Knowledge Jolt

[This is a comment on Pulling the strings together from Jack Vinson.]

Hagel and Brown have posted an HBR blog summary of their book. "Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work" http://blogs.hbr.org/bigshift/2010/08/six-fundamental-shifts-in-the.html

I just finished both the classic book on "change management," Leading Change by John Kotter.  Next on my list is Kotter's companion set of examples and stories of successful changes, The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations.  Leading Change has been sitting on my should-read list for quite a while, particularly since my association with the MS-LOC program at Northwestern.  It's also come up a number of times on a Theory of Constraints mailing list as a must read to get a better understanding of why change implementations get stuck and what to do about it.

Leading Change has its familiar eight stages of change.  But the clear message is that big changes can only happen through leadership, taken on by people throughout the organization, not just the CEO and a few titular leaders.  For a change effort to work, the organization has to grant people leadership capabilities and let them run.  Organizations that want to change cannot work from command-and-control and "the old ways" of doing things.  Kotter makes reference many times to the 20th Century way of doing business that generally assumes everything will stay the same - business that just needs good management.  It is clear that everything will not stay the same, and that change demands leadership appear in many places.  In the closing chapters he talks about how to create those leaders and makes a strong tie to the idea of lifelong learning - allowing people to learn from their mistakes, their work, their curiosity and grow into leadership roles.  The book is both inspirational and somewhat fear inducing.  But then, no one ever said this should be easy.

Kotter's 8 stage process for change is as follows with some of my thoughts on each point.  I can't possibly cover the whole thing here.  If you are curious, go read the book.

1. Establish a sense of urgency.  If people in the organization don't believe the change is worth it, then they will be much less likely to get behind it.  And they will be more likely to drop the focus when the next shiny idea comes along.  And those shiny ideas come along frequently.
2. Create the guiding coalition.  Major changes cannot be accomplished by fiat, nor can small groups successfully complete the change.  But a guiding coalition or steering committee has to be built and committed to helping drive the effort across the organization.  It wouldn't hurt if one or two skeptics are in this core group.
3. Develop a vision and strategy.  What is the organization going to look like when this change is done?  What does it look like while the change happens?  I like that Kotter places a lot of importance on making the vision be something that makes sense to everyone, not just the people who wrote it.
4. Communicate the change vision.  One friend commented that Leading Change is all about communication.  It's a huge component all the way up and down these eight stages.  One thing I see in companies is that while top management believe they've told their people about X, most people in the organization haven't heard about it or recall only small pieces of the idea.  Kotter has seen this as well and reiterates the idea that important ideas have to be communicated many times in many ways.  More importantly, if it's such a big effort, people's daily communication needs to reflect the new way of working.  Internal leaders must "be the change they wish to see," quoting Gandhi.
5. Empower employees for broad-based action.  More leadership.  People throughout the organization must be able to take actions that they see is in line with the vision and the authority that they have to do something about it.  No more claims of "it's not my job." 
6. Generate short-term wins.  I was a little surprised to see this so far down the list, but then Kotter's discussion makes sense.  Many of the eight stages happen in parallel, and the short-term wins have to be clearly linked to the efforts made to get to the vision.
7. Consolidate gains and produce more change.  The core element of this chapter was, "Don't rest on your laurels" after a few good things happen.  Sure, you can celebrate, but you also need to redouble efforts, lest the progress you've made gets lost in the excitement of the Next Thing on the agenda.  Kotter also addressed an important aspect of procedures and policies that are tied to the "old way" of doing business.  These policies can be buried deep in the fabric of the organization and must be found and removed/changed to bring the organization in line with the new way of doing business.  And it's not a bad idea to write down the new policies, so you know why they are there.
8. Anchor new approaches in the culture.  While this is last on the list, I have to believe this comes into play with the development of the vision.  Once you know where you want to be, you also know how you want people to start behaving and what policies are in the way of the change.  As with Stage 7, the sooner the cultural and procedural barriers can be identified and removed the better.

One question I had while reading Leading Change was around the size and type of change under discussion.  Most of the examples were of major changes to the underlying structure or philosophy of a business.  But then as I read into the examples and stages of change, I can see the same problems appearing in seemingly smaller and smaller implementations - nearly anything that requires change to dive into the culture of a business could be under consideration of this model.  And this is where a link to Theory of Constraints appears.

