CircaSpecting: People, Tech, and Business

Decision Rights and Collaborative Engagement

Who's in charge?  It's not always clear.  And, that is a problem.

Jobs are hyper-specialized.  So, "in-charge of Task 123" usually is pretty clear.  But, it's not so clear on the special projects, the innovation initiatives, the cross-functional process improvement teams, the strategic planning teams.  With members from multiple levels and from multiple organizations, it becomes less clear who has the power to decide when faced with alternatives.  This lack of clarity inhibits the effectiveness of the team.  That is why decision rights are important. 

Simply put, decision rights state how each member will be involved in the decisions the team faces.  To put a fine point on it...are we voting on everything ?

Groups of people working together to solve a problem inevitably face decisions that affect what will be done, how, and by whom.  In typical projects, there are many decisions to be made.  Some are intrinsic to specialized tasks that are clearly owned by a member.  The manager/facilitator cannot and does not want to make all those decisions.  The whole group cannot be slowed down by prepping for and chiming in on all those decisions.  Empowerment must happen.  But, overall, anarchy cannot happen.  There is a tension between coordination and empowerment.  Project leaders who do not resolve this uncertainty are flirting with failure.

All projects are like waves, in which the members of the group come together to get on the same page, then separate to work on individually assigned tasks, then come back together, then separate, etc etc etc.  When we separate to do our assigned work, decision rights are usually very clear.  I am supposed to decide how best to do the things I was assigned.  But when everyone comes back together for coordination and course correction based upon latest information -- these are the moments when clarity on decision rights is most important…and most often missing.  Will the PM decide?  Will the group vote?  Will the squeaky wheel decide?

What we need is a clear statement of decision-rights. That is: who gets to decide what?  

Most project managers know to control the project by using phases.  On analytical or planning projects particularly, it is vital to specify decision-gates between phases, because pruning the tree of possibilities is essential to focus the energy of the team.  Everyone needs to understand how this pruning is going to happen, because that knowledge will shape their expectation of participation -- which will affect their engagement and creativity.  It's a balancing act that requires wise management choices, based upon the nature of the team and of the problem. The leader must specify in advance how each of these phase-gate decisions will be made. This is part of the clear communication habit that characterizes good leadership.

Here's an example of how project phasing and decision gates work together. 

Let's assume the project manager chooses the Wave Model template for the group project.  She would divide the process into seven phases.  And, SOMEONE must make a decision prior to closing each phase and proceeding to the next:

1. Problem definition
   Have we adequately defined the problem?
     
2. Solution brainstorming
   Have we generated enough ideas for how to approach solving it?
     
3. Solution evaluation
   Have we adequately debated the pros/cons of each idea?
     
4. Solution selection
   What idea will we pursue?
     
5. Implementation planning
   Have we prepared a plan that can be implemented?
     
6. Implementation
   Are we done?
     
7. Assessment
   Have we adequately documented our experience and learnings?

In advance, the group leader must communicate to the team members how she expects these control-gate decisions to be made.  For instance,  

"We will use the following decision rights on this project:
    Leader decision  on phases 1, 2, 4, 6
    Majority vote      on phases 3, 5
    Unanimous         on phase   7  "

Now, the leader has published a road map for where the group will travel.  This road map allows the leader to communicate clearly "we are here" messages along the way.  And, it specifies who will be making each of the key decisions for the project.

Life is a multi-stage game.  How leaders treat project members on the current project will affect how those members engage on future projects.  Leaders …even cultures…. benefit from the creativity and engagement of team members over time only to the extent those members feel the process is fair and transparent.  When those conditions fail, trust disappears.  This is when engagement falls, replaced by groupthink and sycophancy. This is the end of creativity and innovation within the organization.  It is also the beginning of the exodus of the creative members.

