A Kudos Culture

People want to be recognized and rewarded for their thoughts, ideas, and contributions.” Few statements will garner less argument than that. Yet, when we think about “rewarding collaboration“, people tend to gravitate only to material rewards, which most of us don’t have a whole lot of power to change. However, when participating in collaborative environments, it is especially important to remember that psychological rewards are often just as powerful and behavior-re-enforcing as a restaurant gift card or a cash bonus.

People like to feel appreciated

At the risk of noting the most obvious observation ever written, I will go out on a limb and say that people like to feel important. Thinking back to sociology/psychology class, Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs hits on the people’s desire to reach levels of satisfaction beyond material reward to self-actualization. Similarly, Frederick Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory argues that job satisfaction is most closely tied to “motivating” factors like recognition, personal growth, and challenging work (as opposed to “hygiene factors” such as salary and company policy, which contribute more to dissatisfaction, but do not give positive satisfaction).

Getting out of the realm of theory, it is my experience that recognizing people’s contributions, even peer-level recognition, is a great way to reinforce and encourage collaborative participation. Just knowing that our work is useful/interesting/helpful for our peers in many cases is enough to encourage sharing inside of organizations. In environments where it’s difficult to know if people are actually deriving value from work–i.e. most knowledge-creation jobs–positive recognition of utility and value is an important thing.

In particular, I want to call out two groups of people to get more in the habit of recognizing valuable contributions:

• Lurkers: The lurker is a much-maligned creature. Even the name rings of someone stalking from the shadows. Forget the Paredo Princple/80-20 rule for a moment: if there were no lurkers, there’d be no audience! The lurker is an under-appreciated being (I suspect most so in environments without adequate metrics: imagine if newspapers couldn’t detect the number of subscribers and instead calculated readership based on the number of letters to the editor that they received). But in order to encourage people to continue providing information/content, sometimes the lurker has to leave the shadows. Lurkers should realize that there is value in simply thanking a poster if they find information/insight that is useful, even if the lurker doesn’t think he has something substantive to contribute.


I see you lurkin'...with your lurkin' self

• Question-askers: Readers of this blog know that I am a fan of telling people what you want from them. I am a strong believer that asking the question that you want to have answered is the best way to get the answer you want (this post is so full of the obvious, it’s ridiculous). But when we get responses, many times we don’t always take 15 seconds to thank people for their participation/contributions. This is absolutely critical to continued participation, especially in a professional environment.

Reinforcing collaboration

I think that it is important for organizations, in order to build a more collaborative culture, to build a “kudos culture”. People seek recognition and appreciation from collaboration and sharing: so thank people for contributions and reciprocate! Commenting, re-tweeting, sharing links, and answering questions are all valuable behaviors that demonstrate value and utility of information.

Twitter and the Search Barrier

I am currently reading Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Benefits, a book by Morten T. Hansen of Harvard Business School. It is an interesting read so far: he has laid out some of the key benefits and risks to collaboration, a number of which are quite interesting and potentially useful. However, what I have found most interesting thus far is his take on the four most significant barriers to collaboration. His list:

1. The Not Invented Here Barrier: People not willing to seek input from others outside their unit;
2. The Hoarding Barrier: People not willing to provide information for others outside their unit;
3. The Search Barrier: People are not able to find people, expertise, or information easily, and;
4. The Transfer Barrier: People are not able to transfer complicated knowledge from one unit to another.

All of these points have some validity, and are definitely important and significant barriers to collaboration in the workplace; however, I want to spend some time with the third barrier, the search barrier.

As a side note, I have as yet not read how Hansen proposes to overcome said barriers; I’m only halfway through the book.

What is the Search Barrier?

