There are a lot of web 2.0 offerings out there -- many of them enable some form of social networking. Many provide specific help for some customer relationship management. These are good things. But if you look at business as a whole, there has not been a revolution to move us toward working together online. (This has happened much more in the music and shopping arenas, and in sites like Facebook and Linkedin.) We rate things and build communities around favourite bands or products, but our customers share their thoughts about us a lot more than we share our thoughts about what we are or ought to be doing.

The organizational world needs more interaction. People work in remote relationships much of the time; large organizations need to gather opinion from diverse elements -- in order to get closer-to-the-customer information and in order to generate innovation. They also need to make sure that there is sufficient connection and exchange of thought so that there is alignment of purpose and understanding of critical issues. One U.S. motto, e pluribus unum, means 'out of many, one.' That is, from our diversity may we make a single entity, or take unified stance.

 In order to generate this strength as teams evolve into dispersed geographical webs, we need to have mechanisms for channeling the flow of ideas and the direction of effort in such a way that the many contribute to and understand the one. This is why it is necessary to connect the different parts of the organization or team in a way that encourages ongoing, neural exchange of critical ideas. I'm thinking of both formal structures like online meetings or task lists, and of informal gradually-developed work areas for sharing emerging issues.

At GroupMind, we think of interaction as participating in building a larger intelligence. Every little piece adds more shape to an emerging whole, that only becomes clear through the swarm of various bits of information and viewpoint, sticking together so that the group can make sense of it.

 

I saw a phrase in a blog comment recently: "If you can't see how people react to an action, you won't know how to improve." We talk a lot about setting up the conditions to find out what people are really thinking. --- I'm just wondering... are these the same issue?

The impetus for this musing is my digestion of the Web 2.0 issues that are all around lately. I take web 2 to mean not the cool bells and whistles, but rather the ability of the group to add value to the content. This means many things: the accrrual of ratings on books or CDs at Amazon, tag clouds or tag sites (deli.cio.us), group accuracy and curiosity over time on Wikipedia, prediction markets, etc.

In our work, this is not so much a public capability as a structured reflection by a selected group of knowlegeable stakeholders. With such a group, we want to get at what they really think about certain key issues. This gets back to that first comment: in order to improve (...the product, the strategy, the work culture) you have to know how people react.

I just did a day-long conference for the Project Management Institute of Silicon Valley .. the issue was the maturity of the field. So one key action of the day was to gather the major challenges from the various participants about what they face in their various organizations. There were 12 tables of members, and each table entered their top issues into the software. We came up with 88 issues, and categorized these into 10 or so major theme areas. We got the tables to prioritize these themes and then to work for a while on one issue from one theme area, and enter their solutions into the respective section for one of the top 4 themes. We ended up with 15 specific ideas for addressing the top challenges from the group.

So this is the idea of gathering what the group is thinking about the key issue of the conference -- the main challenges in developing project management maturity, based on the combined real-world expereiences in many SIlicon Valley organizations, and focusing down on developing some shared solutions to the major issues. Using the collective intelligence of that diverse group to drive the improvement of the field... and doing this through interaction, iteration, drilling down to specifics that came from the group's thinking.

Collective intelligence plays out in the insect and animal worlds, and is described by swarm theory. How bees make a decision on moving to a new home, how ants determine who will do what jobs on a given day, how caribou deploy to move the herd away from a predator wolf -- in all these situations there is no leader or command center, yet the actions of each individual contribute to the survival and effectiveness of the group.

It is the collection and coordination of individual data and action, and interactions through a series of simple rules that give a group its intelligence. See the article by Peter Miller in National Geographic. And there are parallels to our work with collaboration.

Miller ties swarm theory to the use of collaboration for group intelligence, noting that collective processes in which brainstorm-and-voting or prediction markets are used result in accurate election predictions and effective search strategies (Google's ranking.) The wisdom of the group is wider and faster than just a group of "experts" (when the process is set up well.) He quotes Thomas Malone of MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence: "It's now possible for huge numbers of people to think together in ways we never imagined a few decades ago," says Malone. "No single person knows everything that's needed to deal with problems we face as a society, such as health care or climate change, but collectively we know far more than we've been able to tap so far."

