What do the Smithsonian Institute, The National Intelligence Community and You have in common?

What do the Smithsonian Institute and the National Intelligence Community have in common?

(warning – i had too much caffeine with michael edson this morning – so this may head into some geeky ground)

The Smithsonian Institute is a federation of 19 museums and other research centers, founded 150 years ago, and dedicated to the “increase and diffusion” of knowledge. The Intelligence community is a federation of 17 Agencies, dedicated to understanding existing and developing threats to national security (The former Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell summarized their mission: “To create decision advantage”.  The new Director, Dennis Blair, is less pithy, but no less focused in his pursuit.)

The Smithsonian has a collection of artifacts and insights that is vast in both its depth and its breadth. No individual has the complete picture of its holdings. The intelligence community has something rather similar – a staggering amount of data to which no individual has full view.

Both institutions are looking at the world ahead, and the staggering, “wicked problems” that it is their priviledge on the one hand and their burden on the other, to solve.

Both institutions have leading edge initiatives to enable their unimaginably vast collections of knowledge, information and experts to come together, so that others can gain new and important insights to further their missions. In the Intelligence community case – it is a life and death race to evolve information availability and analysis such that unpredictable threats are reliably identified and thwarted. In the Smithsonian’s case, it is a heartfelt obligation to connect the curious and expert minds of the world to assets, information, knowledge and experts so that they may cherish and expand the treasure and capabilities of society.

These Institutions have some common obstacles to their goals. They are 3 – vision, technology and culture.

Vision – in order to ignite the energy required to get past the obstacles, each institution must articulate a vision of the future that will engage and direct its human resources.

Technology – both institutions must adopt technology that will unlock data silos,  connect people, expertise and information, and rapidly diffuse knowledge through the system, so that minds can find, identify and develop important issues.

Culture – both institutions have proud histories and legions of dedicated professionals. But their culture, their dedication and their current technologies have created both technical and cultural silos, making the diffusion and recognition of important information nearly impossible. (both are working on it, the intel crowd rather more urgently, and rightly so).

Critical insight into insight – now here the two institutions begin to diverge. The intel community is now working at a feverish pace on a problem which it has long been trying to work on. That is a fundamental understanding of insight. This is a long and exciting (if you’re into that kind of thing) of the nature of insight and whether it can be made more reliable or repeatable. The smithsonian wants to provide it for all – Intel needs it for themselves, and fast.

OK – so who cares, and how does this relate to you? (I may someday write something without the “so – “, but it hasn’t happened yet)

You have “Wicked Problems” – the problems you need to solve today are qualitatively different from a generation before. You are dealing with a rapidly evolving world, and issues that are entangled. Your perspective of these problems is more wholistic because you are more worldly – and that is both an advantage and a disadvantage. You need to identify and overcome the entangled challenges of vision, technology and culture that swirl around the inner knot of insight,  problem solving and most importantly, generating productive action from this insight.

We (that is the generational “we”, rather than the corporate or royal “we”) are inventing a new  generation of work tools, methods and processes that focus on the integration and “cross-contamination” of people, expertise and information and our goal is to get as close to the inner problem of insight and action as possible. Social media may be (at least part of) the “Alexandrian Solution” to the “Gordian Knot” (for those less caffinated and edson-inspired than i – this means taking an entirely different tack on a problem that makes its solution simple or moot).

And in conclusion – I don’t have one – just an exciting journey for us to go on. As we strip mine the problems of collaboration, analysis and insight, we’ll be enabling next generation solutions to next generation problems – in business, culture and security.

Focusing on the Ends, rather than the Means

Collaboration is a means, not an end. I’ve said it, others have said it. Great. Good. Now lets focus on some of those ends – Many of which have been in the news and media this last couple of weeks for a wide variety of reasons. Some of these ends include:

1. Connecting the Dots

2. Engagement and Motivation

3. Efficiency

4. Innovation

In other words, our hope and expectation is that collaborative environments enable us to be better, smarter, faster, more fulfilled and more fulfilling.

