Teblog

Sidestep formal structures for effective change

Many companies like to think they understand all about business processes and change management. They spend fortunes on consultancy, design, structures, processes, training, roll out and management, then wonder why they don't get the results they expected. So they have another go...

Well, maybe things aren't quite that bad, but I bet you can think of plenty of examples of 'change initiatives' that just don't get the buy-in of the grass-roots people who are supposed to implement them. Part of the problem is that they quite often try to appeal to reason. They use PowerPoints with lots of bullet points to try to hook the intellect and forget the emotional dimension. Maybe they think there's no room for emotion in their business.

But why do people go to work generally? Especially so-called 'white collar' workers. It's for the satisfaction of doing a job well and for recognition and this doesn't just mean in the pay packet. Not a good motivator at the best of times.

Part of the problem is that we've become accustomed to treating business as a mechanistic process. And a predictable one at that. Do this, force it through these process pipes, and consistent results will pop out the other end. In truth, many of the most important business processes are chaotic. Think of sales and marketing, for example. Untidy real life gets in the way. Reality has little to do with the org chart and formal processes and much more to do with endless workarounds and informal communications.

Yes, of course some processes or workflows do what they're supposed to. Regulations have to be followed and suchlike. But these are a bit like the unconscious processes of the human body. We can walk down the street while we pump blood, breathe and digest our food. But our attention is on the interesting conversation with the person walking with us.

So it is in business, the interesting stuff and the stuff that is likely to do the business most good in the future is probably the stuff that lies outside the fundamental formal systems of the organisation.

Leandro Herrero has written a most interesting book on how organisations can bring about change by acknowledging that all is not what it seems in the body corporate. He alights on the fact that, alongside the 'organigramme', lives a communication network in which all employees and business partners participate to a greater or lesser degree. Some people are highly connected, others only slightly. These are the strong ties and weak ties beloved of social network analysts. His book is called Viral Change.

It investigates how these social networks can be put to work to bring about transformational change in double quick time - months rather than years - and without any of the complexity of traditional change programmes. Apart from the acknowledgement and exploitation of social networks, the book is heavy on behavioural psychology. In fact, for anyone interested, it contains a 16-page PhD psychology course, which is then summarised in a couple of pages at the end of the chapter.

As someone who's spent several years deep in the social network world and a further thirty plus years as a behavioural psychology advocate, the book resonated rather well with me. But the point that Herrero makes is that behaviour can be observed. It is unequivocal. Bring about behavioural change and the culture will change as a consequence. And you don't need more than five defined behaviour changes to bring about massive transformation. The trick is, of course, in finding and defining those which are most appropriate.

Diving off slightly to one side for a second, why did the iPod catch on the way it did? Apart from it being a neat piece of kit, don't you think the white headphones and leads had something to do with it? People were curious, they enquired, they copied, it became a fashion. But Steve Jobs didn't directed this take up to the nth degree. Apple seeded opinion formers and influencers and let the network do the rest. So why should influence spread any differently in organisations?

Why not seed the movers and shakers - the people who are well connected and, therefore almost certainly respected too - with what needs to be achieved and let them start infecting their closest connections. Then as they and their behaviour change, others will notice and, if they respect or admire the folks who are adopting new ways, they will copy too. Especially if adoption is periodically recognised or reinforced, to use the vernacular. Before you know it, you have an epidemic on your hands and change has permeated. It becomes the norm.

Of course, this is a gross simplification of a 400-page book. But the book does strip away a lot of nonsense associated with traditional expensive and long-winded change management programmes. And, yes, the author is undoubtedly pushing the services of his company, The Chalfont Project. You won't agree with many of the things he suggests, but then you're probably not expected to. If he infects you with the fundamental principles, it's up to you to figure out how to make it work in your world.

The book is a useful catalyst to exploiting the power of social networking and behavioural psychology to accelerate needed change in organisations.

If you're happy to provide your details you can download a free eight page overview of the approach from Herrero's website.

Even if this piece has irritated you, I think it's worth a look. You never know what you might be missing.

Collaboration: the old way. Why not?

Just lately I've been wondering a lot about stimulating innovation inside companies. It was sparked off by a visit to the Imaginatik user conference in London. I was treated to a number of case studies in which customers saved themselves tens of millions of dollars by adopting Imaginatik's IdeaCentral approach to collaborative problem solving.

The companies were large - Walmart, Whirlpool and Pfizer, to name a few - who were saving tens of millions of dollars as a result. Imaginatik likes to promote a ten times ROI at every opportunity, which suggests that the cost of the software and services are probably beyond the reach of smaller businesses anyway.

So this got me wondering. Given that a lot of IdeaCentral is similar (on the surface at least) to social software, could cheaper and more generally available tools be used to similar effect? It is web-based. It has places to post your ideas, comment on other people's, add your profile, make contact, get notifications of updates, voting mechanisms, tagging, search and automatic discovery of similar ideas. Behind the scenes, the set-up and management software and a bunch of add-on modules contribute to this powerful software suite.

Could the bulk of this be done easily using social tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter and suchlike? I'm not sure. While I like these tools and am an active participant in the social computing world, I'm not sure that most people would be ready for an unstructured collection of tools. It would be simply too complicated for the average user to start blogging, commenting, tagging, voting and the like. The management tools are the other side of the coin. It would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to put together some kind system to keep track of everything that's going on.

I'm now going to suggest something retrograde which might have my social software pals throwing their hands up in horror. What about using a forum? It's simple to set up, simple to use and you can easily control membership. (I ran a public forum and the spam levels were absolutely ridiculous.) You can also keep the captured knowledge on your own system, usually in a MySQL database which makes for ready integration with other systems.

