The “Six Month Rule” of Organizational Change – It’s All Personal!

It is said, “All politics is local.”  Picking up on that aphorism, I think it is equally true that all change is personal.

So Much Known – So Little Followed!

There is a substantial body of research and theory about organizational change management (OCM) dating back to the mid-50’s or even earlier.  Most OCM findings seem to resonate with people who are facing, or who have faced organizational change.  And yet, nearly all of the findings and recommendations from the body of OCM knowledge seem to be woefully lacking when it comes to increasing the success of change management initiatives.  If this were not the case, why do so many change initiatives fail to meet their objectives?

For IT professionals, even the terminology can be confusing!  I had a long, and I thought, enlightening conversation with a CIO some years back about the challenges and importance of managing change.  About an hour into the conversation, it became apparent that he was talking about technical change management – configuration management, release control, testing, and all that good stuff, while I was talking about the so-called ‘soft’ stuff (which is so hard!) of organizational change management!

How Have You Dealt With Change?

Ultimately, to effect change such as that involved in the introduction of a new work process or new tool, or increasing collaboration across silos, or improving team effectiveness, individuals must leave behind habits and behaviors ingrained over many years and adopt new ones.  Think about changes you have tried to make in your personal life – how many have truly succeeded?  Be it weight loss, increased exercise, learning a new skill, or any other change, chances are you’ve had way more more failures than successes.

A couple of years ago, after 60 years of reasonably successful brushing of my teeth (I still have most of them!), my dental hygienist suggested a slight change to my brushing regimen.  This did not require new skills, or new equipment, or any difficult physical movement.  It just required changing a habit of literally, a lifetime.  How long would it take to institutionalize this change – to make the new way of brushing my new habit?

For me, it took concentrated effort for about 6 months for the new brushing regimen to become habit – leading to my “Six Month Rule” for behavior change.  And during that period, I slipped a few times.  I did not suddenly decide to go back to my lifetime’s brushing habit, or decide to give up on the new approach suggested by the dental hygienist – no, I just lost focus in the early am when I got up, or the late pm when I went to bed, and – voila – I was back in the old routine!  It took conscious effort, as well as all sorts of reminders to help me stick with the change long enough for it to become institutionalized!  (For those facing a tooth brushing change, try a piece of string or rubber band around the handle of your toothbrush as a gentle reminder!)

The Six Month Rule – And Why Changes Fail

With business attention spans getting ever shorter, how can an organizational change that will take at least six months to shift behaviors be expected to stick?  No wonder the “this too shall pass’ response to dictated change is so common – by the time the changes may be starting to take hold, top management has moved on to the next big challenge or opportunity!

And my “Six Month Rule” applies to changed behavior demanded of someone who believes in that change.  Supposing for a moment, that my teeth brushing routine change was not something I believed in?  Or that it required I learn a new skill?  Or, as with an adjustment to a golf swing, it actually degraded my golfing abilities while I adjust to the new swing?  (Visions of me walking around with gobs of food all over my teeth, apologizing and explaining, “Sorry about the filthy teeth.  I’m learning a new way to brush – it should all be cleared up by Christmas!”)  It’s no wonder that the response to so many corporate change programs is, “This too shall pass!”

Most of what we do during a day’s work is based on deeply ingrained habit.  It’s not necessarily the ‘best’ way, or even the ‘right’ way – but it’s the way that is familiar too us and, most importantly, predictable.  And it is these deeply ingrained behaviors that are so hard to change and that often derail organizational change initiatives.

Lessons Learned, Questions to Ponder

We can all learn lessons about organizational change management – whether we are leading them or simply participating – by looking into ourselves and identifying what we need to be doing differently, and how are we going to accomplish that.  Achieving change at the personal level is crucial for most corporate change programs.  While it is easy to depersonalize change at work as “something that’s going on around me”, the reality is that if we don’t change ourselves at some deep, personal level, the desired change will not take hold.

So, first ask yourself, “Do I want this change to succeed?  What might be in it for me?  What if it fails – how might I be impacted?  Then, assuming you decide the change is positive, ask yourself, “What do I need to be doing differently?  What will that look like and feel like?  How will I go about making the personal changes happen?  How will I recognize success or failure, and what consequences will I hold over myself?”

Back From My Sabbatical – with Lessons from Rock ‘n’ Roll!

Me with Joey Molland from the band Badfinger at the Cavern, Liverpool

I’m pretty sure nobody noticed the fact that I was ‘off the air’ for about a month.  And I’m certain that nobody cared!  But I did feel guilty, and missed the satisfaction I get from blogging and from engagement with those that leave thoughtful comments or challenge my thinking.

By way of explanation, I took advantage of being between consulting engagements to take some personal time to indulge my alter ego.  While my ‘Dr. Jekyll’ is a relatively staid and introverted management consultant/educator, I have a ‘Mr. Hyde’ who loves nothing more than to strap on a guitar, plug into a gigantic amplifier and loudspeakers (known as a ‘full stack’ in the music business) and make musical mayhem!

