by KTVee

I stumbled upon this fascinating video where Nicholas Christakis gives the example of the slim mold to affirm how "connecting to each other and assembling ourselves in networks creates a super organism with unexpected properties". Our networks are not the sum of their nodes, they exhibit a collective intelligence not available to each individual member! 

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The people who truly succeed in business are the ones who actually have figured out how to mobilize people who are not their direct reports. Everyone can get their direct reports to work for them, but getting people who do not have to give you their time to engage and to support you and to want you to succeed is something that is sorely missing from B-school courses.

~New York Times,Oct.3, 2009. Business section

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Tapping into the power of social networks has become an imperative for all kind of organizations. And while for-profits seem to be joining the band wagon easily enough, non-profits and NGOs are yet to follow.  In an excellent initiative, the Moroccan UNCG (United Nations Communication Group) & the Social Media Club Casablanca organized a workshop dubbed "Social Media and MDGs" and I was invited to talk about Social Media for NGOs.  

In the era of virtual activism, pro-consumers, wikinomics and the coming of age of the Net-Generation, surfing the 2.0 wave is no longer an option but rather an obligation for any NGO seeking sustainability. Listening, dialogue, support and innovation, those are the promises of the web 2.0. But how can we get the most out of these new technologies? Which organizational culture should we nurture? How can NGOs become “Platforms”?    In the spirit of "If you get it, share it!" I'm sharing the presentation I gave at the workshop. I would love to hear what you think!

Social Media for NGOs Part I

Social Media for NGOs Part II

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Photo courtesy: .rexguo

"We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible." This is the paradox of the hyper connected world we are living today. "Social media have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity we have never been lonelier."

On a thought-provoking eye-opening article on The Atlantic, Stephen Marche lays down the dense body of research that have been exploring the effect of social networks on our psych.

Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

On the same note, Sherry Turkle tackles how we're increasingly "expecting more from technology and less from each other". We are substituting conversations by mere connections.  We're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control.  ...We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere -- connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention. 

But as Marche underlines, "LONELINESS IS CERTAINLY not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves". We need to work on our relationship with 2.0 technologies in a way that it won't severe our real life relationships but rather enrich them. It's doable, we just need to be more conscious about it!

On a final note, Tiffany ShlainRun beautifully makes the case of how technologies are not only changing what we do, but changing us as well.  

Related articles:  Why I unplug Relearning to be disconnected 

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In the future the power will be with the people who can funnel and share information and have relationships across the organization. In particular, the people who are the most networked with each other are privy to exclusive information—moreover, because of their cross-department relationships, they will be able to act quickly and decisively. The same will be true for people who can articulate, express, and interpret what is happening outside the organization and convince the people within of their point of view.
~Charlene Li

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by Tony Fischer Photography

HBR insight center did a great coverage this week on the subject of "the secret of great teams". And I was particularly drawn by this article "Look beyond the team: it's about the network", by Jon R. Katzenbach, as it reflects what most people overlook: It's about the informal structure! 

I've since recognized that it wasn't just the team of seven; they were drawing on a powerful internal network of around 50 people throughout the company who weren't formally involved, but whose informal participation allowed the team to tap a broad range of expertise and aggressively push through a new business model. The team of seven had no skilled marketers, for instance, and success would require marketing insights, which ultimately came through people outside the team.

Informal structure is a black box to most people. Yet if you "put an organizational chart (the formal structure) in front of most any employee and they will tell you the boxes and lines only partially reflect the way work gets done in their organization"1. We somehow know that a hidden structure exists, yet we are often unable to tangibly comprehend it. Unless we see the organization through a network-aware lens, we will always have an incomplete version of the truth. A team should be seen as a network embedded in other networks. Not only that, we need to understand that the texture of these embedding networks can affect the performance of the team. Research2 has actually found that most productive teams were particularly characterized by having had more diverse information contacts outside the project team than did the less productive teams.  I'm not saying that we must toss away all what we've learned so far about teams. All I'm saying is that we have to be aware by now that "Network Analysis" techniques should be an essential part of every manager's toolbox to be used when needs be.   The narrow notion of a team overlooks the disciplined choices that different performance situations require; it also overlooks the power of a much broader, much more powerful network. In global situations, networks are increasingly important, but they do not supercede the disciplined real team option in situations where a few people with complementary skills need accomplish a clear performance purpose.

1. Robert Cross: "Making Invisible Work Visible: Using Social Network Analysis  to Support Strategic Collaboration" 2. Michael E. D. Koenig: “Gatekeepers, Boundary Spanners, and Social Network Analysis Creating the Project Team”

Related articles: Power of networked teams

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“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams

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At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled "quiet," it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society--from van Gogh’s sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.