According to Hansen, the search barrier is the inability of a company or organization to “know what it knows”. This can be due to a number of factors: company size, physical distance, information overload, and poverty of networks are the ones that Hansen cites. The search barrier is one of the most significant hurdles facing large organizations: think about all the expertise and experience that exist in most organizations, and how hard it really is to tap that knowledge (specifically the tacit knowledge). Basically, it’s too hard or too much work to search through your organization to find the support/input that you need; consequently, organizations are inefficient because they are continuously solving the same problems.

So what does this have to do with Twitter?

It's about finding the RIGHT person, not just people.

In the spirit of continuing to treat Twitter as a solution searching for a problem, I think that this is a very real business problem that can be greatly helped by microblogging. After all, this is one of the most appealing, at least for me, uses of Twitter on the open internet.

Twitter actually addresses many of the key problems cited by Hansen as components of the search barrier.

• Company size could be less of an issue, if only because the network of followers (a.k.a. the target audience) serves as the filter of information. So you aren’t searching all the units of an organization for an answer; you are asking people to serve as a filter and pass on information and/or people that they already know.

• It’s clear that microblogging helps with bridging distances. However, it’s also important to note that microblogging enables “weak ties“, allowing for people to maintain relationships that may become more important in the future.

• Though relatively counter-intuitive, microblogging can help with information overload, because your network serves as a collaborative filter. For the same reason, microblogging can help solve the problem of poverty of networks by making it easier to keep in touch with colleagues.

But microblogging is just a technology

In much contrast to the rest of this entry, I do want to emphasize that simply having the technical capability for microblogging does not ensure success: effective deployment also entails organizational and process challenges in order to achieve the desired results. Social media success is only sometimes about tools; most times it’s more about changing behaviors and inculcating more collaborative mindsets.

Defining Collaboration

One of my favorite blogs is “The Big Shift” over at Harvard Business Publishing, a blog about innovation, collaboration, and other trends in business.  In a recent post, they lamented that “Popular as the word is, collaboration mostly goes undefined.”  They go on:

Many people, we suspect, would define collaboration as any situation where people work together in a coordinated way to achieve common objectives and would include highly specified and synchronized coordination, such as traditional assembly line operations.

I would take this statement a step further, in that many people (and organizations) would define collaboration more broadly than this even to include things like “coordination” and “information sharing”, both activities that I (and I suspect the authors of the Big Shift) would argue are not really collaboration.  And while this may seem like a semantic arguments, the Economist Intelligence Unit stated: “The labels themselves are not important, but labelling every initiative as “collaboration” creates a misnomer that robs [organizations] of the ability to deploy resources efficiently and effectively to create the most value.”

Things That Definitely Aren’t Collaboration

A word on two activities (there are many more) that are grouped with collaboration, but are entirely different activities.  These two are coordination and information sharing.

Coordination generally involves sharing an already-written draft document, report, policy, or proposal with stakeholders inside and outside the initiating organization.  While it sounds good, this is more of a C.Y.A. activity than anything meant to produce value: get other pieces of the organization to check off some boxes, hopefully while not changing products too much.  Coordination, in my opinion, is usually a value-subtracting activity.

Information Sharing is another activity that is sometimes called collaboration, but to me is just a piece of the collaboration process.  In the words of 9/11 Commission members LTG Peter Kind (United States Army, Ret retired) and Katharine J. Burton, “Access to information does not necessarily lead to effective knowledge sharing and collaboration.  When people share knowledge, they are not just sharing information; they are also sharing cultural and social references.” Access to similar information is an important piece of collaborative knowledge creation process; however, it should not be confused with collaboration.

My Definition of Collaboration

Having said this, much like the Big Shift, I have now posted more than 30 posts to this blog without ever really having defined collaboration.  My definition  of collaboration is the following (drawn mostly out of my client service experience):

Collaboration is the interaction of and among employees and their partners—exploiting their diverse expertise and organizational resources to more effectively create superior value and/or deliver more efficient services than an organization or individual could have accomplished alone.