In TOC, there is a set of "layers of resistance" or "layers of buy-in" depending on your point of view.  The layers of buy-in go something like this (layers of resistance are the opposites):

1. We agree on the problem.
2. We agree on the direction of the solution.
3. We agree that the solution solves the problem.
4. We agree that we can overcome any potential negative ramifications.
5. We agree that the obstacles to implementation can be overcome.
6. We commit to move forward.

This progression can be a helpful gauge to see where people are in a change effort and what actions need to be taken to help move the effort along.  Maybe it's because I am an engineer, but I like their logical progression on building an overall consensus to dealing with change.  However, all that is built into the layers of buy-in are the logical transitions.  There is very little in here directly about creating leaders and baking the change into the culture.  And depending on how you look at this model, it is all within the first few stages of Kotter's model (coalition and strategy, mainly).  That said, Kotter's model is probably not the be-all and end-all of change discussions either.

[Photo: "Inde Statue Gandhi" by laurent KB]

[This is a comment on Ten reasons from Sartorius.]

Social media is good and now a days everyone and every business is using it.

[This is a comment on Email Holiday from Africa holidays.]

I actually agree with you,it always better to give your self a break from all this computer work.When you have many email,it may be a problem to read them all.But its not good to over pile.

[This is a comment on Make sense personally and with the group from Jack Vinson.]

Jeff Merrel posted a nice connection to this, asking the questions, "How does this help us make sense of our work?" http://purplelineassociates.com/2010/08/14/how-does-this-help-us-make-sense-of-our-work/

How does this new idea help us connect to our work?

[This is a comment on KM for small business: an array from Atle Iversen.]

This reminds me of the big/small/personal KM discussions.

I believe that the needs for small businesses are often similar to what a project group needs, or what a sales/marketing/support department needs.

People in small business (or project groups etc) have a lot of things in common, and many similar responsibilities/tasks, and therefore need much of the same/similar knowledge.

However, for big businesses with thousands of people, their needs differ enormously, and the "common knowledge" that everybody needs is actually *less* than for a small business. Which is also why I believe that they need different tools and strategies to be successful.

And of course I agree that teaching and encouraging advanced personal knowledge management skills is a great starting point (and will also "educate" people and help them understand their KM needs better later on).

Final point: I would much prefer that people apologized for *short* (mostly useless) ad hoc posts (especially twitter++) than long, thoughtful posts :-)

[This is a comment on KM for small business: an array from Jack Vinson.]

Thanks, @nemochu.

This reference to Bloomfire made me realize that there is another angle from which businesses might approach the "I need knowledge management" problem. Communities. Maybe they participate in communities of practice, or they realize that they have a large community of customers that they'd like to engage in better ways. And Bloomfire addresses that need from the learning perspective, which is yet another angle, though I see it show up with larger organizations (businesses, communities, etc), rather than in small.

[This is a comment on KM for small business: an array from Nemo.]

There's also Bloomfire, which is a newer platform.

I'm on a roll this week.  Or I should say that the people I follow are on a roll that links very nicely to things I've been pondering lately.  This evening, Harold Jarche has a nice discussion of why he blogs.  He calls it Active sense-making.

And this is right in line with my previous post, linking to Thomas Vander Wal's comments about how ideas flow from the individual outward.  If the individual doesn't have a reliable process to ponder and think - to make sense of their own ideas and how they relate to what's happening in their environment - then it will be much harder to build upon those thoughts into work product and ideas that a larger group can use.  The "sense" process in the middle of Harold's image here is all about learning and feedback.  The incubation time depends on all sorts of factors.  Just like I've been doing recently, a lot of thoughts may come together that make much more sense today than they might have a few months ago, simply because of what I've been pondering as well. 

I love it. My favorite description of blogging in this mode is, "Thinking out loud."  (And Jim McGee rightly gets credit for pushing me into blogging.  Here is the evidence in some Thinking out loud posts of his.)

[Image credit: Harold Jarche, "PKM Sense-Making," as found here.]

Thomas Vander Wal has just posted a great discussion of how people go from being smart about their own personal information and personal processes to greater collaboration with larger groups to getting things done and accomplished together.  This should be considered as part of the context of the discussions organizations have in wanting to jump on the next technology (collaboration, KM, social, etc.).  On Fire with Social Progressions.

