Jumping On The Bandwagon, Or Just Cashing In?

How could an article that has such a good title lead to such a tepid conclusion?

Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald,  All Organizations Are Social, But Few Are Social Organizations

News flash: Organizations consist of people. How well an organization works depends on how its people interact and work together. Thus, every organization is “social.” But so what? How do we make use of this universal fact?

Organizations work top down through social interactions structured around the organization chart, or hierarchy. And they work end to end structured around their business processes. These two dimensions — hierarchy and process — shape the way organizations see the world, its challenges and, more importantly, the portfolio of potential solutions to those challenges. There is nothing wrong with hierarchy or process. They are effective organizational approaches to managing complex operations.

But there is a crucial third dimension to organizational effectiveness. We see this when people get things done by working in the so-called “white space” in the organizational structure, or by working across the “seams” of a business process. In their ways of working and connecting with each other, they do more than just what they are told top-down and more than what is defined as their job. This is the social dimension.

Every organization has a social dimension. The challenge is that the social dimension is not accurately reflected in either the organization’s hierarchy or its process flow. For years, social systems were described not as valuable systems to tap into, but as limits on innovation and change. We gave these systems names like culture, core beliefs, norms, tradition, shared thinking, or “just the way we do things around here” — each term describing factors that are so slow to change as to become assumptions that limited either strategy or operations. This was great if you had a positive and successful culture, and a death sentence if you did not. In response, executives relied on organizational command-and-control or process prescription to run the enterprise and effect change because there was no way to readily and repeatedly access the power of the organization’s social systems.

But what if leaders could create a future where customers, associates and suppliers are no longer seen as objects in the system but as valued sources of innovation, ideas and energy? What if they could truly tap into the creativity, knowledge and experience of their organization’s people? What could possibly enable such a transformation?

The answer is social media. And before you roll your eyes, let us say that we know very well that accessing your social potential requires moving beyond simple social media solutions such as blogs, wikis, etc., to truly changing the way your organization works. This means becoming a social organization.

A social organization mobilizes its people — from associates to customers, suppliers and others without regard to hierarchy or position — and their interests, passions, knowledge and experience. Tapping into the collective wisdom of everyone creates a new source of competitive advantage, agility and future innovation.

It seems like the authors are leading us to consider work media — streaming media collaboration tools — as a way to move past hierarchy and processes. This is a message that has been explored by a wide range of other folks, including me:

Stowe Boyd, The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process

Today, the social web is happening, and acting like a solvent on these business constructs: not just superficially, or metaphorically, but at the very core of industrial beliefs. Note: this isn’t just a bunch of humanist rhetoric: the social society is exploding, and new ways of interaction that were unaffordable or impossible before are not only cheap and possible but being adopted widely because of a long list of reasons, not the least of which is simplicity and effectiveness. People are thronging on social sites like Facebook and Twitter because they are a straightforward way to stay connected with others, and this in turn shapes our worldview.

As these new realities percolate in the open web and in the new web-influenced culture, people carry these experiences into the world of business. Indirectly, based on their experience in the open web, which leads them to consider how the social tools could work in the business context. And more directly, some pioneers are dragging social tools into the business context, and seeing where it all goes.

And some, a few, are trying to think through a new model for business, reconstructed around what we have learned in the open web, balanced with what we know about the conduct of business. A new hybrid, intentionally devised to keep the best of the old (or at least the parts that will still work) and fuse that with the new, social models that dominate the web revolution.

From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong. People aren’t really designed to do one thing, like a cog in a watch. They have various relationships with other people, and through these relationships they have influence on the work going on all around them. They are not alone, like a moth in a bell jar. We are not alone, in our work. Even the most repetitive of work — screwing bolts on an assembly line, or delivering the mail — happens in the context of other people, and is made more valuable by their exertions.

Increasingly, people’s work is being viewed as a shared aspect of social relations. Time is a shared space, where we cooperate toward shared ends.

One casualty of this large-scale shift in business doctrine may be the hallowed business process. The notion of a process — a defined series of steps in the production of goods or the delivery of services — subordinates individuals to their roles in the process.

For decades, business planners have made a distinction between repetitive, lock-step processes, where very little variability is involved (think pharmacy), and more free-form, unstructured processes where a higher degree of variability is expected (think emergency room). Taking the abstraction of a process out of the world of chemistry, manufacturing, and logistics, and treating the people involved as so many chemicals, gears, or trucks seemed like a good idea in the past, but is not going to be workable, going forward.

We will have to devise a new, richer way to think about people’s interactions — via social networks — and our connection to mechanical processes and devices. In effect, we will need to model work with two layers, one where people are communicating with each other in a very fluid and flexible way, and another where machinery communicates with us and other machinery in less fluid ways. Some of these communication paths will be very limited, like a copier blinking to represent it is out of paper. But increasingly, even machinery is becoming much more communication-rich, and the way that machines respond to the world is surprisingly humanlike: coke machines that signal their internal state, like temperature, and the fact that there are only two Sprites left, or cars that will automatically start to brake if they sense no hands on the steering wheel.

More importantly, the customers in the emerging social world will have new expectations about their role in business ‘processes’ and may be significantly less willing to be treated like pigeons pecking at levers in exchange for pellets.

I am just surprised that the Gartner guys didn’t actually say ‘social network’ even once. They talk about social media, but maybe it’s too touchy-feely or consumerish to learn from what is working on the open web. It looks like these guys are just trying to cash in on the ‘social business’ meme without having much new to offer.