E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

How Fun and Creativity Can Shape Your Own Social Computing Guidelines and Policy

One of the main issues large corporations and small businesses have been having all along, when trying to go through that business transformation towards becoming a Social Enterprise, has always been the lack of an effective governance model and eventually decide to go for the easy way out: blocking social networking sites at work, hoping that knowledge workers would make better use of their own time, instead of goofing around, supposedly, when in reality they will just be switching devices and access those social networks regardless. Even without having to use your company’s resources.

It’s been one of those recurring themes that we keep coming back to time and time again, over the course of the years, and the solution always seems to be the same one, unfortunately. Instead of perhaps working a bit harder in trying to understand, address and mitigate whatever the potential risks, but also taking advantage of the many different benefits behind social networking for the enterprise, we keep bumping into news items that seem to confirm quite an interesting trend: instead of working your way towards a robust, trustworthy, essential and rather elemental social computing policy and guidelines, folks seem to want to leave that to others to figure it out, if anything at all, when it’s probably a bit too late already.

I remember the day when IBM was first facing that very same issue, on whether to put together a social computing policy and guidelines or not. At the time, May 2005, it was rather refreshing to see how instead of the company trying to figure it out by itself, on its own, it decided to rely on a group of prolific bloggers to come to the rescue and eventually put that policy on a wiki page over the course of two weeks. From there onwards, and 6 years later, two different revisions coming along and we now have got IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines, which we could possibly say have become an industry standard that other companies have adapted to their corporate culture and values to make them their own and shine through all the way. And it all got started with just a bunch of bloggers!

Fast forward to 2011, and I am still finding it somewhat provocative, and perhaps a bit too sad, how plenty of businesses still keep blocking the use of social networking tools, as business tools, thinking they can get away with it without making things potentially worse, for them and for their employee workforce alike. And it’s not just like we are back into 2005, or earlier when help and support were scarce; nowadays we have got a whole bunch of rather insightful articles and resources that can prove to be rather helpful when trying to draft your own guidelines and governance models (Those are some rather good resources to get you going, if you don’t have one just yet, by the way…) to match your company’s corporate culture as well as your values. So there is probably no excuse any longer, is there?

The interesting thing from this whole debate about governance models and social computing guidelines and whether to block access to these social tools or not, is that policy and guidelines don’t necessarily need to be boring and unsubstantial. Quite the opposite! It could well be plenty of good fun! In fact, it should be a fun activity. Like my good friend, Mark Masterson, would say, “If you treat people like sheep, they would probably behave like sheep“. If you make it a fun activity, if you trust them to do the right thing, since you have hired hard working professionals in the first place, they would look at it and fully embrace it, internalise it and own it, to the point that they would match those guidelines to their own overall values and corporate culture of the business. And that’s probably as good as it gets, because the last thing you would want to see, as a hard working, socially networked professional is to witness how internal social tools get abused by others who think they just finally got Facebook for the enterprise to hit their next date!

It just doesn’t work that way! And here is a good example of a social computing policy and guidelines that combines fun, creativity, innovation and the right messages to be shared across in a format that’s very easy to digest. A video clip that lasts for a little bit over 4 minutes. Take a look into Social Media Policy, a YouTube video put together by the Department of Justice in Victoria, Australia (Yes, the Department of Justice! Who would have thought about that, right?), which explains quite nicely their own social media policy that they are using:

Fun stuff, eh? Well, after watching that video and seeing what’s possible to become a Social Enterprise, even for late-joiner industries like Government, I guess there isn’t probably any longer an excuse for you, as a business, to work your magic, just like they did on the video, and put together a policy and set of social computing guidelines that would be respectful and trustworthy of your employee workforce, as well as youself, as a business, towards your corporate culture and those values I mentioned above. That policy would eventually become your flagship as you enter the world of living and embracing social, just like it did for us, at IBM, over 6 years ago, just like it does for Victoria’s Department of Justice. The good thing is that you will no longer have to go the easy way out of blocking access and face the consequences. Quite the opposite; it can be quite an inspiring and creatively fun activity that everyone can contribute and benefit from. And, right there, that’s the next challenge for all of you who may be reading this and not have that policy in place just yet.

What are you waiting for? When are you going to start? Don’t leave for tomorrow what you can begin today! Make it fun, inclusive, participative, engaging, empowering, open and transparent; get that creativity juice going with all of that smart talent that is surrounding you and you will be off to a great start!

Your first step towards becoming a fully Integrated Social Enterprise.

