We may learn on our own but usually not by ourselves. People learn socially. In looking at how we can make sense of the growing and changing knowledge in our respective professional fields, I see two parallel processes that support each other. One is internally focused, as in “How do I learn this?” and the other is external, as in “Who can help me learn this?”.
We constantly go through a process of looking at bits of information and trying to make sense of them by adding to our existing knowledge or testing out new patterns in our sense-making efforts. The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them and PKM (personal knowledge management) can be your customized surfboard.
Here is an internal process based on repeating four activities:
| Sort |
Categorize |
Make Explicit
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Retrieve |
| Observations
& Readings
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Tag, List, File,
Classify
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Write |
Look-up as/when
needed
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These can be combined with three external activities:
- Connect – with others via various platforms and extend my reach
- Exchange – ideas and observations
- Contribute – to conversations
Together, these processes look like this:
These internal and external activities are a way of moving from implicit to explicit knowledge by observing, reflecting and then putting tentative thoughts out to our networks.
Looking Inward
One of the important aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what you may view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice.
Categorizing: Once we’ve found something of interest or value, we will need to categorize it. The big change with the Web is that we no longer have to put one object in one file folder, as we did with a physical object or even on your computer desktop. Today, everything is miscellaneous. Tags are labels that can be attached to digital knowledge objects and an objects can have many labels. That means that we can have as many categories as we want.
Making Explicit: There are many ways of making knowledge explicit. We can talk about it, write about, engage in debate, create a video or even develop a hypothesis. The act of making it explicit provides the discipline necessary to examine our thought processes.
Going Public: Even more powerful than making our knowledge explicit is to make it public. This can start some interesting conversations about things that matter to us. Going public makes our professional knowledge much more personal. It also encourages peer discussions and reinforces the outward looking aspect of personal knowledge management. Web tools to help us go public include micro-blogging; blogs and podcasts.
Retrieval: The importance of retrieval becomes more obvious with the passing of time. As years of sorting, categorizing and making explicit develop into a large amount of information we can begin to see its value. These are our thoughts and ideas but they are connected to the ideas that sparked them and have been reinforced or questioned by our peers. The great benefit of using digital tools and Web platforms is that we can retrieve our knowledge artifacts (or information that has special meaning to us) anytime and anywhere. That’s quite a powerful professional asset.
Looking Outward
“No man is an island entire of himself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main …” – John Donne
Connecting: We need to be reading, watching and listening to find out what is happening in our professional fields. There are flows of conversation around us all the time. For those of us with access to the digital surround we have no excuses not to connect. Finding conflicting viewpoints on a subject is as easy as going to Wikipedia and reading the comments on any controversial subject. The variety and depth of our connections are indicators of how seriously we take our sense-making efforts. Who we know helps to improve what we know.
Exchanging: We exchange and note ideas and information all of the time. In the age of print we lent out or gave away books, magazines and newspapers. We exchanged opinions, sometime without knowing it. An empty restaurant on a Saturday night may have indicated that the locals did not think it was any good.
Conversations help us make meaning. The quality of our conversations is affected by the quality of the company we keep. If we seek out interesting people with different ideas we may learn more and broaden our horizons.
A stock exchange is designed to help capital flow and we need to use knowledge exchanges to allow ideas to flow. For centuries, knowledge exchanges were limited to elites but we now have access to world’s largest and most open exchange ever created.
Contributing. Clay Shirky has brought up the concept of a cognitive surplus that is a result of the leisure time that we gained about fifty years ago. As a society we were in a state of shock and did not have the tools to deal with all of this time, so television filled the void. Shirky says that television collectively takes up about 200 billion hours in the US per year. Wikipedia only needed 10 million hours to get to where it is today as the leading online encyclopedia. We are poised to be able to contribute to more Wikipedia-style efforts but many of use just don’t know how. Our institutions have not prepared us to be ongoing contributors to human knowledge, as we have been led to believe that this is the domain of “experts”.
In a connected world it is getting much easier to contribute, whether it be with words, pictures, music, or actions. Not only that, it may be our social responsibility to be contributors to our common knowledge.
How else will we be recognized as professionals in our fields unless we actively contribute to them?
| TOOLS |
EXAMPLES
OS = open source |
INWARD
SUPPORT |
OUTWARD
SUPPORT |
| Aggregator |
Bloglines
Google Reader
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Sorting
Categorizing
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Connecting |
Social
Bookmarks |
Delicious
Diigo
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Sorting
Categorizing
Making Explicit
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Connecting
Exchanging
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| Micro-blogging |
Twitter
Jaiku (OS)
Yammer
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Sorting
Making Explicit
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Connecting
Exchanging
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| Blogging |
Blogger
Typepad
WordPress (OS)
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Making Explicit |
Contributing |
| Photo-sharing |
Flickr
Photo Bucket
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Sorting
Categorizing
Making Explicit
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Exchanging
Contributing
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Social
Networking |
Facebook
LinkedIn
Elgg (OS)
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Making Explicit |
Exchanging
Contributing
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What I have found out over several years of using PKM methods and tools is that I have been creating a powerful resource. My annotated bookmarks and my blog are the first places I search when I have an article or report to write. My PKM process has given me a digital library brimming with my own sticky notes that I can easily find.
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Jon Husband —
November 17, 2009 @ 1:18 pm 