Reflections on social strategies from #E20S

 

   So in my last but one post I wrote about some of the common experiences that organisations tend to face in their Enterprise 2.0 ‘journeys’, eg the one year tipping point.

To an extent that ‘route map’ type things are ever useful I think you can see a few more common factors from this type of analysis as well.  One for me would be the common delay at the start of this sort of strategy before organisations decide to take the leap.  I’m not suggesting organisations shouldn’t develop a strategy, I think they should – but once they have this, supported by a clear series of next steps (allowing for emergence) they just need to get stuck in.

But you can also see various differences between organisations embarking on their journey.  One of these relates to the fast adopter premium which John Sumser has been writing a lot about – the fact (and I think it is a fact) that early innovators in the social space gain a disproportionate share of the benefits.  Employees and others associated with these implementations see these as new and exciting and are therefore more likely to engage with them than employees in similar organisations doing similar things later on when these won’t be perceived as so special.

Of course can still get this feel of newness if you’re operating in a sector or country etc where not many people are using social media (eg I certainly think this is still the case in most of Asia and Africa).

But I suppose all I’m arguing about here is the shape of the curve, rather than whether or not there is a standard curve at all.  In fact, thinking it through, I can see further evidence for there being a curve (though I still don’t agree that it progresses from IT to OD).

For example, you can see the curve taking place at an individual level too.  There’s the same reticence to jump into social media use (I started posting here over four years ago, but that was six months after actually having set my initial blog up).  There’s the same one year tipping point (at which a lot of bloggers give up).  And I think you see the same disproportionate benefit (readership, links, page ranking etc) going to early individual adopters of social media too.

For example, I believe I put high quality material on my blogs but I still consider myself extremely fortunate that I took up social media quite early on (this applies particularly to my Strategic HCM blog which was one of the first blogs in the HR space, at least in the UK and Europe).

But once again, you see the same variation between sectors and countries etc.  Even when I first got in blogging I remember seeing that some of the very first adopters, particularly in IT, who had been using bulleting boards for years and years before, were already predicting the death of blogging.  I think that’s complete rubbish as, even today, most people haven’t got into the social media habit at all.

That’s why I think any talk of ‘peak social’ is completely missing the point.  If you’ve been using social media a few years it may feel less exciting than it was (hence the one year tipping point).  But you’ve got to remember that most people haven’t yet experienced that sense of excitement (even if it will be less) at all.

Plus of course, even when / if we do reach the real peak of social media use, social media is only one part of a broader more social approach.  We’re getting to grips with social technology but we’re still in the very earliest phase of understanding how we can make the social organisation work.

And that’s the biggest reason of all for not subscribing to any adoption curve that stretches beyond the specific implementation of social technologies.  For much of the rest of it, we simply don’t really know, and it’s much too early to tell.

 

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Social Business Summit: John Hagel on Cascading Change

 

  I’m at Dachis’ London Social Business Summit today.  I’ve just seen JP Rangaswami taling about social but couldn’t get on the wifi to post.  But up now is John Hagel talking about two elements of his big shift (from the Power of Pull).

 

1.   Moving from diminishing to increasing returns

So it used to be the longer you worked on something, the longer you’d have to wait for the next increment.  Now, the more you work on something, the more rapidly something improves.

 

2.   Moving from stocks to flow

The source of value used to be stocks of proprietary knowledge that you’d keep secret and leverage over a long a period as possible.  But now, knowledge stocks depreciate at an ever fast rate.  To create value in this new work, we need to participate in an ever broader flow of knowledge at an accelerating rate.  Hence the value of social software.

 

The best way to take advantage of these trends is through small moves that trigger accelerating moves over time.  This can be through:

• Bottom-up adoption often within teams to support their activities
• Top down driven change driven by an executive coming back from a conference
• A massive deployment of social software for everyone.

 

One difficult with all of these is that metrics are hard to come from – in fact in most of Hagel’s studies, there’s been no impact.  We need metrics that matter – which will differ according to the part of the business you’re in, eg financial metrics for CXOs, operational metrics for lower business leaders and performance metrics (in someone’s job) for people on the front-line.

The target at all these levels is better exception handling which takes 60-70% of management time in most organisations (?).

[This links with JP’s points on the move from the Industrial Age in which work comes in linear flow and we could predict what flow is coming through the pipe based on linear constructs and build processes around these (although they were never as repeatable as we thought).  Knowledge workers have lumpy work – peaks and troughs.  We need to understand pattern rather than process to deal with exceptions which are taking over from the previous age.  JP think this new non-linear vs linear approach is a bit like a video game.]