The Social Enterprise and The Circular Economy

Earlier on today, and continuing further with yesterday’s blog entry on “The Social Enterprise – Welcome to the Era of Intrapreneurship!” that I shared over here, my good friend, the always insightful Susan Scrupski put together a follow-up article that absolutely pretty much nails it for me on this whole topic of transitioning into “The Social Enterprise” from “Social Business”. Under the rather thought-provoking title of “Zen and the Art of Enterprise Maintenance” Susan herself has set up some homework for all of those folks out there who may be involved with Enterprise 2.0, Social Networking / Computing or Social Business (In my case, Social Enterprise). To name: “We are aiming to change the world of work“. And somehow although plenty of folks out there would see that as a call to (silent) arms I tend to think more along the terms of the Awakening 2.0 that a bunch of us have been waiting for a long while now…

Further down in that article Susan gets to explain, in a rather enlightening and insightful fashion, what she actually means with ”We are aiming to change the world of work“, which I guess is probably rather well described under this golden nugget:

“To get to the “fix” part of this equation, it’s going to take the smarts and knowhow of everyone who’s focused on the Enterprise. There’s a great thread on G+ from Sameer Patel on the “how.” The lasting value will be to apply the spirit of social revolution in the enterprise to the practical application of social in the enterprise“

To then finish it all off with setting up the challenge ahead for all of us:

“This is the hard part. Delivering on the promise of social. So consider it a clarion call for all practitioners, consultants, and vendors (big and small): Figure it out. Bring it home for the rest of us and the planet. We’ve done the first hard part which is selling the promise of revolutionary change. And we’ll keep beating that drum, btw. It’s the backbeat to the song we’re singing“

Of course, as I finished off reading through her blog post I just couldn’t help thinking about the “Figure it out“ part of her article and start thinking about potential solutions. And while catching up further with some other interesting reading I just couldn’t help pondering that we may have a holistic solution far too close to each and everyone of us to realise about it, and make it work. It all came clearer to me when I re-discovered a rather inspiring video clip that re-introduces a very innovative and creative concept that I would love to see it being explored by the enterprise world and not just by a few companies: The Circular Economy (Re-Thinking Progress)

In a rather revealing article over at the Guardian, Rosie Bristow describes quite nicely how the current linear economy hasn’t taken us too far ahead; quite the opposite! It seems that it’s made things a whole lot worse, not just for the business world, but just as much for both our societies and the world we live in:

“The basis for this thinking is that the linear way in which the world economy currently operates fuels a culture of consumption and creates more waste than is sustainable in the long term. In contrast, the living world operates in a circular cycle where the waste of one species provides the food for another and resources flow”

That last sentence is probably as good as it gets and it reflects how, once again, nature may be a whole lot wiser than all of us in managing her own resources to create, cultivate and nurture progress. Her progress: the one that affects us all in our day to day lives. So Rosie keeps wondering whether we could make the switch towards that Circular Economy along these very terms:

“What would a circular economy look like in practice? The video suggests that it’s about redesigning and rethinking products so that after they have been used by humans, their component parts return to manufacturers, with biological elements being used to support agriculture and valuable resource parts such as metals being used in the creation of new products. In this way, today’s goods become tomorrow’s resources, forming a circular cycle”

Not such a bad idea, don’t you think? While musing about Susan’s and Rosie’s articles I just couldn’t help thinking that perhaps what we really need to fully embrace and live the Social Enterprise would come pretty close to this whole concept of the Circular Economy, where we try to mimic what nature has mastered doing over the course of millions of years without facing too much trouble, till we humans started reverting that trend. Perhaps both growth and progress are meant to be that way. Perhaps we should starting shifting gears and introduce that whole concept of leasing / borrowing, instead of owning, which, if you ask me, is pretty close to what we would be doing with that Social Web activity we have all fallen in love with: sharing!

Sharing what we know, our experiences, our skills, our knowhow, our selves, so that others could benefit by reusing it themselves and make it better. Sharing our connections and personal business relationships, so that others would benefit from those new relationships instigated by empowering connectors / hubs. I am not sure what you folks would think about it, but this key trait from the Social Web / Web 2.0 does come pretty close to this whole concept of the circular economy, where progress is being made not so much on how much you grow, but by how much you are capable of reusing and learning along the way to create something better without having to destroy, without remedy, something in between.