The basic progression is Personal -> Sparks (small idea) -> Campfire (building with people) -> Bonfire (spreading to a large group) -> Torch (honing, sharpening, set the next fire?).  Read his whole post for the details, of course.  I like how Thomas has described this flow, as it reminds me of yet another aspect on how organizations think about their knowledge management efforts.  Depending on where they are on this flow, they might be more focused on a specific stop along this flow.  Thomas makes it clear that the effort needs to consider everything from the individual behavior to that of small groups, large groups and the enterprise - and beyond.

Another long post.  My apologies.  I hope you find it interesting.  At least you can enjoy this picture of a tool-embedded cake.

I received a number great responses from my last post on KM for small businesses: more than just email.  The most important comment I will repeat: whatever you do has to fit with the style of the business.  There is no such thing as one-size-fits all knowledge management.  Therefore there is no one-size-fits-all technology.  And for small businesses, the technology is most likely a smaller element anyway.  Much more of what's considered to be knowledge management happens in the conversations and interactions amongst the members of the business.

The first layer of technologies that many small businesses look at are those that are freely available: from blogs and microblogs for thoughts and comments, to Skype for meetings, to wikis and Google docs (and others) for collaboration around specific documents.  This is one of the reasons that email is so popular: everyone already has it (whether their personal accounts or the company account).  Of course, one of the concerns are the security and privacy of the information.  This can knock out public Twitter or blogging, but there are plenty of options that maintain privacy. 

Another thing that makes this discussion interesting is that each business comes at this question from a different perspective.  What is behind the "I need X" cry?  Is there a big problem that's causing them to seek out better ways to manage?  Or is there a general sense of need for improvement in several areas?  I'm not sure which is best.  The first approach can help focus the search, but then if you pick something that is too specific to that problem, it may not help in the long run.

Many of the services out there do a lot of things, but their focus is in one area.  Other tools do one specific thing exceedingly well, but then you need to pick up a multitude of tools as your needs expand and change.  37signals' products are a great example of this quandary: Basecamp (for project management), Highrise (contact / customer relationship management) and Backpack (for idea and file management) all have very similar features, but depending on your specific needs, you might pick one or the other.  Zoho offers a dazzling array of services that cover collaboration, business and productivity applications at an even more granular level.  (I'm surprised that it seems you can't just buy a larger package of services.)

Is your need related to the social and connection aspects first?  In that case, there are many offerings out there that help bring all the social-type interactions under one roof.  Many of these options also make it easy to bring in outside partners / customers to portions of the service.  In that case, you'll want the ability to have unique URL's and a branded interface.  I know that Elgg has been used by many people, and they have a developers platform that companies like Mitre have used to build bespoke internal applications.

If the need is around creating new content and working together around that, there are the platforms that started as wikis.  As Stuart French mentioned in the comments, it's another place people start thinking of adding technology to their KM mix.  There are a number of services out there, some of which still have a wiki feel and some which have expanded beyond that.  There are too many to list, but since I have a friend at Traction Software, and I am very much interested in exploring their TeamPage in our small business setting.  Stuart mentioned Atlassian Confluence.  and I have known about SocialText as an option in this arena for many years - it has expanded well beyond the wiki concept.

If customer relationship management (CRM) is a focus, then the established player to consider is the well-known Salesforce.com.  They have a small business offering and these come with their Chatter service that extends their core capability into a more conversational / discussion look, which grows a CRM tool into something that might support more of the needs of KM.

But wait a minute.  Why go with these additional systems?  Why not just help people in the business do a better job with what they have?  Why not teach and encourage advanced Personal Knowledge Management skills, possibly using some of the online services?  That's not a bad idea, actually.  If everyone can use the same tools and those tools can share information amongst colleagues, that may be a good starting point.

Circling back to the opening, though.  This all depends on what the people in the business need and want from "knowledge management," and it depends on where the principals think things will go in the future.  If everyone is tech-savvy,  you have a very different discussion than if you have a mixed group or a group of people who are reticent to use anything beyond email.  Or simply, if people don't have the time. 

