What Is Social Business Really About?

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The only single thing which has to be taken for granted in our era of uncertainty is the fact that many of the mechanisms which underlay business structures have to undergo deep transformations in order to survive. The mass-production and mass-consumption logic rooted in the XIXth industrial revolution which prevailed most of the exchange of goods and services since the end of WW2 is now stalled. The present flavor of capitalism which rules over the rest of economical transactions (“the rest” being the lion’s share of it, as financial transactions represent more than 93% of the total economical exchanges) is breathless. In this context, organizations must find new ways to leverage efficiency, competitiveness and innovation in order to thrive.

In the meantime, the internet has taken our private life by storm, opening up new ways to access information and to connect to each other at unprecedented speed. Learning, interacting, creating, will never be the same again. Using the very same technologies which are reshaping our relationships to the world to transform businesses and empower workers seems, at the very first place, a natural move. Welcome to “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers” 1. Since Professor McAfee first coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” in 2006, many

things have changed. Enterprise 2.0, as term, is now challenged by Social Business, an expression notably promoted by IBM, showing not only a semantic shift, but a change in focus from the academic world to the vendors’ realm, acknowledging a real business value, at least for them. Most of the concerns raised by consultants and practitioners are no more about the right choice of tools and their consistency with the business world, but about their adoption and the way to use them at enterprise-wide advantage.

Nevertheless, many of the assumptions over the needs of knowledge workers, over the relationships between organizations, their partners, suppliers and customers, between organizations and the civil society, over the links between our private and professional lives, over the nature of work in a hyper-connected world, haven’t been challenged at all. We have made many of the social tools and services available on the public web compatible with enterprise’s requirements (as Ray Wang neatly described in his interview for the project 2, we are making them scalable, simple, safe, secure and sustainable), and we threw them into organizations, trying then to make them fit into the way these organizations operate. We monitor our customers’ voice and interact with them on the social channels they use, without modifying our own behaviors. All

Foreword

of the questions and challenges tackled by the Social-Business-Enterprise-2.0 world rely on these remaining unchanged assumptions. But are we sure we are asking the right questions?

The aim of the Future of Collaborative Enterprise project is to try to help organizations, consultants, vendors, and anyone interested in the field, to catch a glimpse of what an organization, leveraging collaboration through social software platforms implementation as well as through organizational alignment, would look like in the future. By interviewing experts from many fields, and then drafting scenarios through design and future thinking methods, we aim at giving you insights on the sustainable and actionable paths to a truly Collaborative Enterprise.

Trying to give answers to the wicked problems most organizations are tackling today is of immoderate ambition, possibly way beyond the reach of the Future of Collaborative Enterprise project. So, what is the point? To be able to give useful, even imperfect, answers, one has first to ask the right questions. By drawing patterns from all given interviews and making sense of gathered insights, by digging deeper into many assumptions about what collaboration means for and inside organizations, as a result from the first phase of interviews in the course of the project, we formulated some of the questions we now have to seriously ask ourselves in order to take a sustainable advantage from the technology at our disposal, and to make further steps toward a true Collaborative Enterprise.

Thierry de Baillon June 2012

1 Andrew McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0 on his blog - May 2006

http://andrewmcafee.org/2006/05/enterprise_20_version_20/

2 Ray Wang Enterprise class software follows five assets

http://www.thefutureofcollaboration.com/2011/12/enterprise-class-software-follows-five-assets/

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Rethinking Technology

The need for Open Software

The Future is DIY

Interoperability

Rethinking Our Information Channels

Intelligent Tools for the Future

Is the Future Push or Pull?

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the intermediation of our relationships. While a strong emphasis is put on adopting these technologies in the day-to-day tasks, this assumes that today’s solutions, inspired from similar services gaining huge traction on the public web, are what workers need to get work done. But is this parallelism sustainable, or even desirable? For Paula Thornton:

“The challenge is that the environments are different, and therefore, they typically require a different sort of solutions, so that, there is this sort of transitional imitation that... What’s needed for the enterprise has to have go through a phase of being imitated into something else that works for the enterprise.”

Adoption, even successfully driven, will be useless if we fail in providing workers with the right tools, which may not be what we are focusing on right now. Even with the right set of tools, social software might fall short from leveraging the right behaviors. “Work”, as we grasp it, not only has specific requirements, different from other activities, but is also strongly dependent of the individual who accomplish it. While we don’t mind so much suffering a few extra steps while using software for our personal activities, it should be an absolute no go when accomplishing a business task, and these extra steps are highly personal. “Adoption” is needed at highest -conceptual- level, but for being useful for work purpose, social software needs to allow for individual, as well as organizational, adaptation. As Prem Kumar Aparanji explains:

“See, the technology itself has not been adopted enough. There are many fast movers who have adopted it, but I always say this,

that the benefit of a new innovation doesn’t really start coming unless people start adapting, not merely adopting, but they have to adapt it, which means the original purpose for which it was build, that, of course people are using it for that, but somebody has come and found a new purpose for this, new innovation, using it for newer things, you are using it newer ways, right? So the adaptation is still not there yet, of these technologies that already exist.”

This level of fast customizations of software, both in terms of functionalities and of ways to use it, along with the support of a strong ecosystem, is something which has generally been associated with the Open Source movement. To reach maturity, social software will have to find its own open community, and to get deeper in the development, not of standard tools, but of standard languages to develop custom tools and uses. The support of OpenSocial by Jive, IBM or Atlassian, is just a scratch on the surface of truly useful social software platforms.

Of the 22 vendors analyzed in the 2011 edition of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software platforms 3, 5 (Atlassian, Acquia Drupal, Liferay, XWiki and MindTouch) are open source solutions. In a market dominated by big commercial vendors 4 like Jive, IBM or NewsGator, open source contenders’ offering appears to be deeply rooted in wikis and document management. To sustain innovation, vendors use external growth acquiring specialized solutions and tools, or, as Microsoft does around Sharepoint 2010, build an ecosystem of independent companies developing add-ons and focused solutions, but is this evolution favorable to the development of the Collaborative Enterprise? Proprietary solutions’ dominance, as well

as the lack of truly innovative open source breakthroughs, might well lead us to a world where “If SharePoint is the answer, what was the question?” as quite ironically says Rolf Idar Isaksen.

As in any technological sector, a risk of hegemony exists, but this could have been of minor annoyance if the implication wouldn’t be the lack of deep appropriation of the tools by the ones they are conceived for. As Isaksen states, “vendors expect us to work the way they think while we should have one more adaptable tool set because this is what is important for us now.” The use of social software is nascent in many organizations, so is our understanding its role and influence in

The Needfor Open Software

Adoption, even successfully driven, will be useless if we fail in providing workers with the right tools, which may not be what we are focusing on right now.

3 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

- Gartner August 2011

4 The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3

2011

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Customization, at the personal worker’s level, might have to go a lot farer for social technology to keep up to its promise. Adaptation of existing applications and functions is a first step toward a deeper and more radical change to make them able to get integrated into work. These applications will need to change state, from data manipulation mechanisms and interfaces, into placeholders for data, providing the necessary hooks for more discrete tools, adapted to single tasks, to operate on top.

