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.

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.

The Long Tail of Collaboration Value

The Long Tail is of course one of the most popular and notable thoughts/books of the social media movement. From Wikipedia:

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. . . . The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group that purchases a large number of “non-hit” items is the demographic called the Long Tail.

Uh Justin…what’s the point?

Well, this may require a logical leap here, but I think that the long tail is a valuable metaphor for the value of collaboration. You see, there may be a few “blockbuster” examples and a lot of less impressive examples of collaboration. But, like those items on iTunes that sells only 10 copies, successful “collaboration events” may only be important/significant to the 3 people that were directly involved. Not something that’s “sexy” or tells a good story.

However, given that, as Rob Salkowitz notes, most knowledge work is a collection of relatively insignificant tasks that ultimately lead up to more significant outputs, these individually insignificant collaboration events add up to generate significant organizational value. So while on an individual level, collaborative interaction may be relatively banal, the sum of these events is significantly higher, if harder to communicate.

Measuring Value

This is another of the unique challenges in measuring the true value of collaboration, especially in knowledge work. Most collaboration yields relatively low value individually; however, when taken in connection with other collaborative activities, the cumulative potential of effective collaboration is remarkable. One of the great ways to make the case for collaboration would be to figure out a better way to measure the value of the tail.

Collaboration as Competitive Advantage

One of the hardest parts of being a collaboration consultant is that quantifying and qualifying why collaboration is valuable, especially in knowledge-creation organizations, is extremely difficult. Everyone knows that collaboration is goodness, but why? What is it about collaboration that is just so great?

A while back, I heard a presentation by Jeffrey Mann and Carol Rozwell (Gartner Analysts), that summed up the (potential) value of collaboration nicely: they presented a collaboration maturity model, and occupying the top line was simply the phrase: “Collaboration as Competitive Advantage”. The slide said that collaboration, in its most mature form, collaboration is so ingrained in an organization’s activity that it gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.

It’s put so simply, yet so accurately: organizations can best their competitors by enabling smart people to swarm quickly and deliver advantages in cost, quality, timeliness, and flexibility.

Collaboration enables improvement in all of these areas. We can reduce costs by improving efficiency and reducing duplicative effort. We can improve quality by increasing the number of eyes on a target and by bringing multiple points of view to bear on any given problem. We can improve our timeliness by again increasing efficiency, but also by better positioning information for discovery and integration. We can also improve our flexibility by empowering people to work across organizational lines and by not binding them to traditional production cycles (especially if that model doesn’t fit the problem).

So just as Nordstrom derives it’s competitive advantage from top-flight customer service and Wal-Mart from its ability to get low cost items to its stores efficiently, organizations can derive unique value from their ability to effectively and rapidly organize teams of smart people to solve hard problems. If an organization understands its own social networks, people, and leaders well enough, I contend that this advantage can be within reach.

Business Process and Knowledge Work

Pre-S: I found this tweet from a few weeks back that I had wanted to write about. I had this thought about two weeks ago, and for the life of me, I can’t remember if it was my own thought or if it was somebody else’s thought. If it is straight lifted from someone else, then I apologize.

Often in my job as a management consultant, I hear the about the need for a defined business process. As I sat around thinking, why do we care so much about business processes? A working hypothesis is something like this: Business process is a manufacturing-era, factory line idea and today’s knowledge work has little need for such defined processes.

Yes I understand the need for standard processes in management and HR functions and the like, but too often I’m asked to come up with business processes for people doing deeply analytic work. And frankly, I’ve come to think that this is largely in vain. Who am I to tell someone how they should think and how they should do their work?

I like to blog in order to get my thoughts on paper. That’s my process. Of my colleagues in my own organization, I’m probably fairly unique. Someone else likes to stand in front of a white board and work it out by themselves? If it works, then who cares.

It goes both ways: I do advocate the use of social software, mainly for other benefits (thinking in public, collaboration, free knowledge management, social networking, etc), but I have run into plenty of people who think I am crazy for doing work in the wiki. But really, why does it bother them that my business process is different than theirs? (bother may be the wrong word…)

Bottom line: people are going to use tools that they find useful. My tool selection is social software. The best I can do is talk about how I use it, why I find it helpful, and what benefits it may have to them. Designing a business process probably isn’t likely to drive them into the open, but rather just cause them to keep doing business as usual and add a copy and paste step at the end of their old process.

In Defense of Blogging at Work

I recently started following a colleague of mine at another firm on Twitter, and have noticed that he seems to be have had a bit of trouble starting an external blog because of some unease by his company.  My guess is that the company has two main objections: 1. They are probably a bit weary of “losing control” of the message that he might put out (Let’s be honest, does any organization really have control over “the message”?) and 2. that if it’s officially sanctioned, he might spend his time at work blogging instead of “working”.  This morning, I’ve been thinking more about the second issue.