1. Starting with number one, Connecting the Dots:

The big ticket item this week comes from the intel community, or really, our president. To wit:

The front page of the Washington Post had this quote today: “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” Obama said after meeting with senior national security and intelligence officials, “it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. . . . That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.”

This was a failure to connect the dots.

No single data point on Abdulmutallab was particularly concerning, but in aggregate, they were certainly worth pulling him over at customs. (Heck – I get pulled over regularly, and I swear that I’m  deeply patriotic, loyal and completely harmless.)

Some data points: His father warned the US Embassy in Nigeria that he had become radical in his religious beliefs, and could be a terrorist. This could simply be a matter of a religious boy becoming estranged from his family – a not uncommon event, that added his name to one, very large, not tightly watched database.

He held a US visa. As do a gagillion other people.

His wherabouts were unclear or unknown for a long time. Hmm.

He bought his airline ticket with cash.

There were intercepts that mentioned someone that could have been him and a holiday period attack.

I don’t pretend to know all the facts, but this wikipedia page at least pretends to (I would be very carefully trusting its accuracy at this stage of the game).

The point is that for this information to have tripped an alarm, it would have had to come together in a cumulative manner, where it was obvious that while there were no really red flags, there were enough yellow ones to take a closer look.

Was this a failure of technology? Yes. Of process? yes. of Culture? Yes.

Is this problem something you face in your business? Probably. If you work in technology, law, medicine, pharmaceuticals or any business where thinking and problem solving is key. Though the stakes may be lower. Maybe.

Collaborative environments allow for maximum information sharing, common operating pictures and objective and heterogeneous analysis. This is an important step on the road to connecting the dots, but we need to dig down much further. Nancy Dixon has done some fascinating research and writing on heterogeneous problem solving, and she’s on my list today to reach out to.

2. Next lets talk about Engagement and Motivation. Daniel Pink just published an exciting book called “Drive“. I confess that I haven’t read it yet, but I heard him talk about it this morning on NPR. He postulates that humans strive for autonomy and that if you want great results that truly reflect their capabilities as humans, then you must give them that autonomy.

Collaborative cultures are about leveraging mutual autonomy. Really about respecting and leveraging individual expertise – aggregating it and reinforcing it with that of others.

The Conference Board just released a study showing a profound drop in job satisfaction in the last 20 years, with only 45% of people satisfied with their work. This drop crosses every  boundary of job level, company type, education, salary, age, etc. While the survey does not suggest a cause or a remedy, we know that collaborative culture is more engaging than command and control structures.

This may be the squishiest and least respective of the potential values and ends of collaboration, but that may be naive. Do you wonder why your business isn’t better? Why your results aren’t better? Why you struggle to get things done as a business? Gee, if the majority of your employees couldn’t care less, that would be one answer, wouldn’t it?

Will collaboration help reverse this critical trend? Apparently there’s quite a bit of data to suggest that it can. I’ll be working on collecting this. Let me know if you have good pointers.

3. Efficiency.

A great talk by John Seddon (thanks for the pointer, Ken) talks about systems thinking, and the benefits of tracking value rather than metrics or costs. He talks about the nonsense that comes from looking at the wrong goal, and, indirectly, the difficulty of setting good goals.

We know that collaborative teams get more done more quickly. This is partly due to engagement, partly due to avoiding the stupid stuff like cycling documents through email and ridiculous processes (not all process is ridiculous, some is fabulously important, but knowing the diff is key) and absent decisionmaking.

We also know that collaborative teams are more effective at project management and that collaborative project management can be very effective at identifying roadblocks, clarifying goals tracking progress, and solving problems. The wildly popular, but (in my opinion) rarely understood Agile Development method is an example of this.

[I just spent an hour researching what we "know" about efficiency. Lets just say that there's a lot of opinion, and little fact (that's readily available through google. Many of this opinion resonates as very true. Fact is generally anecdotal - lots of great management books, but little real research. This may be partially because we don't know how to define or measure efficiency - its a bit like pornography - we know it when we see it. DO you have a reference?] So – note to self and the rest of us – document efficiency effects of teamwork.