I believe that this definition highlights that the value proposition of collaboration for organizations, as “higher value” (in terms of service delivery) is ultimately the driving force behind the focus on collaboration in organizations  Additionally, this definition deliberately characterizes collaboration as a means to achieving an organization’s goals: collaboration is not an end itself.

Want to Improve Collaboration? Close Your Email.

One of the most serious problems in organizations today is our (ab)use of email. There’s no question that email has fundamentally changed the way people work and how people collaborate. However, now email is often thought of as a scourge: leave the office for a week, come back to 500 emails waiting for you, of which probably 50 require action and 10 are very important.

In terms of communication, Email is usually the first resort. Sadly, that means that email is now also most people’s primary means of collaboration. But here’s what email collaboration looks like:

Created by Manny Wilson

Not exactly the cleanest business process. Not pictured is the person in the middle of the process: the stuckee given the unenviable task of aggregating all of the changes made in the various silos into the “master document”.

Here’s an idea: Try Something Else!

So, as a first step towards improving collaboration: don’t use email. Sounds simple, but of course the difficulty is in the execution. I’ll start with the why. There are several reasons that you should move away from email for collaboration.

• People get enough email: If you can contribute to your colleague receiving less email, I will guarantee you that they will genuinely appreciate it. So, rather than sending out another email to lose in the email, try using another platform!
• Email is not discoverable: To me, this is the most important piece. Email conversations are by definition not discoverable. So if I have a question, I could email five people; unless they forward it on, I am limiting my potential sources of answers. However, if I ask the question in a online, discoverable forum, I can still get the same 5 people to answer the question, but also add everybody else with access to the platform to the potential sources of information. As an added bonus, the knowledge gleaned from the discussion is then captured in a discoverable venue, rather than trapped in an email box.
• Email won’t help you bump into others: One of the great benefits of working in the open is that you can actually bump into people with similar work focuses and similar experiences. Working in a more open environment allows for fortuitous opportunities in order to expand social networks. And given that workforces are becoming more dispersed, this will likely become more important as face-to-face opportunities dwindle.

Executing

Let’s face it, it’s hard to get out of email. It’s been too successful in penetrating the business world. How many times a day do you have a face-to-face or phone conversation that ends with “I’ll type up an email summarizing what we just said”? Well, there are some good ways to start:

• Signal: Rather than sending out questions via email, post the question online and send out the link. It’s still an email, but the discussion and answers will be more discoverable to others
• Do Point-to-Point in the Public: We have a lot more means to talk point-to-point in public nowadays:  Wiki User Pages, blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc. Communicating on these is a good first step because they are all more discoverable then email.
• Get out of your comfort zone a bit: Working in the open is a new, weird thing, so it’s not unusual that you would feel strange doing this instead of email. But sometimes you just have to make the leap. Give it a shot.  As a colleague tells me, “If you aren’t out of your comfort zone, you aren’t doing your job.”

PS. A note about email notifications. Email works well as a notification for these other tools.  Getting an email that says to check a wiki page because it’s changed is inherently different from getting a document in an email, because you can delete the notification and know you won’t be missing information later.  If you get a document in an email, you will likely keep that email/document combo because you just don’t know if you’ll need to refer back to it.

Link it All Together

When thinking about the power of virtual collaboration, the emphasis is usually on creating opportunities for collaboration between geographically dispersed groups. And rightly so: virtual collaboration’s most significant asset is that it enables groups that would not be able to collaborate (at least without re-locating) to work together.

However, there is another feature of virtual collaboration that is also empowering, even for teams that are co-located: the ability to hyperlink content, enabling the fusion of information in a meaningful sense. Think about Wikipedia, and why it’s so much easier to browse than a traditional encyclopedia: it’s because there’s just so many available links in a given article (so many in fact that you rarely have to use to the back and forward buttons on your browser). And there are clear lessons to be drawn for collaboration in a professional environment from this practice.

More than Search Engine Optimization

Links do more than provide “Google juice” (admittedly, however, this is important, especially as more and more organizations are turning to Google to power internal enterprise search).

