Black Swan Society

Mark and I recently got an email from someone at the Department of Transportation, who forwarded us an article on The End of Twitter. Specifically, her question was this:

As these late teens and early 20-somethings grow older and begin to affect the workplace more, they will bring with them their Twitter disdain. And what does that mean for federal agencies, which are creating Twitter feeds as fast as they can?

My general thought is to be armed with facts -- facts that can be cited to their sources. When that fails, be armed with compelling narratives. I responded pretty completely, but the point that seemed to stick with her was this one:

"Twitter" itself may not be the tool that gets adopted. The activity it supports, sharing of information (largely textual) information, which could be built in the future into any number of platforms. We don't know what the lifespan is of any kind of service, but we've certainly seen that in the 6 years that people have been really blogging as an actual practice, it isn't fading away (though "microblogging" as Twitter supports has taken a dent). Another kind of sharing service, MySpace, is fading away, but the practice isn't -- its competitor, Facebook, is bigger now than MySpace was at its peak, and its trajectory is climbing. My point here is that Twitter, as a service provider, may fade away -- but it will be replaced by a competing service that does what Twitter does, only better. In enterprise space, right now Yammer seems to be growing in popularity for this, but already there's evidence of competition that can do a "secured" microblogging network better (Present.ly being one potential challenger).

"What are we going to do as these 20-somethings who disdain email infitrate the workplace and change things" Adapt. We've been pretty good at that over the last few decades as technology has transformed the workplace ...

Steve, You're kidding right? The adaptation part... Who's been good at it? Car companies - not so much. IBM was damn near pushed to the brink before they reformed..same with 3M...same with Apple.....and we shouldn't talk about how long it took corporate America to embrace the efficacy of something as radical as email....Peter Senge was talking about learning org.s in 1990 and we still aren't there...Peter drucker still looks like Jules Verne and Marshall McLuhan may as well be Nostradamus for as far as we've come in understanding some of the dynamics he write about in the 60's. I think we can adapt and unless we're in org.s that are "too big to fail" (govt, banking evidently, etc) then they presurre will never be more acute to adapt or perish.

You can pull out big-business examples fo failure, and I can pull out big-business examples of success. but the reality is that it's the newer, the smaller, the leaner and the less entrenched companies are the ones that adapt best. I'll go out on a limb and say smaller companies represent the majority of people and places anyway. Yes 'we' adapt well. Sure'they' sometimes don't, but overall we've adapted significantly to email and the web. If we hadn't they wouldn't be as essential as they are.

So... my .02 goes like this. In a "we" vs. "they" world, I totally agree. We do adapt well and welcome the new. "They" don't. But for many people embedded in large organizations (even small ones) "they" are a pretty big chunk of "us." "We" are a very small part of "them." How do we get "them" to go with "us?" Because at the end of the day, that's the answer to how you change an organization. In the case of social media, I'm seeing around me that there's a lot of fear of the unknown, and it manifests itself in the objections about the "noise" or "counter-productivity" or "security" or "it's the newest shiny object" -- I'm not saying these aren't valid concerns, but Steve raises a good point that many organizations resisted E-mail, until they didn't. Many organizations resisted wikis (still do), until they didn't. It's the same arguments all over again, but I can't recall wikis, blogs or even email were never as "hot" for consumers as social networks are right now. That populism is a distractor. Much like Mark's thoughts (outside of here) that the problem with social media is that it's not expensive enough, another strike against it for organizations is that it's too popular. I think you both are much closer than you are apart on this subject. /.02

...Peter drucker still looks like Jules Verne and Marshall McLuhan may as well be Nostradamus for as far as we've come in understanding some of the dynamics he write about in the 60's.

Dude, that's too funny... too true, but funny.

I've been trying to post this up...got hung up, then realized that Aaron beat me to it with a much better response Not that I'll let that shut me up or anything.. Mark, don't you think banking is failing? And I agree with Steve--large organizations are not good, nor representative, examples of adaptation. Smaller companies represent a much larger % of the population, and although they have fewer resources, they are definitely more agile (and perhaps more eager to adopt more cost effective/streamlined processes). As you noted, organizations typically only adapt out of necessity. It takes larger organizations longer to feel the necessity. I would argue that there ARE learning organizations and that there ARE companies that have fully integrated/adapted to new tools like Yammer...but its more likely that they are 4-40 person companies and not 400,000 person organizations. That doesn't mean that the case studies are any less valuable... Its the same issue with virtual worlds...necessity begets innovation which begets adoption which begets adaption...but without necessity, and the identification of that necessity, no one's experimenting, let alone adapting. They'll just ask for more meetings, or a faster horse

I'm certain Mark's being sarcastic I may not have been clear in my support for Mark's big point -- which is that established organizations (big or small) don't simply "adapt." They're browbeaten into change, generally, until they have no choice but to change or perish. This is one reason why so many small (and large) businesses fail.