I discovered an outlet for my alter ego in 2005 when I was looking for some sort of sabbatical and saw a piece about Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp on a Fine Living Channel broadcast on a Delta flight.  I signed up for the camp and literally found my life changed!  Over 2 or 3 posts in coming weeks, I’ll share some of my lessons learned that I think can be applied to the world of IT management.

Five Days that Changed My World!

That 5-day rock camp in Hollywood, Ca in 2005 had me playing with rock stars including Roger Daltrey (The Who), Jon Anderson (Yes), Dickey Betts (The Allman Brothers), Elliot Easton (The Cars) and many more.  I was teamed up with 5 other campers (who have since become good friends) and we were assigned a ‘counselor’.  This was Kelly Keagy, drummer, singer and songwriter from the band Night Ranger.  Kelly was the creative and singing force behind the rock classic anthem, “Sister Christian” and many other hits.

Our band went to hell and back during the course of a long week, rehearsing from morning till night, jamming with other campers and counselors, and learning about songwriting and the music business in ‘Master Classes’ led by the counselors.  We also learned some fabulous lessons in performance from Kelly.  For example, if a band looks like it’s having fun, so will the audience.  If a band looks nervous and uncomfortable, so will the audience be!

The week culminated in a live performance and ‘Battle of the Bands’ at Sunset Strip’s House of Blues.  The experience was truly incredible – made all the more special as our band won the Battle of the Bands, thanks to Kelly’s remarkable coaching skills.  Also, the whole camp had been filmed by The Learning Channel for a 2-hour documentary shown later that year – to the surprise of many consulting clients who happened to see the TV show, its promos, or its re-runs.  The camp was featured on Good Morning America the morning following the House of Blues performance, much to the amusement of several observant business colleagues who saw the GMA segment but had simply been told I was ‘on vacation.’ (I was rather secretive of my alter ego back then!)

Dr. Jekyll, Meet Mr. Hyde

It’s always amazing to me how apparently unconnected things can suddenly intersect and create new opportunities!  Throughout the several weeks it took to ‘come down’ from the high of the 2005 Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp, I’d been reflecting on how much I’d learned at the camp and what a fantastic incubator for team building it had proven to be.  I also realized  how much more refreshed I felt and more effective I was in my ‘day job.’ As a bonus, I found myself with several ideas about how to build on the camp concept and increase the opportunities for people to experience this amazing event.  I approached David Fishof, the camp’s founder, producer and chief executive and he agreed to meet with me in New York.

David’s immediate reaction at the meeting was that some of my ideas were probably unworkable, but that others had merit.  To cut a long story short, I began working with David and helping create a business plan to expand the camp – geographically (initially it was held twice per year – once in Los Angeles and once in New York) and in terms of concept (e.g., duration, focus).  I found myself meeting with Hollywood producers in Bel Air mansions, and all sorts of interesting characters from the entertainment industry.

The resulting camp expansion has been successful – primarily due to David’s genius as a music producer and promoter – with a TV reality series in the works, regional camps, corporate camps (think about bringing one to your corporate training/motivational event!) and a UK based camp that features one week of recording at the hallowed Abbey Road Studios in London (where the Beatles and Pink Floyd recorded their masterpieces) capped by performances at a Soho, London club and finally at The Cavern in Liverpool.

It was the recent UK camp that was the focus of my latest sabbatical.  And what a time it was!  (More on that, perhaps, in a subsequent post!)

Lessons in Learning, Team Building and Organizational Change

So, what have I learned from my Rock Camp experiences?  (I have now participated in multiple Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camps, playing in Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles, and even in an experimental one-day camp where we opened for Journey and Def Leppard at a stadium show in Columbus, OH, and my latest saga recording at Abbey Road).