It’s probably that openness, transparency, and trusting relationships in the system that surely have made it work for nature all along (Because she always knows what’s best for her and those around her…) and perhaps we need to fully embrace those critical social aspects to “figure it out“, as Susan mentioned. Plenty of food for thought, for sure! And for those folks who may be skeptic about re-thinking new ways to help us progress further into the 21st century, let’s look at what that linear economy has managed to do in the last 3 to 5 years to see, and realise, we are probably not much better off than what we were a few decades ago after all…

Yes, we need a reboot. And pretty desperately. We have been probably needing it for over a decade already, and in times of (financial) crisis (Crisis as in choices / changes), we need now more inspiration than ever to leap forward and provoke that shift towards a Social Enterprise: a sustainable and engaged economy where all factors are looked up equally, including the resources we have got available to us all, so that growth finally makes its move towards progress, respectful and sustainable progress.

And that’s why from here onwards I’ll be making a huge effort, my ¢2, really, to start transitioning myself from that linear economy of consumerism, just for the sake of consuming, into that circular one by applying some smart and educated thinking in what I consume and buy and what I don’t. That basically means I will be looking up to those businesses that would want to start making a difference and change our future and I do seriously hope that my own company will be jumping the shark, too!, as it enters its second century of existence.

But what about yours? Is your business ready to embrace and live the Circular Economy? Do you think it’s worth while trying? Do we have a choice any longer? After all, what would we lose not trying it, right? Probably not much, but a lot to gain, for sure!

Our very own survival as a species.

The Social Enterprise – Welcome to the Era of Intrapreneurship!

There is probably very little doubt out there still about the huge potential, and impact, that Social Networking has been having within the corporate world over the last few years, to the point where a few folks have ventured into suggesting that we are witnessing the tipping point of how we are redefining the Future of the Workplace itself, something that has become, over time, one of my favourite topics as of late and which has finally triggered a thought that’s been lingering in my mind for a quite a bit already: from now onwards I’ll stop talking about Social Business (And leave it down to those folks who coined it first, for our own social good) and, instead, move on with “The Social Enterprise”. And, more specifically, I would like to welcome you all to The Era of Intrapreneurship!

There are plenty of blog posts out there that have covered very well the topic of “The Future of the Workplace” and the impact of social computing in helping shape up the business world to become a whole lot more open, engaged, transparent and nimble. However, there is one particular article out there that became one of my all time favourite ones around this very same topic, and more than anything else, because it describes, pretty well, how work has evolved with the emergence of the Social Web in the last few years. I am not sure whether you folks may have read it already or not, but, if you haven’t, it’s probably one of those blog entries that I would consider an essential reading for people who are interested in getting a glimpse of what lies ahead, if not already! Check out Irving Wladawsky-Berger‘s “A New Style of Work“.

Irving’s blog is probably one of the most refreshing, enlightening and entertaining reads you can bump into at the Internet Blogosphere. In case you may not have subscribed to it already, I can surely recommend you do so. And that blog post I mentioned above would certainly confirm why it’s a worth while read time and time again. In that article he basically defines the work life of Trust Agents, what I would call as well Wild Ducks, that group of knowledge Web workers who do lots of smart work together gathering in social networks, communities and whatever other informal groupings to carry out that piece of work they are truly passionate about and connected with one another due to a common affinity. Nothing to do with hierarchies, nor with organisations, nor with project teams, just plain wirearchy, without which all three of those would probably not exist today, as we know them. Apparently, what Tom Foremski has defined as an “atomic” business model as well.

“A New Style of Work” is a wonderful trip down the memory lane as well that will certainly act as a refreshing reminder of what the Web used to be and what it is today and, clearly, this particular quote states what’s meant for each and everyone of us as individual knowledge workers:

“My time is now my own. I have a lot more flexibility and personal choice in what I do and how I spend my days. The boundaries between work and personal life, already very porous when working at IBM, are practically non-existent.

But, as a self-employed individual, I am also on my own. While the various institutions I work with provide me some degree of support, their infrastructure and processes are geared to support their full time employees, not part-time professionals and contractors. I thus have had to come up with my own infrastructure and processes suitable for my present distributed work style“

To then finish it off with this other insightful quote that I am sure plenty more knowledge Web workers out there would agree with blindfolded:

“The Web has now essentially become my primary work infrastructure. My work processes are essentially web-based processes. While I use physical offices when spending time at any one of the institutions I work with, by primary office is the Web. My primary business address is someplace out there in the cloud“