Process can be agile, but it usually isn’t. Collaborative culture helps to build efficient, repeatable processes that embody learning and best practices so that energy can focus on figuring out the new and novel. Unfortunately, the vast majority of process is a beauracracy trying to turn people into dumb operators. People don’t like that very much, and the outcomes are generally awful. We all intuitively know this. Watch the John Seddon video I linked to above – you’ll love it.

Oh – and check out this great slide deck by my esteemed colleage, Michael Edson. It talks about process and capability maturity in a way that doesn’t make you want to fall asleep, run away or gag.

4. Innovation.

This is also extremely difficult to measure, but we seem to be seeing that giving everyone in the organization, as well as its customers,  a voice, and by enabling the back and forth that comes from truly constructive teams, we create an environment that quickly identifies problems and  unique solutions to them. This is, in fact, the definition of innovation – the ability to see things differently and act on them in kind.

In the nineties, technical innovation took place in tiny startups that were gobbled up by big companies. Recent events have made that model more difficult, so people need to figure out how to innovate within larger companies. How do you make a large company act like a small one?

Enable teams of focused passionate people to exist outside the borg, that’s how. Enable ideas to circulate widely. Use the resources of a large company to quickly vet and improve the ideas of small, innovative teams. We could go on.

I’ll be documenting any and all info I find (and I have some, somewhere) on small team innovation and its importance to great companies.

I’ve long argued (around work at least) that real work is a golden braid of collaboration, process and project management, and that we must have all three to really meet the needs. But I’m now focusing beyond these capabilities and toward what they enable as a way to look at what we deliver and how.

You can expect these ends to be an important part of the discussion for how we move forward. Its going to be  very interesting year….

Yes, and: My newly Improved Presentation (and other) Skills

Last week, after groaning and moaning about it for weeks, I traveled to the Open Text corporate headquarters for presentation training. The big surprise (to me) was that it was well worth the effort. And relevant in many dimensions.

Second City - yes, the improv comedy troupe – held the class with the idea that presentation skills and improv skills are closely related. They’re main premise is that presenting is about communicating with an audience. Pretty basic  – and yet when taken very literally – the idea of really connecting with an audience – we explored some very valuable ideas for improving communication in very actionable ways.

First, and most interesting. Lindsey and Lee are improvisational comedians. They work as part of a troupe. And the troupe has figured out ways to ensure that they are reliably spontaneous and funny. They depend on one another on stage to keep the comedic ball in the air.

Improv, like all serious professions, has developed a vocabulary that is keenly useful in communications.

When someone feeds you a line, it is called the “offering”. It is received as a “gift”. So what?

Well they had us go through an exercise where we partnered up. After one of the partners said any random thing, the job was to say “thank you” and then respond. So what? Try it. You’ll quickly see that it makes you very conscious indeed of whether you are in fact being open minded and building on what the other person is saying or not. It doesn’t make you more cooperative, but it certainly makes you more aware of how cooperative you are being.

Another very telling exercise – the difference between saying “yes, but” and “yes, and”. Go ahead and try with a friend. Giggling is to be expected. We laughed a lot during this day and a half. Have a friend toss you a line. Respond, “Yes, and ….”. Then try “yes, but”. See how  the conversations go in different directions.

What these silly, inane exercises that we’re all too busy or too sophisticated to bother with is highlight and reveal the fact that we can choose to accept what other people say and do and build upon it – even if we’re trying to persuade them otherwise. And that in doing that, we ensure that the entire team succeeds vastly more effectively.

It may be that “yes, and” and “thank you” are the keys to true cooperation – the cornerstone of effective collaboration.

I also learned that I tend to present with balled fists. I wish you’d mentioned that to me earlier. I had no idea.

There were, of course many other important and surprisingly useful things we reviewed, from physical presentation, to tone and variety, and they even forced me to present without slides!!!! It was like skinny dipping.

All very useful, and boy, do I have a long way to go before I can truly embody all of the excellent advice I was given. But the thing I’m going to try to practice, like the little pilgrim, is “yes, and”.