Knowledge management is heavily dependent upon the culture of the organization (both the real culture and the desired culture). 

[Photo: "Tool Cake from Above" by Jenn]

[This is a comment on KM for small businesses: more than just email from Stuart French.]

Hi Jack,

Often with people coming across KM, their first question is "What tools do we need?". You and I know there are a bunch of more important guiding questions that should be asked before tech even comes in to view. This short-cut mentality occurs at both ends of the business spectrum, and can have similar results if not handled correctly.

However. The answer to that question IS quite different when large and small businesses are compared.

Small business often don't have large amounts of capital to invest and more importantly, they often do KM naturally through simple face-to-face conversations and a little mentoring.

I believe the key to KM in SMEs is to monitor knowledge gaps as they appear - maybe you start a new office, maybe two SMEs merge, or the boss is about to retire - and then try some solutions for that need. Fail fast, Fail cheap and Learn well.

Now for the technology question. It is quite common to hear the question from a user or manager "We need a wiki". Actually it's not even a question really, just a statement of fact and IT and KM departments should rightly push back and do a bit of business analysis before deciding if a wiki is the answer.

In the case of an SME though, I am more and more convinced that enterprise wikis, such as Atlassian's Confluence product, are flexible enough to be used for a myriad of knowledge functions. Their relative low price means they can be adopted quicker, their ease of use means IT support is minimal and their flexibility (which in a large corporation can be their downfall) is actually a huge bonus in the small business environment. Company culture still plays a part in their success, particularly when transitioning from one part of the business to a corporate wide tool, but this too can be managed with executive support behind solving the issues at hand.

Anybody else had good experiences with wikis in SMEs?

I've been involved in knowledge management for a long time.  Knowledge management discussions usually assume that the organization is large.  Said another way: these discussions assume that it's not necessary in small organizations.  The people involved are sitting next to each other - asking a question involves turning around in their chair or walking to the office next door.  As organizations grow, there is an innate need to be able to continue connecting with people, even when they aren't a shout away.  Not only that, but we also generate lots and lots of information that we'd like to share with our colleagues, no matter where they are.  For these organizations, KM has taken on many forms, almost always supported by some technology or another. 

But what about small groups of people?  Maybe it's a small business (or nonprofit) just getting off the ground, or a small business that is growing and adding people who don't see each other all the time.  Maybe it's a business with no central office because "the office" is where the customers are.  How do they keep in touch and continue conversations and ideas?  They don't need special software do they? 

The stand-by answer is email along with the phone and live meetings (coffee!).  The primary "technology" is email and the personal computer of each individual contributor.  Email discussions between a few people.  Email documents back and forth.  Emails to organize meetings.  Email follow-ups to discussions.  This all leads to very little coordination or useful historical recall when it comes to bringing more people into the discussion.  Granted, most email interchanges can be happily forgotten once they are complete.  But shouldn't there be better ways for people to actually communicate and get things done than via email?

This line of thinking came about in response to a recent question on a KM mailing list, where someone had been asked about options for a small consultancy.  They are looking primarily for technology, but some of the things they want to support sound a lot like what KM has been talking about: finding and sharing information; tagging and categorizing the stuff; bounce ideas around (share and get comments); accessible from anywhere and any device. 

So, what is out there that is easily accessible to small businesses?   

[Photo: "Cafecillo" by Felipe De las Heras]

[This is a comment on What should a small business (consulting) website look like? from Brett.]

Jack,

I've always found Jakob Nielsen's site useit.com to be a good resource. Though a few years old, the article 113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability still provides some good info and things to consider. Many of which, by the way, you seem to already be thinking about.

What does good look like for a business website?  I'm pretty sure I know what it doesn't look like.  That's only partially helpful in doing (updating) the actual design though.

I've taken over webmaster responsibility for our consultancy website, and we are trying to figure out what the website should look like.  When looking around at other consultants' websites, there is a basic pattern that seems to be right.  And there are plenty of examples of things that don't look good. 