This sort of change pulls people to the edge rather than the core – the place where social technology can have the best early impact.  It’s not just a technology, it’s an organisational change catalyst – everything will change based upon the implementation of social software.

This applies to all businesses eg bus workers have taken to social software very rapidly because of the problems they’ve been having.

 

Comment: yes, but given the extent of change, why start with social software and the changes this will introduce?  My advice is to start with the change you want to create.

Also see my post on the different opportunities for introducing social tools: 3 modes of web 2.0 implementation.

 

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Lynda Gratton on Nokia and the future of work

 

    I’ve already posted at Strategic HCM on Lynda Gratton’s Future of Work blog and her recent article at HR Magazine.  But she’s also got a good article up on London Business School’s site, reviewing Nokia’s Booster Programme.

 

One of the things I’ve posted on quite frequently at this blog, is the need to combing real and virtual (or as Nokia say, analogue and digital) activities in order to best achieve certain outcomes.

In Gratton’s article, she explains how Nokia’s ‘Booster Programme’ used a blended approach including both sets of activities to engage with people throughout the world and to do so in fast and compelling ways:

 

Need: fundamental organisational change covering 5000 employees.

Analogue activities: a two-day face-to-face workshop with team leaders

Digital activities: online social network communities providing much broader involvement of the whole organisation.

“The two-day workshops were staged in locations across the world, including Beijing, White Plains (New York), Helsinki, London and Dubai. About 100 potential change leaders were part of each workshop.

When all workshops were completed, the 700 participants then returned to their teams to engage them in the ongoing process. It was at this point that the online community came to the fore. Working with specialist partners, the design team created an intranet site accessible to workshop participants and all employees of the Markets business. The online community was designed to host conversations and communications with senior managers as well as to provide information and ideas from content experts and community members.”

 

Result: daunting organisational change made fully effective within one week!

Gratton notes that:

“The capacity of social networks to create engagement and innovation is seen to be crucial to the long-term success of Nokia.”

 

But importantly, social networks didn’t achieve this on their own!  It was down to both real and virtual communication, and importantly, to Nokia’s collaborative organisation structure and culture:

“Only about 100 people assuming new jobs. For the rest of Nokia’s employees, there was no need to change jobs; the modular teams of which they were members were simply reconfigured. The discipline, philosophy and mindset of reconfiguration through standardisation and shared platforms ensured that Nokia is able to skilfully and rapidly reconfigure its human resources to meet changing customer needs.”

 

So that’s change management sorted then!

 

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3 modes of web 2.0 implementation

 

     I’ve posted previously (1,2) on the challenges of implementing web 2.0 / social media.  However, there are actually three separate modes of implementation, each with their own set of challenges - and organisations need to be clear about which of these modes apply to them in order to identify and prepare for the appropriate challenges:

 

Mode 1:   Technology inspired implementation - an example of what I refer to as ‘value for money’ (in the value triangle)

 

Organisations often introduce new technologies in order to keep abreast of new development and opportunities.  This happens particularly frequently with social media as there is so much hype around its benefits.

So, for example, an organisation may launch a new internal social network, hoping perhaps to encourage and enable more internal conversations (maybe even as an alternative to going undercover?).  Or it might introduce a wiki to replace document distribution in order to improve knowledge sharing, productivity etc.

However, there is usually no real link to the business strategy behind using social media in this way.  But this doesn’t mean that it’s not a useful thing to do.  And it may also provide an important basis for using social media in the other modes.

 

Implementing social technologies in this mode is best done by introducing the appropriate system across the organisation (to maximise participation), and making it easy and attractive for people to get involved, for example, by letting them use it to support personal vs business needs, and enabling use of pictures and videos etc.

Once people have got used to this technology, the organisation may then go on to introduce another web 2.0 system in the same of a different mode.

 

Social media is also often introduced this way, ‘under the radar’, when there is no business sponsorship for any other use of the technology.

Examples:

• BT

 

Mode 2:   Business driven programme support – an example of adding value

The second mode is one which social media is used to meet particular business needs, for example to improve collaboration or innovation on a particular business project.

This doesn’t mean that the implementation can’t include personal applications, but the main focus is on the business.

 

In this mode, social media is best introduced by using one or a combination of systems, probably with a particular group of employees, in a way that very clearly supports the identified business need.

It’s much more likely that social media will be introduced as part of a major business programme when in this mode.  But the business programme should focus on the need which is being met, rather than the technology that is being used.