Let's say I really like Aaron's We/They/Us/Them dynamic. Of course I agree that smaller companies adapt faster - because to Koreen's point - they'll also die faster if they don't. And of course I think banking is failing - the "too big to fail" quote is in reference to the government's propping up of what would now be dead companies, thus denying corporate evolution its due and slowing the flow of capital from creative, innovative companies by forcing that capital to pool in a collection of Jurassic dead-pool wannabe's. I guess my initial point was that I don't think we have decades to achieve the next transformation in the workplace.

Yeah but another reason (among many others) that businesses fail is that they make decisiosn for short term gain (and shareholder gratification) rather than longer term strategy and planning. GM and Chrystler, the banks, the mortgage industry and others screwed themselves through short-sighted decisions for a quick buck today. "You have to grow or you are dying" appears to be the mantra. Well, up to a point sure. but if you only care about growth, share price and how to pay inflated CEO salaries you have a very flawed business. ... apparently one of Chrystler's considered strategies (according to some expert on Public Radio) was to 'grow out of trouble'. Grow? Today? Where? How? But in terms of adoption of new technologies, corporates have an obvious bind, as we all know. Technology costs lots of money. They are 'forced' to buy low-budget equipment that's 2 or 3 years behind the current 'standard' and then try to eek it out for 3 or 4 years before again buying in 'new' equipment. They are scared to upgrade to the latest OS or hardware, because they cannot afford the downtime of new, unreliable equipment - and the training it takes to get less-then-geeky staff trained to use it. The knock-on effect of this is that even the most progressive corporation is always going to appear to be 2, 3, 4 or even more years behing the current vogue or the eager tecchies like us and our peers. So Twitter, or Yammer or whatever might one day sweep across the corporate world ... but not before about 2011 or 2012.

Okay... so we're all pretty agreed that organizations need to transform NOW, and not later. What are the arguments we're facing, and what are we doing to deconstruct those arguments that's actually working or at least sticking?

I started the conversation about 'new technologies about 18 months ago when I joined my current employer. In various ways that conversation has continued and flowered across the manager, director and C-level leadership since then. I'm not trying to say I instigated the conversation, by the way. It was undoubtedly already on the move when I joined. Last fall, a company-wide announcement went out 'we are now a learning company and you are all responsible for your own learning, sharing your knowledge and skill, mentoring etc. So you should be utilising (add your own list of old and new tools here, including 2.0 and beyond) to make it so' Obviously I paraphrased a bit Part of my role is to invstigate, evaluate and evangalise new tools like Wikis etc. so I'm involved in the implementation stage of this 'learning company' drive. The company *is* adopting Wikis and social learning, etc. and itt will take time - more than I prefer to see. But the change is being driven from the highest level. It helps that our leadership appears to be all under 50 (there may be exceptions) and also that we are small (200++ employees), but we are part of the health insurance industry which is not known for being progressive, so in some ways we will be pulling our customers along with us - especially in the training arena. It's an exciting time, but I think it will be 3 years before we will see the real fruits of our efforts ... by which time our conversations here and elsewhare will be about as-yet-unrealised tools and technologies and my employer will be playing catch-up again

#1 Objection = FEAR Fear of loss of control (when they're not really controlling it anyway), fear over people saying something wrong/secret (when that's not really a new vulnerability if they already have email), fear over a collapse of traditional construction of expertise.....

Another objection...cost. Too high, too low...doesn't matter. Ties into Mark's #1 objection of fear...but its the one they'll say instead of admitting to fear. so how do you combat the cost obstacle when its really masking the fear obstacle? "too high"= tricky, but you have to break it down...yes, ROI is tough to measure, but some people have done it for some of the apps out there, and more data is emerging. "too low"= i find this ridiculous, personally, but...its still a perception problem. again, i think you combat this with data on value. this just gave me an idea for another string

My concern with Steve's org is the "you're on your own". We shouldn't expect adequate self-learning skills (the evidence is against it), and we should take responsibility for learning skills, explicit cultural values, and more. I do believe it's a critical time for orgs to wake up, and the evidence is that it's not happening fast enough, but I can't seem to get to the right level to make the obvious pitch. Sigh. Trainers are either on board or not, but it's their managers, and the Directors/VPs.../CLOs that need to smell the coffee. Today, I heard from Adam Nelson of Linden Labs that CIOs are the source of most initiatives in strategic knowledge/learning. Glad someone's doing it, but wish it was someone who understood learning....