No one expects you to abdicate authority or responsibility -- that's why you sit in the corner office.  You are not creating a vote-for-everything culture.  You are simply being clear about the boundaries of delegation and participation.  Remember, there is a correlation between engagement and creativity.  You get to choose where you want to be on the engagement/creativity continuum on each project.  Then, members can make appropriate investments of their energy and creativity -- without feeling bait-and-switched later.  Setting and delivering on employee expectations in this regard is essential to long-term corporate creativity.

The Read-Write Enterprise

A few years ago, the web was a monologue forum.  Website-owners created stuff, and everyone else looked at it.  Then, a crazy thing happened: users were given create/upload/edit priveleges. Suddenly, we had a Read-Write Web, instead of a Read-only Web.  And, it turned out that users really wanted to do more than consume and chat.

 

Lyzasoft believe the enterprise is due for the same opening-up, to involve all employees actively in creating and editing and remixing all types of information relevant for the enterprise.  This is about more than Word documents and spreadsheets.  It's about ALL the content of the enterprise: dashboards, charts, videos, images, reports, tables, manuals...everything.  We are working to create the Read-Write Enterprise.

 

So, just to be clear: star ratings and instant messaging and groups are not the Read-Write Enterprise.  The fundamental is...user generated content.  In other words, most of the work to-date has been about allowing users to talk about pre-developed content; so, the conversation is emergent, but the data content itself is not.  

When you define a priori the content around which the participants can converse, you kill creative thinking in at least 3 ways:

1. You make issues forgettable.  As the Madison Avenue folks have known for a long time, your brand is more memorable to a person when you involve her brain more.  Spoon feeding does not work.  Remember the Marlboro billboards?  Why was the cowboy image imposed over the brand name?  To get your brain to play with the ad like a puzzle.  And, it worked. When we feed people static or pre-digested or bounded informational content, they forget it.
2. You constrain the conversation to status-quo thinking.  If you give young kids plastic farm animals, they will role play Farmer John -- not Gordon Gecko.  If you want creative, emergent solutions you have to allow for creative, emergent content as input to the process.
3. You dim the brightest bulbs.  The best brains for creative problem solving are driven by curiosity.  They NEED to try new things, look at things different ways.  Play and experimentation and exploring actually energizes them, lights up their brains.  If our collaborative environments do not allow these minds to play, they will not engage.

In the Read-Write Enterprise, users can create and manipulate the actual content -- videos, spreadsheets, charts, images, documents, presentations...anything.  They work blend and extend and republish and link the company's information, so that it morphs and grows in sync with the flow of new challenges facing the business.

Narrative Power vs. Powerpoint

Vladimir Nabokov said great writing is
"a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science.”

A few days ago, I had a dream.  It seemed very strange, because people and things from one part of my life were interacting in another part of my life.  Like seeing your Mom sitting at your boss' desk at work, writing a letter on an ipad by pressing physically on the pad with a boat oar. 

In the morning, I relayed the highlights of this Dali-esque bizarro nightmare to my wife, and she responded simply: "that makes sense."  Uh, how?  She recalled how we had talked the previous day about my mother's coming birthday, how I had forgotten my ipad when I went out of town, ..and of course that we live on a boat. 

What does this have to do with narrative?  Everything.

Our brains need narrative, and our dreams are powerful evidence.  When we dream, we CONNECT diverse things from our memories -- they do not simply sit in little display boxes in our mind.  Our mind weaves them together.  With narrative -- a story line, action, interaction, flow. It is fundamental to the way our minds process the world: we connect things with stories.

And, why is this important?  When we communicate with narrative, we put knowledge into context.  That's important, because our audience's brains like to get a rolling start before being smacked with a fact.  Further, when we communicate with narrative, our audience's brains don't work to provide the narrative themselves -- so more cycles are available to focus on what we are saying.  Also, narrative is a mnemonic; it helps your audience remember and recall your facts. And, finally, narrative is extensible -- meaning your audience can more easily see potential new/additional/related issues or applications, even beyond what you anticipated yourself.