Harold Jarche makes an interesting analogy between these tools we use and the way we are now using our phones:

“A lot of people are customizing their mobile phone with apps, and there are many apps that let people do single types of tasks, whether it’s a reminder, or a checklist, or something else. There are plenty of these little tools, all in the 99 cent price range. I think we are going to see a lot more happen in this space. We will see more specific small tools that will take very little to learn and will just help you do one thing better, faster, or cheaper.”

Similarly, Paula Thornton says:

“It’s not about applications. It’s about discrete individual functions that maybe we spin in the connections that... Oh, by the way, we might call them applications. Applications are dead, and until we get rid of things like SAP or use SAP simply as a data storage mechanism and then append on top of it, all of these little micro-processes, or micro-functions. And that we leverage SAP in the background, simply as the data store for all the micro-functions. Then we’ll be doing something good. But get rid of the damned applications.”

If social technology aims at empowering people, it should start by allowing them to choose the tools and functions they want to use in a particular context, thus allowing them a higher level of control on the software environment they are using. When giving a voice to workers, one has also to give them the choice of the channel they prefer using to express themselves. This is exactly what Prem K Aparanji expresses:

“When most information systems are

developed, we consider the actor to be predetermined to be dumb, to be able to do only a few certain things on the system. We assume that, and we assume that these actors are isolated elements. They are there only to trigger off these actions in the system that we are building. But that is not what actors are, right, so you have to start thinking about the actor as an autonomous entity, which is able to take decisions by itself.”

Pushing social software into the DIY realm would be a bold step, but certainly the best and most efficient way to “solving people’s problems that they currently have, giving them tools to get their job done, not giving them tools that help the manager provide more control”, as Brian Tullis says. Neither would it be an open path to IT anarchy, as this, instead, might provide a solution to the dilemma between freedom and regulation that most organizations are facing. Dr Pehong Chen explains how separating background data storage architecture from user-opted manipulation functions could help enforcing information governance:

“So I think a lot of people mistakenly have been trying to bind the government’s policy with the underlying mechanism and in doing so making it extremely difficult or too rigid for this kind of social phenomenon to take hold. Our goal here is to decouple the two, so that you can still set your policy, your governance, but allowing the mechanism to be totally distributed to the users. We call that DIY, Do-It-Yourself, because if everything has to go back to IT, it will be really, really hard to make it happen.”

As tough as the challenge might be, leaving to the final user the responsibility and freedom in the way he uses information while ensuring its proper governance should be one of the primary intent of social software platforms. But enforcing ad hoc policies can only be achieved if the volume of data is kept manageable, which implies reducing redundancy and avoiding being flooded by externally available information without preventing access to it.

To achieve that, Professor Yuzuru Tanaka, from HokkaÏdo University, proposes a revolutionary approach 5 to this problem: his Intelligent Pads allow, “using knowledge in their own context”, accessing and manipulating information by combining elementary tools, “the same as playing with Lego blocks.” Furthermore, these tools don’t displace information, creating useless clutter and redundancy, but access information where it originally resides. Tanaka’s Intelligent Pads might well provide a bright glimpse of what social tools will look like in the future.

The Future is DIY

5 Yuzuru Tanaka, Meme Media and Meme Market

Architectures. IEEE Press - Wiley Interscience, United

States and Canada, 2003

If social technology aims at empowering people, it should start by allowing them to choose the tools and functions they want to use in a particular context.

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The future of the Collaborative Enterprise lies further than its organizational boundaries. Organizations belong to an ecosystem, of which partners, subcontractors, suppliers and customers play an active role. As Ross Dawson puts it:

“So now we are seeing this thing both the imperative of effective collaboration within organizations to be able to work closely together across locations, across different departments or divisions different aspects of the organizations. And increasingly, and this is the biggest shift over the last decade or so and continuing is the imperative collaborating externally. Collaborating with clients, what I call knowledge-based relationships and with suppliers, with partners and indeed building ecosystems.

And we’re starting to recognize more and more this growth of business ecosystems more essentially which are broad-based collaborations. So business value is created not within a single organization but across a number of organizations.”

Leveraging this kind of openness and facilitating exchanges of knowledge across the boundaries of organizations is another reason for expecting the rise of open software and new standards. What we are assisting today is a centripetal move toward integration of social software with business applications, but

a different kind of interoperability is needed in order to allow businesses to effectively collaborate across their whole ecosystem, “You need systems that are able to cross boundaries”, in Dave Gray’s words.

“I think its also true for companies, there’s no way you can know in advance what things you might need to link to, or hook up to, or interoperate with. You just can’t know those things, and you can’t know, and you certainly can’t assume that those things will be invented, and owned by your company in every case. In many cases they will be outside your company, they will be your partner that you need to interact with, or there might be information that’s required from customers.”

To achieve this, we will need to adopt a more “centrifugal” state of mind, and develop standards which allow different flavors of social software to connect seamlessly.

Of course, we might see a totally different scenario getting live, if one vendor could gain an overwhelming dominance over the market... But this would mean that, as we are getting out of the era of global industrialization, we would then dive into an era of industrialized collaboration. A risk we must really stay aware of for the following years.

Interoperability

This would mean that, as we are getting out of the era of global industrialization, we would then dive into an era of industrialized collaboration. A risk we must really stay aware of for the following years.

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Most of our today’s online interactions are in the written form. Emails, forums, activity streams and most of our collaborative tools require us to type and read words, impeding our communication capabilities in many important ways:

Human interactions are made up of many behavioral signals from which we make sense.

The words we speak or write, of course, but also our gestures, the tone of our voice, the mixture of talk and silence,... While written communication is a better medium for thinking and construction of meaning, synchronous, synaesthetic communication help building the relationships involved in communication. Rachel Happe says no other thing:

“So I think, one of our analysts has studied this case, that text-based asynchronous technology can start a relationship but they don’t get ever further in that path. Synchronous text, like AIM, helps much better. Or Twitter, or any of those things. Some synchronous audio helps going further, because you can listen the intonation. Synchronous video leads higher up on that scale, in terms of our ability to connect and have really fluent conversation right off the box and really establish a degree of intimacy.”

A lot of people are not confident enough with writing to be able to express themselves beyond formal or casual communication To address and overcome these limitations, both to leverage online relationships and to make social software efficient for more forms of communication, we might see the rise of new classes of tools making more use of video and audio as inputs. Quoting Michael Wu:

“Technology also could change. In the future, maybe instead of typing, because people like to kind of listen to things, even if for myself I sometimes prefer just reading, because I can jump back and forth, while when listening, you have to kind of listen to the whole thing, there is this temporal element to it, you cannot kind of scramble pieces of it, and you won’t get very much out of it that way, but reading it, you could kind of jump back and forth, and read what you want to read and get the solution that you want.

So, maybe in the future, people wouldn’t

type in questions, they would just leave a message and ask a question, and then other people could leave a message or type the solution out. It’s just a different way in which people could interact. I think that all that could help change the behavioral norm.”