This is exactly what I meant with the title of this blog post when welcoming you all to the Social Enterprise and the Era of Intrapreneurship. You are not reading it wrong. I actually meant every letter: The Era of Intrapreneurship. An era, where thanks to the Social Web, whether internal or external, or both!, knowledge workers, for the first time ever, are now in charged of their own productivity, of their own workflows and personal business relationships with others, of their own responsibility not only towards the work that needs to be done, but also towards the fellow peers they collaborate and share their knowledge with. Thanks to that Social Enterprise we are starting to see how knowledge Web workers are becoming a whole lot more open, public and transparent in narrating their own work, therefore making observable work an integral, critical and paramount activity at the workplace; we are starting to witness how knowledge workers are shaking off their fears for the work they do, or don’t do! as well the fears of no longer being considered indispensable, despite the the huge amount of knowledge they have accumulated over the course of the years, or those other fears of no longer being considered the experts they once thought they were. In short, fear is out, having fun @ work is in.

It’s that social revolution that we are witnessing entering, slowly, but steadily, the corporate world, that’s certainly going to help us move along, not thinking along the terms of becoming a social business, but more embracing that social transformation that trojan mice typically would provoke as intrapreneurs. It’s that social revolution and transformation that will help us all understand how critical it is for each and everyone of us having the right access not only to relevant information and content resources, but also access to the people behind it by nurturing and cultivating those relationships and networks on a regular basis in order to make better, smarter, more sensible and more informed decisions, regardless of wherever we may well be, whether in a physical office location, or while working from home, while travelling or while at a customer site. What will matter then is how work will start shifting around us, and not the other way around, as it’s been happening all along over the last few decades. Iriving’s account of how, amongst several other social flavours, mobility, i.e. going mobile, and blogging, specially, as one of the most powerful ingredients to help boost your own personal brand vs. that one of the corporation (as I have blogged about over here myself a few days back) is probably as good as it gets in helping set the stage of how the workplace has been transformed into something so empowering as helping employees take a bit more co-responsibility of their own workflows, without having to wait for orders, or being told what they would need to do. Quite the opposite, in most cases, the center of gravity has been, finally, lowered down tremendously, to the point where it’s through those informal social networks and communities they themselves co-facilite the ones who will be defining what work needs to get done and with whom.

Something that, to me, represents the true spirit of Entrepreneurship, in our case, for this article, Intrapreneurship. Something that, for the first time in a long while, could be classified as a truly inspirational social revolution that will help transform not only how we do business, but also how we behave as human beings in our very own societies. My dear friend, Susan Scrupski, couldn’t have put it in much better words than this wonderful gem she shared earlier on today to describe what I have meant all along with that social revolution within the enterprise:

“[...] The zeitgeist of Social is about introducing the promises of Web 2.0 (Openness, egalitarianism) to reinvent the way things have been done in prior eras, evolved from industrial age principles, e.g. Taylorism.

Social is not about anarchy ; it’s about freedom and democracy and innovation. It’s not about rigid structures and hierarchies; it’s about transparency and honesty and re-distributing power to create agile change motivated by passionate, engaged actors. It’s about leadership that rewards and recognises talent and instinctively has a collective understanding of the community it serves, because it’s tuned into what they think, as well as what they do. It’s about authenticity and trust. (Yes, trust)”

Like I said, I couldn’t have put it in better words than those and if you haven’t read the entire piece I would strongly encourage you all to go ahead and do so and go through the highlights of a keynote with 45k attendees that may have marked the beginning of that Social Revolution within the Enterprise itself.

Essentially, this is not about becoming a Social Business; because with the word “Business”, we lose all of the original intent that sparked the creation of that Web 2.0 movement back in the day that Susan talked about in her post. We need to go beyond that! Further beyond that! This is all about embracing and living a new state of social empowerment that will break the status-quo within the Enterprise, and I do realise that for plenty of people out there I may be in fantasy land myself and won’t probably see it in my lifetime or perhaps a bit too deep into my Hippie 2.0 shoes, but just like recent global events have shown us, we are witnessing a truly unique historic moment where, now more than ever, it would be up to each and everyone of us to decide where we stand, i.e. whether we would want to co-lead it, or wait for it to blow us all away without remedy and no point of return! It’s your choice. It’s our choice. And I guess, if you have been reading this blog for a while, you know on which side I would be standing, right?

… Well, what about you though? Are you also a wild duck, one of those critical trust agents, intrapreneurs ready to co-lead that social change within your own enterprise? Are you ready to drop Social Business and instead continue to live the Social Enterprise Revolution we all once truly believed in, when we all thought we could change the world with the Social Web? What do you think?

Of course! Come on and join us! The waters have always been lovely!