One of the books I'm most excited about reading this year is Susan Cain's "Quiet: The power of Introverts in a world that can't stop talking". Maybe because I think of myself as an introvert or maybe just because it essentially questions the common belief that being outgoing, outspoken and social is the only path to success. It takes all kind of people to make the world, and as much as we need extroverts, introverts "bring extraordinary talents and abilities to the world, and should be encouraged and celebrated". In a passionate TED talk, Susan makes the case that introversion is dramatically undervalued, and that the world will be a much better place if our culture stopped solely celebrating extroversion and accepted the power of Quiet as well.

I think I'll go back to my books' suitcase now. Until we talk again, have a great Sunday!

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There is neither typical rhyme nor reason in these successes or failures—the size of the company, industry, or even prior experience with social technologies did not dictate the outcome. Instead, my research shows, the biggest indicator of success has been an open mind-set—the ability of leaders to let go of control at the right time, in the right place, and in the right amount.
The first step is recognizing that you are not in control—your customers, employees, and partners are. If you are among the many executives who long for the “good ol’ days” when rules and roles were clear, indulge yourself in that kind of thinking for just a few more minutes—then it’s time to get to work. This is a fad that will not fade, but will only grow stronger, with or without you.

~ Charelene Li - Open leadership

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Photo courtesy of quinn.anya

Here is a fact: Organizations are a set of interwoven networks, embedded in bigger networks. They thrive or die according to their networks' health. And while most organizations are aware of that, few ever act with a network-aware mind.

A social network approach is primarily concerned with the interconnections between [actors], rather than being focused on their attributes or behaviors. The patterning of such connections - the configuration of positions and relationships - constitutes the structure of a social network, from which the social behavior of individual members can be analyzed and interpreted. This structural arrangement has important implications for the [actors] involved as well as for the overall social network, insofar as it enhances or constrains their access and control abilities.  ~Emergent Leadership in Virtual Collaboration Settings: A Social Network Analysis Approach. J. Sutanto, C. Tan, B. Battistini et al

Thinking organizations as networks relies on different lenses:- A micro lens zooms on the employee and his ego-centric network
- A macro lens xrays the interactions between different subgroups of the organization (business units, project teams...)
- A holistic lens studies the organization taking into account its context (socio-economic context, partners, ...)

Each lens requires different network measures and concepts. And each lens answers a different set of questions. Example: The HR department needs to know how the new recruits are doing after 6 months of hiring them. A viable approach would be to conduct an ego-centric network analysis on the recruits. The main objective is to identify the ties among the new recruits and other employees. If the recruits are still peripheral it's time to take action to help them integrate. Launching an internal mentorship program for instance can help new recruits meet key collaborators that could help them advance their work and nurture a sense of belonging.

Thinking organizations as networks doesn't necessarily come with extraordinarily out-of-the-box answers but it surely sheds the lights on problems from a different angle. The emergent body of research and application of Social Network Analysis has provided some important insights on how thinking with a network perspective can be associated with organizational benefits (better collaboration, enhanced innovation etc.). However, there always seems to be quite a chasm between academia and corporate business and many techniques developed by the research community still haven't made it in the real-world yet. An interesting classification I came across the other day aims to cross this gap to some extent as it tries to map SNA techniques to business processes. The framework is based on the APQC Process Classification Framework and lists the various uses of social network analysis depending on the business process at hand (Operating or Management and support process). 

Source: Social Network Analysis and Mining for Business Applications. F. Bonchi, C. Castillo, A. Gionis, and A Jaimes, Yahoo! Research Barcelona 

I have come to think of this framework as a good list of the promises Social Network Analysis makes. While it is true that many techniques stated above are still in their infancy and face numerous technical and cultural challenges, it is only a good thing to keep an eye on their progress. You may never know when the opportunity of applying them presents itself.  We will go into the details of these techniques and the challenges they face on our upcoming blog posts. Until then have a look at your business processes and see if any of these techniques would fit. We would love to hear your feedback!

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Photo courtesy of this lyre lark

Strong processes, weak culture 

• Processes present a limitation in that they encourage what Jim Collins (in Built to Last), or Harvard Business Review’s Leading by Leveraging Culture , call a weak culture. The assumption is that teams are not aligned enough with business strategy, so it is necessary to put prescriptive processes in place to ensure for teams alignment. 
• Operational units, i.e the team that will be using these processes on a daily basis eventually are hardly ever consulted. This way, the processes acquire a Top-Downcharacteristic and the organisation enter into what Thierry de Baillon calls the Taylorist Knowledge : everything is in place to feed the weak culture.
• A strong culture organisation does not need that much strong processes.
• The processes are then bottom-up, operational units validate processes that have proven successful
• From my experience in managing IT projects, I notice that the more prescriptive a method is and the more it embodies a self-powered weak culture.
• The less prescriptive the method is the more it encourages initiative, successful participation and a strong culture.
• My 2 cents is that the 21st century organisation needs more a strong culture than it needs strong processes.

