How Confucius can help us liberate organisations

Photo courtsey of Steve Webel on Flickr

Confucius dedicated his life to convincing Chinese leaders that they must act virtuously. But as modern organisations struggle to deal with the increased complexity of the network era, Confucian thinking provides a valuable reminder that we as individuals must strive to transcend the cultures of the organisations in which we find ourselves. Let me explain.

More than ever before, organisations are shaping the human condition by determining how we live and work. To improve the human condition, we therefore have to ensure that we are consciously shaping our organisations, and not simply being subservient to their cultures and values.

Culture and tradition have historically been the way in which stories are passed on, and the way in which the human species remembers. But the networked era gives us access to so much information that we are able to construct a much more personal, individual understanding of the human condition.

The networked era makes it possible for us to realise our individuality within a community. In fact, the network era demands that we do so - this is what is driving the demand for authenticity. The opportunity of the networked era is that we no longer have to hide behind organisational culture - each person can create their own culture, their own unique set of beliefs and values.

This is what it means to be enlightened: to be free of the passive conditioning of culture and to actively shape your beliefs and values. And it is this enlightenment that drives engagement.

But isn't this dangerous? What sets our moral compass if we free ourselves from the tyranny of culture? Is it the transparency and authenticity that the network era brings? If we are fully exposed, we cannot hide behind cultural practices - it is the radical transparency of the network that makes us accountable, the fact that we are fully visible to others. This is where Confucian thinking is invaluable: if we abuse this new-found power and act without virtue, we risk being publicly shamed and losing our credibility.

Organisations are sub-cultures. But while the network era demands that we realise our individuality, the hierarchical power structures of our organisations make it almost impossible for individuals to challenge the dominant culture. It is unsurprising that employees become disengaged when confronted with the colossal walls of organisational culture.

A core function of leaders then is to transform the lives of the people they lead. But in the capitalist era, leadership has become too focused on making money. The capitalist culture of shareholders has made business leaders beholden to the profit-driven demands of people external to the organisation, rather than to improving the lives of those working within the organisation. This results in many leaders breaking Confucius' Golden Rule: "Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself".

In the network era, the challenge is for every employee to create and adhere to their own set of beliefs and values. The radical transparency of the network age demands authenticity, and enables us to challenge those leaders and organisations who act without virtue. If we are to reinvent organisations for the benefit of society and humanity, we must strive us to remain autonomous in the face of the dominant organisational culture, and consciously choose to act according to our own personal set of beliefs and values.

And, as Confucius says, to conduct ourselves with virtue.

It's time to liberate experience

Everybody's experience is valid. But all too often we are required to limit our experience to conform to the will of others.

Nowhere is this more true than in organisations. Every organisation has a shared system of beliefs and behaviours, which can be understood as its culture. Cultures emerge from the constant interaction of people with each other and their environment.

But the unpredictable, non-linear nature of these interactions is a primary reason why organisations find it so hard to change a culture. The principle of cause and effect that guided approaches to leadership in the industrial era is no longer suited to the complexity of the knowledge era.


Liberating experiences

So what can we do? Well, one powerful solution to this problem is to harness the power of experiences.

A key value of experiences is that they are neither right nor wrong, they just are. You may think you know what is happening in your organisation, but unless you are making a conscious effort to listen to the full range of customer and employee experiences your understanding will be limited.

The digital age has made it possible to liberate, access and search the constantly shifting landscape of experiences happening within and beyond an organisation. But we are only just beginning to see a corresponding shift in the willingness to use these experiences to guide decision-making.


Legitimation by experience

Every experience is legitimate. If you have an organisation of 1,000 employees, you have 1,000 pairs of ears and eyes that can help you build a picture of what is actually happening. If you widen the net to include customers' experiences, this number increases exponentially.

Using these experiences to guide the activity of employees makes an organisation significantly more responsive to its environment. But while digital tools have shown us 'how' to do this, many organisations are still struggling with the 'why'.