Unfortunately, the world of bullet points and dashboards and twitter and IM has dulled our storytelling chops.  The offers of speed and ease and simplicity are temptingly convenient.  But, they are no substitute for a good storyline.  So, smuggle in a few …OMG…complete sentences to your powerpoint slides.  Use animation in your data visualizations.  Remind the audience what was going on before/causing your observations and what you think might/could/should happen after/because of your observations. Re-connect your data to the real-world …to the people and processes within and around the firm.  

Remember: data are representations of the real-world, which is ultimately what you are trying to affect.  And the real-world involves people in a setting with a purpose, confronted by dramatic tensions or dragons or what-not…saved when they rally to bold action around a clear and compelling plan.  (Ok, so that was a little over-the-top, but you get the picture.) There's a reason you still remember the morality tales you heard in kindergarten.  Narrative works.

Fear of Flipping the Switch

One of the lessons of life that I’ve been learning lately is that execution does NOT flow naturally from preparation.  Actually, the more you prepare, probably the HARDER it is to move on to DOING.

Here’s what I’m experiencing lately in an interesting little object-lesson called "moving aboard our new sailboat."  The experience is purely personal, but I think it reveals some things about the mind that are 100% applicable to the professional world.

Preparing is sort of a safe little fantasy world.  You tell yourself stories about what is going to happen when you start doing -- the great things that will happen, the ordinary things that will happen, and even the challenging things that will/might happen.  Then you get organized for those things.  You play out those stories in your mind, and you come up with new stories, and you document and buy and stage things to be ready.  But, there is a vast existential chasm between the mental life of these stories and the real life of...well, living.

One of the hooks in preparing that makes it so sticky is similar to the old adage about life: the more you know, the more you realize how little you know.  In planning/preparation, it’s easy to get into the mindset of trying to prepare for everything.  It’s a fool’s errand, but it catches many people in its grasp -- because (1) it seems responsible and (2) it does not actually carry the risk of DOING.

Anyone who has worked in large companies has seen this phenomenon: over-planning, over-preparing -- because you can always justify your preparation as prudent in the face of some bogey-man risk...but REALLy because you are petrified of walking across the threshold from your fantasy world into the real world, because deep down you know that the real world is going to be different from the predictable world of “planning.”

At some point, after you’ve read the manual on switching power sources for the refrigerator
between shore power and generator power, you actually have to ... FLIP SOME SWITCHES AND HOPE YOU DON”T BLOW UP SOMETHING.  You have to crank the generator, which means you have to do a few other things.  You have to route power to places and turn on pumps for heat exchangers and other things.  And, either your plan works and you can have ice cream while at anchor off Saba, or it doesn’t and you are buying lots of expensive new gear.  But, here’s the mindset that matters: 

If I am reasonably smart and reasonably prepared and have a reasonable idea for how to do something, I WANT TO KNOW THAT IT WORKS IN THE REALWORLD...NOW.  You have to reach out and flip some switched -- not stupidly and randomly, but still you have to flip them -- and SEE WHAT HAPPENS. 

Either you will find that you are in fact prepared, or you will find that you were living in Plato’s cave.  From where I sit today, either of these outcomes is superior to admiring shadows on the wall.

 

Of Card Hustlers and Tech Sales

“Let me show you what our product can do with your data.”

Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong, I love data analysis as much as the next guy, and our product has great features for slicing/dicing/ computing/ visualizing data.  But, I cringe when a customer fixates on that sort of demonstration.  Because, as an industry we’ve been doing this computational and spatial and logical manipulation of numbers FOR SEVERAL DECADES.  Let’s just say, as an industry, that we’re 95% of the way “there” -- meaning we’ve achieved a 95% perfect calculator.  Most of what’s new now is nothing more than blinky lights, shiny things....a neat parlor trick.  

So what.

If you want to make a meaningful improvement in your organization’s effectiveness, efficiency, and creativity, you need to look for a 10X improvement in something...or a 100X improvement in something.  