The first question, though, is what a business should expect the website to do?  For a consultancy website, it needs to do a few things:

• Legitimize the business.  For at least ten years, nearly all businesses have a website.  End of story.
• Help with the marketing process.  People come to the website after they hear about the business, either from the owners / employees, from referrals, or any of the places where we've mentioned our name.  People might even get there via web search.  The website has to round out that initial marketing contact with more information and some sense of what the business does.  And of course, a means to contact the business.  Note: In our case, we intend the website to be an extension of our outreach or the beginning of the marketing funnel.  The actual business deals are done through personal contact (not consummated on the web, for example).
• Provide a means for ongoing contact with customers, associates and other friends of the business.  The website might host newsletters, relevant news, events, a blog, forums and the like. 

Great.  Given that, we still need to think about what the website needs to contain.  This is well before we think about layout and colors and other details, though having a basic design to work from helps to spark conversation too.  Pardon the cliché, but I can't define a good website, but I know it when I see it.  Here are some elements that I'd look for in a business / consultancy website. 

• Is it easy to figure out what the business does?
• Are they consultants – what do they do?
• Do they sell a technology – what is it?  Why is it great?
• Do they have some affiliation with other organizations?
• Does the website look professional?  This is where that subjectivity comes into play.
• Is there a consistent “look” throughout the website, so it’s easy to navigate? 
• The colors should be pleasant without being boring.  They shouldn't make my eyes bleed.
• Is it all text?  All pictures?  Photos and other images seem to make the sites a bit more interesting.
• Do images make sense in their context?
• Links to other places on the website (and external) must work!
• Can I contact the business in question?  Do they have multiple means of contact (including the ones I happen to use: email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, phone, ...)
• Content beyond the basics about the business.  These all help keep people coming back and provide a wider look at the people behind the business:
• Do they have case studies or testimonials reporting work that the business has done before?  This seems to be a requirement of business websites.  It's a stretch, but can the case study companies be contacted?
• Do they have some kind of resource library?  This could be anything from a set of white papers or publications (written by the members of the business) or commented links to other materials, such as books or other relevant websites.  And please don't make me provide my contact information before viewing your resources.  (Interesting that many people recommend doing just that to collect sales leads - is this a valuable way to get leads, or do you just make it easy to "contact us"?)
• Do they keep a blog or newsletter?  (Or some mechanism for communicating with their clients / potential clients as a group)
• I've seen a lot with a "latest news" or "recent update" on their home page.  For a small business, it might be tough to come up with a lot of "news" that would fit.  This could obviously be a web feed that combines blogs, recent case studies, events, and other updates.
• Search?  Search is relevant if there is going to be a lot of stuff to search for or if the site design obfuscates the materials that might be there.  But once there is a lot of stuff on a website, search may not be a bad idea.
• Opinion: I don’t particularly like Flash (or animated graphics in general).  This gets in my way of figuring out what the company does.  (And search engines don't index the content of the flash animations.)
• Does the website work on mobile devices?  If someone gets a link on their smartphone, can they navigate around the website and find everything they can find from a larger computer?

One of the biggest questions I have is whether a small business website needs to have something like a blog or frequently-updated articles and news items - something that would show up in some kind of chronological list of postings and have a web feed.  (It might also have categories / tags.)  I know that for me and many of my regular readers, there is probably an expectation that the business owners are keeping a blog.  Is that a general expectation or need?  In our case, I would be doing most of the blogging or other regular content work - though I'd download from my colleagues as much as I could.

This list of items was generated in discussions and from my own experience.  There are some experts out there (though I expected to find more).  Here are some useful references:

• Web Design Best Practices and Tips from crowdSPRING.
• 10 rules for your small business home page by Sue Polinsky on Download Squad.
• 12 Website Design Decisions Your Business or Organization Will Need to Make Correctly by Web Marketing Today.
• A site review of a plumbing company website from Broad River Creative that has some interesting points.  That blog has some interesting commentary too.
• And there are always Web Pages That Suck's highlights, such as The Ugliest / Worst Business Web Sites of 2009, which provides plenty of fodder for what not to do.  They also have a self-assessment tool, Does My Website Suck.

Oh, that business is P3 Consulting Group.  Feel free to give me some commentary or pointers for improvement.  I'd also love some pointers to people who have expressed this information more clearly and who do website design as a profession.

In case you don't already know, I am not a web designer.  Just a consumer and the lucky person responsible for the maintenance of the site for now.