• Links provide context: Links have the distinct benefit of allowing people to read more information if they choose and/or need to do so. So again, thinking about Wikipedia, if I want to get some quick background about a given topic, I can go there and read just that article. However, if I want to get a bit more context, I can read through the given article, as well as a few other key articles that are linked to the main article that I’m interested in.

• Links assist in the analysis of data: Given all of the hubbub around link analysis (and social network analysis), hyperlinking content together helps to further analysis. Again turning to Wikipedia for an example, you can look at all of the articles that link to a given article. I can see the hundreds of articles that link to the article about Steve Jobs, for example: on that list are a number of connections that I never would have thought of that I can explore: Why does the “Walt Disney Company” link there? What’s the relationship between Jobs and Larry Ellison?

• Links help to bridge gaps: An especially valuable use of hyperlinks is to bridge gaps between collaborative constituencies (a topic that will be the topic of the next post…). In the professional world, collaborative environments are usually segmented and walled off by specific job functions/types (i.e. different Sharepoint sites or team rooms). It’s true in almost all organizations: accountants work in a different collaborative environment than consultants; developers use different collaborative tools than marketers; and, FBI agents don’t work in the same environment as intelligence officers. However, links can help to break through these walls, primarily by linking to content outside of the walled confines of more limited environments. Linking to this content makes it helps people think more strategically and enables more collaborative thought, while also being a strong alternative to pulling content into closed environments (making content more discoverable).

Tying it all together

Linking is a simple, yet under-utilized tool/technique: most times, out of laziness, constrained time, or other reasons, we produce digital content (be it an email, document, or other) and don’t use the power of linking to it’s full extent. Linking gives us the power to enable our audiences to be as smart as they want to be, while also enabling us to demonstrate diligence in research and knowledge of key sources. Put simply, linking is, in many ways, what drives discoverability and integration of information in a digital environment.

What do you want from people?

I put my document out there for people to collaborate on, but didn’t get anything

One of the most common shortfalls in collaborative projects is under-participation. People just can’t get other people to contribute to their work when using a collaborative environment, be it a wiki, blog, discussion thread, or whatever (the technology here really doesn’t matter). Aside from the problem of not thinking about who you want to collaborate and rallying your crowd, the most common problem is that people starting a collaborative project don’t really think about what they want from the participants. Rather, people tend to concentrate on what they don’t want from participants. (As an aside, a lot of people tend to think of over-participation as a more serious issue…I’ve yet to have that problem in my experience; Someday I hope to see it).

Seriously, What Do You Want from Me?

Fear not! In many cases, this problem can be solved fairly easily with just a little bit of thought from project leaders. Most importantly, you have to think about exactly what kind of input you actually want from the crowd. How do you go about doing this? Well, start with specific questions.

An example: imagine you walk into a bank and the loan officer asks how they can help you, what would your response be? “I’d like to get some advice on a mortgage”. However, when we approach collaboration in the workplace, we don’t ask questions like that: usually, it’s more like “What can you tell me about loans?” This question is unlikely to get you the answer you want and/or need, especially because you probably have a specific questi0n and/or problem that you want an answer for.

So What?

Basically, most people just want to know what you expect from them. People are busy and usually have enough to do. So, be specific in your requests (a common complaint in email). The best thing to do? Start with a specific question. If you want to know if a wiki solution could help solve a problem, don’t ask me what I know about wikis. Tell me about your problem, so that I might be able to provide information in a useful context! Your results are likely to be better. When you start a collaboration project, be specific in what you want from somebody: posting a long document on a website and saying “comment” or “review” (or nothing at all for that matter) isn’t likely to return you the right answers. There’s a lot of power in asking your colleagues “Does the section on Topic B make sense” or “Am I missing any key steps”.

Part 3: What’s in the workflow is what gets used

Note: this is the third blog in a series reviewing each of the 6 pieces of the McKinsey Article “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.”