As we move further into the knowledge era, it is no longer effective to expect leaders and executives to have all the answers to complex problems. The answers lie in the crowd, in the employees and customers who make up the organisation and its ecosystem. Their real-world, real-time experiences are an invaluable resource of information that shows what is actually happening, and not what the 'organisation' thinks is happening.

Every organisation has an army of potentially willing helpers who want to share their experiences. Why wouldn't you want to liberate this power?

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The QoE use the Perpetual Experience methodology to help businesses become more responsive, more innovative, more authentic, and more efficient. If you're interested in harnessing customer experience to transform your business, you might also like:

• Why Perpetual Experience matters
• Why take the customer out of customer experience?
• Digital is changing human experience, not just customer experience

Thank you to Philippe Leroyer on Flickr for the use of his excellent photo.

How 'community' can drive digital transformation

Two problematic areas for today's organisations are employee engagement and digital transformation.

Although organisations want employees to share knowledge, care about their work, and embrace digital ways of working, they often try to impose these desires on top of the existing culture of work. And attempts to impose culture change from above will always be met with resistance.

The problem is that we have two sets of forces pushing against each other: an outdated, hierarchical view of work based on a 20th century industrial model of organisation, and a 'socialised' view of work stemming from a desire to harness the power of online communities and networks.

These two opposing approaches to organisation are fundamentally incompatible, and this is a key reason why many organisations are struggling with digital transformation. Digital provides an entirely new way to approach work, collaboration, and organisation, but if transformation is undertaken with a 20th century industrial mindset then it will not reap the full benefits that digital offers. This is not a new problem, as Cham (2014) notes by referencing the argument made by Marshal McLuhan back in the 1960s:

"If we try to understand digital transformation with an industrial mindset we are 'walking backwards into the future'"

In the hyperconnected 21st century, we should be designing organisations around community, not work. Millenials have grown up in a hyperconnected age, they instinctively participate in a wide variety of communities, and they expect the modern workplace to function in the same way as their connected personal existence. So it is no surprise that they often become quickly disengaged when confronted with bureaucratic, hierarchical organisations using outdated technologies that bear little resemblance to the community-oriented tools to which they are accustomed.

So how can we design work around community?

If you look at start-ups, community happens automatically. Everyone knows everyone else, and has a good idea what they are working on. There are never enough people to do the work that needs to be done, so everyone has to help each other out on a daily basis. There is a strong sense of shared purpose, and an urgency that binds the team together. Each employee has to make important decisions under pressure, giving them a strong sense of connection to the vision and purpose of the start-up. Autonomy and initiative are essential.

And most of all, people talk to each other all the time. There is almost no hierarchy to quash the inherent creativity of the team. All ideas regarding how to improve the business are welcomed, discussed, adapted and implemented.

The challenge for larger organistions and businesses is how to reimagine their operational model around principles of community. If we designed our organisations around community, not just around work, things could be very different.

"Putting community at the centre of the organisation fundamentally changes the motivation to do work"

Communities develop around a clear purpose, and this purpose is what drives people to engage with the community. Establishing a clear purpose for an organisation (beyond simply making money for shareholders) is therefore a valuable way of tackling the problem of a disengaged workforce. Designing an organisation as a community turns it into a place where people are emotionally engaged, share knowledge instinctively, and collaborate on shared projects with a strong sense of purpose. And in a knowledge economy, these three factors are fundamental to an effective, engaged, and digitally literate workforce.

Digital transformation represents an attempt to harness the innate human desire to share useful information and participate in purposeful communities. But any digital transformation strategy that focuses on platforms instead of people is almost certain to fail - successful transformation is dependent on understanding what motivates people to participate in communities.

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References

2014  Cham, K.L. “"Virtually An Alternative ? The Medium, The Message and The User Experience; Collective Agency in Digital Spaces and Embodied Social Change", 5th LAEMOS Colloquium on Organization Studies Constructing Alternatives: How can we organize for alternative social, economic, and ecological balance?, Havana, Cuba http://laemos.com

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You might also like:

• Digital is changing human experience, not just customer experience 
• Creative, meaningful work is the goal for everyone
• The real difficulty is escaping from old ideas

Digital is changing human experience, not just customer experience

It's increasingly evident that digital disruption is wreaking havoc across many sectors. But to understand how digital technology is changing customer experience, it's useful to consider how digital is changing human experience in its entirety:

• 'Search' is rewiring our brains, and changing what we need to remember
• The cloud is changing our perception of ownership
• Hyperconnectivity has forever changed how we interact with each other
• Digital devices have transformed how, where and when we make purchases

And my personal favourite:

• It's now possible to make a good living by vlogging your life (I felt considerably older just watching this programme..)