[Photo: "When I Asked For Your Opinion..." by The Pack - I was going for a "my two cents" theme]

Thanks to Harold Jarche, we have a fun meme for people who are into social media.  Let's counter those 10 top reasons to ban social media in the organization, based on Ron Desi's video from four months ago, Organizations should ban social media.  And I'm not particularly into it as part of my business, I just think there are a lot of good ideas here for my personal practice as well as for the larger question of knowledge management. 

My version of the rules to this game: create a counter to each of the reasons.  Maybe the conversation shouldn't even be about these "reasons to ban" but should come up "reasons to use" social media.

Here are mine.  I'm sure you can come up with your own set that are even better. 

10. Social media is a fad.  In the long-term, everything is a fad.  Does that mean it isn't helpful?  The question is whether this particular fad has any value to us today.  The argument I like the most is that social media (or Enterprise 2.0 or "this technology") gives us an ability to return to the heart of what organizations should be about: people working with each other.  Social media is a great way to help people connect and engage with each other, especially when they no longer share physical space.
9. It's about controlling the message.  This one has very little connection for me.  Within the organization there is no "message" to control.  And outside the organization, plenty of other people are handling the message, both the company message as well as all the messages customers have about the company (which are often shared with these tools).
8. Employees will goof off. And, so?  How is this different from all the other ways we have of relaxing and taking a break?  In business people are expected to be available nearly all the time, so we also need to give them a break if they need it, whether that is heading down the road for a coffee or checking their favorite blog.  And by the way, many of those blogs have a business connection.
7. Social Media is a time waster. And the 25% of time people spend hunting around on the corporate intranet is a good use of time?  Maybe if I could ask a question and get a direct answer, I could be more productive.
6. Social media has no business purpose. How about a few: connecting people in the organization; pulling people away from their over-stuffed email boxes; helping to answer questions on-the-spot.  My participation with blogging and other social media has been deeply fulfilling and has helped me make business connections that I would have never made (or never even found).  I'll let someone else talk about the benefits for public-facing social media.
5. Employees can’t be trusted. 5, 7 and 8 are all saying the same thing, though this one says it more clearly.  If you don't trust your employees, why are they employed?  And if you don't trust them, I am fairly sure they know it already.  Give them some appropriate, simple guidelines and let them have at it.
4. Don't cave into the demands of the millennials. The generation argument is rather flimsy.  Besides, they are all participating in social media on their phones, which you don't control anyway. 
3. Your teams already share knowledge effectively. Excellent.  And how are they sharing that knowledge? E-mail traps knowledge and doesn't help it spread.  The same goes for document management.  Social media adds to the ability of people to find each other - people who can help solve problems and get those projects out the door.
2. You'll get viruses. Another non-issue.  Teach people responsible use of the internet.  Oh, and make sure your IT group has the latest patches installed.
1. Your competition isn't using it, so why should you?  You might want to ask that question again.  Even the stodgiest companies have blogs, wikis and other pieces of the social media puzzle running.  And, once again, your customers are probably using it to talk with other customers.

If you just want the list, here they are in reverse order.  Go ahead and make your arguments.  Or agree with the points, if that works for you.

10. Social media is a fad.
9. It's about controlling the message.
8. Employees will goof off.
7. Social Media is a time waster.
6. Social media has no business purpose.
5. Employees can't be trusted.
4. Don't cave into the demands of the millennials.
3. Your teams already share knowledge effectively.
2. You'll get viruses.
1. Your competition isn't using it, so why should you?

And here is the video embedded, in case you haven't watched it already.  Be prepared to smile - Ron Desi has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

[Photo: "fad" by Max Boschini]

I don't quite know how this happened, but I have just read another book on the tribal dynamics of organizations.  This time it is Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright.  Of course, the book has its own website, where they are seeking more examples of Tribal Leaders and the organizations that create them.

My ears are up particularly because this is at least the second time this topic has arisen in my reading lately.  Great Boss Dead Boss (my review) developed along some of the same topics with its emphasis on people grouping together in tribes.  And these books taken together make me see discussions and descriptions of workplace behavior in a new light.  As in, "No wonder they are struggling.  They are clearly stuck in Stage 2." or "That is a classic sign of Stage 3 behavior."  For example, the Stages were so obvious to me in Luis Suarez' discussion of a Andrew McAfee piece that I had to mention it in the comments.