So why is this so important to me. Not because of my presentation skills, but because I spend time trying to understand the difference between effective and ineffective teams and leaders. And people ask me how to build these. And I think that Lindsey and Lee just taught me a very effective tool. Accept the offering as a gift. Build on it – even if you disagree. And the presentation is not about the slides. Its about how you present yourself and connect with your audience. The ideas and content are an overlay to that.

I hope you accept this offering and receive it as a gift. I hope you’ll hear the unspoken “thank you” and “yes and” when next we chat.

Thank you.

When minds meet

Collaboration, at its best, is a meeting of minds. When two or more people come together, share a vision, and give each other “gifts” of insight, information, effort, value toward making that vision real, it is an exhilarating feeling.

Collaborative teams create a sense of urgency, and a feeling that they can’t be stopped in reaching that goal. Their members are fully engaged. They keep each other energized and focused.

Any business aspires to having this description of their teams. But having these teams sometimes seems more like luck than something that can be purposefully built. By understanding the characteristics of excellent teams, we can look for and encourage these traits, and assist these teams in forming.

1. Ensure a clear mission.
The very best people, with the greatest talent and passion, can’t converge into a team without a mission to serve. That mission needs to feel important and unique. For the marketing team, it can’t be “generate leads” but more like something that says “let the market know what’s special about us”. It needs to be both aspirational and concrete – a heady goal that engages both creativity and execution skills.

A poorly defined mission will fail to engage people, leading to lots of business without generating real value.

2. Respect.
The team members need to appear credible to one another. They should be introduced to one another as worthy peers, and excellent leadership will constantly reinforce the value and credibility of each member to the others. When you approach a table full of people that you respect, you approach differently. The tenor of debate is higher, the interest in one another’s ideas and contributions is sincere.

3. Trust
If you trust your teammates, you can discuss challenges and problems. You can look out for one another. You can offer more ideas, reach more deeply, and feel as though you don’t want to let each other down. Intimacy develops, ensuring that this meeting of the minds deepens.

4. Commitment to continual improvement
Trouble is out there. Find it, embrace it, and it becomes your source of power to constantly innovate and move forward. Associate blame with it, or pretend it doesn’t exist, and it will always be suppressed. It will be your undoing. An excellent leader will address trouble head on. They will give voice to problems so that they can be addressed – not always solved, perhaps, but acknowledged, considered. An excellent leader will not be intimidated or afraid of facing issues, and will encourage the same in their team.

The purpose of collaborative technology is to encourage and enable teams to pursue their goals, meld minds and do more than any individual could ever do. Social Collaboration tools are particularly useful in doing this. But no tool can make a team form – they can only support existing teams.

There are people who believe that collaboration replaces leadership. Not true. Leaders shepherd the mission and goals, orchestrate activity, reveal talents, encourage connection, create urgency, and leave people alone to get their jobs done. In the ideal team, leadership is reflected in every team member, so that they can act as leaders as well.

I’m looking for more documentary evidence of great teams, and great examples. If you’ve ever been on a team like this, you know what I’m talking about, and you probably don’t want to settle for anything else. Please share your story with me.

Social Media is not a strategy

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Web 2.0 Conference. The conference, like the Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston this past summer,  is atypical in that most of the good stuff was happening in the talks and workshops. People were there to learn and see what the thought leaders were thinking. And there were some fabulous thinkers there. Jeff Dachis and David Armano gave a fantastic discussion of social business, Gentry Underwood artfully presented is very useful insights into adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Really, the list of luminaries and their beautiful and insightful presentations are well worth a look here.

In this context, my talk was very nervously executed (I was speaking on topics I don’t normally cover, I’m more of a culture and collab gal), but the quality of the audience was fantastic. The basic idea was this. You don’t start with a social media strategy. You start with a marketing strategy, a customer relationship strategy and a collaborative objectives strategy.

Insightful and important questions ranging from budgeting to competitive differentiators, and importantly, how to convince people of the worth of what you’re doing came up, and I believe the Q&A lasted longer than the talk itself.

