Organizations in 2002

Research on the Future of Learning and Business

Charles Handy: “Corporations should be membership communities because I believe corporations are not things, they are the people who run them.”

Why should financiers have such power and talk the language of ownership just because they provided the money? People don't own people and corporations are people. It's all part of the Machine Age model.

In order to hold people inside the corporation, we can't really talk about them being employees anymore. To hold people to the corporation, there has to be some kind of continuity and some sense of belonging. We also have to talk about commitment, but we have to talk about it both ways--corporation to member, member to corporation. With the way corporations are evolving--with all this virtual business and all these alliances--my worry is that unless we develop a more sophisticated model of the organization, the corporation will become just a box of contracts with no commitment on anyone's part at all.

john kotter’s new theme: building capacity for change

porous boundaries

virtual watercoolers and tea rooms

Networks

Networks have been with us for a long time. It’s probably how you found your job. We’ve been networking socially since long before the personal computer came along. Once you got the job, your internal network probably became your best source of information. What’s new are local area networks (LANs) and the Internetwork (Internet) which make social networking vastly faster, easier, and more extensive. Electronic networks are so efficient that they by and large eliminated the role of the middle manager.

What do managers do?

Mechanical old job = POEM (Plan, Organize, Execute, Manage)

Organic new job = DNA (Define, Nurture, Allocate)

The Hyperorganization

Just documents have changed from linear, one-step-after-another to jump-around, multi-pathed hyperstructures,

organizations are shifting from rigid hierarchies into loosely linked, flexible hyper-organizations.

Hyperorganizations rearrange themselves to meet demands:

Improving the Capacity to Improve

You’ve heard about how Edward Demming’s work on quality improvement didn’t become mainstream in America until the Japanese applied it successfully. By 2002, competition will drive companies to adopt the processes of another overlooked thought pioneers, Doug Engelbart

Engelbart has been writing about future high-performance organizations, enabling collaborative technologies and practices for knowledge work since 1958. And he is still writing about the future with fresh insights, new paradigms, innovation strategies, architectures, technologies, and inspiration. "Collective IQ."[1] (Engelbart more or less invented the mouse, display editing, windows, outline/idea processing, hypermedia and groupware…by 1956!)

Engelbart foresaw that complexity and urgency were increasing exponentially, and that the product of the two would soon challenge organizations and institutions to change in quantum leaps rather than incremental steps. In addition to aspiring to be increasingly faster and smarter at their core missions, organizations would need to get increasingly faster and smarter at how they kept improving.

“A” is the core business of R&D, manufacturing, marketing, sales – things like making airplanes, healing patients, or giving haircuts.

“B” activities improve how “A” is accomplished – automating functions, streamlining, outsourcing non-core tasks, or upgrading quality processes.

“C" activities – called “bootstrapping” by Engelbart -- increase the effectiveness “B”. The goal is to get better and better at improving the organization’s performance. Examples of bootstrapping include such activities as getting better at scanning the competitive environment; and improving your ability to run pilot programs and projects (for instance, picking the right pilots to get maximum return on investment, getting them up faster, and replicating them better).

The most important "C" activity is to encouraging and funding cross-functional "improvement communities" explicitly charged with working on common challenges to improve improvement.

New levels of collaboration

Moving beyond threaded e-mail and videoconferencing, future collaborative tools will combine historical data, predictive analysis and real-time discussion to create a decision-making process that is more rapid and better informed.

Network bandwidth growth will be multiplied, in effect, by sophisticated compression algorithms and hardware that will make rich media streams fit into available channels. Content analysis tools will make it easier to identify relevant experience and expertise.

Groupware

1960s-1970s: The age of e-mail: Groupware's roots are in mainframe- and minicomputer-based store-and-forward e-mail and conferencing systems, particularly in the academic and research communities.

1980s-1990s: The age of groupware: PCs, networking and common protocols spurred communications inside and among organizations, cc:Mail and Novell's Message Handling Service helped spread e-mail on corporate desktops, while Lotus Notes provided customized programming tools and links to external applications.

1990s-2000: The age of real-time: Groupware has moved to synchronous real-time communications (chat, videoconferencing and application sharing), smashing barriers of time and space and providing the mechanism for major changes in work and lifestyle patterns.

pc week 3/1/99

Groupware

Applications which allow two or more people to work together or as a group. The application can be scaled up to support departments, total processes, or the entire enterprise. Examples of groupware applications are synchronous and asynchronous conferencing, e-mail, group calendaring and scheduling and group document editing and management.

Chris Argyris

Model I is an approach that is geared more to reaching agreement than it is to validating the truth of something at issue. As such, it encourages people to say what they think others want to hear. Since agreement is more important than truth, this model can put an individual, group or organization out of touch with reality. By contrast, under a Model II approach, the parties work hard to have honest communication and to become aligned with reality. Model II rewards tough reasoning that is productive.

