The short answer to the question is that the transitions happen badly today. The keyboard still remains the primary interface for converting off-line conversations into on-line knowledge. Of course, it isn’t really the keyboard, ultimately it’s the human that makes the conversion between the two worlds take place. That brings a good deal of fallibility to the process, but it is also what makes it inherently personal, human and social, and what makes social software so well suited to tackling the issue.

Blogs and Wikis have long been used to capture the essence of meetings and events, to make them more broadly available to the organisation – although I continue to be shocked by how few meetings are minuted, or even have actions recorded (as Penny was). Milestone Planner has made that process a habit for me – typing a line of text and clicking on an avatar is all it takes to record an action. The simple act of creating a digital record of the off-line event has a dramatic impact on the likelihood that it will be followed up and actually happen. When that action is ‘socially’ accountable – by being made visible on-line to others – the likelihood goes up even further (that’s one of the main concepts behind Milestone Planner).

The interface between on-line to off-line data has also been a narrow one. The office printer is still the main way that digital assets get back into the physical world. There is the occasional nod to the meeting room projector, that makes our PowerPoint creations appear as a fleeting flash of light, but the piles of printed paper that seem to gather by any office printer bear testament to the device’s dominant role in creating ‘real’ things from our digital machinations.

The narrow paths between on-line and off-line in the business world seem ridiculous when you look at the technology we actually have at our finger tips: Phones to capture pictures and video, or even audio, conference call systems that can record and transcribe speech, virtual world environments, speech to text software, augmented reality, … the list goes on. Many business folks are already using these tools – mostly the ones that move in social media circles I note! – but they are a tiny minority in a sea of literal monotony.

Mobile devices, be they phones or tablets, have a central role to play in smoothing the transition between the on-line and off-line lives of business data. That is partly due to the amount of technology they pack into one space, but it is one of the things to fall out of the inherently personally nature of the interface between the two worlds: Mobiles are inherently personal, privatised and individual. We keep them with us, much more than laptops, and they have a much better sense of our place and identity, through features such as GPS, and their ability to create and store video and photos that represent our daily experiences.

Unsuprisingly then, mobile devices have lead the charge in enabling better ways of switching between the two worlds. Possibly one of the most clunky ways this is happening is in the use of QR codes, little square of digital magic that can be printed, then viewed by reader software and used to jump to a web page. Though many question their usefulness, 14 million Americans in the month of July used a QR code – that’s a lot of interactions. Where do they fit into the business process? How about putting a QR code on a meeting room door, with a link to the on-line booking system, or adding them to your meeting documents to give attendees a link back to the project plan or documentation? Although they are effectively a progression from bar codes, they don’t have to be boring. The built in error correction allows marketers and designers a lot of creative freedom.

QR Codes are just one way that the divide is being bridged, there are plenty more exciting ones. On one side, virtual reality systems have been building out from the virtual world, on the other, augmented reality systems have been building out from the physical world. The main thrust of a recent Digital Surrey event at CSC’s offices was that the two will become increasingly blurred. Businesses like Layar have be creating digital layers of information over the physical world, so that you can interact with information around physical objects. You might already have seed the Arcade Fire video, that has a great example of using video and HTML 5 to create a personalised video that draws in the physical world. Another example is Blue Mars Lite, a 3D virtual world platform that draws on Google’s street view data. It enables you to gather people into a virtual space, based on a real world environment, and chat and explore that space online.

Social technology, and the developments around it, can blend on and offline, easing business processes and making them both more human, and less fallible. So much valuable business information is still transient and offline – corridor conversations, customer meetings, conference calls. The majority of that information is undiscoverable , unsearchable, and ultimately lost - those who couldn’t be right there, right then, loose the benefit of the interactions, often resulting in repeated conversations and decisions made with inaccurate or out of date knowledge. To paraphrase an old sci-fi programme: We have the technology to fix this, we can rebuild it. The barriers are not the technology any more, they are resistance to change, and a lack of application.

There is a lovely video from Microsoft doing the rounds, which paints a picture of better ways of interacting with devices:

I have to admit to being a bit disappointed to see a QWERTY keyboard in the video, but other than that, it is an exciting vision.  As Steve commented during the event “Providing a friction free way for teams to collaborate significantly increases likelihood that they will do so.” - We are already starting to experiment with the ways touch can be used to create better business applications, and in the next few weeks we’ll be adding QR code support to aspects of what we do here. There is much to be done!