How IBM's Sam Palmisano Redefined the Global Corporation 

• The real story behind IBM's success is the course Palmisano set for 21st century global enterprises. 
• Recognizing that the company's command-and-control culture wouldn't work in the 21st century, he defined leadership as leading by values and created a unique collaborative organizational structure.
• This meant abandoning IBM's existing organization, in which product silos and geographic entities operated independently and frequently were more competitive than collaborative. Palmisano reorganized IBM into a "globally integrated enterprise" focused on worldwide collaboration. He cajoled, pushed, and pulled the company into a client-centric, agile structure able to customize delivery of IBM's software assets, hardware assets, and intellectual property.
• His ingenious first step toward creating a collaborative culture was a massive, global collaboration. In 2003 he launched an online, interactive "values jam" involving all employees for 72 hours to determine what IBM's values should be. The three principles that emerged from that event guided decision-making throughout the organization, giving IBM's huge, globally dispersed workforce the discipline necessary to execute the company's new strategy.

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption 

• Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption — an intelligent manifesto for optimizing the 11 hours we spend consuming information on any given day in a way that serves our intellectual, creative, and psychological well-being.
• Johnson draws a parallel between the industrialization of food, which at once allowed for ever-greater efficiency and reined in an obesity epidemic, and the industrialization of information, arguing that blaming the abundance of information itself is as absurd as blaming the abundance of food for obesity. Instead, he proposes a solution that lies in engineering a healthy relationship with information by adopting smarter habits and becoming as selective about the information we consume as we are about the food we eat.
• Johnson argues that instead of the lens of productivity and efficiency, which have become a false holy grail for our inbox-zero-obsessed culture, we should consider this through the lens with which we assess what we consume biologically: health. Because the problem is now larger than a mere matter of getting things done.
• Like any good diet, the information diet works best if you think about it not as denying yourself information, but as consuming more of the right stuff and developing healthy habits

Do Great Things 

• Whether you’re a programming prodigy or the office manager holding it all together, technology empowers small groups of passionate people with an astonishing degree of leverage to make the world a better place. Yet I fear that our industry is squandering its opportunity and its talent. In companies large and small, great minds are devoting their lives to endeavors that, even if wildly successful, fail to do great things.
• When did beating the competition or protecting your existing business become more important than serving users?
• An abundance of angel capital and increasing fetishization of entrepreneurship has led more people to start companies for the sake of starting a company.
• The result is a massive talent dilution
• It’s good that starting a business is easier than ever, but the pendulum has swung too far from Silicon Valley’s hey-day when a handful of great companies were able to gather a critical mass of great people to do great things.
• No one knows whether you and your teammates will realize your audacious visions, but in order to do great things, we must attempt great things.

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business 

• And here's the conundrum: When businesspeople search for the right forecast--the road map and model that will define the next era--no credible long-term picture emerges. There is one certainty, however. The next decade or two will be defined more by fluidity than by any new, settled paradigm; if there is a pattern to all this, it is that there is no pattern. The most valuable insight is that we are, in a critical sense, in a time of chaos.
• Some people will thrive. They are the members of Generation Flux…What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates--and even enjoys--recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions
• “In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That's something our current systems can't handle.”
• You do not have to be a jack-of-all-trades to flourish in the age of flux, but you do need to be open-minded.
• If ambiguity is high and adaptability is required, then you simply can't afford to be sentimental about the past. Future-focus is a signature trait of Generation Flux. It is also an imperative for businesses: Trying to replicate what worked yesterday only leaves you vulnerable.
• Our institutions are out of date; the long career is dead; any quest for solid rules is pointless, since we will be constantly rethinking them; you can't rely on an established business model or a corporate ladder to point your way; silos between industries are breaking down; anything settled is vulnerable

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In case you missed it, and I'm sure anyone hardly did, Apple decided to reinvent the textbook experience by "identifying transformative currents and building the right tools to navigate them"

 iPadded textbooks are still textbooks, but they're personalized textbooks. They take advantage of the emotional connection people, and especially young people, feel to their devices. They encourage, rather than frown on, active note-taking. They demand, rather than curtail, exploration. They create a kind of kaleidoscopic experience: video, text, audio, all whirring and whirling into each other in a self-guided tour of history or chemistry or biology. They invite students to create learning environments that, though standardized on one level, are, on another, uniquely theirs. And that changes everything. 

And though it did not revolutionize the publishing industry -at least not yet-, it actually created enough momentum to raise interesting discussions on the need of reinventing the reading experience. Reading is definitely "morphing as it transitions to a new technology platform" : Tablets. And by leveraging the power of social collaboration, reading will never be the same for sure! Here are some videos that make this case.

Have a great Sunday!

Update: I stumbled upon this video from Readmill which states an essential question "Why make a book digital and not make it shareable?" Why indeed!

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