For a few days in March, I lived on a beach in an uninhabited bay on the north shore of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas of French Polynesia. Talk about a simple life: sleep, eat, watch nature, repeat.
One of those days, my watching nature involved sitting very still on the beach for several hours as the sand crabs came out to forage on the beach. I was very still, so they went about their business within a few meters of me. And, they taught me some interesting lessons, one of which I’d like to share.
At first, the crabs appeared to be wandering down the beach in random zigzags, sort of like a stumbling drunk wandering down a city street. But, upon closer examination, it became clear that the zigzags corresponded precisely with the edge of the previous wave. The crabs diligently followed the ragged edge of the wave-ends, because that’s where the nutritious bits are. Any higher on the beach away from the turmoil of the water, there is nothing useful because the water has not carried anything up that high. Any lower, and the turmoil of the water keeps the nutrition floating and swirling such that the crabs can’t eat it. The nutrition for growth is at the edge, in between the dead-but-dry higher ground and the too-wet-to-use surf.
I think the analogy is very clear for our organizations. The edge is messy, but that's where all the good stuff is. At the edge, there is a lot of trash you cannot use. So you have to be discriminating. And, the edge is constantly moving. So, you have to move around a lot to stay in the sweet spot. The edge I am referring to is what’s happening far from “corporate” -- far from the board room, far from the governance committee, and far from centers-of-excellence and other such policy bureaus. It’s the world of CSRs and drivers and staff accountants and buyers and sales reps and marketing analysts and the like. The conversations and ideas and experiments and knowledge of this sea of employees is chock full of valuable nutrients for growing the business. But, we have to play at the edge...with all the challenges that entails.
- First, we must embrace the messiness. Resist the impulse toward policies and centralization and standardization, because all that really happens when you try is this: you move yourself away from the action. You cannot tame the sea. You may think you are taming the sea, but you are really simply walking up the beach away from the waves where the action is. Your life will feel more organized, but it will also be less rich. Let people work and talk and act the way that feels natural for them, and they will naturally expose many great ideas you can harvest.
- Second, we must keep our heads on straight. Not all ideas are good ones. But, we don’t want to quash the sharing process. Generally speaking, this means that you don’t pass judgment on bad ideas, you just ignore them. And, it means you don’t use big direct financial rewards for good ideas, because employees will then force you to pass judgment on their ideas because they are focused on the reward. There is a large body of research that corroborates this assertion: employees contribute best when they are treated as if this is part of their normal role....not some extra-special thing we’d really like them to try doing now.
- Third, we have to be close to the action. This is where I believe enterprise collaboration (think, Facebook for the enterprise) has such fantastic potential: we can all participate in (or just learn from) many conversations around the business, all the time, with very little effort. Sure, alot of this stuff (hopefully not as high a percentage as on consumer social media) will be junk; but alot of it will be gold. Just remember, this is what economists call a free option: bad ideas you can ignore at little cost, while good ideas are there to use for great benefit.
Many policy-wonks in the executive suite and the IT governance team are reluctant to embrace enterprise collaboration because it’s edgy and messy. I say: that’s sort of the point.
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