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.

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.

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. 

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

 

What is Collaborative Intelligence?

I get asked often to define this term of Collaborative Intelligence that we started using a couple of years ago.  As I’ve said on my blog, I am a little wary of labels and categories.  So, I’ll simply convey what I see converging in the real world: Collaborative Intelligence is a set of technologies and techniques helping groups of people apply their collective intelligence toward making good decisions together.

It’s important to remember that every hour of every day at work, every employee is making decisions.  If you are a knowledge worker – actually, even if you hammer rivets or crush rock or solder wires for a paycheck – then the decisions you make are (hopefully) dependent upon something like the following Decision Stack:

• Data:  the set of available facts
• Model: a theory or algorithm about how things work
• Aspiration: preferences, desires, or goals and their rationale
• Compromise: tradeoffs and diplomacy among competing interests

Every little decision we make each day involves this stack. Sometimes certain pieces of the stack are flawed; sometimes they are subconscious; but, all decisions involve these things.  And, every day, all day, we are doing this at work.  “Collaborative Intelligence” is just a short-hand label for what we see when we are working together to make better-informed decisions.  So, it’s about how groups of people (2-n) explore data, models, aspirations, and compromises to help make things better.

 Collaborative Intelligence is not just some new features added to Business Intelligence.  Business Intelligence (BI) is a field of technology that has made great contributions over the last 30 years in the preparation, storage, retrieval, and distribution of facts.  To a meaningful but lesser extent, it has also made contributions in the area of developing  explanatory and predictive models.

Unfortunately, mainstream BI has gotten stuck in a corner in the above diagram, relying on technologies and techniques that are fundamentally centrally-driven, static, data-focused, and impersonal.  This has opened a great door for more grass-roots, participative, people-centric, adaptive, edgy, conversational, and diplomatic tools and techniques, like what we see evolving in the Enterprise 2.0 space.  The grass-roots conversations and activity streams that are the stock-in-trade of Enterprise 2.0 platforms are full of information-scent, Pirolli’s concept of little hints about hidden-but-interesting things.  So, when using those platforms one feels naturally drawn into conversations and topics and investigations, within which one can share additional facts, models, aspirations, and compromises. 

So far, the Enterprise 2.0 tools have not addressed the important BI territory of Data and Models; but, it is only a matter of time until they realize that collaboration without Data and Models is just idle chatter.  It is up to the BI community to realize at the same time, however, that People are essential to the process of applying data to make things better.  I have no doubt we will see the tools and techniques of BI expand along the lines indicated by the arrows in the diagram above, just as the tools and techniques of Enterprise 2.0 expand in the opposite direction.  This convergence will be wonderful for users.

This is what we are working on at Lyzasoft: helping people find the information and experts they need to make better decisions.

Mysticism, Management, and Cultures of Innovation

I like people who see the world differently.  They are more entertaining, and they are also more helpful -- nudging my brain in novel ways.  One of my most different-seeing friends is a wonderful artist by the name of Joel Swanson.  (http://www.joelswanson.net/)  

At a gallery opening of some of his recent work, Joel highlighted a few wonderfully insightful statements by Sol Lewitt from his book Art-Language, written back in 1969.  While they were originally focused on the creative process of artists, I think they apply well to the high-ambiguity/high-creative process of innovation in general.  I’ll restate them, then I’ll try to explain how I think we can apply them outside the world of art.

1. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.  
2. When words such as “painting” and “sculpture” are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist, who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond these limitations.
3. Irrational judgments lead to new experience.
4. Mystics leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

It is fitting I think to make a post on mysticism and innovation in a week in which Apple’s market value exceeds Exxon’s as #1 on the planet.  Fitting because there is no logic that could have reached the conclusion to build the mac or itunes/ipod or the ipad or the iphone. You can call it “hunch” or “intuition” or “gut feel” or “inspiration” or “sixth sense” or whatever.  But, you could not have defined or categorized or sized any of these things before they existed.  We simply did not have the words or the analogies or the baseline statistics.  It took a “mystic” leap to see the world differently.

Unfortunately, your company’s culture probably requires all of these definitions and categorizations and estimates BEFORE people will take an idea seriously.  Uh oh.  This could explain why so much “innovation” in many enterprises is little more than a retread or repackaging of the same old stuff.

All of which leads me to the $64,000 question: how does a leader cultivate the right conditions for the emergence of groundbreaking, creative ideas?  I’m no expert, so I’ll just toss out six suggestions for starters.

1. Don’t get into labels and numbers too early in an idea’s life.  Forcing categories and labels and quantification too early will prune all the really new thoughts from the room, because the really new thoughts defy the pre-existing linguistic constructs, categories, numbers, standards, etc.  Our reality shapes our words and categories INITIALLY, but after that the words and categories become the master -- shaping and constraining our ongoing perceptions of a changing reality.
2. RE-think and play with categories and measures....often.  Accept, even encourage it.  OF COURSE, you have to maintain balance here: some applications (KPI/SEC/etc) require stability in categories and measures.  BUT, that’s no reason that you can’t experiment elsewhere with looking at reality differently.  It’s not EITHER/OR.
3. Focus on the person’s CONCEPT of the world/ biz/ product/ process/ competition/ whatever -- not just the numbers or even the conclusions.  Some really great kernels are lurking in powerpoint presentations with ill-advised conclusions or with erroneous arithmetic.  Step back and ask yourself: how is Bob seeing the world, to have focused on this or that in such and such a way?  You don’t have to agree with his conclusions to profit from changing your perspective.
4. Let the grass roots grow under ideas.  When big-wigs adopt an idea formally, all of the suggestions above become REALLY hard to do.
5. Reward conceptualization.  Preserve the conceptualization contribution as distinct from the implementation, because otherwise the implementers get all the glory.
6. Reduce information friction with a collaborative intelligence platform.  Even the best original idea benefits from the refinement and extension of other perspectives.  But, this can happen only if the two potential collaborators can connect.  Use a collaboration platform to maximize the chance of connections b/w a few people who grok the same concept and can extend/ remix/ bend/ share/ extend/ implement it.

Crabby Leadership

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.