1. Change and opportunity are all about taking risks – being prepared to make a fool of yourself, and damn the consequences!  For many of us, most of the time, fear of failure is a huge inhibitor to success.  Sometimes, it manifests itself strangely as fear of success!  In that first camp in 2005, I found myself in a band with 3 guitarists but no bass player.  I reluctantly volunteered to take bass duties on one song, having never played a bass guitar.  (For the uninitiated, the bass typically has fewer strings, but a much longer neck, meaning the fret positions your hands have learned over years of playing no longer work!  Less obvious, but a huge unexpected insight to me was that the bass should really be approached as a percussion instrument, with more in common with the drums than the melodies of the song.)  Much to my horror, we were to open our stage show at The House of Blues with an old Animals song, “We Gotta Get Outta This Place!” which starts with a bass riff – so screwing that up would be, to say the least, horribly noticeable!  As a result of taking this risk, I’ve come to love bass guitar, have played with bands, outside of the camps, in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Austin, and am engaged in a couple of musical projects.  I’ve learned that bass players generally have an easier time getting gigs, and I’ve learned to listen to music differently than I did before trying my hand at bass.  Best of all, I learned to be less intimidated by risk taking.
2. The old ‘forming, storming, norming and performing’ homily of team building is not only true – each step is essential.  If you think you’ve managed to bypass the storming stage, you are wrong.  You simply are not yet a bonded team, and if you think you are ready for performing, you will find yourself storming during a performance – not a pretty sight!  I had one camp experience where we all seemed to gel.  The band members had common musical tastes, similar skill levels, and seemed to genuinely hit it off.  I foolishly thought we’d finessed the storming stage.  Wrong!  During our first stage performance, our singer got a panic attack, and stormed off the stage and out of the club!  We weren’t quite as bonded and comfortable with each other as I’d believed.   Lesson learned – you have to go through the four stages.  If you have not had disputes and differences of opinion in your team (or band or whatever), you just have not yet uncovered them, or are too polite to confront them.  Hidden just below the surface, these dysfunctionalities lie waiting to trip you up – at the worst possible moment!
3. Learning is exhausting – and exhilarating!  The most learning (at least, for me) takes place when I can immerse myself in the learning experience.  Regrettably, in today’s hectic, multitasking world, it’s hard to carve out the time for learning.  I know there will be periods of forward progress when anything seems possible, and horribly dark periods, when it all seems like a lost cause and a waste of everybody’s time.  But with real commitment and focus, great things are possible, even from mere mortals with very limited musical talent such as me!  A couple of years ago I was in a camp band with Teddy “Zigzag” Andreadis, who had toured with Guns ‘n Roses (among other major bands.)  Furthermore, Slash the exceptional guitarist from Guns ‘n Roses was going to be joining us in the studio.  We decided to learn Paradise City, a choice agreed to before I realized how fast some of the bass lines were – seemingly beyond my humble abilities.  Within a few hours, I had the part nailed – even Slash complimented me on the bass part.  Some months later, our band from that camp decided to play a reunion gig in New York at Arlene’s Grocery.  “No problem!” I thought.  Then, to my horror, I found I could not play the part!  I went back to some of the video from that camp to prove to myself that it had not been a dream – that I really had learned and played the part!  Knowing that gave me the confidence to try again – and have a very successful and rewarding performance in New York.  Lesson learned?  Learning takes tremendous energy and focus – and the courage to get through all sorts of setbacks.  Don’t agree to learn a new skill unless you are prepared to immerse yourself.  And to commit the time to do it properly!

Crowdsourcing Organizational Change: A Collaborative Approach to Leading Change

In the first post in this series, I provided some brief context for ‘change leadership’ (a term I find more apt than ‘change management.’)  I also introduced a caveat about linear, sequential, ‘programmatic’ change methodologies and briefly discussed the emergence over the last 15 years or so, of a more organic and emergent view of organizational change.

I observed that these emergent models are less alternatives to the more mechanistic models than they are refinements that help us interpret and apply them – i.e, organizational change can be planned and led, but the plans must be continuously revised in the light of emergent behaviors. And sometimes the emergent behaviors actually precede the recognition of the need for organizational change – i.e., you are not starting from scratch – you often recognize a good change that is happening (perhaps in one part of a company) and want to accelerate and broaden that change.

From “Push” Change Leadership…

Traditional organizational change methods are generally based on a ‘push’ model of change – we (company leadership) want you (employees) to work differently (e.g., reengineered processes, new incentive/reward systems, new tools/technologies, new organization structures, mergers/de-mergers, and so on).  For example, John Kotter’s 8-Step Change Process suggests we should:

1. Establish a sense of urgency
2. Create a guiding coalition
3. Develop a vision and strategy
4. Communicate the change vision
5. Empower broad based action
6. Generate short term wins
7. Consolidate gains and produce more change
8. Anchor change in the new culture

There is something both ‘Taylorist’ (the leaders are smart and know what to do, the workers are dumb and must be told what to do) and inherently manipulative about this approach.  I believe that the types of changes many companies are attempting to engage in today require that both ‘hearts and minds’ must be engaged in the change.  It’s not enough for them to simply to follow a new process – they must truly understand and wholeheartedly embrace the values and ideals behind the process.  They must want to follow the new process (or whatever the change being implemented is), not do so just because they’ve been told to.  Ensuring an exceptional customer experience, for example, does not simply happen because your customer-facing employees follow new procedures.

As such, change that requires “hearts and minds”, while it might be accomplished through a ‘push’ model of change leadership, is far more likely to take hold with more of a ‘pull’ approach.  In fact, I’d argue that most of the changes around Enterprise 2.0 (corporate and organizational adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, social networking, and so on) very much lend themselves to a ‘pull’ approach, or at least to more of a balance between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ change models.

… to “Pull” Change Leadership

So, adopting Enterprise 2.0 really requires more of a ‘pull’ approach to organizational change management.  And the good (great!) news is that Web 2.0 lends itself to enabling this kind of change.  Of course, there’s a ‘catch 22’ here – if people aren’t using Web 2.0 (or even worse in some companies – are not allowed to use these tools!), then how can they be used to facilitate change?