On the output side, Stowe Boyd foresees tools

able to convert one channel to another, and to present information in the form which suits us best:

“Pull that out, and condense it, compress it, analyze it for me. And give it back to me in a format that isn’t a human written document, but is some kind of.... infographics maybe, of everything that happened, with the big findings, and maybe some links to things that seem not really helpful at first glance... But something completely different, not a document, but something that’s a representation, like an interactive, graphical, diagram, of the sort that magazines create now to help you understand.”

Allowing us to use the communication channel we want, to share information as well as to retrieve it, is a field of research which could definitely help in making social software more social.

Rethinking Our Information Channels

We might see the rise of new classes of tools making more use of video and audio as inputs.

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Automation of day-to-day tasks is another subject which can potentially unleash the potential of collaboration, by leveraging the creative and meaningful part of work and allow workers to focus on what matters.

Just imagine, like Stephen Collins, that:

“If we can push out the boundaries of where we imagine a calendar or a document or a messaging platform or whatever; if we push the boundaries out in terms of imagining what those things do, I think that’s what we need to try. Try a new way of getting people to understand when their appointments are. Sure, we are tied into date and times and you’d have to present it on a calendar. But imagine if it was, the way you could do it, was to create it on your collaboration platform and your phone syncs and your Gmail syncs and whatever your corporate calendar is syncs.

And sometime in the future your Internet connected car knows that at 9:00 you’ve got an appointment. And you get into the car in the morning at half past eight to drive to work and it says, hey you’ve got an appointment. You need to take the fast lane on the freeway to get to your appointment. This is all possible. We just need to want to do it.”

But linking together the tools used everyday in order to streamline their efficiency is just a starting point. For Dave Gray, many tasks, even those that are part of managerial work, could be automated:

“For the last fifty years, we’ve been automating a lot of manual and factory work, and we’ve got robots doing a lot of that,

and the factories are in many cases more productive with fewer workers. What’s going to happen with the information revolution is that a lot of that management work is going to not be done by people any more. So all that information that needs to be translated from the front line up to the senior executives... Oh, a lot of management work can be actually automated with information systems.”

Of course, anyone immediately thinks about the time unnecessarily spent to sort and file email, to compile reports and build reporting material, to pass on and broadcast information to higher or lower levels of the hierarchy,... but how we access and filter information is also already changing. Tags, RSS feeds, contextual search engines, are tools many couldn’t live without anymore. But, albeit useful, these tools remain essentially dumb, and new generations of intelligent agents could help us focusing on the information we need. What Laura Peytavin, quoting Eric Allman, founder and Chief Scientist of Sendmail, calls avatars:

“Virtual representations of what we have made during electronic meetings where we would be represented by our avatar, to avoid being obliged to move around every time, to be solicited all the time. This, some people begin to think about it, so it would allow us to have a doppelgänger, to solve the problem of being presently too much flooded with information, therefore to be able to classify what we want to master, to focus on what we want to master, and then to have tools to more or less pilot our avatar to have it do whatever we ask it to do.”

Intelligent Tools for the Future

How we access and filter information is also already changing. Tags, RSS feeds, contextual search engines, are tools many couldn’t live without anymore. But, albeit useful, these tools remain essentially dumb, and new generations of intelligent agents could help us focusing on the information we need.

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Our ability to create, monitor, store and exchange huge amounts of data grows every day, as the performance of our systems increase. But the value of data doesn’t reside in its capture, in its quantity or in the speed at which we are able to gather it. Data is embedded into higher levels of meaning at which creation of value can occur. From data (the content) to information (adding context and intent), knowledge is created from making sense of gathered information. Many challenges, technological as well as organizational, exist at every stage of the path from data to value.

Getting from data to information will require more than improved mechanisms to store, manipulate and, even more importantly, to filter it, as most now agree with Clay Shirky’s statement 6 that what we suffer from isn’t information overload, but filter failure. According to Esteban Kolsky:

“The value of the data is at the moment that it was created as a specific component within a specific context with intent with a specific content. And if you do that and you actually capture that value, you can use that value. And you can store that value but you don’t need to store the data behind it. And that’s where we’re going as we’re going to a different world where the data and the information are different.”

But storing data along with the context in which it is created would be useless without the proper mechanisms to access the information we need at the time we need it, with the level of detail we need. Here lies an important dilemma we will have to solve in the following years: must we leverage the automatization capabilities of

information systems, and leave to them the capability to present us with the information we need, or should we instead better cultivate the human soft skills of freely making sense of huge sets of informal information? In other words, is the future of information management “push”, converging on more and more qualified information being served to workers by intelligent systems, or is it “pull”, focusing on education, introducing pattern-matching and other emergent skills learning in the school room? This question, and the answer that technology, as well as the society at large, will be able to give, might shape the future of organizations in deep way.

For Ray Wang, “the users have to be given some of those capabilities to do better filtering. Right, because we are suffering from information overload, and that data deluge that’s occurring is really creating... probably more addicts than necessary. We have lots of information, we have lots of data, very little information is probably better.” He describes further what he calls “Engagement Applications”:

“So, the things, for example, on role-based security, that’s going to dictate what I share with you. And the elements in complex event processing that going to determine the rules in our rooms, of each interaction that I’m going to automate over time. Right, so the soft learning mechanism and predictive tools that organize and drive correlation. So we need to put these together and then we need action frameworks that create offers or suggestions that tie back to our networks, tie back to other data, right. So it would living in that kind of engagement world where the engagement of, you, between a person to person or person

to machine or machine to machine becomes very important and so, how we structure this new world, of not just peer to peer, its almost machine to machine.”

Similarly, for Rolf Idar Isaksen: “We have to think differently how the search engine or the search machines have to cooperate with the collaborative part of it. We just have to expect this has to be handled and it must not be information overload. I must be able to get the information I need when I work on this case. If I just want the local information, I get local information, pertaining to my team or even my organization within the company.”

Nevertheless, we don’t know what we don’t know, and the development of predictive systems to serve knowledge workers with information they are supposed to need could prevent them from accessing what they really need at some particular point in time. As Paula Thornton, making a parallel with Google predictive search engine, says: “Google’s algorithms are based on ‘popularity’ (of sorts). Many times in business the content you really need to find is the most obscure thing that no one else is interested in. In the enterprise you actually know something about your content and you want to intervene with the taxonomy.”

Instead of empowering workers, the development of technology could come with the risk of impoverishing their capability to innovate and to create knowledge. The alternate scenario, on the opposite, relies on the human ability to learn new behaviors. For Stephen Collins:

“All the information is important. I’m not

saying it’s not important, but we’re not very good at distributing it and we’re not very good at managing it, which of course is the problem. And I think what we need to do is culturally, we need to learn new versions of the bad habits so that we throw away the bad habits and develop better ones. You and I would have this. I mean, if I read every Twitter message that went past me every day, I would do nothing but read Twitter messages and I still wouldn’t read them all. There’s too many. So we need to learn to pick the things that are important to us. Not to look at email constantly, not to look at Twitter constantly, not to look at the web constantly but to only go and use those things when it’s critical. It’s new habits to learn and it’s very, very hard.”

