Category: Organization in the Collaborative Age

How Major Internet Companies Are Concerned About Societal Impact

There is an increasing concern by the leading Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc of the societal consequences of technology. And they are trying to take the initiative, probably because they fear that otherwise there will be laws and regulations against them.

They went up to create a group called ‘Partnership on AI‘ that is currently bringing together internet giants, NGOs, key industrial consultants. It was ‘Established to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society.’ It is based on the tenet that ‘We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for raising the quality of people’s lives and can be leveraged to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequality, health, and education.’

The Bloomberg article ‘Microsoft Says AI Advances Will Require New Laws, Regulations‘ explains why those large companies are becoming concerned. The impact of AI will be wide ranging but first of all it is essential to prevent social upheaval. It feels a bit like the concern of the largest capitalists in the 19th century, keen to prevent the communist revolution: it is essential that benefits of the new value creation flow back to the people and that protection be granted. And in turn this would protect the de-facto monopoly of the internet giants. Will they win of lose?

Share

How Startups Are a Toolbox for Dealing with Uncertainty and Complexity

Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame defines a startup as “a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty“. I find this definition extremely powerful. In reality startups are an organizational model to deal with uncertainty and complexity. And it can be actually seen as a tool in that context.

Eric Ries goes further: “According to this broad definition, anyone—no matter their official job title—can be cast unexpectedly into the waters of entrepreneurship if the context of their work becomes highly uncertain. I argued that entrepreneurs are everywhere—in small businesses, mammoth corporations, health care systems, and schools, even inside government agencies. They are anywhere that people are doing the honorable and often unheralded labor of testing a novel idea, creating a better way to work, or serving new customers by extending a product or service into new markets”.

This is why in his new book ‘The Startup Way‘ he explores the way the startup toolbox can be imported into larger and more institutionalized organizations. I tend to find that he sometimes stretches the concept a bit too much – don’t expect suddenly mammoth corporations to become an agile startup (that would end up like a mammoth in a porcelaine store I presume), still the idea is interesting and fruitful, if properly executed in the right remits.

Share

How Power Creates Responsibility (and Weakness Promotes Irresponsibility)

One of the issues we are facing as democracies is the rise of irresponsible requests from small groups. In fact, weak groups have nothing to lose: and they tend to become quite irresponsible. The weaker, the more desperate and the more irresponsible. A good illustration is the condition of trade unions in France, or the desperate gestures of people threatening to make their plant explode to avoid its closure.

On the other hand, power almost always brings responsibility, although it might take a while for the people to perform this transition (as such it is typical that a political party coming into power after too many years in the opposition will take one to two years to become quite responsible).

This observation bears also a way to deal with irresponsibility: give more power in certain areas to bring responsibility on the table. It can be an excellent negotiation strategy when facing a really irresponsible party.

Share

How Each Social Group Has Its Own Vernacular Tongue

Have you realized that each social group, be it a local community, a sports club a particular industry or a specific company, has its own vernacular tongue. In particular, it tends to use words and acronyms whose sense is only understandable by the initiated. We often underestimate the community power created by this shared understanding – and the exclusion power for those that don’t understand it.

Which means that an outsider’s first focus should be to learn that specific tongue, so as to be integrated. The power of integration brought by the capability to speak the community tongue is incredible and underestimated.

As a consultant I do enter many different client organizations and learning the specific words, expressions and acronyms is the first priority. Once they are known and used properly, I feel integrated in the community, and they feel I am part of them, which is quite useful.

Hat tip to Alain Carcassès for the discussion and the original idea

Share

How Remote Teams Can be More Productive Than Colocated Teams

This interesting post on Techcrunch ‘Not even remotely possible‘ makes the point that a remote team can be quite more productive than if they are colocated.

“Quite apart from the time and rent saved, there’s growing evidence that remote teams can be more productive than in-person ones. Consider: “We found massive, massive improvement in performance — a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home.” Consider companies like Automattic, Gitlab, InVision, and Zapier, all of which thrive as fully remote companies.” [the Stanford link is a study made on China’s largest travel agency]

The interesting point here is how the way we work changes because of remoteness: “The biggest transition from office to remote work isn’t the geography; that’s incidental. The biggest transition is the mode of communication, which goes from default-synchronous (walk over to your colleague’s desk) to default-asynchronous (PM them on Slack.) I certainly concede that certain forms of work, and certain people, benefit more from synchronous communications; but I put it to you that “most kinds of software development” is not among them, and that an ever-increasing fraction of the world’s work can be described as “most kinds of software development.””

Managing remote teams and getting traction from home is the future. It saves money, environmental disruption and is even more productive! So why wait?

 

Share

How AI is already at work managing employees

AI management of employees is not a scene of the future. It is already happening. Of course on a specific type of work, but nevertheless this is not science-fiction any more!