We will dig deeper into this in a subsequent post, where I will take a fictitious (but realistic) change situation and see how Web 2.0 ‘pull’ can be leveraged as a great counterbalance to traditional ‘push’ methods of change.

Image courtesy of Transforming Visions

Influencing Change In Your IT Operating Model

My last post, “Business-IT alignment – The Relationship Dimension” drew some interesting and even passionate commentary.  In particular, one frustrated commenter (someone in a Relationship Management role) pleaded, “What should I do? How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?”

I’ve posted numerous times on aspects of Organizational Change Management (see link for examples) but perhaps it’s time to revisit this perennial puzzle.

Change Management – The Quintessential Misnomer!

Actually, I think that the term “Organizational Change Management” is a terrible misnomer – change can’t be “managed” in the ways that people and projects can.  It can be “inspired”, “led”, “facilitated”, or it can “subverted” and “rejected,” but it can’t be managed.  Also, for IT folk, the term is too close to “change management” – that technical stuff associated with ensuring that changes to a system are implemented in a controlled manner.

I prefer the term “Change Leadership” – with the important caveat that we are all leaders when it comes to changes we’d like to see.  If it’s a change we don’t know is needed, or we would like to see it not happen, then it is down to others to “lead us into the light” and get us on board with the change.  Either way, it’s a leadership issue.  That’s why I loved my most recent commenter’s plea – “What should I do? How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?”  This is one relationship manager who recognizes his role in leading change!  (And who is not afraid to ask for help in filling that role!)

So Much Known, So Little Applied!

The big irony for me is that so much is known about and written about Organizational Change, and that we all have many years of first-hand experience trying to change our own behaviors or those of friends or family members, and yet most organizations are so completely inept at it!  There are books on change dating back to the early 1940’s (see, for example Kurt Lewin’s work), and a current search on Amazon.com yields 11,860 titles!  And, according to Google, there are currently 191,000 Blogs on the topic!  Clearly, the domain is fraught with subtleties and complexities.

Why Are IT Professionals So Inept at Organizational Change?

OK, so that’s a deliberately inflammatory question and a massively sweeping generalization – but from my personal experience in a 40-year IT career, it’s generally true.  I think it has to do with the characteristics of the IT profession that draw people to it – tangible, finite, project oriented.  IT professionals take highly ambiguous situations and ultimately reduce them to zeros and ones!  I’m not sure which is ‘chicken’ and which is ‘egg’ (i.e., do people good at driving out ambiguity gravitate to IT, or is it a learned behavior by IT professionals?) but I find that IT folk don’t like ambiguity.  And yet leading change means living with ambiguity.  IT professionals like plans, with beginnings, middles and ends – with defined deliverables and clear milestones.  Organizational change has none of these characteristics.  It is about people, not systems or bits and bytes.  It is about politics and influence, not routines and processes.

So, with such a plethora of research and written wisdom, what can I hope add to this body of work?  My goal (in a short series of posts) is to highlight the most useful Organization Change Leadership Model I have come across, and try to simplify and illustrate it with real examples from the world of IT management.  I’ll also point you to the excellent Change Management Blog.

Kotter’s Change Model – And It’s Potential Flaws

Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter has researched and written extensively on organizational change and has articulated an 8-Step Change Model.   (See his excellent HBR article “Why Transformation Efforts Fail.”  Also, the invaluable MindTools web site has this excellent summary of the Kotter Change Model.)

First, an important caveat.  To my point about the misnomer of “Change Management”, the Kotter model  implies linearity and assumes predictability and manageability of the change processes.  I don’t believe it should be interpreted or used this way.  In the immortal wisdom of Jerry Weinberg, “The project actually started long before it was officially declared ‘a project’.”  So has the organizational change typically ‘started’ before anyone gets too involved in planning how to drive it or, at least, to steer it!

In the last 15 years or so, a more organic and emergent view of organizational change has surfaced, leveraging chaos and complexity theory.  See, for example, Wanda J. Orlikowski and J. Debra Hofman’s “An Improvisational Model of Change Management: The Case of Groupware Technologies.”

I don’t see these emergent models as alternatives to the more mechanistic models, but as refinements that help to interpret and apply them – i.e, organizational change should be planned, but the plans continuously revised in the light of emergent behaviors.  And sometimes the emergent behaviors actually precede the recognition of the need for organizational change.  For example, many IT organizations today are trying (and failing!) to leverage social networking (typically around Microsoft‘s SharePoint).  At the same time, many members of the IT organization are participating in a number of social networks – both within their company and with external communities (e.g., FaceBook, LinkedIn, Plaxo).  So, while IT leaders are trying to “manage” a social network initiative (i.e., planned, formally managed), the reality is that social networking is already happening, but in an unplanned and emergent way.  If the planned efforts could understand and leverage the emergent activities, there is a better chance that social networking could be “steered” towards improved outcomes for the IT community and for the company.

My next post will pick up on the Kotter Change Model and begin to illustrate it with real world war stories and examples.