"A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do," says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert. "None of us knows what society as a whole needs, but we look around and say, oh, they need someone to volunteer at school, or mow the church lawn, or help in a political campaign."

What can be done to work changes across whole systems?  How can change agents work with issues such as Dispersed Organizations and the Problem of Involvement, Working in Polarized and Politicized Environments, Working in Communities with Diverse Interest Groups, Working Cross-Culturally? These are titles of chapters in Bunker and Alban's Handbook of Large Group Methods.

A conference in late March at Bowling Green State University will address these challenges, using innovative formats for encouraging interaction among the 300 or so participants. Many Organizational Development thought leaders will be there, including Peter Block, Harrison Owen, Juanita Brown, Marv Weisbord, Diana Whitney, the above mentioned authors Barbara Bunker and Billie Alban... as well as many of the 60 authors of the Handbook for Change, edited by Peggy Holman, Tom Devane and Steven Cady.

The NEXUS for Change conference has an online website, which is built on GroupMind Express, so that collaboration can be built into both planning and publicity for the event. Check it out at www.nexusforchange.org.

There is a section on the site where we hosted a 90 min. conversation among thought leaders (Tom Atlee, Jean Bartunek, Nancy Badore, Peter Block, Harrison Owen and Marv Weisbord) and captured audience reaction, as well as graphic recording and blogging of the themes. You can even listen to the PodCast of the discussion.

 

Until February 26, you can download a free copy of Harvard Business Review's survey of Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 here. It includes how nanotechnology will affect commerce, what role hope plays in leadership, and why, in an age that touts accountability, we need to beware of “accountabalism.”

The article includes research on tipping points and a review of issues involved in building successful networks.

This is basic stuff, but it is so easily overlooked in the everyday life of an organization. What do your customers really think? How are the actions of your leadership team perceived by others? Are we going to deliver our next feature or product ontime? Are we on some collision course, and don't know it? Think about your own situation -- how do you get feedback? What information should your organization know, but you don't? Who is going to tell you what you might not want to hear, and how is that going to happen?    more »

I propose a set of simple behaviors that will help to bring focus to any type of online collaboration. These can be remembered as the Rule of Two: they are a set of prescriptions that are easy to do, easy to measure, and in our experience will dramatically increase the probability that your online activity will be successful. Taken together, they will turbo-charge your collaboration, assuming of course that a) you have an important issue to work on together, b) you have support from senior management, and c) you invite the right people to the party.    more »

One of the biggest issues in getting your organization into online work is the mental shift. It isn't just a matter of "doing what we already do, but do it virtually." This shift is one of 

• being clear about the process
• building steps backwards from your desired result
• intentionally simplifying what the group does
• building in feedback cycles.

Most people using collaboration, it seems to me, are doing one of these: running surveys, conducting ongoing discussions, holding online meetings or making a list of tasks. Nothing wrong with this -- but what we advocate is setting up an ongoing workspace, and doing several of these things in context within an organized environment. When you do this, you are more likely to involve your intended audience in meaningful work over time, because you will end up doing more than one mode in order to collaborate effectively. Your people will understand the context, and therefore can be more participative.

One of the largest benefits in working online is that the work is immediately archived -- that is, it is available to everyone, anytime they want to access it. People can refer back to what happened, and the process is transparent. But this also means you need to make it

• easy for them to find, and
• easy to understand in the context of other work that is taking place.

Have simple areas to contain different parts of the work, and show links to what is current. Have one place where the discussion about that work takes place, and make sure someone is actively "gardening" the discussion and the progression of tasks in your process.

Workteam Action Updates:Rivet International, Meridian Resources and the Board of the International Feldenkrais Federation have arranged ongoing work projects around lists of key information, where team leads can update the current status of actions or programs and the entire team can review these at any time.A Regional Economic Commission in Latin America supports dispersed inter-government teams to develop policies and standards for new uses of IT across the region.
Dallas Baptist University runs a graduate level online marketing course in which teams of students brainstorm and prioritize a set of problem solving criteria with which to ...   more »