McKinsey’s third recommendations is “Participatory technologies have the highest chance of success when incorporated into a user’s daily workflow. ” Of all of the recommendations delivered in this report, this one I believe is the most important, yet most often overlooked recommendations that one can give regarding the implementation of Web 2.0 in the workplace. Web 2.0 in the enterprise already suffers from a stigma: “it’s not real work”. And, quite frankly, people have enough work to do without adding wiki contributions and writing blogs to the equation.  If you are going to deploy new tools (at least successfully), it is crucial that they be connected back to “real work” and not just added to the pile.

The Stigma

While most new tools have the difficult task of having to prove their worth over the tools that they replace, Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise have the added weight of being associated with the tools on the open Internet, knowing only horror stories and that these tools are largely by employees’ children. When you add this stigma to the fact that it’s just seen as another thing to do in a long busy day, it’s hard to escape the illusion that Web 2.0 is just a new way to distract employees from their job.

It’s about replacing processes

In order to fully realize the value of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace, people have to use the new tools to actually do their work. If you just impose the wiki as another duty, adoption’s going to be low. This is the classic problem for knowledge management platforms: It’s easy enough to contribute, but it still requires people to do extra work, so you get less than ideal adoption.

This means during the roll out, the benefits of a wiki need to be communicated to the workforce: How can it help them do their job significantly better and/or faster? How can social bookmarking help reduce email and improve people’s access to information?  How is wiki collaboration better than collaborating via email?  While the previous recommendation stated that organizations should let users decide the best way to use the new tools, organizations will need to communicate the realm of the possible to the potential audiences. The goal should be to inspire users to change the way they do their jobs.

Liveblogging on BRIDGE at Gov 2.0 Camp

Note: this is a liveblog of a session at the Gov 2.0 BarCamp on BRIDGE about open software development for the United States Intelligence Community. His site is http://matthewburton.org/a-space

In the 1990s, every agency had their own network that did not touch. IN the late 1990s, the IC created Intelink to start to connect information at different agencies.  Alas, classification restrictions kept agencies from posting their valuable information.

A-Space is Facebook for Spies and it is supposed to be the answer to this.  It is NOT Myspace for Spies, because Facebook is far more advanced as a platform than MySpace.

Why does it take so damn long to get technology to the government? the RFP process: put out a request, months later we get bids and then years later you finally get the software that people want.  Usually, this software doesn’t actually solve the problem because the development is all done in a closed cycle without input from the people who will have to use the tool.

A-Space is supposed to, via BRIDGE, is supposed to help people get their apps onto the system.  A-Space is built on Clearsapace and is a platform on the IC’s classified network for Intelligence analysts.  BRIDGE hopes to make it possible for individual developers and smaller companies to contribute applications.  BRIDGE can be used by anybody who is sponsored into the environment (unclassified).  Bridge strives to be a sandbox for proof of concept for developers to show their tools before being pulled up to operational/classified networks.

Problem with BRIDGE is that it is low and does not necessarily have a community of users.  Another problem is that BRIDGE doesn’t offer a great solution on how to find software solutions.

BRIDGE is seeking a larger pool of web applications, which A-Space will be a platform for delivery.  BRIDGE is designed to open up the sofware development process for the government.

Forge.mil is an unrelated project, but is designed to serve as a software repository for the military domain.  RACE is designed to serve as a DISA bridge to operational domains.

PS Sorry this is incomplete and sparse, but I did the best I could.

Let the Users Decide

Note: this is the second blog in a series reviewing each of the 6 pieces of the McKinsey Article “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.”

The second piece of McKinsey’s article is all about letting the users decide the best use cases for Web 2.0 technology. In their words:

Efforts go awry when organizations try to dictate their preferred uses of the technologies—a strategy that fits applications designed specifically to improve the performance of known processes—rather than observing what works and then scaling it up.