Image Courtesy of Management Excellence

Business-IT Alignment – The Relationship Dimension

Much has been written about “Business-IT Alignment” over the years.  Alignment can refer to Strategy – the degree to which IT strategy and business strategy are aligned.  (This, of course, is both ‘old news’ and yet often not the case in practice.  And there’s one school of thought that says there’s no such thing as IT strategy – it’s only business strategy with IT implications.)

Alignment can also refer to Structure – IT capabilities are structured to align with business structures and needs.  But there’s a crucial ‘third leg’ to the business-IT alignment stool, and that is the alignment of relationships that sit between business units and IT capabilities.

The Crucial Relationship Manager Role

Many IT organizations have created a role that bridges the business and IT.  Rarely actually called “Relationship Managers”, this role represents IT to the business and the business to IT. I’ve posted on this role before – see, for example The IT Relationship Manager’s Role in Expanding Business-IT Capability,  and From Supply-Constrained to Value-Constrained IT Business Model, and IT Maturity and the Role of the Relationship Management.  Sometimes called an IT Account Manager, or Business-IT Director, or some-such, the role is primarily responsible for ‘demand shaping‘ – stimulating an appetite for high value demand, and suppressing appetites for low value demand.  Sometimes, people in this Relationship Manager Role are effectively mini-CIO’s or Business Unit CIO’s – leveraging shared IT infrastructure (and often leveraging common applications and enterprise systems) but taking care of business unit-specific IT needs.

Relationship Alignment

There are at least three dimensions along which Relationship Managers can align with their business partners.  The first two dimensions are pretty obvious and generally handled well, but the third dimension is trickier and often not well addressed.  The dimensions are:

1. Domain Expertise – the Relationship Manager (or whatever title this role operates under) needs to really understand the business domain for which they are responsible.  Be it marketing, supply chain, human resources, and so on, they need to have deep domain knowledge in order to bring real value to their business partners and have the credibility to have impact.
2. Geography – as the real estate cliché goes, ‘location, location, location!’ so goes Relationship Management.  At its best, the Relationship Manager should be co-located with the senior managers of the business unit with which they are aligned.  At the very least, they need easy access.  The occasional ‘fly in’ to meet with their business partners typically doesn’t do it in terms of creating a productive business-IT partnership.
3. Maturity – this is the tricky dimension, and one that is typically not well addressed.  Skilled Relationship Managers are a rare resource.  You want your most effective and creative Relationship Managers aligned with those business units and executives with the highest demand maturity – i.e., with the best  capacity to recognize and leverage high value IT-enabled opportunities.  Innovative, ‘change agent’ types of Relationship Managers will quickly become frustrated facing off against executives who are technologically in the dark ages, or who cherish the status quo.  Similarly, progressive, innovative business leaders will become quickly frustrated working with a Relationship Manager who lacks drive, a sense of urgency, the creativity to generate valuable ideas about IT possibilities, and the wherewithal to bring them to fruition.

How Healthy Are Your Business-IT Relationships?

Clearly, the CIO is in many ways the ‘über-Relationship Manager’, setting the tone for demand shaping and the strategic context for IT, and typically ‘owning’ the business-IT relationships with the most senior executive team.  But no CIO has the bandwidth or domain expertise to handle all the relationships at all the management levels needed to surface and steer the best opportunities to create business value from IT.  So, how healthy and productive are your key relationships between business and IT? Do you even know what would be considered ‘key relationships’?  How would you know the degree to which they are fully delivering value against their potential?

Let me know your thoughts and experiences around Relationship Management effectiveness.

Innovation and Web 2.0 – A Compelling Relationship?

I had a very interesting and exciting week!  I was a speaker at an nGenera Senior Executive Summit, which drew about 60 top executives from mostly large companies – CEO’s, CIO’s, CFO’s, HR and shared service heads, and even a couple of Lawyers and Platform/Brand managers.  It was an auspicious group – both in terms of participants and presenters/session leaders, which included Jim Collins, Michael Treacy, Don Tapscott, Tammy Erickson and Dartmouth’s Tuck School Professor, Chris Trimble.

I introduced my ideas about leveraging Web 2.0 (broadly defined) to significantly drive up the value of business innovation – specifically by following the principles and processes of Design Thinking.  I’ve been getting to this point in my last series of posts (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.)  In fact, those posts were largely written as I was developing my session materials.

Does ‘Design Thinking’ Have Legs?

Part of my thesis built upon the success of the Design Thinking movement that has gelled over the last 5 years.  I have found the success stories compelling, and the underlying principles resonate with my own experiences and values over the last 30 years in trying to leverage IT for increased innovation.  However, I was troubled by the recognition and acceptability of the term ‘Design Thinking’ – especially in the US.  The text of a 2007 speech by BusinessWeek‘s Bruce Nussbaum given in London tipped me off that there might be a problem here.

Nussbaum’s Banana…

In his 2007 speech to the Royal College of Art, Nussbaum noted:

In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word “design.” Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that “design” only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology—I just call it all a banana. Peel that banana back and you find great design. Yummy design. . The kind of design that can change business culture and all of our civil society as well.”