I recently came across a story about gazeMetrix, an image recognition technology that scans photos online and uses social intelligence software to identify the context in which a particular product is most found. The implications of this are profound.

It is becoming possible to search human experience in ways that have have not been possible before.

This opens up a whole new frontier for our ability to understand how (and where) customers actually use products and services, and to engage with them in new and innovative ways. More importantly, it highlights how we need to think differently in response to the affordances of digital technologies. This is why digital has to be at the heart of every customer engagement strategy, and increasingly every business model. If people are already talking about the 'post-digital age' in which digital technologies will become absorbed into the very fabric of our everyday lives, then the digital age is already firmly established.
 
Industrial Age vs Information Age mindset
 
But despite the rapid, radical digital transformation of human experience in the last ten years, many organisations remain stuck in an Industrial Age mindset. Gerry McGovern recently went as far as to say that the traditional organisation is not fit for purpose anymore, and that achieving a seamless customer experience is not possible without seamless organisations. Arguing that organisational models that encourage internal competition are no longer appropriate, McGovern highlights how internal silos create a disjointed customer experience that does not reflect the hyperconnected reality outside the organisation.
 
As far back as 2010 (remember then?), Harvard Professor Bill George highlighted that the challenges facing businesses today are "too complex to be solved by individuals or even single organizations". George argues that "collaboration — within the organization and with customers, suppliers, and even competitors — is required to achieve lasting solutions".
 
Digital has transformed human experience forever. Surviving the disruption of the Information Age requires a mindset that puts digital at the core of human - and customer - experience.
Thanks for reading - if you like it, please share it :-)

You might also like:

• Should we be educating our customers?
• Creative, meaningful work is the goal. For everyone.
• Why take the customer out of Customer Experience?

How do knowledge, power, and influence affect customer experience?

 This post was written in conjunction with Carl Lyon for The QoE and was first published on The QoE blog

Our first topic of 2016 explored knowledge, power and influence in organisations. Or to be more specific, where is the knowledge, who has the power, and how is this affecting the ability to influence behaviour?

Searching for trust
 
To understand this topic, it’s useful to use the metaphor of going to the doctor. In the
industrial age, we went to the doctor to seek their professional opinion on a particular
ailment. The doctor was the ultimate source of knowledge about our issue. We had
little alternative than to have blind trust in him/her, and as such they held almost
all the power to influence our behaviour.
 
Fast forward to the information age. What do the majority of us now do before going
to the doctor? We Google our symptoms. The ability to search online has dramatically
shifted power away from the doctor to such an extent that the best question a doctor
can now ask us is ‘what have you Googled?’
 
This has a dramatic effect on trust. If the doctor fails to address our concerns arising
from our Google search, our trust in them falls to a new low. But if the doctor asks
us if we have any concerns, listens to the knowledge we have obtained from our Google
search into account, addresses our issues, our trust in the doctor then increases
to an all time high.

The power of context
 
Search has significantly shifted power away from organisations by putting information
and opinion in the hands of the customer. It is highly likely that customers will Google
a problem before calling a call centre. And in some cases, it is likely that the information
they find online will be more up-to-date than the information available inside the
organisation itself.
 
This is why many call centre employees increasingly resort to Google searching in order
to resolve customer queries. The most up-to-date information lies within the customer
community, not within the official knowledge management system. The knowledge of
the community is being updated in real time, whereas it can take weeks (if not months)
for official sources of information to be updated.
 
But more importantly, the knowledge of the community is contextual. Whether customers
realise it or not, their query will arise from their specific context. Answering their query
effectively will therefore require an understanding of this context.
 