Examples:

• Microsoft Academy Mobile (I’d argue this was about a business need because Microsoft needed people to up to speed with this for external as well as internal reasons.)

 

Mode 3:   Creation of organisation capability – an example of creating value

This mode is quite similar to mode 2.  But here, the focus is on the intangible capability, the type of social capital that is being created.

It’s likely that the programme creating this social capital will receive an even bigger launch, will involve all or at least most people in the organisation and that social media will form a much larger part of this programme, than in option 2.

It’s therefore likely that culture change will be central to this.

Examples:

• IBM
• Cisco

 

Photo credit: Henningklevjer

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Implementing Enterprise 2.0

 

The other book for which certain chapters have been made available online is Ross Dawson’s Implementing Enterprise 2.0.

Of particular interest to me is Chapter 11 – Social Networks in the Enterprise (and for my day job: Chapter 20 – Implications for HR, but this isn’t available without payment).

Dawson notes that:

“Social networks, while potentially extremely valuable to organisations, are possibly the most difficult of the Enterprise 2.0 suite of tools to implement successfully. The most important challenges are behavioural, though there are also notable technological challenges.”

 

In addition, there are particular challenges that need to be addressed in implementing internal social networks:

“The best focus for initial adoption of internal social networks is specific teams or groups, within which it can be fairly easy to gain majority or significant uptake in a brief period. These groups can then help seed contacts in other groups across the firm.”

 

This reminds me of some earlier posts touching on the different ways to introduce social media.

I actually think these different approaches relate to the three levels of value in the value triangle.  I’ll post further on this shortly.

 

 

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Controlling the Social Business

 

   One of the interesting questions involved in developing a social business is how do you develop and manage social capital, given its intangibility.  Can you actually manage it, or do you just need to let it emerge?

Case studies contained within Jive’s report, which I reviewed in my last post, provides some input into this issue.

 

The need for process, discipline, common vocabulary

Cisco provides a good example of an organisation which is successfully using a control based approach to developing the social business.

Jive refers to John Chambers’ video interview with Harvard Business Review last year (see my post on this here) predicting that the next wave of corporate innovation and productivity growth will be about amplifying the power of people.

Chambers explains that new collaborative work styles and applications enabled by Web 2.0 will be powerful tools for the successful enterprise of the future. If anything, the movement is happening more quickly than he expected.

And Cisco has found that the major barrier to becoming more collaborative has been the company’s existing / previous control based culture:

“I think the stumbling block that we all trip on is we’ve been successful in command and control, and therefore we know how to do it very well.”

 

However, it’s clear that Cisco believe they can still control this move towards increased collaboration:

“It will be built around something that actually our children, and young people invented in social networking… Except we will bring it to business with process, with discipline, common vocabulary, common review cycles, resource allocation, top management focus on it, etc.”

 

Viral growth and social interaction

I think the case study which provides the most contrasting view is of the development of an employee social community, EMC|ONE (Online Network of EMCers), at the storage technology giant early in 2008 (and which has similarities to the case study from BT I posted on last year):

“Jamie Pappas, Manager of Social Media Strategy for EMC, said a decision was made to allow participation to grow virally without any sort of internal marketing splash that mandated or forced employees to join.

Within just three months of that soft launch, however, more than 2,000 employees had registered in order to post comments and other contributions, and more than 40 sub-communities had emerged. As of early 2009, more than 11,000 employees had registered, which is about one-third of the entire company.

One of EMC’s most controversial decisions was whether or not to let employees chat about topics that are less business-specific, such as the best restaurants near each local EMC office or local community activities. Although there is ongoing internal debate about whether these conversations are appropriate, they have been allowed to happen.

‘I am a firm believer that the social interaction aids the business interaction,’ Pappas observes. The result has been personal, social connections that engender trust and make for healthier working relationships.”

 

The solution

For most firms, an appropriate combination of approaches is going to provide the most useful approach.  Perhaps letting people get used to using social media for their own purposes (the EMC approach), but requiring participation in those areas that are mission critical (as per Cisco).  But even these areas can be developed collaboratively rather than imposed.

As Jive’s CEO, Dave Hersh explains;

“There needs to be a fair amount of structure behind the scenes, but you can’t impose a specific working order on people… social business [software'] works best when you let the people drive what’s most important.”

 

 

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Technorati Tags: Jive Software,Dave Hersh,Cisco,John Chambers,EMC,EMC ONE,Jamie Pappas,social business

 

 

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