I would bet that a lot of organizations and companies are wary of blogging during work hours.  On one hand, this is understandable, especially given most people’s perception of blogs in general (I’ll call this the LiveJournal or Xanga perception): blogs are a the opinions of someone with too much time on their hands.

However, I tend to think of this limited thinking as a short-sighted (and actually deeply hypocritcal way of thinking).  I’ll start with this: I use my blog to think about my job, my responsibilities, and as a way to put some of my thoughts into words.  These thoughts and musings ultimately are beneficial to my job because they help me think through the problems and issues that I face in my responsibilities every day.  In short, I do my thinking here to get something down on digital paper (and hoping potentially that someone else might read it and suggest something as well, but I do see value even without comments).

So what it comes down to, in my mind, it is silly to come down on a platform for thinking.  I’ll put it this way: most people probably do their thinking in emails or Word; why is it any different if I choose to use WordPress as my personal library of thoughts? A blog is just a communications tool; what you do with it is the important part and, thus, organizations should judge their worth on content rather than just blanket policies banning the use of a given platform.

I’ll conclude first by saying, yes, I do recognize the in client-service organizations, deliverables and client service comes first.  I won’t be blogging if I have to get a deliverable done or am against a deadline.  However, on days where I have time to sit back and contemplate job-related issues, why is it a problem that I do it here, where other people can see and might be able to help me develop my ideas further?  Ultimately, I think it comes down to a communications problem on the part of bloggers, including myself: people just don’t understand the purpose of blogs.  Personally, I think I now understand that bloggers should try to be more explicit in their defense of blogging, especially to wary organizations.

Training is Unimportant

A colleague of mine recently posed the question to the broader group at the social software conference I’m currently attending: “Why do we think training is so important?” His basic point was that, as a social software trainer, he’s lucky if 10% of users he trains actually touch the tool again.  Having trained a large number of users in social software as well, I am unfortunately and unhappily going to have to agree.

I’ll caveat this statement by saying that yes, it is totally possible that I am just not a good teacher.  I am not trained as an instructor, but I am one of the two foremost authorities on wikis in my company, so the role falls on me.  (That last sentence, especially the last half, scares me a bit).

ANYWAY, why are we in the enterprise convinced that training is so damn important when it comes to socializing and implementing Web 2.0?  There is no Wikipedia training class for new users to take before they start to contribute to articles.  Nobody ever taught Anil Dash or JP how to blog. So why is it that we have to teach Joe Consultant or Jill Manager how to do these things?

Well I think the answer is two fold.  One, I think it’s because we are stuck in the traditional integration mindset, where software training is a key component of unveiling a new capability to the enterprise.  Two, I think it’s because we actually do need training, but training of an entirely different kind.  It’s really about awareness: awareness of the tool, awareness of the benefits, and awareness of the change required to work in the new social software environment. Over the last few trainings that I’ve run, I’ve tried to adjust my training style/focus away from coding in the wiki towards talking about the benefits and such.

I tend to think that the benefits of social software are evident, when in actuality, they are not always clear.  Especially in the case of new implementations, where the content in these environments is really lacking and the value may be limited.  So where I see value in being able to connect what I’m thinking if I’m working in a wiki alone, others aren’t likely to do so without a clear demonstration of value.

The Michigan Wolverines and Organizational Change

One of my favorite things in the world is college football, and more specifically, the Michigan Wolverines. Indeed, you could say that my introduction to Web 2.0 was through a vibrant network of college football blogs that is far more entertaining (and probably more informative) than ESPN.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Michigan hired a new coach this season; and for the first time in about 40 years, the new coach is a guy who is not a “Michigan Man”.  With this came a radically different offensive system, that requires different styles of players than Michigan’s historically recruited (most obviously having a quarterback with the ability to run the ball, where as Michigan has traditionally had QBs more known for being 6’5 statues with rocket arms).

So last week, in their first game under the new era, Michigan lost to Utah.  Utah isn’t a bad team (actually they’ve been picked as a BCS buster-type), but they are a team that Michigan had traditionally been able to beat handily. But alas, without the right players in the system, RichRod lost his first game as coach of the Wolverines.

This got me thinking.  Rich Rodriguez is forced to play his system, or, more accurately, an adaptation of his system,  with players that were mainly recruited to play in a different system.  This problem is quite similar to those facing managers and leaders all across the business world, especially in this time of rapid change in the business world.

The lesson that I take from this comparison is that leaders, be they in business or government, are often forced to run their systems with other people’s players.  This can of course have drastic consequences, if the skillsets don’t match up to the new leader’s visions and strategies.  Ultimately, the leader has a few choices: 1. Adapt the model, 2. Re-Train the players, or 3. Get a new team.  Probably more accurately, a combination of all three.

This has been rambling and barely coherent, but my take away is that, at least right now, for a Web 2.0 implementation, it is important to remember that you are trying to run a spread option offense with a three-yard and a cloud of dust workforce.  Models have to be adaptive, players have to be trained, and new recruits need to be brought in.