We instinctively seek answers to our questions from people who understand our
context, whether this be our friends, work colleagues, or our online network. And we
are more likely to trust the answers we receive from people who understand that
context. So how can organisations tap into the deep ocean of contextual information
that surrounds its customers, and use it to improve customer experience?

Organisations as dynamic, omni-channel communities
 
To tackle this growing problem, we need to re-imagine the organisation as a dynamic,
omni-channel community made up of both customers and employees. The community
has the knowledge and power to influence the behaviour of the organisation and help
it adapt to the rapidly changing demands of its customers. And the community may
well be made up of both customers, employees, and general observers.
 
This transformation has been given many names, including open innovation, bringing the
outside in, or even simply customer/employee engagement. The music service Spotify
is a great example, as is the Chinese Telecom giant Xiaomi who release a new version
of their operating system every week in response to user feedback.
 
The ability to listen and adapt has been key to the success of these information age
organisations. By minimising the effort required to engage with their community,
organisations can gain access to a wealth of untapped insight that can be used to
improve the business. And crucially, making the pockets of specialist information held
by customers, employees and departments more searchable by the community,
allows this contextual knowledge to be shared and leveraged in new and valuable ways.
 
Organisations that can listen, think, adapt and act in response to their community are
those that will successfully evolve and ride the wave of digital transformation. But while
a community can be grown inside any organisation, a common barrier is the tendency
for the organisation to act without listening, or worse, continue to believe that
‘it knows best’.
 
Many businesses still behave like an industrial age doctor by assuming that customers
haven’t searched online before calling. But if a business is engaging with the contextual
knowledge being co-created by its community, it will be perpetually evolving in response
to customer needs.
 
And that, surely, is just what the doctor ordered.

Should we be educating our customers?

This post was written in conjunction with Carl Lyon for The QoE

To what extent should a business attempt to educate its customers?
 
Historically, many businesses have taken it upon themselves to try and educate their customers about their products and services. From pensions to paracetamol, most products come with some form of impenetrable instruction manual that customers are expected to read in order to understand what they have purchased.
 
Attempts to educate customers often stem from a desire to minimise complaints and bad press by managing their expectations. Sometimes a business needs to educate customers about why their request might not be in their best interest – particularly in an increasingly high tech environment. Those 100-page policy documents might make sense to the underwriters, but they will mean very little to the customer who needs a 1-page summary in jargon-free language.
 
But do these attempts to educate customers work in an era where the customer resorts to an internet search as soon as they have a problem or query? Prior to the Internet (remember that?), the business was the trusted source of knowledge. But the speed at which knowledge is now created and shared makes it increasingly difficult for a business to manage its knowledge effectively.
The employee responsible for doing the educating may themselves never have experienced the problem that a customer is facing, leading to a perceived lack of authenticity. And, rightly or wrongly, the customer often believes that the best person to ask for advice is another customer rather than a representative of the company.
 
The problem of educating customers is just as difficult for B-2-B as for B-2-C. For example, business A may procure a new product from business B, but there is a significant danger that the former can overload the latter with too much training and documentation. However, if business A holds back on educating business B about the full range of options afforded by its new purchase, it may be accused of not delivering value for money.
 
Changes made by third-parties also cause a headache, as Facebook’s decision to start auto-playing videos demonstrated. When a large number of mobile customers found they were suddenly consuming more of their data allowance, they accused their mobile providers of over-charging them. And in some cases, it was the customers who first informed the mobile operators of the problem – the customers were ‘educating’ the business.
 
So do businesses have a responsibility to push information to customers to inform them of such changes? Should customers have to opt in to or opt out of these ‘helpful’, paternalistic communications?
 
Who should be educating whom? How? And for what purpose?
 
In a hyperconnected era, the flow of information between company and customer is dynamic. Knowledge is no longer the exclusive possession of the company: the customer can – and should - educate the company just as much as the company educates the customer.
 
How? This mutually beneficial relationship can be developed by making customer communities as integral to a business as the board, the finance department, and the sales team. Customer communities and forums are a largely untapped resource, and businesses should be employing more open business models to co-evolve with their customer communities - incorporating their feedback and insights into both problem-solving and product development.
 