There were some great discussions at this week’s TVSMC meet up about observing and visualising work, particularly in talking with Simon Bostock. The challenge is that “knowledge work” isn’t as visible as “traditional work.” If I am ploughing a field, it is pretty obvious when I am half way through, and it is also obvious to my boss that I’ve ploughed half a field – or not ploughed half, if you are a glass half-empty type! Knowledge work doesn’t play that way. There are some great insights via a post from Jim McGee, although I’d beg to differ on a few points. Specifically, I believe that social technology can help to restore the organisational learning that has been lost in the transition to knowledge working, and that we can actually visualise our workload.

Will You Get  it Done?

Since we added the new dashboard into Milestone Planner, I’ve noticed an interesting change in the way that I work, and view work. There’s a couple of powerful, but not immediately obvious, things about the three stacks: completed, in progress and not-started/upcoming. At the Milestones Level, I can tell if I am in trouble or not. In my dashboard here, it’s pretty obvious I am in trouble!

I’ve completed 5 milestones in the last week (the default range of the dashboard), I have 39 due now, and 33 due soon. So, my historical work rate is 5 milestones per week – If there are more than that upcoming in the next week, then I am clearly in a spot of bother! That’s assuming that the Milestones require the same level of effort of course, and here is where the second set of stacks comes it - actions. At the actions level I am doing pretty well. I’ve burnt my way through 34 actions in the last seven days, I am working on 18 in progress, and I have 48 not started. The ratio between completed and In Progress does suggest I’ve probably got a few too many on the go at once, and the ratio between the number of upcoming Milestones and actions not started suggests I might want to look at those upcoming Milestones and see if some of them need breaking down into actions.

There’s much more to do of course – and I don’t just mean my work! – but it is interesting how useful visualising our workload can be. Balancing what we have coming up, relative to what we have achieved, is a great way of compensating for the overconfidence bias that all of us have. We can offset how we overestimate our ability to predict future events, but looking at our past performance. Just because you believe that you can do it, doesn’t mean that you can. You really don’t want to end up like the guy in this video!

[Backstory on the video here, with kind thanks to tvsmc regular Alec Muffett, and to Jamillah Knowles]

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some Milestone commitments to renegotiate!

The Harvard Business Review blog has a post on “How To Ignite Creative Leadership In Your Organization” which draws on the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study. The report talks about the rapid escalation of complexity, and CEO’s doubts about their ability to manage it. It’s a time of rapid change for businesses, with global integration causing the world to operate in different ways. From volcanoes to volatile markets, business leaders are constantly being confronted by blind spots.

That doesn’t bother the kind of outcome-based, collaborative leaders we get to interact with. They aren’t phased. The Harvard post puts it like this:

Creativity in this context is about creative leadership — i.e., the ability to shed long-held beliefs and come up with original and at times radical concepts and execution. And this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. We believe, however, that this isn’t about having a lone creative leader at the top but rather about creating a “field” of creative leadership, by igniting the collective creativity of the organization from the bottom up.

We put it like this: Plan across the social networks that exist within your business. Let information and change propagate through them in real-time. Set milestones, aim for them, adapt them, adjust them, put everyone in charge. A “field” of leadership, rather than a point of leadership. In our world, people propagate the key information between plans and projects. People, with the right social tools, do a much better job of getting the right information to the right place, and innovating with it, than any of today’s computing power possibly can.

Creativity isn’t the enemy of good planning, it is its absolute best friend. Back to that Harvard post:

Creative leaders in these firms are more prepared and willing to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To win, they take more calculated risks and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate. They are ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful and are committed to ongoing experimentation with disruptive business solutions.

Frank Kern: Senior Vice President, IBM Global Business Services talks about the background to their report: “We’re entering a pivot point…”

The 2010 CEO Study is here. Of course this isn’t new news. Dr Anne Marie McEwan of The Smart Work Company has been shaping our thoughts on what we can learn from the past for quite some time (Smart Working: Learn From The Past). What makes for good leaders hasn’t changed. What is different is that technology is moving from being a barrier to good leadership to being an enabler. Here’s to creative (and collaborative) leadership.

