Organizations in 2002

Research on the Future of Learning and Business

Charles Handy: “Corporations should be membership communities because I believe corporations are not things, they are the people who run them.”

Why should financiers have such power and talk the language of ownership just because they provided the money? People don't own people and corporations are people. It's all part of the Machine Age model.

In order to hold people inside the corporation, we can't really talk about them being employees anymore. To hold people to the corporation, there has to be some kind of continuity and some sense of belonging. We also have to talk about commitment, but we have to talk about it both ways--corporation to member, member to corporation. With the way corporations are evolving--with all this virtual business and all these alliances--my worry is that unless we develop a more sophisticated model of the organization, the corporation will become just a box of contracts with no commitment on anyone's part at all.

john kotter’s new theme: building capacity for change

porous boundaries

virtual watercoolers and tea rooms

Networks

Networks have been with us for a long time. It’s probably how you found your job. We’ve been networking socially since long before the personal computer came along. Once you got the job, your internal network probably became your best source of information. What’s new are local area networks (LANs) and the Internetwork (Internet) which make social networking vastly faster, easier, and more extensive. Electronic networks are so efficient that they by and large eliminated the role of the middle manager.

What do managers do?

Mechanical old job = POEM (Plan, Organize, Execute, Manage)

Organic new job = DNA (Define, Nurture, Allocate)

The Hyperorganization

Just documents have changed from linear, one-step-after-another to jump-around, multi-pathed hyperstructures,

organizations are shifting from rigid hierarchies into loosely linked, flexible hyper-organizations.

Hyperorganizations rearrange themselves to meet demands:

Improving the Capacity to Improve

You’ve heard about how Edward Demming’s work on quality improvement didn’t become mainstream in America until the Japanese applied it successfully. By 2002, competition will drive companies to adopt the processes of another overlooked thought pioneers, Doug Engelbart

Engelbart has been writing about future high-performance organizations, enabling collaborative technologies and practices for knowledge work since 1958. And he is still writing about the future with fresh insights, new paradigms, innovation strategies, architectures, technologies, and inspiration. "Collective IQ."[1] (Engelbart more or less invented the mouse, display editing, windows, outline/idea processing, hypermedia and groupware…by 1956!)

Engelbart foresaw that complexity and urgency were increasing exponentially, and that the product of the two would soon challenge organizations and institutions to change in quantum leaps rather than incremental steps. In addition to aspiring to be increasingly faster and smarter at their core missions, organizations would need to get increasingly faster and smarter at how they kept improving.

“A” is the core business of R&D, manufacturing, marketing, sales – things like making airplanes, healing patients, or giving haircuts.

“B” activities improve how “A” is accomplished – automating functions, streamlining, outsourcing non-core tasks, or upgrading quality processes.

“C" activities – called “bootstrapping” by Engelbart -- increase the effectiveness “B”. The goal is to get better and better at improving the organization’s performance. Examples of bootstrapping include such activities as getting better at scanning the competitive environment; and improving your ability to run pilot programs and projects (for instance, picking the right pilots to get maximum return on investment, getting them up faster, and replicating them better).

The most important "C" activity is to encouraging and funding cross-functional "improvement communities" explicitly charged with working on common challenges to improve improvement.

New levels of collaboration

Moving beyond threaded e-mail and videoconferencing, future collaborative tools will combine historical data, predictive analysis and real-time discussion to create a decision-making process that is more rapid and better informed.

Network bandwidth growth will be multiplied, in effect, by sophisticated compression algorithms and hardware that will make rich media streams fit into available channels. Content analysis tools will make it easier to identify relevant experience and expertise.

Groupware

1960s-1970s: The age of e-mail: Groupware's roots are in mainframe- and minicomputer-based store-and-forward e-mail and conferencing systems, particularly in the academic and research communities.

1980s-1990s: The age of groupware: PCs, networking and common protocols spurred communications inside and among organizations, cc:Mail and Novell's Message Handling Service helped spread e-mail on corporate desktops, while Lotus Notes provided customized programming tools and links to external applications.

1990s-2000: The age of real-time: Groupware has moved to synchronous real-time communications (chat, videoconferencing and application sharing), smashing barriers of time and space and providing the mechanism for major changes in work and lifestyle patterns.

pc week 3/1/99

Groupware

Applications which allow two or more people to work together or as a group. The application can be scaled up to support departments, total processes, or the entire enterprise. Examples of groupware applications are synchronous and asynchronous conferencing, e-mail, group calendaring and scheduling and group document editing and management.

Chris Argyris

Model I is an approach that is geared more to reaching agreement than it is to validating the truth of something at issue. As such, it encourages people to say what they think others want to hear. Since agreement is more important than truth, this model can put an individual, group or organization out of touch with reality. By contrast, under a Model II approach, the parties work hard to have honest communication and to become aligned with reality. Model II rewards tough reasoning that is productive.

Instead of addressing the issues head on, Model I reinforces a defensive approach that avoids confrontation. In fact, it says, that's the way you can show that you are caring and thoughtful. The result is that people do not detect and correct errors. Or they don't get at the important problems that they have in their heads. Samuel Goldwyn, who would say that he wanted his people to tell him the truth even if it cost them their jobs.

Model II is tell it like it is, engage in dialogue. The sacred set of values in an organization are these: valid knowledge, informed choice and personal responsibility to monitor the effectiveness of the effort. It is not happiness, satisfaction, morale and so on.

Evaluation? There are three kinds of actions that we are looking for: 1) Do people advocate? What I'm doing right now is advocating. 2) Do they offer evaluations? "Joe's behavior is poor" or "The marketing department isn't doing well." 3) Do they make attributions? These are statements about causality, assertions that you make about what is motivating somebody else: "I know why they're doing this."

And there are three ways that you can do those things. In Model I, you leave your mark by not illustrating anything that you're saying, by not encouraging inquiry and by not encouraging testing. With Model II, you encourage illustration, you encourage inquiry, you encourage testing.

So we can go to a tape recorder and listen to a discussion involving two people, or 10, and score where these people are. What we find is that the scores are high here and they are in the zeros here. Over time, that begins to change, so that you can begin to measure progress. That's one measure. There are others.

Fad or Milestone?

Year		Innovation	People	Systems
1911	Taylor	“Scientific management”		X
1924