Rather than filtering information prior to presenting it, in this case, technology will provide us with improved tools to allow us to filter by ourselves. For Greg Lloyd:

“This has to do with the sort of focus, being able to turn the dials in same way that you can turn the dials with twitter... It may change over time, it may change over projects... where I am paying particular attention to. Where is my vision pointed. You still have the peripheral vision, which is way beyond there, which is a radical shift from email and other communication.”

Is the Future Push or Pull?

6 Clay Shirky It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter

Failure - Web 2.0 Expo - New York 2008 http://blip.tv/

web2expo/web-2-0-expo-ny-clay-shirky-shirky-com-

it-s-not-information-overload-it-s-filter-failure-1283699

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Reshaping Organizations

A Composite and Fractal Organization

The Myth of Corporate Culture

Adoption?

Customer Care or Collaboration?

Strength and Uncertainty

The Role of Management

From Workspace to Lifespace

Dark Siren Songs

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Ranjay Gulati explains very clearly and thoroughly how collaboration brings answers to some of the hardest challenges organizations are facing today:

“What we are realizing today in companies is as companies operate in more global context, are looking at dynamic markets, they are looking for more flexibility, ability or agility, being able to respond to market shifts quickly, being able to downscale and upscale very fast. And so when we look at a dynamic turbulent market where companies are looking for more agility, it naturally leads them to this model where they are starting to look at opportunities to collaborate with others externally.

At the same time, we’re also seeing the rise of the imperative for collaboration internally within the organization where silos that get created to manage division of labor need to learn to work together in a more collaborative fashion. So what we see is that organizations are trying to cope with uncertainty combined with the need for speed. And as you look at these two kind of dwelling imperatives, you can see that collaboration both with other entities outside as well as inside make that possible.”

But can organizations really transform themselves into collaborative enterprises? Most, if not all, attempts to answer this questions are considering that organizations are homogeneous. Amazingly, while trying to accompany them through this transformation, we are still assuming an industrialized vision of organizations: monolithic and coherent. “We all understand that when the world industrialized it wasn’t just about creating factories. We industrialized education and agriculture and government. I mean, we industrialized our whole society”, says Mary Adams. Instead, we should take into account how complexity and uncertainty have already brought in deep changes to existing models. Organizations operate more and more as finite ecosystems of diverse, inter-connected and inter-dependent entities, each with its internal purpose and culture, balancing between collaboration and competition according to contextual requirements. In other words, in most cases, the Collaborative Enterprise will be a composite and fractal organization, its own structure mirroring internally the relationships it maintains with external stakeholders and intervening with them with similar rules.

As Anne Marie McEwan says:

“The notion of autonomy, if you think about it, is nonsense within the context of distributed and interconnected subsystems. Hansen, author of Collaboration 7, talks about the need for disciplined company-wide collaboration. Whilst he has a specific definition of what that is, to do with willingness and ability to collaborate, I think the concept of disciplined autonomy is interesting. Disciplined autonomy might be seen as a bit of a contradiction. There are all sorts of reasons why the socio-technical systems movement, which preceded lean, didn’t succeed. One of the things that socio-technical organisations were criticised for is a strong focus on autonomy and then what you had was silos pursuing independent agendas. So that’s why I think that the decentralised operating autonomy of business units and networks has to co-exist with centralised co-ordination.”

Michael Wu makes a somehow similar statement, making an analogy with biological systems:

“You could think of it by looking at biology. I mean, clearly I’m made of millions of cells, but it’s not like every single cell in my body is the same. I have muscle cells, I have skin cells, they do different thing and they organize themselves into different organs or system that does different tasks. So, there is a need for some difference –there need to be some departments, but the key is that those departments need to communicate with each other. I think the breaking down of silo doesn’t mean that you have to put an engineer in the marketing team–it doesn’t mean that. It means that the engineer should be aware of what the marketing doing and the marketing should be also aware on what are the engineers are doing as well. I think that awareness and being

communicative in both sides is what it means to break down those silos.”

Coexistence of models isn’t damageable. Instead, they contribute to reinforce and improve each other. A collaborative mindset needs a competitive counterpart to fully deliver. As John Hagel explains:

“Actually from my view we never get

performance and improvement without a combination of collaboration and competition, or it’s very hard to sustain that kind of performance improvement; that you need a balance between the two in order to drive rapid and sustained performance improvement. One of the areas that we spend a lot of time investigating in this context is extreme sports where there is a relentless focus on performance improvement. These athletes are constantly challenging themselves and challenging each other to get to the next level of performance. And you find very interesting blends between competition and collaboration”

A Composite and Fractal Organization

in most cases, the Collaborative Enterprise will be a composite and fractal organization, its own structure mirroring internally the relationships it maintains with external stakeholders and intervening with them with similar rules.

7 Morten T. Hansen 2009. Collaboration: How Leaders

Avoid The Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results.

Boston: Harvard Business Press

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As Harold Jarche observes, organizational culture appears to be an emergent property of work practices:

“Culture as far as I’m concerned, organizational culture, is an emerging property of all the things that people do together overtime, and then culture emerges. You can’t change culture, you can change how people do things and then a new culture may come up. You can make things more transparent, you can make things more democratic, and you have that.”

This de facto links organizational culture to organizational structure, meaning that, in a Collaborative Enterprise, the coexistence of different models and practices will lead to diverse cultures, further enhancing internal heterogeneity. As Rachel Happe says:

“One of the huge problems is they don’t have one culture. They have many cultures. So one pocket in the organization might adopt social very easily, yet the organization around it won’t, and then that little piece will be more isolated in the rest of the organization. We may have an internal organization where social collaboration is working in part of organization but not the whole organization. I think also that change is just harder, inside a big audience you’re also spanning the globe, and so not only you have a corporate culture, you have the culture of the many different locations and countries involved, and different languages. So you’re just layering on complexities.”

Nevertheless, proper cultural alignment between involved actors is required in order to efficiently collaborate, whether internally or externally, what Prem Kumar Aparanji calls

“alignment of the organizations”:

“The collaboration between a supplier and the organization would really come in only when the relationship itself has matured to one extent that not just the top guys of the two organizations are, not comfortable with each other, but also the people down below, the people who actually work, also are comfortable with THEIR counterparts.”

While such a kind of this cultural alignment is at reach of teams or small departments or companies where close relationships between people already exist, achieving the same in large companies is a much tougher goal, as most companies are rather characterized by internal diversity, cultural as well as structural. Vertical silos, coexistence of hierarchy and “flat” structures, divergence in goals, size, mindsets, practices or time frames are common factors. In order to successfully foster internal collaboration companywide, some organizations will reshape themselves to reduce their internal heterogeneity on one side of the equation: structural or cultural.