It was a far cry from the ‘fluffy’ end of Social Media, instead the conversation was grounded and practical. It was fantastically well run, with a format that mixed presentations with panels, lunch-time discussions and theopportunity for one to one discussion. It even managed to highlight a number of local charities in the format. A huge amount came out of the day, but for this post I’ll focus on the things that most directly impact what we are doing here at SocialOptic. Much of the press coverage around social media has been on the consumer space, so it was refreshing to have a lunch hosted by Madlen Nicolaus of Kodak that focussed on social media in the field of Business to Business. With people like Stuart Baines of Futurity Media, Yann Gourvennec and Adam Tinworth around the table, ideas flowed. Three key bullet points for me were:

• Think about your use case. Are you looking for new uses for an existing product, or new customers? They require different strategies.
• Social media can be used to augment market research, but what people ask for and what they will buy are very different. The need for product management skills has increased, not decreased.
• Is your business the right focus for building a customer community? Sometimes it is better to support an existing topical community and be part of that. Any one product is just a small part of a business person’s life.

Something that, for me, there isn’t enough discussion about is using Social Media inside of the business, and as part of the business processes for internal and external communication. I might have a slight bias (given that we see Milestone Planner as social software), I think it provides one of the biggest returns for business. Olivier Blanchard’s keynote: ‘Integrating People-to-People’ did an excellent job of providing an integrated look at a potential operational framework for social media, which Olivier has blogged about here. I joined Oliver for a panel, moderated by Andrew Gerrard, with Steve Bridger, myself and Gabrielle Laine-Peters. It was interesting that, while we all have wildly different perspectives, our thoughts and conclusions were broadly the same. The key notes for me were:

• The age of Social Media means thinking differently about who you hire. On the one hand, as I often repeat, we are all in PR now, and on the other, collaboration trumps management in an innovative business.
• Social Media isn’t just about marketing, it is about all forms of communication, from customer service to facilities management. Tactical use of the technology can miss the major benefits.
• Leaders need to give staff ‘permission to act’. Demanding that employees use social media, while punishing them for doing so, is never going to have a constructive outcome.

There is a long way to go in understanding how the use of social media is changing employees expectations around communication, and a huge depth of opportunities for the use of the technology. Like Minds provided a great framework to think about both of these and some steps forwards. I am sure it will be driving many of the milestone updates in our plans, and posts on our internal blog for a good while to come! Thank you to Scott and Drew, the attendees, those that watched on line and to the speakers and panellists.

That was the topic for my talk at Social Media in Enterprise (#SMiE) at Cass Business School – with much thanks to David Terrar and Alan Patrick for putting on a great event.

Recently someone said to me “Two types of people look at you funny.” – those two types of people being undertakers and psychologists. The sad thing is that most businesses would rather see an undertaker than a psychologist, even though the heart of all of their business problems is people-related. Worse still, when businesses look to deploy social media or any other form of collaborative technology, they tend to tackle the technical-feature decisions, rather than the social-people ones. If you approach social media without the psychology, you just end up with the media – you may as well just pay your staff to watch TV. And, sadly, that’s what many businesses do with their communications – they broadcast information out, and don’t build in the vital return paths that provide the business intelligence that is needed to excel.

Is your business social? Or is it anti-social?

A distinction has to be made between process-centric and knowledge-centric businesses. All organisations feature both aspects, but the balance is radically different. For example, a manufacturer of commodity items in a market with little competition will tend to be highly process-centric. It is all about doing the same thing, those processes, faster and cheaper. Better and smarter would be good, but it isn’t mandatory. At the other end of the scale, a market analysis company in a highly competitive market is highly knowledge-centric. Cheaper and faster might be good in such an environment, but ultimately better and smarter win out. In a knowledge-centric business informal communication is a key component of value creation. As soon as you define that informal communication in its context you are talking about social interaction. The leap to seeing the business value of social software isn’t a big one, but before we go there it’s worth pondering the social nature of business a little further.

Hired for a purpose or for a higher purpose?

Even a cursory perusal of the literature that covers running a successful business is likely to convince you of one thing: Businesses that succeed, and continue to succeed, are driven by a big vision that reaches beyond the walls of the business itself, and towards some higher (social) goal. I challenge anyone to name many successful business where the initial staff were hired just to do a job. From Cisco Systems to Zappos, from Google to Innocent, you will find companies full of motivated staff who spend most of their time more convinced that they are changing the world than changing the balance sheet. Before you join, invest in or do business with any company, ask these questions:

What is the (social) purpose of the business? How does it contribute to society? How does it support community?

The answers will tell you more about the health of the business than any annual report. Businesses are, and have always been, social. Business leaders may have lost sight of the imperative need for a social purpose in recent decades, but consumers are marching to remind them that the right to make money is predicated on the responsibility to serve the society which the business is, in reality, totally reliant on. It has always been so. The social enterprise is not a new concept, and while Cadbury may now be Kraft, a new generation of socially aware businesses is starting to spring forth. Now, before I get accused of being a hippy, let me be the first to point out that running a business is fundamentally about bringing in the cash. However, the permission to make money is granted by the customers and their influencers (society and societies). Ignoring that is a guaranteed path to failure.