More than 100 people came to my session, and I was grateful for the engaged audience, and have a lot of new twitter buds as a result. Hopefully I also created some interest in the excellent range of technologies, products and expertise that Open Text has to enable Enterprise social media.

My slides from the talk are here. If you attended the session, or if you didn’t, I’d appreciate your thoughts and a continuation of the Q&A.

A Means to an End: Aligning Social Media and Business Strategy.

Social media is many things with many definitions. Ultimately, however, it is a collection of tools that enable us to get some things done that were difficult, impossible or just less satisfying than before.

This is a discussion is about what types of business objectives are better achieved with social media. I will look at social media as a tool for market engagement, customer service (in the broadest sense), lead generation, as well as a productivity tool, and a tool for creating high-performance corporate cultures. As with any good tool, the real value is in how its wielded – and the applications of it are limited only by the insight, imagination and ambition of the craftsmen who use it.

Lets begin with an overview of business objectives:

Market Engagement

Businesses want to engage their markets for several reasons:

- To understand market needs, wants, goals and desires so as to craft products, services, messaging and pricing to suit.

- To create awareness of their brand or offerings.

- To get new customers

- To improve their reputation Mainstream Social media has proven to be remarkably useful in each of these regards.

Enabling brand and product managers to listen to their markets, engage and discuss their needs and their offerings in a way that was nearly impossible before. Key tools: Mainstream social media sites and aggregators: Facebook, twitter, youtube, myspace, niche social networks that cater to your target market. Connections back to your own web properties is essential.

Customer engagement

Customer service in the form of providing information, support, service, updates and more for the purposes of increasing satisfaction, optimizing revenue opportunities, creating loyalty and customer advocates.

Social media has made customer engagement far less expensive while making it far more effective and satisfying for both customer and company. Key tools: Some mainstream social networking and media aggregation sites, but your own web properties play more of a starring role here. Custom Social networking sites for customer service, account management, customer communications are the primary tools, external social media tools are a place to reach out in order to bring your customers into your communities.

Employee engagement

Corporate intranets are intended to share corporate information, policies and processes with employees. In general, they are poorly designed, and disrespected as having only the most banal information. Adding a social dimension here can help increase relevance, share leadership thinking more deeply and in a fashion that garners greater buy in by employees. Employees can also be encouraged to share ideas, find answers to policy and process questions, make suggestions and generally get more benefit from the core corporate support services such as HR, facilities, finance and procurement.

Key tools: discussion forums, ratings, Q&A, idea management, blogs, microblogging.

Employee productivity

While social media is frequently thought of as a social, extra-curricular activity that may have some benefit in the brand reputation and PR realm, the same tools that allow this form of communication can also be leveraged to create super-effective, next generation productivity tools.

These tools are not toys, but leverage the new communications paradigms offered by these tools to quickly get good work done. Most organizations, particularly those that deal primarily in information and ideas – that is any company that has a significant creative, analytic or R&D arm – needs to optimize and leverage that work and those work processes to the greatest extent.

Social media tools, because of their ability to improve communications, as well as create and maintain weak ties, make it easier to support the three most important forms of collaboration and productivity:

Creative – a team can use shared workspaces and other social media constructs, such as feeds and wikis to organize work, collect individual contributions, review, edit, and iterate vastly more efficiently than only through the use of in person meetings, email and conference calls.

Connective – knowledge workers can tap the collective intelligence of the organization by finding and friend-ing knowledgeable people within the organization, spotting trends and activity that may be relevant, and contributing their own value where its relevant and valued. This type of activity can save thousands of hours in the “who knows x about y” department and research has shown that tapping a diverse set of skills and perspectives leads to higher quality outcomes in less time.

Compounding – Here’s the fundamental idea: all work should leverage, to the greatest extent possible, leverage work that has already been done. Most companies currently have the basic capability to let employees search on documents and find things of relevance (this is rarely perfect, but even so). Social media tools, however, capture not just work product, such as documents, but work processes and resources as well, making it possible to find not only a document, but how it was created, how it evolved, who contributed, and what resources were used. The ability to find and follow this type of information is vastly more valuable than having just the end product to an employee who must accomplish a similar task or bring it to the next level.