One of the first to make the Web 2.0 connection, Nussbaum went on to say:

Innovation is no longer just about new technology per se. It is about new models of organization. Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation. That’s what Web 2.0 is all about.”

I tested the waters of my Summit attendees, first by asking how many in the room had some familiarity with the term ‘Design Thinking’?   Three hands shot up, and a couple sort of hovered around shoulder level (presumably meaning, “I’ve heard of it, but please don’t call on me to talk about it!”).  Of the three hands, two were from companies for whom I had Design Thinking case studies about and who were listed in my very first slide (I had not at this point turned on the projector.)  The third hand was from a senior executive at a major Industrial Supply company that I had not expected to be particularly Design Thinking literate.  So, test 1 indicated that the term is not widely known.  Of course, this does not necessarily mean that Design Thinking is not widely practiced – perhaps all 60 companies in the room do in fact excel at Design Thinking, but refer to what they do as some variation of Nussbaum’s ‘banana’?  However, I truly doubt this.  In fact, the many one-on-one conversations that I had with the executives at this summit during the reception and dinner following my presentation supported my sense that explicit efforts to drive up the value of business innovation are relatively few and far between.

Are Design Thinkers Web 2.0 Enabled?

To the larger part of my thesis, there was little evidence at this Summit that any form of Web 2.0 was being explicitly leverage to support Design Thinking (or innovation, or the banana!)  There were a few ‘accidental experiments’ and emergent social networks – both internal and external – but nothing claimed as part of a deliberate, holistic effort to increase innovation through Web 2.0 technologies.  This for me was the big surprise.  The Senior Vice President of Strategy from one of the Design Thinking literate companies told me at the reception, “When you first connected Design Thinking and Web 2.0 in your presentation, I thought you’d completely lost it!  But as you gave examples, the light bulbs began to turn on – I think you are onto something!”  This was gratifying indeed – well worth the price of admission!

Graphic courtesy of RI Nexus

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Design Thinking 2.0: Enabling Innovation with Web 2.0 – Part 2

In my first post in this series, “Design Thinking 2.0: How Web 2.0 Might Foster and Enable an Innovation Revolution” I summarized the concepts of Design Thinking and raised the question of how Web 2.0 might enable increased innovation.  (For an interesting perspective on Design Thinking by Business Week’s Bruce Nussbaum, see his excellent essay based on his 2007 speech to the Royal College of Art in London.)

In my next post I will  drill down and suggest ways to use Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to increase innovativeness and business success, but for now I want to examine the Core/Edge distinction in order to focus us clearly on Edge capabilities, where innovation tends to surface – without being encumbered by the Core.

“Core” and “Edge” Capabilities

Identifying the best ways to leverage collaborative technologies for innovation require an appreciation of the distinction between “Core” and “Edge” business capabilities.  The notions of “Core” and “Edge” I think were first articulated in June 2005 by John Hagel III, a former McKinsey consultant, and John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox in a Wharton Summary interview titled “Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?”  In that interview, Hagel noted:

The… edge… has to do with the notion of competitive advantage, but it also has to do with the view that the ability to develop capabilities involves operating at the edge. Of course, “edge” has multiple meanings as well. It means the edge of the enterprise, the edge of business processes, geographic edges in terms of emerging economies, demographic edges in terms of younger generations coming in with different mindsets – it’s a whole set of edges that create the opportunity for accelerating capability building.”

Seely Brown noted in the same interview:

… being able to listen deeply and participate on the edge, you can pick up things before anybody else picks them up, and you can use that to accelerate your own capability building… This puts a new spin on why distributed collaboration around the world might be critical in creating this sustainable edge.”

My colleagues and I picked up this theme in our multi-company research at nGenera and I covered it in some depth starting in March 2008 with my “Surfing and IT Innovation” post, followed in July 2008 with my “Edginess and IT Innovation” post.

The reason this Core/Edge distinction is so important for IT professionals in the corporate environment is that the Core exerts enormous gravitational pull – innovation activities such as business experiments at the edge tend to get pulled into the core where standards and rigid processes rule.  The Core typically consumes 70% to 90% of IT resources, starving edge activities of the resources and focus they need to flourish.

Requirements of Core Capabilities

Core Capabilities exist to support exploitation of existing business opportunities.  As such they tend to be ‘locked down’, complex and hard to change – in fact, they are designed to prevent ‘bad change.’  Core processes are intended to be highly stable and predictable, typically built on proprietary and relatively fixed architectures.

Requirements of Edge Capabilities

By contrast, Edge Capabilities exist to stimulate and support the exploration of new business opportunities. As such they must be open, agile, transparent and adaptive.  While Core capabilities must ‘prevent bad change’, Edge capabilities are designed to stimulate ‘good change.’  They leverage open, emergent architecture and open sourcing. This, of course, is the realm of Web 2.0 – social media, open source, open innovation, cloud computing, etc.