In case you aren't familiar with the idea of "tribes," the authors talk about them as the essential building block of human groups.  Tribes are small towns, work teams, lunch groups, corporate divisions, hockey teams, industry groups - tribes appear anywhere that people gather.  It's "built into the genetic code" for humans to gather in tribes for support and recognition.  The idea behind the book is to decipher what's going on in tribes, based on the authors' research, and look at how those tribes create Tribal Leaders. 

One of the big elements of their research highlighted that tribes operate in five different stages, with Stage 5 being the Workplace of the Future and composing fewer that 2% of workplace tribes today.  The stages:

• Stage 1: "Life sucks" for everyone, and therefore it is okay for me to behave badly to make my way.  Fortunately, this stage is relatively rare in corporate life.  The book
• Stage 2: "My life sucks" is an upgrade from Stage 1, as people can see that life is okay for some other people, but in this stage, people have little to no motivation to change because they believe their life (or their work) is bad because of uncontrollable outside influences.  It's all "their" fault.  The authors claim about 25% of workplace tribes operate in this mode.  And you can see it when you talk to people who use language that blames others and who are convinced that any change effort is doomed to failure.
• Stage 3: "I am great, you are not."  Here is the world that many corporations live in (50% of workplace tribes).  Organizations have hired the best and brightest people, who have come out of educational and training environments that promote individual excellence.
• Stage 4: "We are great, they are not."  This is a shift from individual competition to the entire tribe competing against other tribes.  In organizational settings, Stage 4 is a combination of having common goals and values as well as a common "enemy tribe" to compare against.  This represent 22% of workplace tribes.
• Stage 5: "Life is great."  The pinnacle of workplace tribes are those who seek and promote good life for everyone.  The tribe is driven by their noble cause and for the shear joy of doing what they do.  Values are the central glue that holds the tribe together - and violation of those values can rip the tribe apart if the leader lets the violation stand.  There are no tribal competitors, not because they don't exist, but because the tribe is striving to make an impact (on the world) rather than striving to win (against another tribe).

While large companies may consist of tribes at varying stages and people exhibiting behaviors from several stages, the authors suggest that there will be overriding tribal cultures in every organization.  The book describes the process of upgrading from each stage with the explicit goal of helping the leaders (Tribal Leaders) bring their tribes into Stage 4 and 5.  As you might expect, the authors claim that tribes in the higher stages consistently outperform those in lower stages.  Interestingly, throughout the book the authors make it very clear that it is not possible to jump multiple stages at once.  Also, they suggest that the experience of previous stages are critical to growing into the next stages.  For example, the authors suggest the importance of personal excellence to Stages 4 and 5 relationships, and that is only there when people get through their "I am great" world of Stage 3.  Another aspect of the various stages is that there is some self-reinforcing behaviors that happen within the tribal cultures.  People look for evidence that things are still the same, so even when leaders attempt to make changes, it is the previous culture seeks to inoculate itself from those changes.  This sounds very familiar to anyone who has followed change management research and literature.

The description and discussion of Stage 3 was most troubling for me, as I was reading it.  I really didn't see a tribal culture described at all.  Rather, the "tribe" of Stage 3 seems to be a collection of individual contributors, who all complain that everyone else isn't as great as they are, and why can't people perform as well as them.  What is the tribe in that?  But then, seen in the context of Stage 2, which is almost a requisite tribe for the Stage 3 over-achievers to rail against; and in the context of Stage 4 and 5, where the personal mastery and expertise and crucial elements of building lasting relationships, then it becomes clearer that Stage 3 is a phase that must be endured, particularly for the Tribal Leaders.

While the authors didn't particularly cover this topic, it is clear that there is very little to do with technology in the transformation of organizations into Stage 4 and 5.  It's all about how the tribe and leader interact to develop the common values and seek out their cause.  I could see technology playing a supporting role in keeping people connected and supporting one another.  I could also see some interesting uses of Organizational Network Analysis in helping to diagnose where an organization might be in the spectrum of tribal stages.

When I talked about this book with my colleagues, they immediately heard undertones of the ideas of Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing (first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965).  This model focuses on team development, though many others have used it and built upon the ideas.  I pushed against this connection in discussion with my colleagues, but the question is still sticking with me.  What is the difference between this Tribal Leadership model and the Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing model of team performance? 