Structurally, they will leverage the autonomy and similarity of sub-structures, what Dave Gray calls “the podular organization”:

“Companies are always kind of refreshing themselves and reinventing themselves anyway, and I think sometimes some companies already are designed in a very kind of podular way, like restaurant chains for example: in a restaurant chain you already have individual kind of somewhat autonomous units, you know, you have this, lets say McDonald’s, and you have each

McDonald’s store, I only use that because its a global example that everyone will probably recognize. Each McDonald’s store is in essence like it’s own little company, and companies that are organized in that way have actually, I think, an easier job, because as stuff gets older in one unit you can refresh it and you can do something completely different, whereas if you have everything that’s inter connected at a global level and everything is centrally controlled then it’s very hard to do in a more organic kind of progressive way.”

Culturally, they will rather focus on developing and maintaining a global and shared vision among all employees. At Zappos, for example, “we won’t hire people even if they’re the most amazing candidate in the world from a technical standpoint, if we don’t feel their culture fit we won’t hire them”, as explains Zach Ware.

It is clear that companies undergoing such a kind of radical redesign will effortlessly become true Collaborative Enterprises, but it is unlikely that many organizations will ever be ready for such a bold move. In most cases, they will have to deal with their internal contradictions and heterogeneity.

The Myth of Corporate Culture

In a Collaborative Enterprise, the coexistence of different models and practices will lead to diverse cultures, further enhancing internal heterogeneity.

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As many mid to large size organizations resemble more a patchwork of cultures and structures than homogeneous organisms, should we still focus on “adopting” collaborative behaviors companywide? It appears more and more clearly that, in our context, the “one purpose - one platform - then change management” paradigm is an artifact from our industrial past, and doesn’t fit how companies and groups of people work.

First, as Paula Thornton points out “there should be no adoption driving”: “The purpose of these tools, initially, is to tap the energy that is sitting there wasted, for people that are all ready who do this. And want a form where by they can do what is they need to do. The rest of the situation is to integrate it into the stuff that people normally do. I mean the bottom line is it’s get treated to much as an appendage and, it should simply be a mechanism whereby people can just get the work done.”

Similarly, for Jon Husband: “I think that there are forces that are taking us towards the point where what we are talking about generally as collaboration is becoming more understood as “this is just the way people do things”. But that has to infuse, adapt and, I guess, erode the existing structures.”

Still, we are seeing very few real world examples of Collaborative Enterprises. Part of the problem is to be found in the heterogeneity of cultures and structures just discussed. Collaboration does not only represent a huge organizational step away from the industrial rationale, but just as with other wicked problem 8, a common understanding of the why and how of collaboration doesn’t exist in companies. As Mark Oehlert explains it:

“The CEO and the CFO have different cultural responsibilities than people in different parts of the organizations. And so, I think, when you’re talking about getting people to embrace change, you have to first understand the culture that they’re going to have to try to do that in; and understanding the kind of pain points in that culture for them, and coaching that explanation of how the change is going to help them in a way that makes sense within that culture.”

Thus, for collaboration to diffuse evenly in an organization, the first step would necessarily be to get a shared and thorough understanding of how people work, communicate, share and build knowledge. But this prerequisite, naturally achieved in an homogeneous culture or structure, will remain a really tough challenge for most, and will require more open, divergent, experiential frameworks and approaches than the ones currently experimented.

A much more plausible scenario is instead about acknowledging and leveraging diversity, and letting collaboration diffuse unevenly across teams, departments or communities, on both sides of organizational boundaries. These organizations will more and more consider themselves as ecosystems, composed of interrelated sub-structures, each one owing its culture, collective behavior and level of autonomy, the more agile being able to transform and reshape themselves transversely with regards to temporary goals or projects

Adoption?

This prerequisite, naturally achieved in an homogeneous culture or structure, will remain a really tough challenge for most, and will require more open, divergent, experiential frameworks and approaches than the ones currently experimented.

8 Conklin, E.J. (2005). “Wicked Problems and Social

Complexity” Chapter 1 of Dialogue Mapping: Building

Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, Wiley,

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The Collaborative Enterprise is an extended organization. As Michael Wu states:

“Other people don’t know what I know, but making the problem explicit and visible to everybody, you have many more pairs of eyes to look at the problem and giving everybody a chance to say that, whether there’s something that I can do or I cannot do, so you essentially tackle a bigger problem and you find the skill necessary to tackle this problem faster and easier. I think that’s one of the big, big difference.”

Similarly, for Ross Dawson:

“We’re starting to recognize more and more this growth of business ecosystems more essentially which are broad-based collaborations. So business value is created not within a single organization but across a number of organizations.”

Of course, operating across an ecosystem doesn’t mean that all stakeholders are created equal, and working with suppliers and

partners or with customers covers different realities. On the customer side, maintaining close relationships is getting more and more important, notably under the pressure of Facebook, Twitter and other large social networks, which bring personal conversations into the open. To quote Jon Husband:

“And I think, I’m generalizing, making vast generalizations here, I think that my recollections through the years of growing up, is that when people did have their input acknowledged, whether that’s by a response, or letter, or phone call, or maybe some kind of credit voucher – whatever the response is, they felt like they’d won a small victory. That’s I think the kind of thing that needs to change. It needs to be seen as a natural and necessary, as part of the service feedback loop that must be maintained at all times and at all costs.”

Customers have taken the control of these new channels, and empowering customer service to keep organizations up to speed with requests for help has become an imperative. Dave Gray observes that:

“Now, if I can shuffle you over to the front department and the front department can solve your problem, why can’t I have that conversation with the front department and solve it, and just tell them it’s been solved? Why do I have to force you to do that? Well the reason that I have to do that now is

because the company doesn’t count your time as a cost that matters. So, your time doesn’t matter to the company, and that’s obvious to you, and what are you going to do? Well you’re going to leave and go find a company that you know that does a better job.”

But as important as providing an enhanced customer experience through online channels might be, it represents only a small part of what collaboration with customers would bring to companies. Let us remember that The Best Service is No Service, to borrow from Price and Jaffe’s book 9 title. Furthermore, social customer service will at some point suffer from the same problems of scale and cost mitigation already encountered on other channels. To further quote Dave Gray:

“We need to be able to provide information from systems that were build from company convenience, to systems that are designed for customer convenience. Because in many ways they’re in conflict. What’s convenient for customers is inconvenient for the company, and what’s convenient for the company is inconvenient for the customers. So how do you marry between those worlds? And of course a company that does everything inconveniently and only cares about customers, probably will have trouble making a profit.”

A real power of collaboration with customers would reside in the co-creation of products and services which will help in creating value for both sides. Yet, true and unbiased open innovation with customers, as described by Bob Thompson: “in my mind, it’s not a realistic

strategy for most companies, but it shows the possibilities that you could literary have your customers design something for you or at least rate and vet the design”, comes with a big question mark: to which extend would the necessity to take care of customers’ needs, beyond customer service, be linked to collaborating with them? Wim Rampen states:

“If I’m trying to think of new ideas then it would better to have really intelligent customers that have gone through the same problems themselves, even if they work on other industries. And that’s the advantage because almost every customer is an experienced customer in some field because they work”

To put it simply, some customers are qualified enough to be considered, and treated, as partners. This represents a shift from most today’s assumptions over marketing-driven co-creation toward a true coproduction model.

Customer Care or Collaboration?

9 Price, B., Jaffe, D. (2008) The Best Service is No

Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from

Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control

Costs. Jossey-Bass.