Balancing Core and Edge Capabilities

The table below further highlights the differences between Core and Edge capabilities and shows example of each type.  My point here is that most IT organizations have many years of experience in perfecting Core capabilities but have relatively little experience with Edge capabilities.  The IT leaders’ natural preference is to control rather than facilitate, to direct rather than stimulate.

In Part 3 of this series, we will look at a generic Design Thinking process and see how each step can be enabled by Web 2.0 “Edge” capabilities.

Image courtesy of Larval Subjects

Design Thinking 2.0: How Web 2.0 Might Foster and Enable an Innovation Revolution

About 3 years ago I first become aware of what can best be called a ‘movement’ dedicated to “Design Thinking,” when the term started showing up in some of my favorite blogs (e.g., Idris Mootee’s Innovation Playground).  The concepts became clearer and more compelling to me in June, 2008 when the Harvard Business Review published a wonderful piece on Design Thinking by Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO, the world-renowned innovation and design firm).  Since then, several books as well as some remarkable shifts in company fortunes have reinforced my interest, including Tim Brown’s ‘Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspired Innovation‘ and ‘The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage‘ by Roger L. Martin.

Most recently I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how Web 2.0 might help foster and enable Design Thinking.  I’ve been doing this as part of a new multi-company research project I am leading.  And I’m very excited!

The Case for Design Thinking in the U.S.

The insightful Thomas L. Friedman, in a New York Times Op-Ed column on March 2, 2010 titled, “A Word From the Wise” noted comments in a speech by Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, who was in Washington to talk about competitiveness:

that a 2009 study done by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and cited recently in Democracy Journal “ranked the U.S. sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in innovative competitiveness — not great, but not bad. Yet that same study also measured what they call ‘the rate of change in innovation capacity’ over the last decade — in effect, how much countries were doing to make themselves more innovative for the future. The study relied on 16 different metrics of human capital — I.T. infrastructure, economic performance and so on. On this scale, the U.S. ranked dead last out of the same 40 nations.”

Too many companies (and the governments that shape corporate behavior through taxes and regulations) have become too comfortable with exploitation, and not sufficiently adept at exploration.  They have come to rely too much on analytical thinking, and not enough on intuition.  They have become so bogged down in their business core, they have all but ignored the edge where customer problems meet the creative process to create new products and services.

In the next few posts, I want to share what I have discovered and learned so far, and hopefully stimulate some constructive discussion and engage you, my readers, in shaping the upcoming research.

Does Your Executive Management Know What They Are Doing?

In a 1998 HBR article entitled, “Interpretive Management: What General Managers Can Learn from Design,” Richard K. Lester, Michael J. Piore, Kamal M. Malek, observed:

Today’s markets are increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Managers can never know precisely what they’re trying to achieve or how best to achieve it. They can’t even define the problem, much less engineer a solution. For guidance, they can look to the managers of product design, a function that has always been fraught with uncertainty.”

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”  Marshall McLuhan

So, the big question for me is how can the tools we have shaped into Web 2.0 enable ‘Design Thinking’ to help us realize dramatically higher business performance?  It seems that we have a whole new and powerful set of capabilities – social networking, crowdsourcing, innovation jams, social and semantic search, collaborative project, program and portfolio management, polling, listening feeds and activity streams, tags, 2D and 3D modeling, prototyping, virtual worlds, workflow modeling and automation, and on and on. And yet, aside from knowing that a distant friend is having a bad hair day, most of these tools and technologies are still looking for a meaningful business purpose.

So, What Is “Design Thinking”?

There are many definitions and descriptions, but the ones I’ve found most illuminating are:

The methodology commonly referred to as design thinking is a proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results.” – Mark Dziersk, Fast Compan

A discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” – Tim Brown, Ideo

Design thinking is always linked to an improved future.  It is a creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas, rather than critical thinking which is more concerned with analysis and the ‘breaking down’ of ideas.   Design Thinking moves design from a downstream (tactical) step to upstream (strategic) – vests everyone involved with the role of ‘designer.”  At its best, Design Thinking balances art and science, intuition and analytics, validity (doing the right things) and reliability (doing things right), exploration and exploitation

Design Thinking Has Profound Organizational Implications

Design Thinking has profound implications for:

• Organization structures
• Rewards, recognition, compensation
• Portfolio management and strategic alignment
• Governance and leadership style
• Talent management and global sourcing

I believe that it also presents a significant opportunity …

• For IT, HR, Finance, Facilities, Legal, etc. to step forward and make a real contribution to business success
• To re-think ‘staff /line’ roles and responsibilities
• To learn to love matrix management!

How is Design Thinking playing out in your organization?  How have Web 2.0 capabilities helped (or hurt) these efforts?  How do you see this playing out over the next couple of years?

To be clear, Design Thinking is essentially human centered, and there is something potentially incongruous in discussing the use of Web 2.0 to enable it.  However, I still firmly believe that these collective and collaborative technologies have a role in “greasing the skids” to make Design Thinking more accessible.  I will pick this up and drill down a bit further into this realm and discuss  ideas on how Web 2.0 can play a positive role in Design Thinking.