Instead of addressing the issues head on, Model I reinforces a defensive approach that avoids confrontation. In fact, it says, that's the way you can show that you are caring and thoughtful. The result is that people do not detect and correct errors. Or they don't get at the important problems that they have in their heads. Samuel Goldwyn, who would say that he wanted his people to tell him the truth even if it cost them their jobs.

Model II is tell it like it is, engage in dialogue. The sacred set of values in an organization are these: valid knowledge, informed choice and personal responsibility to monitor the effectiveness of the effort. It is not happiness, satisfaction, morale and so on.

Evaluation? There are three kinds of actions that we are looking for: 1) Do people advocate? What I'm doing right now is advocating. 2) Do they offer evaluations? "Joe's behavior is poor" or "The marketing department isn't doing well." 3) Do they make attributions? These are statements about causality, assertions that you make about what is motivating somebody else: "I know why they're doing this."

And there are three ways that you can do those things. In Model I, you leave your mark by not illustrating anything that you're saying, by not encouraging inquiry and by not encouraging testing. With Model II, you encourage illustration, you encourage inquiry, you encourage testing.

So we can go to a tape recorder and listen to a discussion involving two people, or 10, and score where these people are. What we find is that the scores are high here and they are in the zeros here. Over time, that begins to change, so that you can begin to measure progress. That's one measure. There are others.

Fad or Milestone?

Year		Innovation	People	Systems
1911	Taylor	“Scientific management”		X
1924	Follett	participation	X
1932	Mayo	Incentives, Hawthorne	X
1943	Maslow	Hierarchy of needs	X
1947		NTL	X
1956	Bray	Assessment	X
1957	MacGregor	Theory Y	X
1958	Skinner	Programmed instruction		X
1959	Hertzberg	Motivation	X
1962	Mager	Instructional design		X
1970	Knowles	Adult learning	X
1971	BCG	2x2 matrix
1973	Military	ADDIE		X
1978	Gilbert	Behaviorism	X	X
1982	Peters & Waterman	Excellence	X
1988		Teams	X
1989	Gery	EPSS		X
1990	Senge	Learning organization	X
1993	Champey & Hammer	Reengineering, downsizing		X
1994	Andreesen	Mosaic, web		X
1995
1996

Modern Terminology

ALPHA GEEK: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in

an office or work group. "Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek around here."

ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and

advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

BEEPILEPSY: The brief seizure people sometimes have when their beeper

goes off (especially in vibrator mode). Characterized by physical

spasms, goofy facial expressions and interruption of speech.

BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was

missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

CHIPS AND SALSA: Chips = hardware, salsa = software. "Well, first we

gotta figure out if the problem's in your chips or your salsa."

CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.

DANCING BALONEY: Little animated GIFs and other Web F/X that are

useless and serve simply to impress clients. "This page is kinda dull.

Maybe a little dancing baloney will help."

DEPOTPHOBIA: Fear associated with entering a Home Depot because of how

much money one might spend. Electronics geeks experience Shackophobia.

(Radio Shack)

FLIGHT RISK: Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning

to leave a company or department soon.

GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same

no matter where one is. "We were so lost in generica, I actually

forgot what city we were in."

GOOD JOB: A "Get-Out-Of-Debt" job. A well-paying job people take in

order to pay off their debts, one that they will quit as soon as they

are solvent again.

IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying,

but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J. trials

were a prime example.

KEYBOARD PLAQUE: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on

computer keyboards.

MIDAIR PASSENGER EXCHANGE: Grim air-traffic-controller-speak for a

head-on collision. Midair passenger exchanges are quickly followed by

"aluminum rain."

MOUSE POTATO: The online, wired generation's answer to the couch

potato.

OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that

you've just made a big mistake.

PEBCAK: Tech support shorthand for "Problem Exists Between Chair and

Keyboard." (Techies are a frustrated, often arrogant lot. They've

submitted numerous acronyms and terms that poke fun at the clueless

users.) Another variation on the above is ID10T: "This guy has an

ID-Ten-T on this system."

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an

electronic device to get it to work again.

PEROT: To quit unexpectedly, as in "My cellular phone just perot'ed."

PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a

cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's

going on.

SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits

over everything and then leaves.

SITCOM: What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them

stops working to stay home with the kids. Stands for Single Income,

Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage.

STARTER MARRIAGE: A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce

with no kids, no property and no regrets.

SWIPED OUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless

because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

TOURISTS: People who take training classes just to get a vacation from

their jobs. "We had three serious students in the class; the rest were

just tourists."

UMFRIEND: A sexual relation of dubious standing. "This is, uh... Dale,

my... um... friend..."

VULCAN NERVE PINCH: The taxing hand position required to reach all of

the appropriate keys for certain commands. For instance, the warm

re-boot for a Mac II computer involves simultaneously pressing the

Apple, Q, and Shift keys. Also known as "The Three-Fingered Salute."

XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's

workplace.

[1] http://www.bootstrap.org/vision.htm

eLearning Executive Sumary Research Notes & Working Papers The Network Age Business People Learning Technology Organizations Knowledge Mangement Decision-Making

© 1999, Jay Cross & Internet Time Group