0.05X is just noise.

Whatever is keeping your organization from being more effective, efficient, and creative....IT IS NOT A CALCULATOR PROBLEM.  The solution is not a better tool to allow a user logically, mathematically, or spatially to manipulate her data.

What should we be talking about?  

There is a growing body of recent organizational research demonstrating three of the biggest issues inhibiting knowledge workers:

1. They don't know what data are already available on the subject, or cannot find it, or cannot understand it
2. They don't know who has expertise in the subject, or who is already working on the same subject
3. They don’t know what’s been tried before, what was experienced, and what was learned

Notice a pattern?  Ignorance.  After 50 years of calculator investment -- LITERALLY TRILLIONS OF $ -- most employees are ignorant: they are unaware of the information assets, human assets, and corporate experience THAT ALREADY EXIST IN THE ORGANIZATION.  There’s a good argument being made now that the degree of ignorance on these dimensions is something like 99%, which means that there’s a 100X improvement opportunity here.  Sound high?  Consider this: knowledge workers and managers report spending more than 25% of their time -- every day -- searching for information they need.  Every day.  And, here’s the real killer: that’s just the time they spend looking for things they know to look for, things they believe there’s a chance they’ll find, etc.  There’s a radical step-function opportunity in efficiency, effectiveness, and creativity lurking in the knowledge-sharing problem.

So, please, please, please.....stop asking to see what a product can do with your data.  You’re falling for a card-hustler’s hypnotic tricks.  Keep your eye on the frontier of 100X improvement, something that can actually have a noticeable impact on your team’s results: 

1. Making sure employees can find and understand the data available across the organization
2. Making sure employees can find and engage expert coworkers across the organization 
3. Making sure employees can learn from the community’s experiments and experiences

 Once again: it's all about people.

Collaboration and False Friends

My new friend Huguette has been studying up on her English with a book called Vrais Amis et Faux Amis.  In English, that's "true friends and false friends."  Now, this book is not about friendship; it's about words.  Specifically, it's about words that exist in both English and French -- true friends being the situations in which both languages interpret one word the same way, and false friends being those risky situations in which the same letters or sounds have different interpretations by the two cultures.  For instance, "superb" means the same thing in both languages.  But, "car" means this to English-speakers...

...but this to French-speakers.

 

So, it would be easy for me to THINK that I understand Huguette when she uses the word "car," but my mind would be traveling in a different direction from hers…which could create a funny (or not-so-funny) situation later.

This morning, I was thinking about how pervasive this situation is -- even within a single culture.  And, it dawned on me:

DISagreement is not the worst situation in communication.  
MISagreement is.

We are in such a hurry all the time.  A hurry to talk.  A hurry to be heard.  A hurry to move on to the next thing.  A hurry to get something done.  Many times, I REALLY WANT to believe that the other person agrees with me.  So, I am not careful to confirm we have a true agreement, rather than a MISagreement.  It is only later that we must suddenly stop/rewind/redo either one or both partners' resulting work.  

Fortunately, disagreement is also often an illusion.  Yes, fortunately.  You see, I find that most initial appearances of disagreement are such that with a bit of clarification we find that we were simply focused on different parts of the same problem or that we did not have the same information -- and we don't actually disagree in any meaningful way about what needs to be done.

Paradoxically, the fastest way to a truly collaborative outcome is the early appearance of disagreement. 

The early appearance of disagreement usually turns off the automaton-in-a-hurry-to-move-on switch in your brain, slowing you down to focus on what is happening now: this conversation, this partnership, this collaboration needs attention right now to make sure we are in tune -- to avoid MISagreement. 

When you sense one of these situations, I recommend you approach it like the scientific method: test for the alternative hypothesis -- "When you say <insert word>, I interpret that as <insert narrative description or example>.  How are you using the term <insert word>?"  Repeat this until you find the term on which you are disagreeing -- or until you decide that you really, actually disagree.  Either way, it is in your best interest to highlight, isolate, and address misunderstandings and to avoid MISagreements.