Does money grow on trees – or in networks?

Whenever someone engages with a new business, there is the inevitable, and sensible, desire to know how it works. What baffles me is that more often than not, the answer to such enthusiastic enquiries is to thrust an org chart into the inquisitor’s hands. Never, in my entire life, has one of these curious artefacts reflected the current employee reporting chain in any business with more than a dozen or so staff. Even if, by some miracle of information engineering, it did, that would still tell me precious little about how the day-to-day operations of the business proceed. That branch of the tree diagram on the right, that seems to have a cluster of titles related to accounting – do those individuals just spend their days talking to themselves, never interacting with the other parts of the organisation? Of course not. A functioning business is a network of people connected by communication channels and focussed around projects (points of purpose), documents (information) and meetings (interactions). It’s not about individuals, as much as an organisation may build its policies that way, it is about teams and teams of teams. It’s social.

Belief is the first step to behaviour

Social systems require trust, purpose and commonality to persist. They require other things too, but these three are key health indicators. Without trust factions form and fiefdoms emerge. Without purpose effort is applied in conflicting directions, or not at all, leading to dissipation and disillusionment. Without commonality, the social mesh is fractured and broken by misunderstandings. I’m sure you’ve never worked in a business that has been wrecked by fiefdoms, dissipation and continual misunderstandings, but let’s say that you have a friend who has. Now you know why. Putting the ship right requires changing what people believe, and that isn’t easy. And yet “just believe” seems to be the leading business case for most social software in business. That’s no way to make a business case. This is business, and it’s all about the Benjamin’s. Changing what people believe starts there. However, I have an issue with “ROI”. I’ve run a billion dollar P&L, which carried the joyous privilege of having to review ROI-based business cases every week. The problem? Randomly Ordered Integers, the lot of them. Admittedly they were sometimes created with passion and care, but every existing ROI spreadsheet is a case of garbage in, garbage out – or as one fellow exec put it “a barrel load of assumptions carefully chosen and arranged to summon up the letters Y, E and S.”

Let’s start with a different question: Where is the intellectual property in your organisation? If it is a knowledge-based business, a good guess is that it is in the heads (and conversations) of employees and buried in inboxes on laptops. Just before you say “but it’s on the server,” what’s the size limit on your employee’s mailbox? And where does it go after that? This is the fate of enterprise 1.0 software and mobile email. Email has to be one of the singularly most inefficient ways of moving information around a network of people. Almost any tool that frees employees from unproductive hours tending to their inbox will pay for itself in weeks. If it can rescue the millions of dollars worth of information that is lost each time an employee leaves an organisation, through the information that walks out of the door in their heads and the email archive that becomes deleted or inaccessible once they leave, you have a gold mine. That’s the ROI.

“Are you here to set up the socialist system?”

Neatly filed under “you couldn’t make it up,” the cordial greeting from an employee at a recent customer – “are you here to set up the socialist system?” – I wish I could claim to be such an idealist, but actually I was just there to train a few people to blog. This is about software, not politics, but social software deployments often cause more politics than an election campaign. Effective social software distributes communication across the human network. In doing so it can wipe out the power-bases of middle managers and those that exercise influence through the creation of information vacuums. Those folks are smart enough to spot the change coming and don’t take kindly to it. That’s no reason to avoid social software though. The scarcest resource in any business is not financial capital. Financial capital can be created from thin air, at least on a temporary basis (see compound debt products as a proof point). The scarcest resource in any business is human capital. Human capital does not appear from thin air, it has to be attracted, nurtured and maintained. If you can find the right human capital for a business, the financial capital will follow.

Making a change

To break down the fiefdoms and fix the dissipation and misunderstanding requires transparency, an emergent plan and building some common understanding within the organisation. Once these three take root, trust, purpose and commonality will emerge. The challenge is that transparency, emergent plans and common understanding can be highly illusive when all you have are fiefdoms, dissipation and misunderstanding. Time for a plan B. That plan B is to look through the organisation for groups that already exhibit the very behaviour that social media promotes and equip them with the tools. It will usually be in the most innovative areas of the business. Enable the teams and let them lead by example.

Business is changing, and success rests in enabling change to propagate more quickly, and that happens through more efficient human networks. Business is social. It needs social software.

Q: If you gave an infinite number of  monkeys an infinite amount of time, would they reproduce the works of Shakespeare ? A: Now we have the blogosphere, we know that they won’t.