In my experience, this assessment is absolutely dead on. It seems counter-intuitive, but I can easily imagine leaders sitting around a table trying to figure out who–EXACTLY WHO–could best benefit from an organic, flexible knowledge creation environment. Doesn’t this just sound crazy? I understand that most technologists, especially inside large organizational structures are used to the model of providing a technology that has a set purpose and a very specific target audience, but it seems very strange to me that you want to try to dictate uses for Web 2.0 tools.

Rather than trying to do shoehorn “ideal” groups into new tools and new ways of working, why not just let it happen? One of the beautiful things about Web 2.0 is that the best-of-breed software is free. That’s not to say they are without costs; however, Web 2.0 is best implemented in a “Fail cheap” model. Let users decide what works and what doesn’t.

Web 2.0 is about supplying tools for the toolbox. It’s not about setting up a technology and then trying to force users to participate. That’s just not how these technologies work. (This is not really how any technology deployment works: if it’s not in the work flow, then it’s just another thing that people “have to do” and therefore falls flat.)

Social media tools allow for emergent collaboration. They allow for self-organization, outside the formal organizational structure. They are flexible enough to work for many different projects and many different purposes.

What leaders need to do is provide the freedom and ability to experiment to see what works for a given organization (or part of an organization). Let the practitioners decide what tools fit the bill and improve the workflow. Leaders can then help spread the word about what works; they can help to tell the stories that emerge from successful use of the tool in an effort to help spread best practices and scale participation.

The article makes this point well: AT&T managers were able to help adoption “by supporting an awareness campaign to seed further experimentation”. As a final point, I do think that the article misses the boat a bit by talking about participation metrics instead of outcome metrics, but that may just be my own biases creeping back in.

McKinsey’s take on Web 2.0 – The first in a Series

Perhaps the most read, circulated, and probably influential Web 2.0 publication of 2009 so far has been McKinsey’s article “Six ways to make Web 2.0 work“, by Michael Chuil, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts. I have read this piece with great interest and feel that I needed to organize my thoughts on this paper. Hence, a blog series is born: Over the next few posts, I will muse about each of the six techniques suggested by the author as important to making Web 2.0 work in the enterprise. First up: Leadership.

The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.

I find that this is one of the more hotly debated topics around change management: does change come from the bottom or from the top? Of course the answer is that change really comes from both the top and the bottom. In my mind, change often comes via pressure and innovation from the bottom, eventually requires buy in from the higher levels of leadership. The opposite happens as well: leaders have innovative ideas or see strategic opportunity and begin to sow the seeds of change in the base. Put simply, change needs champions at all levels.

Change, leadership, and Web 2.0

In this case, the article is right on. “Build it and they will come” in Web 2.0 is almost always a failure. And leaders who are willing to be champions for Web 2.0–especially with other senior leaders–are also key to the success of a Web 2.0 implementation. Similarly, the first step towards Web 2.0 implementation is almost always a small, bottom-up effort: everybody needs proof of concept and pilots before jumping in with two feet.

Indeed, a lack of perceived leadership support is often cited (in my experience) as a key hurdle for adoption. However, while the article talks about how senior leadership is important, I think that perhaps leadership at other places in the organization is equally important. This includes everyone’s favorite villain, the middle manager: leaders need to ensure that these folks are in the know about social media initiatives and understand where they fit into flatter organization.

Perhaps surprisingly, I think that Web 2.0 implementations are most dependent on leaders and champions at the working level. Web 2.0 requires that working level people, who are likely to benefit most from collaboration and working transparently, clearly understand and talk about the benefits of Web 2.0 amongst themselves. And for this to manifest itself effectively, working level folks have to take it upon themselves to champion Web 2.0 and share their lessons with their peers. This is mainly due to the inherent credibility with the working level, which senior leadership might not have.

The takeaway is this: success in Web 2.0 in the enterprise is dependent on having leadership through all levels of an organization. It’s not about the top, it’s not about the bottom. It’s about the whole organization.