While the MISagreement problem certainly happens in spoken communication, I think it is epidemic in written communication like corporate reporting presentations -- especially those that use abbreviated text, bullet points, and illustrations.  In fact, I think we often TRY to make MISagreement happen in our presentations: it requires a great deal of intellectual honesty to use words and images that are intended to avoid MISagreement.  

It is not enough to use words that can mean what you say.  It is essential to use words that cannot mean anything else.

 Even if this means inviting disagreement.  Because I'll take a true disagreement over a false agreement any day of the week.

 

Fusion-powered Idea Machine

Collaboration is not additive, it is multiplicative.  

This sounds sort of math-geeky, but it’s actually some pretty simple logic – and it provides a very nice scheme for thinking about how a group is more than the sum of the individual members' knowledge.  This is the magic of collaboration, when the fusion of our knowledge produces something more.  

Here's how it works.  Aside from his/her computational and creative skills, each person in the team brings two things to the party.

E is the explicit knowledge of a person, expressed in his/her artifacts.

T is the tacit knowledge of a person, expressed in his/her intuition.

To keep things relatively simple, let’s focus on a team of two people, a and b, each of whom carries both types of knowledge discussed above.  

a = (Ea + Ta)        b = (Eb + Tb)

When they work together on a problem, sharing both elements of knowledge with each other, some powerful idea cross-products emerge – activating Tacit knowledge in lots of places:

(Ea + Ta) x (Eb + Tb) = EaEb + EaTb + EbTa + TaTb

The first term EaEb is combining artifact-based knowledge. Left brain + left brain.

The middle terms EaTb and EbTa are the intersection of one person’s intuition with another person’s artifacts. Left brain + right brain.

The final term TaTb is the collision of multiple vectors of tacit/intuitive power — it’s the magic that happens when we are both at the whiteboard together.  Right brain + right brain.

One caveat: as discussed in the sidebar above, “activating the Tacit” requires a degree of interactivity, experimentation, adaptation, sampling, etc. that is technologically difficult to deliver in an appealing user experience.

Therefore…

Based upon the framework above, here’s a representative list of capabilities your collaboration platform must provide if it is to start the innovation reactor: 

Sharing (EaEb, the first term)

1. Upload, share, link, embed any artifact, data, widget or feed from any source
2. Multi-dimensional organizing  and associating with tags, keywords
3. User-defined relationships and links between artifacts
4. Integrated search engine for all formal and informal knowledge
5. Mesh trust model for fine-grain sharing

Extending (EaTb and EbTa, the middle terms)

1. Rich, evolutionary user profiles including endorsements and expertise
2. Emergent group/room/discussion formation and feedback solicitation
3. Conversations (email, IM, voice, vidcon) associated with artifacts & vice versa
4. Direct commenting, textual annotation, and margin drawing by colleagues
5. Interactive sampling, remixing, derivation from all shared artifact types
6. System recommendations based upon content, tags, and user behavior 

Creating (TaTb, the final term)

1. Private communication channels and pre-publication experimentation spaces
2. Ability for users to synthesize data from any source easily, impulsively
3. Simultaneously co-created digital whiteboards, spreadsheets, documents, charts, presentations, Gantts, etc.

Casting Call

If you are a leader of a growing business, you spend a lot of time recruiting and assimilating new team members.  I hope to share a few ideas in this post to help you get a better return on your efforts.  Most of these ideas fit under this heading: roles, NOT responsibilities.

I hate job descriptions.  Hate.  I am passionate about seeing people flourish to their potential, and IMHO nothing smothers potential like an HR-friendly, legal-approved job description.  The prototypical job description would make Marx chuckle and say "I told you so" -- meaning this description leaves almost nothing to chance, focuses exclusively on the list of specific things for which this person can be judged individually as having done/not, and speaks of the position's manager as one who will tell you what to do, when, and how.  This is not an epic existence.  Far from it.  This is a recipe for total creative shutdown, for dehumanization, for withering, for apathy, for disengagement, for stagnation.  If that's not clear, contrast it with how we learn naturally…as pre-school children, before the institutional machine starts working us over.

