Thanks for capturing this and sharing, much appreciated!

Scott

The hard bit is getting the communciation right!

It will be interesting to see if flat organisations (and perhaps social media tools?) improve communications. I think they should, but they may also increase vagueness, too. We’ll see!

I think he is absolutely right that if you want the best people, you should pay them sufficiently to make money cease to be the issue. But then, all other things being equal, another organisation could come along and poach your workers (staff, colleagues, coworkers, whoever) for marginally more money. So it doesn’t really change much: in a competitive environment where there is a free flow of people as well as capital, if I can get more money for the same effort, I am likely to do so. And I am not really motivated by money!

There has been a lot over the last couple of years about bankers’ bonuses. I believe that whilst bonuses may not motivate success in a significant fashion, they also act as signals: if you want people who are going to function effectively in what is cut-throat competitive environment, find those who ARE motivated by big bonuses – and hire them. That’s the way the economic model works.

(And hopefully they’ll start adding some ethical tests into the mix as well…)

I do think Pink’s ideas – which are not new, really – could have a big impact on future organisations and their structures – particularly if the fable move towards flat structures with portfolio workers actually happens. If one has a variety of different jobs with different organisations on the go and they all pay roughly the same, how is one organisation going to stand out from the rest? Providing interest through autonomy, mastery and purpose (surely part of Maslow’s higher level needs?) sounds like a good way to do it!

Eaon – I’m heading over to Amazon right now to check that one out. Sounds good.

I especially like your point about describing the problem, not the solution. This harks back to so many other successful approaches like Covey’s “Begin with the end in mind” and GTD’s Natural Planning Model. Not a new idea but a very important one and tools which facilitate this, like Milestone Planner, will make it more prevalent.

We’ve added the word ‘by’ to clarify things a little. We encourage people to thing ‘outcomes’ rather than ‘activities’. As opposed to building a to do list, think about it as build a plan for the things you will have achieved. e.g. “10 new customers signed up”. “new shop front agreed”. It’s a slightly different way of thinking, and helps you achieve more things, with less stress!

Of course, you are free to build your plans anyway you want to! We want milestone planner to be as flexible as possible, but we want our community to be as successful as possible in their businesses too!

Nice one

Robin

I have just started collaborating with somone on a new project plan and they thought my timescales were all late :-p

Hats off to you for doing the right thing, Security vs Usability can sometimes feel like a compromise and the very fact that you are thinking about these things is more than a lot of companies!

you are on the money

and as for gordon:
i played around with high trust games with kids
and belief is a necessary part of it
and when it works
boy it works well

When I say social systems, I am assuming positively functioning social systems. I think we’d agree that a system that has bullying, intolerance and so on is not positively functioning. Those behaviours can be directly put at the feet of a lack of effective relationships and poorly constructed social identities. Broken social systems exist, but that isn’t what we want inside of a healthy business.

Fixing the relational causes fixes the behaviours, which are of course due to the beliefs in the first place – the usual social psychology dualism. Mark shows one half of that dualism in his book, but I think you’ll find that he recognises that the broader academic context supports the other side too. It is a question of degrees and context.

I’d agree “Social media” folk often fail to distinguish between the instrumented relationships found in the work place and traditional friendships (although I worry that the term “social media folk” sounds a little pejorative!). Workplace relationships are different, but they do still fall under the usual work place constructs (both Penn and the University of Surrey have done some good studies).

Social technologies are indeed just another communication channel in some ways. They certainly aren’t inherently democratic (hence my comments about socialism!), and Clay Shirky made some very good observations on that front post US elections. Using the tools is necessary, but not sufficient. There needs to be cultural change along side the deployment of the tools. The amplification provided by social media can be a useful tool to aid that change process. Like all technologies, it is about the execution, not just the tools. Email started out so promisingly!

Then, you say “Social systems require trust, purpose and commonality to persist.” If that were true, phenomena like bullying, intolerance, and gangs would wither away. But they don’t. In many cases, they are sustainable, resilient and contagious. It seems to be a very common failing among “social media” folk that they associate the term with friendship, and trust, and general niceness, but the “social” includes all the ways in which people relate to one another, and organize ourselves into groups.

Social technologies enable us to amplify conversations and reshape communication practices. They dramatically reduce the cost of giving lots of people access to lots of information. But they aren’t inherently democratic and honest, and they need not tip the balance in favour of democracy or honesty.

Patchwork Elephants in the Enterprise Ecosystem On Tuesday night David Terrar and I ran the first Social media in Enterprise session (#smie on Twitter), as part of London’s Social media Week (and Benjamin Ellis took some pictures). We only thought…