It's funny, Clark, that you mention the idea of 'who' is driving knowledge/learning initiatives. I was just reading an article (and if I could remember where it was at, I would add the link - someone really needs to come up with a better way of managing bookmarks, any ideas?) written from the IT standpoint. The article essentially blamed learning departments (AKA HR) for hijacking most of these sorts of projects. The article went on to suggest that IT organizations were best for these types of projects because they had "better project managers" and "people who were better at thinking logically" (in terms of system architecture). I really need to find that article. Anyway, I think this brings up another one of the obstacles we face - the idea of ownership. I know we faced this fight a few times at my former employer. Unfortunately, if the project didn't deal with a 'class' we got little respect in terms of our input to the greater good. I think that perception was changing, but there was still a long road to haul. It had been at a point where we were doing our own grassroots experiments just to test theories and prove we could actually impact organizational performance outside the classroom. So given this environment, how do you get all of the 'interested parties' to play nice and recognize the greater good?

"My concern with Steve's org is the 'you're on your own'. " Nothing could be further from the truth! I was trying to be brief - plus I am seriously hopeless at corporate-speak so I don;t sell this stuff well. I'm a second-rate developer with a big mouth and a bigger nose We have a number of things going on like Talent Managment, Learning on Demand, Bonus Goals, Job Specific Outcomes, Mentoring (I could go on, but ...) that make it absolutely clear that "you are on your own" is never true. The Direcors and Managers not only set learning goals, but ask associates to set their own. We have self-assessment, peer assessment and more to help everybody understand strenghts, weaknesses, oportunities etc. Frankly, since I spend half my life on the Web 'researching stuff' I find most of it irrelevant for me - and much of it I find too 'corporatey' for my personal taste. But it's not about me, or any other individual. The point is that the company provides all the tools, encouragement and support that it can imagine to maintain a healthy, happy, motivated, learning, forward-thinking, progressing bunch of people. The company's motivations are to capture and retain existing knowledge and expertise (through blogs, wikis etc.) whilst also sharing that expertise (mentoring etc.) to improve the knowledge, skill and motivation of everybody. The company knows full well that if they get this wrong, the entire training budget will be spent on on-boarding and introductory skills since everybody bails after 18 months to 2 years these days if they are not suitably motivated and rewarded... don't they?

John, that's the point: who *should* own it. PM and logic we ought to have, understanding learning they shouldn't and we should. Steve, that *sounds* great. is it working? Does the org really create a positive learning culture. It sounds like it's right, so I'm curious if that's your perception. If so, you're *way* ahead of the curve.

Clark - still early days yet, but I do think it is working. Frankly, though, it is going to be 3 to 5 years before the results are conclusive, becuase many of the current initiatives are going to take a while to get up to speed. I absolutely believe we are *trying* to do the right thing and I believe we are taking a great approach. I don't meet a lot of cynicism, but then I'm also a remote worker (as is about 50% of the learning team), so in many ways I am isolated from the company's culture.

I like the question of who *should* own these initiatives, because it seems every organization is different. Often things start in IT, but die there...either out of lack of interest in other areas of the org, or because the IT department doesn't do a good job evangelizing. Things that start in training have the content and maybe the context...but then implementation barriers can take over if IT doesn't feel they *own* it. Anyone know of any good balance of these issues for implementation/support?

#2 Objection: Compatibility w/ existing systems. I think we, as promoters of this new environment, need to bring an awareness and maybe a plan to the table about how we can integrate the new systems we're pushing with existing POS's like LMSs and the like. (its fear again really)

A couple thoughts on compatibility... First, its #3 (cost was #2). Second, this is trickier than just simply figuring out how to integrate...so many companies I've worked with have existing systems, but aren't using them well (eg, J & J pretty much just scrapped using their LMS system and have found all kinds of work arounds to avoid it). Lots of reasons for this, obviously, but my point is that its not always the right answer to integrate with existing systems to facilitate organizational adoption. Sometimes existing systems can't support, or integrate with, new technologies--either because they are too archaic or promote "old" thinking, etc. That's why the new is so disruptive, right? That said, obviously if an existing system is working well, its a good plan to figure it out. But too often organizations keep throwing good money after bad as a crutch or because they already spent $X. Our purpose should be to show how the new adds value through improved processes, time savings, improved communication, direct cost savings, increased sales...and help facilitate the intrinsically disruptive nature of "the new."

*Who should own these initiatives?* If there is not a clear and comfortable partnership between IT and {insert the name of your learning group here} then new initiatives like Wikis or Yammer etc are bound to fail. Neither 'side' should have clear ownership, although logistically there may be a requirement to have a project lead who sits on one side or the other. I'd personally prefer to see ownership reside with someone who is not biased towards either side - someone who's motivation and role is bound firmly to the *learner*, not the teacher or the technology enabler. That someone probably needs a comfortable grounding in both IT and Learning, but does not necessarily have to be expert in either ... which probably means most of us and our peers might just qualify :-)