Children instinctively live mythically.  "Precision" is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion.  Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects. Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one's environment….putting on a whole vesture, a whole time, a Zeit.  People today reject goals.  They want roles -- R-O-L-E-S.  That is, total involvement.  They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs.  Marshall McLuhan

At some risk of inviting critique from the HR and Legal department, here are my 3 simple reasons for ditching "job descriptions" and replacing them with "roles."  

#1: Roles are about BEING, rather than DOING.

The hyper-focus on responsibilities is a canker left over from the Smith-to-Taylor industrial days, breaking down tasks into sub-tasks -- and roles into sets of tasks -- ad infinitum.  Great for pin manufacturing.  Not great for the post-modern, post-industrial information economy in which ideas and creativity cut the path to profit.  I know this is cliche, but that's probably because it's true: we are called human BEINGS, not human DOINGS.  When you think about your team, don't do it with an org chart in front of you.  Don't think about tasks and responsibilities.  Rather, approach it as a director of a theatrical production: how would I describe each role on the cast?  If you have not seen a cast summary in a while, go find one on the internet.  It will DEFINITELY NOT talk about tasks, because it's a ROLE.  And, the beautiful thing about roles is….they give the cast member room to improvise, to interpret, to experiment….to grow.  To BE and BECOME. 

#2: Roles are elastic and relative.

Most job descriptions that focus on responsibility are rigid and isolated.  Given the pace, complexity, and fluidity of the challenges you face each day, can you afford to have your hard-won recruits shackled within rigidly defined individual responsibilities that make the word ME look a lot bigger than the word TEAM?  I think not.  Most of us face challenges that (1) were unanticipated when the job descriptions were written and (2) can only be solved collaboratively -- in relation to other people.  Define and communicate roles in a way that reflects this reality. 

#3: Role performance must be judged holistically.

To satisfy the HR or Legal guidelines, we create job descriptions from bullet points of easily observable accountabilities for each individual on the team.  But, while the king may prance around proud of this clothing, he's naked -- and everyone knows it this time….the recruits especially.  As discussed in the previous paragraph, the nature of work has morphed significantly in the post-industrial era.  We need to stop pretending that the old accountability model works.  The old list of job responsibilities isn't REALLY what we're using to evaluate people.  Nobody's buying that.  So, we should stop pretending that's how we judge people.  A role is judged holistically and subjectively -- sort of like a…human.

Change the way you think about your team, then change the way you communicate about it.  Think of your team as a cast, yourself as a director.  Eschew silly pretense about tasky job descriptions.  And, you'll find yourself building and retaining a much more creative team. 

We are in the Massage Business

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.  Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions (seeing, hearing, etc).  The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act, the way we perceive the world.  When these ratios change, men change.  The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment.  Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.  Marshall McLuhan

Somewhere during the last 20 years, we hit a tipping point in man's relationship with technology as media -- active participation became the norm, replacing passive consumption.  It had something to do with mass adoption of video camcorders in the late 80's, email and the internet itself in the late 90's, and later from the very odd source called the online role-playing video game.  Through these sources, we learned to interact with technology, information, and each other in an active, adaptive, unconstrained way.  And, as McLuhan foresaw, this new interaction changed us -- and, I will argue the change opens up a big opportunity for your business.

How different is the internet REALLY as a medium for information?  

Well, um, vastly different.  Consider how one consumes information in the library (if you can remember what that was like).  You search for information clusters (a book) through a rigid category scheme (taxonomy) created and maintained by someone else (librarians), and when you find a cluster (book) you must consume it linearly until its literal, physical end.  If you are lucky, the book includes some footnotes regarding related works, from which you can bridge to other clusters -- when the library has the other book!  Oh, and you typically do it alone, while being told to ssshhhh by the librarian.  It is a process that assumes you are an empty bottle on a conveyor belt, awaiting a spurt of goo to be shot into your head before you move off and make room for the next bottle.  There's very little freedom and interaction in this model.