In the post ‘An internet company has found a single manager for 60,000 employees‘, Quartz explains how the company Rainforest QA is using AI to coordinate the thousands of mainly part-time employees doing basic checking tasks and bug-finding on algorithms and other software. Thus, how it has automatized most of its task assignment duties.

The web is already noisy from the possibility of funds being managed by AI instead of human teams. It seems that most of the basic management tasks of tasks assignment or arbitration between possible investments is soon going to be taken over by AI.

Welcome to the future of the organization!

Share

How Lifetime Employment Has Become Impossible As the LifeSpan of Companies Dwindles

I stumbled on the enclosed picture and I found it was a great way to illustrate the tremendous change from the Industrial Age to the Collaborative Age.

Where life employment could be a reasonable assumption, the average lifespan of companies today requires us to rethink that perception completely.

And this represents the average lifespan of the larger companies, not considering even smaller companies that are generally less stable over time.

Our own lives transcend the life of temporary organizations. Organizations become more and more transient organizations built around a project. They are rarely developing into a sustainable organization of its own, and are often acquired by other businesses.

The time of companies’ instability has come. Are you prepared?

Share

How the role of Chief Data Officer Becomes Indispensable

The role of Chief Data Officer now becomes indispensable even in industrial organizations. In all organizations, data the inter-linkages between systems become increasingly important in terms of effectiveness and value-creation.

And data is the new oil. Don’t let this source of value on the roadside or available to others. It is now a substantial asset of all organizations (although not recognized by the obsolete rules of accounting we are all using).

I now believe all organizations should have someone responsible for Data: identification of repositories, coding and consistency, usage for analysis and decision-making, lessons learnt and availability of past experience etc. Whether a Chief Data Officer or another title, it is a transverse role that is the core of future value creation.

Don’t wait to create this role of Chief Data Officer!

Share

How Conway’s Law Shows How Systems Are Dependent on Human Organizations

Conway’s Law states that “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations“. This was stated in the context of computer programming in 1967 and still holds validity today.

It just shows how difficult it can be to abstract oneself from the social organization in which we are embedded. As a result, even information and data treatment approaches will tend to reflect organizational and social boundaries.

I find that this is particularly applicable in the context of large organizations, where taking a systemic view is generally difficult. Initiatives tend to develop locally and then to join at the organizational borders.

This law holds a lot of food for thought when it comes to designing data management systems in organizations. We should recognize it and at the same time iron out those interfaces that are really an issue for the effectiveness of the solution we are seeking.

In any case remember the social setting always influences the software system solution!

Share

How to Define Personal or Organizational Success

Michelle Obama is often quoted to have said: “Success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.”?

This is quite a powerful quote with, I find, a very deep meaning.

And this approach is both applicable to individuals and to organisations.

The foremost aspect is that what is important is to make difference in other peoples’ lives and not just in one’s own. Making this difference can be direct but also indirect for example through setting an example or an inspiration for others to follow.

An truly, at the end of the day, that’s what is important in one’s life.

Share

Towards Office-Less Organizations

Since 5 years I have been operating my small consulting company globally without offices (why pay the overhead when we spend most of our time at clients’ offices?!?). It always seems strange to acquaintances, but that’s the way many businesses run today. In this example, ‘The company behind WordPress is closing its gorgeous San Francisco office because its employees never show up‘.

Working from Home

Working from home or on the road is the new normal. I hope that architects will take into account this requirement for home offices a bit more systematically. Traditional businesses would need to notice. In large organizations I still find people who can’t work remotely using video conferencing tools on their laptops (or even still using desktops!). What a waste!

I am not saying that having a co-located team is not appropriate in certain instances. For example I am deeply convinced that continuous team geographical colocation is an essential success factor in project execution and probably also in certain instances of creative endeavors. But in most cases, temporary offices can be rented out when they are needed. And office space needs to be more flexible – for example project team co-location can be more effective outside the traditional organization offices.

Flexible offices are the future, as is remote work across time zones and locations. Traditional office spaces are due for obsolescence. And this will happen sooner than some might expect!

Share

How to Overcome the Project Execution Paradox

The Project Execution Paradox is this: the more you advance in a project, the more you know about it, and at the same time the least degrees of freedom you have to influence it.

It is a close cousin of the sunk cost syndrome, which leads us to continue on absurd projects because of what had been spent already.

There are several techniques to overcome this paradox. They are mostly aimed to minimize commitment and maximize knowledge early in the project. They are routinely used without people realizing their ultimate aim:

  • create an explicit gate-based decision path that allows to review the project case during the development of the team’s knowledge and understanding of it, and possibly decide to stop it (or to go back to the drawing boards) before too much gets committed,
  • the ‘lean startup’ path that develops the project with small commitments of resources of energy while maximizing learning and the number of possible iterations,
  • All planning approaches which aim at dedicated resources to increasing knowledge before large expenditures are being made.

Whatever the approach, the paradox will remain and surprises will occur during project execution. By being aware of the Project Execution Paradox we can try to anticipate better and be prepared for its expression.

Share