To which extend would the necessity to take care of customers’ needs, beyond customer service, be linked to collaborating with them?

Social customer service will at some point suffer from the same problems of scale and cost mitigation already encountered on other channels.

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At the other extremity of the spectrum, organizations are already no more islands. They more and more have to collaborate with suppliers, and in larger projects, competitors are also partners. As Mary Adams explains it:

“[...]And in there, just in their piece of the market, there are probably a hundred vendors. But in any one hospital there are probably twenty of those vendors that are installed and have to work together. And you know have to have; they have to be able to plug into each others work, they have to be able to share data and their solution may win one time to be this piece, but then another piece maybe you know, they are still in there. I mean it’s a very complex situation.

So, I think you can’t win by cutting other people out. You win by being better than everyone and being more collaborative. I mean by sharing, by helping and so this is one of the big challenges for many companies is to understand that their partners are as important as their customers in many cases; and that you have to manage those relationships. And if you get cut off from one of the key players in the market and they don’t want to talk to you or you know they don’t want to partner with you, that’s much more serious than losing one or two customers, because you are going to lose

lots of customers if you end up with that.”

Balancing competition and collaboration according to a changing context will more and more become a challenge that most companies will have to tackle. For Ross Dawson:

“There are some actually some quite simple strategic questions that need to be asked. And one of those is where do we collaborate and where do we compete? And I think that’s, there are actually relatively few organizations that have thought it through in such simple terms. But in fact the terms actually are that simple. I mean, then you need to think through the implications of it. But that there’s a change in boundary between where you collaborate and where you compete. But organizations first need to recognize where are we collaborating, who are we collaborating with, and where are the areas where we’re competing. And these, your collaboration and the competition can absolutely be with the same organizations.”

The more collaborative organizations will become, the more adaptive they will need to be in order to gain or keep competitive advantages. Strength and uncertainty will go on pair.

Strength and Uncertainty

The more collaborative organizations will become, the more adaptive they will need to be in order to gain or keep competitive advantages. Strength and uncertainty will go on pair.

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In the Collaborative Enterprise, reinventing the role of management is an imperative, as most of managerial tasks developed to fit “industrial” thinking. A lot of things are said about the need for managers to become leaders. But is there anything new here? Leadership, its nature and importance in managerial tasks at different levels of the hierarchy, have been largely studied and discussed since Mintzberg defined it as one of the key management roles back in 1973. The role of managers as leaders isn’t to be underestimated, of course, as people will more and more gather into collaborative nodes, as empowerment catalysts, but also as “goal keepers”, helping in making the right decisions in the right time. For Greg Lloyd:

“The role of management I think is... potentially focused on what sort of innovation is acceptable, how do we basically open things up for collaboration, cooperation across non traditional boundaries, which some people view as risks, and how do you.. turn that different perspective into something which can be a sustained... a genuine competitive advantage.”

In fact, many managerial tasks in a Collaborative Enterprise would mainly be an evolution, and an empowerment, of what they

are today. In 1989, Kraut, Pedigo, McKenna and Dunnette identified 10 the key managers’ roles as follow:

• One-to-onewithsubordinates(forfirstlevelmanagers)

• Linkinggroupsandallocatingresources(formiddle managers)

• Aneyeontheoutside(forexecutives)• Ambassador(formanagersatalllevel)• One-to-onerelationshipswill,ofcourse,

will be replaced by leadership or, more precisely, by what Harold Jarche calls “network weaving”:

“Managers need to set the context. They should be building consensus and using analytical tools to monitor their networks. They should ask if there are any structural holes in the network. They should see if people need more support because they are not getting the resources they need, or conversely, if they are getting flooded with information. They should always be seeking ways to help get work done, not direct it. Managers should be looking at the workplace from a network perspective. The job of leaders is network weaving, network understanding, and it’s all very organic, it’s like growing a garden.”

In an organization acting as an ecosystem of interrelated units extending beyond its boundaries, connected with customers, suppliers and competitors, and ultimately with the society at large, the role of managers will still be to link these units together, and to orchestrate the available resources across the most agile and resilient of them, by discerning and making sense of patterns of information exchanged. As Serge Soudoplatoff says:

“They have to give up the “ I .” This means that the role of a manager, today, isn’t about being, I would say... about being the crossing of everything which happens in his company, but being... more or less that he leaves the most possible things going in peer to peer mode. Here, I think, a lot of people could be really surprised.”

Yet, the more collaborative an organization will be, the more interwoven it will be with external stakeholders, and the more difficult it will become to simply define it as an entity. Today’s post-industrial organizations define themselves through their physical workspace, as well as, as Karl Weick formulated in The Social Psychology of Organizing 11, through enactment, by the structured discourse of managers. For Anne Marie McEwan:

“According to my understanding of Weick, he says that organizations don’t exist, he said the only thing you’ve got, at any given moment in time, are groups of people, bunches of relationships, people working together to either achieve or frustrate such objectives. I mean notion of an organization is wrong, it doesn’t exist. This is what exists. So if that’s the case, and I think it is deeply

the case and fundamentally the case, how then do our technologies, our workplace, our tools, how do all these things augments us to do the things we need to do, we want to do, we have to do? But it’s all about how these things enable and supports what we do.”

Thus, managing a Collaborative Enterprise won’t only be about making sense of how networked entities operate, but, as the workplace vanishes, and as customers and competitors are more and more active stakeholders of organizations, about keeping alive the identity of organizations to keep it from diluting into limbo. And this might going to be a really tough job for which managers aren’t prepared at all.

The Role of Management

10 Kraut, AI, Pedigo, PR, McKenna, DD, and Dunnette,

MD (1989). The Role of the Manager: What’s Really

Important in Different Management Jobs. Academy of

Management Executive, Vol. 33, No. 4.

11 Weick, Karl (1969). The Social Psychology of

Organizing, McGraw Hill

Managing a Collaborative Enterprise won’t only be about making sense of how networked entities operate, but, as the workplace disappears, and as customers and competitors are more and more active stakeholders of organizations, about keeping alive the identity of organizations to keep it from diluting into limbo.

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Leveraging learning and genuine collaboration not only requires to get rid of many of the behaviors and types of relationships inherited from the industrial era, but also to think differently about the workspace. For John Hagel:

«How would you redesign the workplace to accelerate learning, to accelerate talent development? And I think, we have not yet done the research, but our hypothesis is there are different kinds of environments for different kinds of tasks in learning. It’s a very different process if you’re trying to develop a new product and come up with new levels of performance in the product versus if you’re trying to develop tighter deeper relationships with customers and learning about their needs and trying to find ways to be more helpful to them.”

When, as says Harold Jarche, «work is learning, learning is work», the operational aspects of collaboration also imply redesigning the workplace. Stephen Collins gives an example of this evolution:

«And if you look at organizations, they are starting to make the right steps. Take away the offices so that senior people aren’t in the offices. They’re on the floor with the people who are doing the work so that they see what’s going on every day. And put them in close with their teams so that they see what’s going on, so they see the noise and they see the distraction and they figure out the best way.”