In contrast, information on the internet is classified organically and redundantly.  It is hyper-related and instantaneously comparable across clusters.  Much of it is user-created and user-administered, particularly the classifications -- which can even be personalized.  And, the form of the medium allows for simultaneous consumption and discussion by multiple parties.  Compared to using the library, this process makes me feel in control, free, creative, and connected -- all of which encourage me to take more risks, to look in odd places, to consider the unique/different/odd/far-out.

Please don't misunderstand me: I do not believe this is a "youth" thing.  Video games, FB, widgets, ipads, youtube, iMovie are changing people -- all the people, young and old -- who use them.  We are all becoming accustomed to a holistic, non-linear, participative, evocative experience with content.  We expect to be involved, active.  We feel a tool or technology is outdated or stifling when it forces us into a rigid, linear, or passive consumption mode.  Like, for instance, Powerpoint.  ug.  Or, how about the monthly revenue results review -- we sit around a table and walk through a scripted presentation by one person following a linear argument. No wonder that people are playing with their iphones under the table.  We have been programmed by our personal information technology media TO WANT TO PARTICIPATE, TO WANT TO ACT.  Unfortunately, our corporate technology media do not reinforce this drive to act.  Yet.

This is where we get to the part about "opportunity."

By fostering active user participation in the medium, Enterprise Collaboration Platforms will translate to greater active participation … IN ACTING.  In other words, people will be reprogrammed FROM waiting for orders TO making things happen.  If I had a dollar for every CEO who has lamented a lack of initiative among employees, I'd be a rich man.  Well, let's do something about that.  Implement a collaboration platform, and cultivate a bias toward chiming in, toward stepping out, toward taking chances, toward experimenting, toward acting.  

Enterprise Collaboration is NOT about chatter; it's about shaping your culture, getting employees active.  It goes beyond improving content, beyond "better information" -- the medium itself will have a profound impact on moving your team from its heels to its toes.

The medium is the massage.  Marshall McLuhan

Dangerous Business, the Future

Improvisation is the way to wonder, and wonder is contagious.  Everyone loves to uncover something amazing, something startling.  And to share it with others.  Human beings' natural state is looking for the wonder in life.  By bringing many disciplines, facts, and people into a single conversation, today's enterprise social software is making idea-fusions possible on a scale never before seen.  This is the atomic age of ideas, the age of idea-fusion.  

The contained, the distinct, the separate -- our Western legacy -- are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused.  When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively (fused), startling discoveries often result.  Marshall McLuhan

There are some startling discoveries being made by combining a little of this with a little of that.  And, the interesting thing is that many of these magic cocktails are being put together by total amateurs.  But, that's not really a surprise.  Experts hate to be startled. Experts have a category for each thing, and each thing is filed in its category. Experts are shorn of wonder as their initiation rite.   It's sort of sad.  But, worse than sad, it is bad.  A bias against wonder saddles experts and everyone around them with an unbearable inertia against progress, against experimentation, against exploration….against anything that produces the startling and wonder-filled….the aha moment.  Why?  

These improvisations and fusions across disciplines are dangerous.  They threaten established ways of seeing the world.  By transcending and blending categories, they threaten categories -- including the categories in which the experts place themselves.  They threaten our strategies and methods.  They threaten…wait…what do they really threaten?   

These improvisational fusions threaten only our bad assumptions, delusions, and pretenses.  They threaten only to break us free from the inertia of tradition and habit and we-can't-remember-why. In that sense, collaboration's cross-disciplinary fusions will, indeed, produce a powerful reaction.  One that will power your organization for years to come.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.  A N. Whitehead