The Internet, or more specifically the Web that runs on top of it, has given hundreds of millions of people the ability to share ideas and thoughts with each other. We are seeing what that means in the public, consumer space, but what does it mean for businesses?

Enter Jemima Gibbon’s new book “Monkeys with Typewriters – Myths and realities of social media at work” . I had the pleasure of being at it’s launch last night, in a packed lecture theatre at Cass Business School. Jemima (@JemimaG) was joined by a panel featuring Euan Semple / @euan, Luis Suarez / @Elsua, and @Suw, chaired by Clive Holtham / @bunhill and with Jemima of course.

The panel was presented with a series of questions, followed by a Q&A with the audience, then a vote on the question – a kind of wireless quiz show for grown ups. I’ll go through the questions, with points from the panel that struck me, and a few points from my own perspective.

Does online social networking during office hours waste valuable working time?

This one is almost an old chestnut. Euan pointed out that we focus on social networking and social media, but don’t question other wastes of time like meetings that don’t come to a conclusion, or time spent writing unused reports. Then there’s the motivation problem, as Suw put it, if employees are wasting time on Facebook, you don’t have a social networking problem, you have an employee engagement problem.

Luis made the business case for social tools in the workplace:  What about wasting time trying to find the right expert? He said that in IBM they found that it could take 2-3 hours. With social networks, they are able to find the right expert in less than 5 mins.

The questions from the floor were pretty supportive of social networking. I actually voted “yes” to the question, simply because the tools are used to waste time – there are employees who will make recreational use of social networking. That doesn’t mean that it should be banned or that the tools are a waste of time, rather that employee engagement should be looked at, and people taught how to use the tools professionally and productively.

Vote Result: 83 Votes with 47% Yes / 53% No.

Is email the best way to share information and ideas?

Luis obviously had a view on this one (Luis / @elsua is most famous for having spent two years working almost totally without email). He made the point that if you reply to emails, you only get more. He went on holiday and had only 4 emails when he came back. That sounds wonderful to me! Suw talked about the ‘interruption’ cost of email – after that ‘bing’ goes off, how long does it take to get back into flow state? We end up like little skinner rats, pressing on the lever (checking email) to see if something nice will have arrived for us with each press of the ‘check button’.

Email is seen as a proxy for productivity – if you get and send lots of email you must be busy – and Suw talked about how email is used by people to cover their rears. Euan argued that it is about self preservation – you need to learn to let things go.

Ask “do I really need to send this email?” – there may be a better way of doing it… …the more I hang out in email the less I get done for myself

Luis

I know from data collected for the Continued Communication research project that only a tiny percentage of users consciously choose what  communications channel they use – people generally respond through the channel that a message was received by: calls with calls, emails with emails. This is one of the reasons we are building tools to keep people out of their inboxes. People prefer to use email, as they perceive it to “not disturb the other person”.

Vote Result:  65% No  – 35% Yes.

I’ll talk about one more question, specifically because it has come up on the blog here before (“Hubs to meshes – Person to Person Management”):

If companies allowed employees to “self-organize” would nothing ever get done?

A wonderfully provocative question, with suitably robust answers from the panel:

“It is not a situation of will anything get done, it is a question of when can we do this across the whole organisation?” @Elsua

Luis painted a very clear picture of how knowledge management is transforming the work place, while Jemima cited the example of The Tuttle Club as a self-organising collective. Suw pointed out that small groups can self-organise easily, large ones cannot. In the end the panel and the audience made a compelling argument against a yes/no answer – it seems to be a matter of individual, role and extent. Euan raised the topic up another level, asking if organisations are tolerant enough of failure?.. One of the characteristics of long-lived organisations is tolerance.

In the end the Vote Result: 80% no, 20% yes, but with quite a lot more abstentions than the other votes!

I think there were a few moments when the audience and the questions got themselves confused between yes’, no’s and double negatives, but it made for a vibrant debate, touching on the many issues that need to be thought through. Biased as I am (I’m featured in the book), I would highly encourage you to grab yourself a copy. Jemima’s writing style is wonderfully engaging and you’ll hear opinions from a broad selection of those active in the space, including Tim O’Reilly of all things Web 2.0 , JP Rangaswami of BT and Lee Bryant of Headshift.

Pictures (CC) Benjamin Ellis

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We are building social software for social business, supporting digital conversations that get more things done.

We’ll share more as it happens, right here.

-Benjamin, Jim and the SocialOptic team.