For what purpose? The answer is: to build confidence. We attempt to educate customers to give them the confidence to make better decisions about our products and services. Our customers can do the same for us - their feedback gives the company the confidence that everything is aligned and working as it should be.
 
The networked era is changing the role of the organisation from an ‘all-knowing parent’ to a ‘trusted advisor’. Trust and confidence are increasingly integral to brand value, and there is great value for organisations in making this transition. But navigating this change requires businesses to treat customers as adults, and be prepared to demonstrate greater trust, openness and authenticity.
Our customers can help to educate us and are prepared to do so, but only if we are prepared to listen and respond with the same objective: to increase understanding and build confidence.
 
Source : The QoE discussions November 2016 Written by Tony Reeves

How is the network era affecting large organisations?

This post was written in conjunction with Carl Lyon of the QoE

Slavery was a terrible thing, but for thousands of years it remained a convenient way to get work done. Mass slavery persisted until enough people decided that dominance through fear was no longer an ethical means of organising people.

The widespread abolition of slavery heralded a paradigm shift in consciousness. The advent of the industrial revolution brought with it the emergence of the first large organisations. Command and control became the best way to coordinate the masses, and the profit motive became the new organising principle.

As large organisations became more complex, often through mergers and acquisitions, a more subtle variant of the command and control approach emerged - that of ‘conformism’. Groups and departments within the same organisation often adopted an ‘us versus them’ mindset as they sought to defend their perceived territory from the new arrivals. The resulting blame culture that emerged gave rise to a silo mentality, and inter-departmental politics became the control mechanism.

So what’s next?

We are now thirty years into the digital era, and fifteen years into an age of hyperconnectivity. Digital technologies are fundamentally changing the ways in which we work, think and socialise, with ‘search’ and ‘share’ becoming central to the human experience. Mass connectivity has brought with it mass transparency, shining a spotlight onto the internal workings of large organisations.

While this has liberated the individual, it has caused terror for many businesses and governments as they are no longer able to hide behind traditional marketing and communication strategies. Not only are the masses getting much better at reading the intent behind the message, they are increasingly able to broadcast their own in order to challenge previously unchallengeable power structures.

We are seeing the emergence of a new organising principle: the network. But what does this mean for large organisations?

1. Reputation is now becoming as valuable as the profit motive. According to Thomson Reuters and Interbrand, 75% of the value of today’s average corporation is intangible. And in a survey by the World Economic Forum, three fifths of CEOs felt that brand and reputation were responsible for more than 40% of their company’s market capitalisation.
   
2. The power of collective opinion can increasingly determine the fate of any organisation. Whereas ‘old power’ models were based on the ability of a person or an organisation to control information and people, ‘new power’ models are grounded in sharing, co-creation and the potential of the crowd.
   
3. People – both inside and outside the company – matter more than ever before. As the global population becomes increasingly connected through social media, people are rapidly changing their expectations of large organisations. From customer experience to recruitment to marketing, digital and social are forcing transparency and accountability on an unprecedented scale.
   
4. There is significant opportunity for an organisation to innovate by empower its workforce through networking and socialisation. And the potential to innovate is no longer confined to employees: digital and social now make open innovation - crowdsourcing ideas from outside the organisation – both possible and profitable.
   

But navigating these opportunities and challenges requires a new mindset, one that acknowledges the limitations of command and control, rejects the fear of socialisation and embraces the power of the network. If you can no longer tell people what to do – even if they work for you – then you need a new approach to leadership. If you want to inspire loyalty, trust and engagement, you need to create the conditions in which people can and want to relate to the values of your organisation. And if you want to reduce complexity, you need to appreciate that a socially empowered workforce capable of asking and answering informed questions can be a powerful partner.

Inevitably this new era will challenge organisations to produce, store and share intelligence in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago.

But, like it or not, the future is network empowered socialization.

Source: The QoE April 2015, Carl Lyon Written: Tony Reeves, University for the Creative Arts