Key tools: shared workspaces, communities, friending, profiles, wikis, feeds, instant messaging, planning tools, and other technologies that promote information aggregation, communication and networking.

 

Challenges

The Challenge of acting human: As I’ve said before – acting human is an unnatural act for most corporations. They’ve been trying for so long to be perfect and distance themselves from the warmth and fallibility of humanity so as to project flawless, rock-like solidity. The problem is that in this post-commerical era, where consumers are jaded, the corporate façade is not trusted – its considered more of a sham than deserving confidence above and beyond people. People now trust people more than brands. So how do you act human without being inconsistent? Warm without looking incompetent? Sympathetic, interesting and engaging without looking unprofessional?

Well, it takes a leap of faith. Savvy employees will understand that they are aiming to reflect well on the company as well as engender excitement and loyalty from the market. Mistakes will be made. Respect will be given to those companies who admit their mistakes immediately, and offer thoughtful, meaningful responses to them. Plan for success and plan for the mistakes

The Payoff: Trust, credibility, loyalty.

The challenge of the collaborative culture: collaborative cultures are different. They are mission focused, ego-swallowing machines where every problem and challenge is quickly surfaced, discussed and dealt with. Individuals, and the team as a whole learn quickly, act decisively, and efficiently  by quickly engaging people, harvesting their work, and letting the entire team polish and hone it to perfection.

We aren’t used to working this way, however. It takes a tremendous leap of faith that I can show my vulnerabilities and still be respected. information sharing is valued over information hording, and leadership is distilled into its purest form of setting direction, orchestrating activity, inviting and responding to new information from any part of the organization.

Management by fear and blame is left behind along with its tendency to breed mediocrity from people who either don’t want to take risks, or who have lost faith that their best contributions can be valuable in the organization.

The payoff: agile, smart, streamlined efficiency that can shine like a laser beam on any challenge. Fierce productivity.

10 Reasons to wiki

I’m speaking at the Potomac Forum at the Willard Hotel (Washington, D.C.) this Friday, October 16th. Its a how-to workshop focused on government – how to create a social media campaign, how to create effective policies, how to blog, how to engage with communities, and my subject – how to use a wiki.

It used to be that wikis were techie things where you needed to know a markup language or worse to use them. But times have changed.

The last time I spoke at the forum I asked how many people in the audience had never used a wiki – so – this workshop will focus on two things – 1) the mechanics of how to actually set up and use a wiki, and 2) why you might want to.

After defining what a wiki is, I’ll walk through some of the many uses of wikis:

1. Wiki as team roster.

2. Wiki as document organizer

3. Wiki as issues list

4. Wiki for FAQ

5. Wiki is the document

6. Wiki to get organized

7. Wiki to aggregate resources

8. Wiki to build a portfolio

9. Wiki to plan

10. Wiki as knowledge base.

Next, I’ll cover some rules of engagement:

1. Make sure you have a purpose, and that you’ve expressed it to your co-contributors. Focus is the key to success.

2. Capture your roughest thougts. If you do this, you’ll always be giving yourself something to build on.

2. Be appreciative when someone else contributes, and let them know.

3. Don’t forget to go in and prune.

4. The earlier you share, the more collaborative you can be. Once you or your colleague have formalized your thoughts, its much harder to change them, and much harder to accept well meaning critisicm. So – share while you’re still open to feedback, and comment while they are. Its very hard to put hours into creating something, and then have people point out its flaws. Its much easier to remain open to new ideas before you’ve invested too much in developing them.

Last, I’ll cover some of the features to look for in a wiki, depending on the purpose you’re after, and show some examples of great wikis.

If you’d like to learn more about how wikis can bring a new level of efficiency to a team, then register here for the two-day event, or leave me a note in the comments here.