The industrial era had standardized space as well as time, and had transformed them

in abstract, normalized, containers for work tasks, allocated according to the hierarchical level of employees. Until recently, the higher in the hierarchy you were, the larger office and the more flexible schedule you might have got. Shifting toward more collaboration means setting human back in the center, thus allowing individuals to regain some control over the amount and kind of time and space they need to get their job done. «So the collaboration is not just something which achieves business objectives but also supports the individual aspirations, the individual ability, way to express who they are and their capabilities», states Ross Dawson. Some organizations 12, such as the Gates Foundation, are already rethinking and redesigning offices, and are experimenting with different organizations of space to facilitate free form collaboration.

Yet, the Collaborative Enterprise will depend on external collaboration at least as much as it will leverage internal networks and, to this structural necessity, corresponds individual behaviors, amplified by technological evolution. Luis Suarez explains that:

«One of the conversations that we had internally on this topic is the traditional concept of the workplace disappears. Work will happen wherever you are. You may be at the office, you may be working from home, you may be traveling, you may be at the customer’s site, but work will be happening around you.”

This growing atomization of the workplace isn’t only geographical, due to increasing mobility and remote working, but also behavioral. To quote Stowe Boyd:

« The idea that there is like these specific hours you do work and nothing else, and these hours you don’t do any work at all, I mean that’s… that’s so old now, it’s some of laughable. Because I would saying but on one hand management continues on with its thinking about their level of control, as if they can actually on one end take advantage of the fact that they call you at nine o’clock at night, or you get a business call at nine at night. And you will respond. It’s… assumed, you know. On the other end, they think they can somehow magically divide your life into the work and the non-work part, when it’s still radically to their advantage, or satisfies their sense of control or something. But it’s impossible.”

Work is getting more and more woven into the global flow of human activities, often leading to what Gilles Lipovetsky names a dichotomy:

«The model that I think is developing is, on one side workers, managers at least, are more and more wishful of being more committed to work smarter, and at this level there is nothing to be feared of, but at the same time there is a detachment from companies as a collective. So it is the genius of enterprise that has to re-mobilize their managers and employees. Companies cannot content themselves, cannot accept this dichotomy.”

How will organizations manage to solve this disconnection? Beyond the need for management to learn new roles and develop new skills, businesses will have to actively assume the growing intricacy of work and leisure relationships. Reconciling them can

only occur when organizations restore a continuity between the workplace and the civil community, and play an active role in facets of human activities other than only economics. Zappos’ Downtown Project, in that sense, is leading the way. In Zach Ware’s words:

«The other aspect of what we’re trying to do downtown, by moving from a Suburban campus to an urban campus, is actually using the community, the area outside of the office as an extension of the office. And so, there is a side project that Tony and few of us are working on called Downtown Project, where we’re investing in revitalizing Down Town Las Vegas. And one of the reasons for that, we’ve all stated that’s really not the only reason, is we want people to be able to get out of the office and go to a coffee shop, or go to a bar, or get into the park, go to a restaurant and work, because that’s what they kind of want to do anyway, and people naturally are more comfortable in those types of spaces.”

With the move from workplace to lifespace, from customer-centricity to citizen-centricity, will come new responsibilities and deep transformation for organizations on the way toward a Collaborative Enterprise.

From Workspace to Lifespace

12 In New Office Designs, Room to Roam and to Think.

The New-York Times, March 17th 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/business/

new-office-designs-offer-room-to-roam-and-to-think.

html?pagewanted=all

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Dark Siren Songs

Organizations are transforming themselves, slowly but steadily, much more likely under the pressure of markets than of any other parameters. Taking the path toward a Collaborative Enterprise, for most of them, means undergoing a long and tough journey, which requires embracing a new paradigm of work and challenging deeply ingrained organizational habits to fully deliver its promise.

Still, we have to consider every step with uncertainty, humility and cautiousness, as, while it is often said that technology is neutral, and that new technology has the potential of enabling new behaviors, what is not said is that old behaviors can take over new technology to enforce the status quo. Social technologies make no exception here, and behind the risk of hegemony and standardization of today’s available tools and platforms, lies the threat of an industrialized vision of collaboration. Instead of fostering diversity and individual empowerment, social technology might easily (evilly?) be used to reinforce a control mindset inside organizations. Just as the generalization of open spaces allowed increased surveillance through distributed control, social tools,

by giving visibility on how work gets really done, beyond existing formal processes and procedures, potentially provide managers with new supervision channels. As Gilles Lipovetsky states:

«I see in the collaborative enterprise rather something which answer businesses’ needs for innovation and productivity than something which would answer, let’s say, people’s needs for affectivity and communication. Because for people it exists in the reality. The atmosphere of the workplace, the relationships with the hierarchy, the refusal of stress as a management model, that is what is real for people. But not for businesses. Businesses need, in a high context of competitiveness and competition , to leverage talents, to harness people’s creativity.”

Furthermore, as our physical links with the workplace loosen, and as mobility and remote working get more and more acceptance from organizations, getting work done will more and more rely on our online presence. To what extent? For Ray Wang:

«There is one thing that I am very worried about actually, is I think it is of the uttermost importance that we preserve the right to be offline. If we don’t preserve that we’ll loose all our freedoms. It starts with ability to be able to escape … of being offline. And so we can be punished for not being online. For not being online we cannot be punished. It’s happening right now. We are recreating Skynet, we are recreating Matrix, we are recreating all the things that we would fear on our own. And if we can’t protect that basic right of being able to be offline, and being able to conduct a life offline, we’re in trouble. We are in big trouble.”

As worrying as Wang’s concern about the right of being offline, thus about the right of preserving our privacy, seems, it might well be only the tip of an iceberg which will be at the center of many of our interrogations. Beyond privacy, the Collaborative Enterprise will have to deal with the very notion of identity: what will the boundary between private and professional be, in a world where both are more and more intimately woven, and where the meaning of organizational space, time and focus is becoming fuzzy? Will our right for privacy extend to work activities, leading to larger autonomy and individual responsibility, or will instead professional assignments invade more aspects of our lives, leading toward what Jon Husband calls «soft fascism»?

«I think we’re on our way towards what I call ‘soft fascism’ in certainly the industrialized countries. And I think what ultimately the web and collaboration forces bring to us is a need for the individual… a heightened need for responsibility for paying attention

for… The constraints that have been put upon people to date have been typically from constraints from them acting like some… The metaphor that has often been used is we’re really children in grade school. And that’s what’s been behind a lot of the initiatives and the lamentations about empowerment for many years is that by large hierarchy in organizations doesn’t treat knowledge workers as adults, as responsible adults.”

The more collaborative organizations will become, the more important will be their role and responsibility in our lives, beyond economical considerations, and at some point they won’t keep avoiding to draft the lines a new kind of social contract. With much clearsightedness, Lipovetsky summarizes:

«Before, you had relationships according to the group you belonged to. Today, people’s relationships are at the same time inside the company and outside of it, and maybe class solidarities have been dismantled, maybe the collaborative enterprise comes and fills the void of the breakup of class solidarities which existed in former times. Does it succeed? This is another story.”