The connection to Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing seems to be around the shift from Stage 3 to Stage 4: shifting from individual contributors to the group (tribe) contributing as a whole - and contributing more than they would as individuals.  In Stage 4 the group is aligned to a common goal.  Tribal Leadership calls this a Noble Cause (which I keep mis-typing as "Nobel").  My difficulty with this connection, is that I've always seen Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing as a team-level path, rather than an organization-level path.  But there is nothing keeping an entire organization from making that shift along these lines.  And I can see the Norming activity in particular as a tribe gelling around common values as well as around the tribal leader.

FYI: I "read" the free audio book version, made available by Zappos for anyone who's interested.  The book isn't about Zappos, but Zappos epitomizes many of the characteristics that Tribal Leadership discusses.  Listening forces me to pay closer attention - or pay attention in a different way.  I read it while sitting at my computer, because I wanted to build a mind map of the discussion.  The graphic below is my mind map, and here are pictures of the four main branches: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.  Be warned, they are large.

Thanks to Euan having a bad day, I have found Steve Schwartz' article at Lifehacker on The Science Behind "Having a Bad Day" (and How to Solve It).

When I was a teenager, I was grousing to a friend's mother that we were going to have a terrible weekend because we couldn't join a group of friends on a camping trip.  The mother responded with, "You are as happy as you choose to be."  And the article says essentially the same thing: "A bad day is as real as you make it."  If this is the case, the solution should be pretty obvious: If I make the bad day, then I can un-make the bad day.

When I was younger, I used to greet people with a cheery, "Good morning!" no matter the time of the day.  I think I learned that from the principal of my high school.  My intention was to get people to realize that they could start their day over, if they needed to.  And one of the things I notice over and over again: one day the little things roll off my back, another day they all pile up into a big ball of blackness on my soul.  Once again: the solution is within.

So, there is no such thing as a bad day (or any other period).  Thing happen, and how we interpret them is dependent on all sorts of factors.  If you want a "good" day, find ways to use the "bad" things for positive benefit.  Don't let all the "stuff" pile up into that ball of blackness.  Start the day over.

Good morning.

[Photo: "Good morning... morning...morning..." by JulyYu]

Do you want to do things well, or do the right things?  The difference between efficiency and effectiveness is exactly this difference.

Today, I came across this interview with Keivan Zokaei of the Lean Enterprise Research Center from last year where he says the same thing. Moving from efficiency to effectiveness using adaptive systems thinking.

Effectiveness is all about doing the right things.  Doing things that help bring money to the bottom line of the organization - or to help the organization achieve what it wants to achieve. 

But isn't "being efficient" a good thing?  Of course it is.  the problem is that most organizations focus on being efficient under the assumption that if everyone is efficient, then we must be successful in the end.  It should be obvious that this isn't true - but it isn't.  Organizations are complex beasts.  Doing things really well in one area might actually degrade the ability of the entire organization to do well.  

If you don't believe me, check around your organization for the way it is measured.  Is your plant equipment measured on "uptime?"  How does uptime everywhere relate to selling more product?  (No, not MAKING more product.  SELLING more product.)  Are you project team members measured by how well they are able to hit internal milestones?  Does that translate into projects finishing on time?  Are the sales people measured (rewarded) when they hit their targets?  Are they rewarded even more by exceeding targets?  Are they punished if they don't hit the targets?  I wonder how high their targets would be if these reward schemes weren't in place?  And how much does the organization suffer in lost sales because of it?

The best organizations know what the right things are, and then they have focused efforts on improving the efficiency of those things.  All the while, monitoring their business to check for other things that may get in the way of overall effectiveness. 

I'm looking forward to reading more of Bob Sproull's new blog on this topic, Focus and Leverage.  [Both this link and the link to the article above were mentioned by @Kallokian.]

[Photo: Excellent descriptive graphic, "Efficient VERSUS Effective" by Laura Dantonio]

[This is a comment on The blinding light of Web 2.0 from tribaldating@gmail.com.]

yeah, i totally agree.
no matter how advance technology is, some things is just better to keep to 'stone age'.
just like a piece of agreement, a hardcopy with a signature can never be replace by an computer generated one.