If you’re new to wikis, or  just love a really good explanation,  this video is surely the best basic introduction to the wiki concept:

Bigger isn’t better, and email is no way to work

I spend a lot of time these days trying to articulate the value of enterprise collaboration. This because I’m now working on a surprisingly good “social collaboration” product for enterprise. (Why surprising? Cause its out of the box functionality and usability are excellent (hours to deployment) and yet it scales like gangbusters. this is another story. check it out here).

Here’s the thing. Enterprises get big to benefit from economies of scale – the idea that the more you do something, the more efficient (cheap) you can make it. This works well for many things – manufacturing, transactional services like banking and insurance – businesses that produce things that are the same every time.

But a bigger, and ever growing, component of business success is about problem solving, idea sharing, strategy and insight. This is true in knowledge enterprises: Intelligence, Military, Technology, Medical, but its also true in manufacturing companies that need to come up with product strategies, marketing strategies and process improvements for those ever important cost savings.

This knowledge work does not benefit from efficiencies of scale – but it could. The concept of crowd-sourcing is ultimately the concept of scaling thinking.

There are a few fundamental issues, however that companies face that social collaboration tools can actually solve – without having to look into the future and take a leap of faith in the alchemy of collaboration.

1. Email is a really bad way for groups to communicate with one another.

Email is a really great way for two people to communicate, or for one party to send announcements to others, but if you’re looking to have a multi-way discussion, where multiple people are reviewing, revising, asking and answering questions, then email really stinks. I’m guessing that I don’t have to give you too many examples of why – but just think about the last time that you got edits on a doc from more than one person, had to integrate them and recirculate for approval. How easy waas that? And guess what? This is how most work is done in most businesses. This simple problem in itself is, perhaps, the very best reason to choose your favorite social collaboration tool and use it. Your entire company will thank you – once they get the hang of it.

2. Emailing documents around also stinks – nobody knows which is the latest version, those powerpoints are big, too easy to loose them.

again – the email stinks thing, but it really does. And maybe you have some document management software – how well is this solving this problem for you? Its part of the problem, but not nearly enough.

3. When I leave, I’m gone.

Most of what I know isn’t in a document – its in the conversations I have, the comments I make and the documents I create. When I’m gone, I can leave you a few gig of email and docs somewhere – good luck sorting through it all and finding any value in it. But if that’s all part of a collaborative community, it becomes searchable, it remains in context, and can be easily connected with other people in the company for continuity.

4. When I arrive I’m lost.

How long does it take you to figure out how things get done in a company? The org chart can help. Some. But its not nearly enough. Knowing who knows what and who does what is a matter of building relationships and trying things out, and having an effective network of people to query and being able to see the results of other people’s queries. Social collaboration tools can be an enormous help – without them, you’re basically stuck with email and the org chart. Maybe a “helpful” HR orientation. If you’re insanely lucky, you might have a mentor or a manager with 5 minutes time to spend with you.

5. I have no idea what you’re doing.

I go about my job and you go about yours. Sometimes we’re trying to solve the same or similar problems, searching for similar resources and compiling them together. Sometimes we’re communicating with customers, planning events, initiatives, research. And we don’t have any idea that there’s someone to share the work with, or to grab some great stuff from, because we have no idea what the similarities or synergies are. We might hear rumors through other people, and if we’re lucky, we hook up and get some value from the relationship. If we have time and luck. Businesses need to do better than depend on time and luck.

So – I love nothing more than to discuss the long term effects of collaborative cultures and make assurances about how you’ll innovate more and increase agility and capability once you’re fully down the road with social collaboration. But its hard to prove that’s what happens. And its also unnecessary.

All you need to know, is that email is the biggest waste of time – not because you’re getting unimportant messages, but because it doesn’t help get the necessary work done,  it doesn’t help people know what’s going on, and ideas, information and documents that travel via email get lost without fail.

Social Collaboration tools do not need to solve every challenge you’ve ever had, and they won’t. But they’ll get you out of working in your inbox. All it will take to prove it is a good days work with them.

Uncle Sam wants to share: Social Collaboration in the Public Sector.

The public sector is leading the charge in adopting collaborative technologies. Why?