Graphic courtesy of IDEO

“Branding” Your IT Organization

I love this post on Attraction of Identity from my kindred spirit, Russ Aebig. (And not just because he references my work on Business-IT Maturity!)   Russ poses the question:

As an organization, who are you? What is your internal and external story?”

Russ goes on to say:

IT organizations typically are not oriented around branding and when pushed to think about it realize they have many disparate, confused, and mixed  identities, each shaped by recent events with their customers. From a brand perspective, there will be no clear message which the IT customers can positively associate with.”

The IT-Marketing Disconnect

Hallelujah!  And I’d go further to say that IT organizations typically have little to no sense of marketing, the core set of disciplines within which branding belongs. Many years ago, as an intern, I did a stint in both the sales and marketing organizations of a British computer manufacturer and quickly learned some of the key differences between these disciplines and how they play off against each other.  As a marketing executive defined it to me back then, “Marketing is about ensuring an environment in which your products (or services) sell!”  As such, marketing has much to do with understanding the market needs and dynamics, then shaping perceptions in that market so that your product’s (or service’s) ability to meet those needs is known and compelling.

Against that background, you can imagine the many shortcomings in how IT organizations:

• Create deep understanding about their markets, segments, problems their customers want solved
• Position their products and services in ways that can help solve those problems
• Make it easy to find and engage in the IT organization’s available services
• Price their services in ways that make sense to their customers and are “easy to do business with”
• Communicate in powerful and positive ways to shape perceptions about how they are solving business problems and creating value

The Power of Branding

If IT organizations were automobiles, what make would your organization most closely equate to?  Would you be a Ferrari – extreme high performance, lots of pizazz, reserved for the enlightened few with the means to drive it?  Or perhaps a Mercedes – high quality, superbly engineered, high technology, style, and within reach of (some) mere mortals?  Or a Mazda – quality at an affordable price, with lots of innovation, to boot!  Or a Chevy truck – great value, solid dependable performance for going beyond the normal needs of a family saloon?

If you don’t like the automobile analogy (which I use somewhat tongue-in-cheek) pick something closer to home – perhaps a retail store chain, or consumer service provider, or a hotel chain.  Do you want to be known for breadth of service, with all the bells and whistles?  Or tightly focused on some core competencies?  Are you an innovator?  Or more about the nuts and bolts services needed in day to day operations?  This kind of branding analysis and execution may lead you to recognize that you have more than one brand to your IT organization (think FedEx Express, FedEx Ground and FedEx Office!)  With different types of services, different value propositions, and different ways of engaging.

The key, I believe, is to be thoughtful, as Russ suggests, about your value proposition(s) – how you want them to be seen and felt.  This is not only “good marketing” – it’s also a great way to build alignment among your leadership team as you work through the definition of your organization’s mission, vision, values and brand messages.

Image courtesy of Lauren Fernandez

Avatar – Blending “Hi Tech/Hi Touch”

Way back in 1982, futurist John Naisbitt authored the fascinating book Megatrends.  I especially recall my reaction to one of the trends – High tech, high touch – and the need to balance between technology and human interaction.  I recently caught a small segment on television about the making of Avatar.  (There’s lots of interesting clips of this stuff on YouTube.)  A couple of things really struck me.

Cameron Invented Some Cool New Tech!

The breadth and depth of new technologies invented (or, in come cases, refined) by James Cameron and his team is truly astounding.  Not just the “performance capture” technologies and related techniques, but also the technology to integrate the video streams from dozens (in some cases, hundreds) of video cameras and computer generated graphics in real time to a single ‘virtual camera‘ device that Cameron could look through as the filming was being done, and let him select the best angles and perspectives to capture the moment.  According to Wikipedia, the virtual camera system:

…displays an augmented reality on a monitor, placing the actor’s virtual counterparts into their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, “It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale.”

Other technical innovations included a system for lighting very large areas, a massive motion-capture stage and the technology and methods for full performance capture, including facial expressions.  He also reduced the weight of notoriously heavy and unwieldy 3-D cameras to something that could just about be hand-held and up to the dynamics he envisioned for Avata.

But, Cameron Also Paid Attention t0 the Hi Touch!

But what most intrigued me, and took me back to Naisbitt and Megatrends, was the attention Cameron paid to the “hi touch” to make such a hi tech movie work.  This included taking the actors to rain forests in Hawaii to spend time getting the feel of such a landscape – and some of the most similar terrain he could find to his imaginary Pandora.  He wanted the actors to hike around the forest – to be able to recapture the feeling of a lush forest when they were on the concrete sound stage.  He wanted the actors to really look as though they were in control of the flying creatures, so he build a gimbal rig to let the actors get the feel of the movements (which had been previously worked out with wire frame models and their possible flight paths).

Hi Tech, Hi Touch

How are you balancing the high technology you are deploying with the high touch techniques that will help them integrate into the human world in which they must operate?

Image Courtesy of Collider.com