Users can start new topics, others can comment. They can search. They can be notified of comments. A good clue about value is whether a suggestion has comments. Because it's being implemented in a business context, so there's no personal or business advantage in flaming or being silly. Once an idea has collected a few comments, perhaps the management could move it up the list to give it more prominence. (Or maybe some forum software exists to do this automatically, I don't know.)

For smaller organisations, I would have thought that this would be an simple way to collaborate and it would be a pity if it were to be sidelined by the more shiny toys of recent years.

Of course, I could be talking through my hat. What do you think?

Green Grading

Getting people interested in environmental issues is tough enough but, once interested, they are faced with a blizzard of conflicting advice.

Part of the problem has been that no single organisation has been able to draw all the threads together and provide a simple labelling scheme, like that on European white goods such as washing machines and refrigerators.

We have country/continental divisions and we have an infinity of IT devices and manufacturers. Many of them are trying to 'do their bit' and, in the absence of commonly agreed standards, are going it alone.

On the one hand this is good, because it demonstrates commitment. But on the other it's bad because it's difficult to compare one scheme with another without doing a lot of homework. In theory, I suppose someone might invent a comparison web site for green products, but I'd actually be quite surprised if it were to happen.

The best bet for the industry is for everyone to pull together under the aegis of an independent body.

What sparked this line of thought off was a message from Fujitsu Siemens to the effect that it has decided to announce its own green labelling scheme. It's sent me a nice spreadsheet to show all the details and, they look pretty good to an untrained eye. Apart from the bit that talks about 'largely biodegradable'. I worry about the bit that's left after the rest has biodegraded. But this isn't really the place to go into detail.

The announcement has a curious statement in it which is worthy of reproduction:

"We reviewed and rated all existing eco-labeling systems but found that they were not far-reaching or stringent enough for our needs. Therefore, we concluded that the best way forward would be for Fujitsu Siemens Computers to create and implement our own Green IT labeling system. We are also publishing the qualification criteria, and industry partners are welcome to join our program. However, so far, we have not found a suitable partner whose criteria were as far-reaching as we were hoping for, and who could create the label in the timeframe we had set ourselves. Nonetheless, we would not hesitate in adopting a suitable industry-standard labeling system, should one be introduced in the future"

I tried calling this morning to seek clarification, but I guess they were all busy at the VISIT customer event in Germany today. The key points are clear enough though: it doesn't like existing standards, it couldn't get anyone to team up with it and it would be willing to support an industry standard.

The announcement also started off with "Green IT label is industry first". I suspect some other companies might challenge that. Hewlett Packard, for example, started a green labelling scheme in May of this year, called Eco Highlights. The two schemes differ, but the intention in each case is the same: to make clear the environmental credentials of the product so labelled.

Anyway, back to the Fujitsu Siemens statement. I am not surprised that other manufacturers didn't want to join the scheme, and I doubt that lack of time had much to do with it. And when it comes to none of the standards being good enough, this suggests that the company rejected the ECMA-370 IT Eco Declaration and EPEAT, which is based on IEEE 1680-2006.

Here's the ECMA description: "This Standard specifies environmental attributes and measurement methods for ICT and CE products according to known regulations, standards, guidelines and currently accepted practices." It gets manufacturers to complete appraisals for every product and for the company itself. Perhaps members should be pushing it to convert assessments into a grading system.

And this is the EPEAT description: "The EPEAT Registry on this web site includes products that have been declared by their manufacturers to be in conformance with the environmental performance standard for electronic products - IEEE 1680- 2006" This ranks products into Bronze, Silver and Gold categories.

While I applaud Fujitsu Siemens' dedication to sustainability, I fear that if all companies were to create their own grading schemes, we'd end up more confused than ever.

Piggy-backing on social software

While our attention has been diverted by the razzle dazzle of the social software startups, traditional software companies have been quietly getting on with updating their own products. In the past month or so, I've been to four briefings with established organisations, each of which has presented me with demonstrations of their updated legacy software which, on the face of it, look just like the work of the startups.

All the jargon is there too - network effects, long tail, social networking, wisdom of crowds, comments, tags, rankings - you name it, they're saying it. And, to be frank, I found it quite offensive at first. As someone who spent several years participating in the emergence of social computing, I thought that they were cloaking themselves in the regalia of this new world in order to pretend that they are still in the game. I was wrong about their motivations, of course.

It took a while for the penny to drop. It wasn't until the fourth presentation that I realised that the imitation was not simple flattery, or even a desperation to appear relevant. They really had twigged that this new stuff had a viable place in their world. They had found ways of making the old stuff easier to use on the one hand and more powerful on the other. Two of the announcements are still under the radar, so forgive me for not naming names. Suffice it to say that in all cases the benefits derive from social things like collaboration, collective insights and sharing. And not-so-social things such as monitoring the activities of individuals.

A social software startup is unlikely to get anywhere close to developing the sort of enterprise software that drives our businesses. Some will survive and mature and maybe even merge their way to prominence. Others may simply have their moment in the sun, then fade away. But their legacies are there for us all to benefit from. They're a sort of living research laboratory for the IT industry.

Companies which have spent years building and evolving substantial software products that deliver real value are right not to be too disturbed by these new developments. But they are absolutely right to consider what's good about their own offerings, what's good about the new stuff and then graft one to the other, as appropriate. Just because something is labelled 'legacy' doesn't render it irrelevant. Quite the reverse in fact.