The future of the Collaborative Enterprise is, somehow, the future of the civil society.

what will the boundary between private and professional be, in a world where both are more and more intimately woven, and where the meaning of organizational space, time and focus is becoming fuzzy?

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Inspiring People

The Need for Reciprocal Confidence

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McLuhan 13, but the Collaborative Enterprise is less an attempt to leverage the same kind of technologies and collective proliferation inside organizations than an answer to deeper human aspirations by realigning work with our most natural behaviors. The purpose of the Collaborative Enterprise is not only about increasing performance, but about increasing it sustainably, Gilles Lipovetsky explains that:

«Pushed to its limits, this management model leads to an organizational model that isn’t sustainable. It isn’t sustainable, so why? Because today, in our society of individualism and hyper-consumerism, the quest for happiness, for well-being has become something fundamental. And I don’t think that a company can sustainably and efficiently go against men and women primary aspirations.”

To some extent, individual behavior replicates organizational behavior. Thus, setting up the right environment to foster collaboration neither requires only nurturing trust among employees, nor even leveraging management’s commitment to lead by example, but also to restore a reciprocal confidence between workers and organizations. For that, it is necessary, as Rachel Happe says, to provide them with a safe environment to freely express themselves:

«Take a little project, the thing that you need to do, and actually if you’re worried about the public profile of it, take it away into a corner, and sort of work on it where you know if it fails it’s not going to fail, you know, massively, in the full glare of public view. So, in another words create a safe environment.”

Furthermore, many organizational mechanisms, built for profit, have narrowed the spectrum of workers’ aspirations and motivations, and extrensic motivations won’t help much, as they don’t change employees’ perception of the company they work in. Instilling passion, and allowing it to thrive, to change both people’s behaviors and people’s perception of the organization they are part of, is a key driver, as tells John Hagel:

«Focusing on just business performance, if you want performance in your business and in an environment where we have increasing pressure, I think all of us need performance and a rapidly improving performance. And from our research at least, you don’t get that without high degrees of passion among your employees, among your workers. So I think part of it has to do with nurturing passion that already exist. There are workers who are passionate about what they do and yet they often find their passion is discouraged and suppressed as opposed to embraced and rewarded.”

«In the big business, they don’t know how to fight like family, and they never get over it. It’s all social stuff. Small businesses by large are better at the social stuff than large businesses. And large businesses get over it by simply refusing to admit that it’s there and so they hide it. You know I mean then the businesses just become psychotic. You don’t have feelings, you don’t get over it, you know, all these things, or let’s not talk about that now, or we’ll table this discussion, or… All these things that prevent us from being human.”

Paula Thornton says it all. Without rethinking the relationships between workers and organizations, many businesses will stay stuck

halfway from becoming true collaborative enterprises. There is nothing new here; companies which used to thrive in fostering harmonious relationships among employees always have had a distinct competitive advantage. Introducing social and collaborative tools will, of course, benefit every organization, by enabling conversations and creativity around tasks and processes which have reached the limits of both efficiency and effectiveness.

Yet, what we are witnessing today is not so much a shift in the way we communicate than a deep societal change. Indeed, social networks are rapidly transforming the public web into the global village envisioned by

13 Marshall McLuhan (1961). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The

Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto

Press

The purpose of the Collaborative Enterprise is not only about increasing performance, but about increasing it sustainably,

The Need for Reciprocal Confidence

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Appendixes

List of questions

List of Interviewees

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The following list of questions was provided to all interviewees, more as an adaptive blueprint than as a formal list, to foster the conversation.

• Describe how collaboration can change the way we are working today. What would be the main differences?

• How can we collaborate (for better or for worse) with our customers? With our suppliers?

• Describe a scenario involving innovative ways to collaborate- you choose the context

• Competition is key to most strategies. How could collaboration change the game?

• Most companies are reluctant to change. What would you say to motivate them?

• You are CEO of a big company. How do you facilitate collaboration?

• You are a small biz owner. What are the benefits of collaboration in your company?

• Will the collaborative enterprise take one unique shape, or many different ones?

• Can present technology support this vision of collaboration or do we need different tools?

• Social technologies are changing really fast on the web, and some are picked up and replicated by enterprise software. Which ones do you think are holding the richest promise? What should come next?

• As we produce and consume more and more information, how can we prevent overload? How can we weight information?

• Sharing information while retaining its property always has been an issue for organizations. How can they solve this paradox?

Prem Kumar Aparanji Evangelist - SCRM, Cognizant

Mary Adams Principal, Trek Conlting LLC, Co-author, “Intangible Capital”

Stowe Boyd Web Anthropologist, Clairvoyant, Futurist

Dr. Pehong Chen Chairman, President and CEO, BroadVision, Inc.

Stephen Collins Founder, acidlabs

Ross Dawson Futurist, Entrepreneur, Strategy Advisor, Author, “Living Networks”

Dave Gray Founder and Chairman, XPlane, Partner, Dachis Group

Ranjay Gulati Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor at the Harvard Business School, Author, “(Re)organize for Resilience”

John Hagel Co-Chairman, Deloitte Center for the Edge, Co-author, “The Power of Pull”

Rachel Happe Principal & Co-Founder, The Community Roundtable

Jon Husband Social strategy and architecture for wired organizations

Rolf Idar Isaksen Consulting & Project Management, EDB ErgoGroup

Harold Jarche Chairman, Internet Time Alliance

Esteban Kolsky SocialCRM Expert

Gilles Lipovetsky Author, Philosopher, Sociologist

Greg Lloyd President and co-founder Traction Software Inc.

Anne Marie McEwan CEO, The Smart Work Company Ltd.

Mark Oehlert Anthropologist, Historian, Technologist, Learner

Sameer Patel Partner, The Sovos Group

Laura Peytavin EMEA Tech Support Coordinator, Sendmail

Wim Rampen Manager Customer Intelligence and Brand Management, Delta Lloyd

Serge Soudoplatoff Entrepreneur, teacher, advisor, responsible for Gov. 2.0 at fondapol

Luis Suarez Social Computing Evangelist, IBM

Yuzuru Tanaka Laboratory Director, Meme Media Laboratory, Hokkaido University

Bob Thompson CEO, CustomerThink Corp.

Paula Thornton Collaborative Design Strategist

Brian Tullis Director, Information Services, Alcoa Fastening Systems

Ray Wang Principal Analyst and CEO, Constellation Research

Zach Ware no title - Zappos

Michael Wu Principal Scientist, Analytics, Lithium Technologies, Inc.

List of Questions List of Interviewees

We wish to thank the following persons whose insipartion helped us in materializing the project:Claude Super, for his Twitter conversationsVenessa Miemis, whose Open Foresight methodology helped us in shaping our interview-based approachPaula Thornton, for her critical approach of the initial list of questions

Photographs by Marcella Bona, Stacie Grissom, Hannah Swithinbank, Yhancik, J.Gabás Esteban, Håkan Dahlström, Corrado Alisonno, (OvO), Jason Kuffer, Dan Johansson published under Creative Commons licence