August 5, 2008

“free the battery humans!’

4 Comments

What the heck, I know I men­tio­ned this in pas­sing ear­lier today, but I liked this one so much I thought it worthy of its own blog post.
The uber-intelligent Lee Byant from Headshift left a great com­ment in my “Cloud Bott­le­necks & Huma­ni­fi­ca­tion post:

Hi Hugh,
I agree that the twin cha­llen­ges of de-commoditisation and huma­ni­sa­tion are part of the key to com­pa­nies like this deve­lo­ping the kind of new rela­tionships we all want to see.
You have tried the blue mons­ter thing, which is a kind of inter­nal adver­ti­sing cam­paign, to gal­va­nise peo­ple inside large com­pa­nies. I think we need to com­ple­ment this with a num­ber of other tech­ni­ques to huma­nise the orga­ni­sa­tion and take inter­nal brand enga­ge­ment to a new level if we are to move for­ward.
I wrote a lon­gish post about this recently based on a talk I gave at Reboot: http://www.headshift.com/blog/2008/07/free-the-battery-humans.php

Thats the slide deck from Lee’s talk above. What a fabu­lous ope­ning image. I wish I had been there to hear him speak:

What these three dimen­sions have in com­mon is their depen­dence upon the peo­ple inside the busi­ness. By ele­va­ting the indi­vi­duals in the orga­ni­sa­tion above sys­tems, and by re-balancing the rela­tionship bet­ween peo­ple and pro­cess, we can create a social fabric that lives and breathes the values that large com­pa­nies are trying to ins­till in their orga­ni­sa­tions. We have the tools and the ideas to do this in ways that were not pos­si­ble before, and we are in a posi­tion to finally move beyond Tay­lo­rism and the fac­tory model to a new era of genui­nely people-powered orga­ni­sa­tions and net­works. We know how to create rich and pur­po­se­ful social net­works as vehic­les for colla­bo­ra­tion and co-operation. We know how to aggre­gate ideas and nego­tiate com­mon lan­guage to create bet­ter forms of infor­ma­tion orga­ni­sa­tion and retrie­val. We know a lot more about what is pos­si­ble when peo­ple trust each other by default; and we also know a lot more about how to engage in debate and deli­be­ra­tion with peo­ple who agree with us and peo­ple who do not.

Yeah, I agree with Lee. Affec­ting real change inside a large com­pany requi­res more than just a mad, blog­ging car­too­nist ran­ting away from somewhere out in dee­pest, dar­kest West Texas.
The fact is, this stuff is REALLY hard. Even if the com­pany WANTS to change. But that’s what makes it so damn inte­res­ting. Rock on.

4 Responses to ““free the battery humans!’”

  1. RKR says:
    August 5, 2008 at 6:01 pm

    To over sim­plify my point of view, (as I usually do):
    Most cor­po­ra­tions are a for­tress full of mana­gers who like to kill the messengers…

  2. knackeredhack says:
    August 6, 2008 at 3:15 am

    Lee’s essay was fas­ci­na­ting for its breadth and depth. I’d recom­mend Gerd Gigerenzer’s work on heu­ris­tics in this con­text. He speaks to the areas of decision-making under con­di­tions of uncertainty/complexity, how to create effec­tive colla­bo­ra­tion, the role of lea­dership and par­ti­cu­larly the impact past lea­dership can have on cor­po­rate cul­tu­res long after an exe­cu­tive has depar­ted.
    Short-termism, which is the enemy of colla­bo­ra­tion and a more expan­sive rela­tionship bet­ween cor­po­ra­tion and staff, often starts with the need to hit quar­terly ear­nings tar­gets and how the CEO ope­ra­tes tac­ti­cally ver­sus stra­te­gi­cally in that con­text.
    Diverse groups and hiring more unortho­dox emplo­yees are shown to trump more con­ven­tio­nal approaches in the lon­ger term, but both require more deft mana­ge­ment and bed­ding in. So in hiring, too often the line mana­ger expec­ta­tion is for peo­ple to hit the ground run­ning and the can­di­date choice in effect is sub-optimal. Busi­ness schools too have ten­ded to breed con­for­mity of approaches.
    Tim

  3. deannie says:
    August 6, 2008 at 5:12 am

    I enjo­yed the slide pre­sen­ta­tion but slide #15 has me stum­ped — what does this mean: “con­su­me­ri­sa­tion of enter­prise IT is our chance to think about codifyng new human, con­nec­ted values for the future”.
    In any case, it is truly the rare team or even indi­vi­dual in my sphere that is even inte­res­ted in the con­ver­sa­tion, let alone con­tem­pla­ting making any subs­tan­tive change for the very rea­son you state: This is hard!

  4. Lee Bryant says:
    August 12, 2008 at 6:25 am

    Thanks Hugh and Hi.
    Dean­nie: the phrase you quote basi­cally means that the pro­cess of con­su­me­ri­sa­tion of IT (ie back­ward inter­nal IT cul­ture being influen­ced by more rapid change in the con­su­mer sphere) pre­sents a unqiue oppor­tu­nity for us to embed bet­ter, more human values in the next gene­ra­tion of inter­nal IT sys­tems and thin­king. Hope that helps a bit. It is sad that peo­ple in your sphere are not inte­res­ted in the con­ver­sa­tion. I think the change is hap­pe­ning, but every­body has their own rea­sons or dri­vers for adoption.