1. They are mission focused – their goal is not profit, but service. In the case of the real leaders and innovators, the military and intelligence communities, their mission is life and death. They are keen to embrace methods and technologies that further the mission.

2. They are complex bureaucracies – the Federal government employs some 200,000 people. Policies and processes can be complex and less than agile. People within these bureaucracies must rely on their knowledge and relationships to improve effectiveness.

3. They must do more with less. The mission of government rarely shrinks, but their resources do. The resourcefulness and dedication of civil servants is what drives them ever forward.

4. The leadership of these agencies recognizes the talent within and the complexity of the mission.

5. Obama told them to. He’s demanding a new perspective of government effectiveness and how technology can enable it.

So – who’s sharing what? A very short list of examples, pulled from a very long list of initiatives:

1. The intelligence community is sharing via A-Space and Intellipedia, and its next generation, Intellipublia, among other initiatives.

2. The army is sharing via The Warfighters Forum and has instituted a set of 12 Principles to support collaborative, knowledge-growing, organizations.

3. The State Department is working to get embassy personnel up to speed quickly and retain knowledge as they rotate through different assignments with Diplopedia.

4. The Navy is using Tripwire, among other tools.

There are a dozen more great examples of government adopting collaborative concepts and technologies. What are they hoping to gain?

1. Effectiveness

2. Situational awareness

3. Retention and reuse of work, knowledge, process and capability.

4. Leveraging the full passion of committed employees.

Join me on Friday at 1pm eastern time for a review of how some of Open Text’s latest technology helps meet these objectives with an easy to use, easy to deploy application to support collaboration in the public and commercial sectors. Go ahead and register here.

I hope to hear from you on this webinar, and here, on this blog about your challenges, successes and questions about how social collaboration can make your organization more effective.

The radical enabler: Many to Many Communication

What’s different about today’s internet and technology – what we’re calling social media?

Many to many communication. For the first time in human history, people can converse en mass without being in the same room. The implications are many and highly varied, and this is why people have such trouble defining the terms.

We’ve moved from letters to Newspapers, Magazines and  telephone. Modern one way media like television and radio emerged. New social media tools are truly radical in that they enable multi-way communication that is so different from what precedes it, that we don’t really even have words to describe it.

“Conversation” is the best, really the only, word we have to describe this, because the only precedent for it is social events of relatively small groups of people meeting face to face. But the term is overtaxed. Appropriate in many circumstances, “conversation” does not quite get to the heart of issues like ambient awareness, group filtering, and the strange patterns of the spread of memes, ideas and information that feel like we can almost grasp them, but haven’t yet.

David Armano and the Dachis Group have started defining the terms, if not completely yet the dynamics of this in an exciting way that promises to be a useful framework for discussion. I’ve written on the various types of collaboration that people seem to struggle to articulate (though I lack Armano’s considerable skill at illustration).

We also lack words for multi-modal communication. If i want to invite someone to call/email/IM/Tweet/Social message me in the form that is most convenient, the only word I have is “ping” – an obscure term that I got from old unix guys, who got it from even older radar operators.

This strangely, but radically new form of mainstream many-to-many communication is the unique thing that social media enables, and its no surprise that we’re still grappling with its implications. We’re still figuring out what to call it.

Lawrence Lessig gives a breathtaking review of what “read-write web” means (if you haven’t watched this yet, you really should), but I think there are other basic issues that many-to-many unearths:

- We’re not completely sure how to listen. We use each other as filters, but we’re still working this out.

- We’re still working on how to engage. Best practices exist and are developing, but we’re in early stages. So what’s my point here. As always they are several.

1. We are just beginning to unpack the value of many to many, and will be doing so for the next decade or more.

2. We need more and better vocabulary to describe what we have and what we want. if we can’t discuss it, we can’t easily get it.

3. Along the way we will be articulating, demonstrating and leveraging what many of us already sense in our guts about the many ways information and insight travel from mind to mind. This hints at the astonishing power to truly connect minds, harness enthusiasm and make nearly all human endeavor more productive and efficient.