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?

Creative, meaningful work is the goal. For everyone.

This post first appeared on the Creative Huddle blog.

If you didn't need to earn money, what would you do? You'd be on a permanent holiday, with all the free time in the world. It would be amazing for a while. Lots of travelling, seeing the world. But after a year or so you'd get bored. You'd have to find something to do to keep yourself busy, something to give your life meaning.

Meaningful work is our goal. When our work is meaningful, it doesn’t feel like work. When we are involved in a creative project that matters to us, we are completely engaged, we lose track of time, and we have a clear sense of purpose. So imagine if we could get paid for it as well. How amazing would that be?
 
In our recent Creativity at Work survey, we asked people to state how they felt when they were being creative. They said things like:

• Happy and sometimes exhausted
• Good. Fulfilled. Inspired. Motivated
• I get motivated, feel fully invested in wanting ideas to succeed and thoroughly enjoy it.
• It makes me feel an integral part of the success of the company.
• Empowered, challenged, free
• Free. capable. excited about possibilities. Energised.
• Keeps me motivated and keeps the fun in work. If you have the space and freedom to be creative it gets the mind going and makes you feel passionate.

As the modern workplace becomes increasingly complex, it can be harder for employees to feel a sense of purpose. The combination of multiple projects, distributed teams, online communications and shifting deadlines can often obscure the meaning of our work. It is easy to become disengaged as we become overwhelmed by the noise. And disengagement leads to lack of motivation, unhappiness, lower productivity, and ultimately lower profits.
 
So how do we help ourselves and our employees rediscover the meaning in work? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Take a moment to think about why you go to work. What makes you get out of bed? How do you feel as you walk out the front door each morning?
2. Make sure you’re absolutely clear about why you are doing the job that you do. Do you love the work? Does it provide you with a good work/life balance? Why do you keep showing up day after day? What are you looking forward to?
3. Take a step back and picture your role in the wider context of your organisation. Why does your job exist? And your department? Look at your organisation’s vision and mission statements – how does the work that you do help your organisation deliver its vision and mission?

Now, if you’re a leader or a manager, take a moment to think about how much input your employees have had in shaping the organisation’s vision and mission. Or their departmental strategy. Or even just the work that they do every day. How much autonomy do they have – and do you have – over your work? When was the last time they had the opportunity to be involved in a creative project that they cared about?
 
Here’s the thing: people are amazing. Full of creative potential. Even the most disengaged member of your organisation could be s potential leader – if you can encourage them to use their natural creativity and find meaning in their work.
 
We are all inherently creative, we just need a little time and autonomy to find our purpose. To find our ‘why’. So think twice before you send that employee on another training course to improve their performance, you may need to just allow them a little breathing space to be creative, and help them find out why their work matters to the organisation.
 
With the right questions and encouragement, we can find meaning in our work. And if we can’t, we should be doing a different job.

 

The real difficulty...is in escaping from old ideas

Or to give you the full quote: “The real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones” (John Maynard Keynes)

If you have twenty minutes, make a cup of tea and take a peek into the future. In this short video, John Seely-Brown (JSB) - a futurist, formerly of the XEROC-PARC research centre – highlights the many ways in which the intersection of people, information and technology is transforming how we understand knowledge.

In the video, JSB begins with the above quote from J.M. Keynes to illustrate how we struggle to move away from old, trusted ideas and into new, uncertain times. Although delivered at a conference on the future of Libraries JSB goes far beyond this to grapple with knowledge management and innovation, highlighting that progress in the 21st century now follows a rapid series of 18-month s-curves driven by exponential advances in computation. The implication of this is that we no longer have the time that we had in the 20th century to reinvent social practices and adapt to change – today, change is rapid and unrelenting.

I’ll do my best to provide a summary of the key points (please note that although I wish I was as smart as John-Seely Brown, almost all the ideas that follow are his...)

We are moving from knowledge ‘stocks’ to knowledge ‘flows’

As change speeds up, we are moving from a paradigm where we ‘stored’ knowledge to one in which we participate in ‘knowledge flows’. Perhaps the most important implication of this is the difficulty in storing the tacit knowledge created by these flows – we no longer have the time to identify this knowledge, make it explicit, and store it. This poses significant implications for organisations who are investing significant capital in trying to capture and store knowledge (an example of how we have difficulty escaping from old ideas).

The half-life of our skills is shrinking to about 5 years

The speed of change potentially renders our skills obsolete every 5 years. This highlights the major problems this poses for formal schooling and the need to move away from education that is based around learning content. Instead, we need to learn the critical skills that enable us to dip into relevant knowledge flows in order to find and apply relevant content to a given problem. We also have to learn how to participate effectively in the vast, complex networks in which we increasingly find ourselves.

Homo Sapiens is becoming Homo Faber
Or rather, ‘Man who Knows’ is becoming ‘Man who Makes’. The default mode of operation in networked societies increasingly involves making and sharing knowledge, not simply consuming it. But rather than just building content and things, we are now able to build contexts as much as content. JSB highlights how maker culture, blogging and remixing enables us to change the context of a message or a piece of content. Millenials with increasingly sophisticated devices now expect to be able to remix and adapt content, and the implication of this is that we have to learn how to read ‘context’ as well as simply ‘content’. Maybe ‘context marketing’ will soon be on the horizon…

‘Effective play’ is needed to help us un-learn

If our skills will become obsolete every 5 years, JSB points out that ‘unlearning’ will become just as important as ‘learning’. He argues that our ability to learn through play is integral to helping us unlearn and develop a new, flexible and creative mindset. At the heart of the triangle of knowing, making and playing, are ‘imagination’, ‘curiosity’ and ‘agency’. This need for millenials to learn through doing, playing, and making should be shaping how we conceive of the future of work.

How imagination, curiosity and agency are shaping how we work (adapted from John Seely-Brown)

Reverse mentorship is a source of innovation

We may have instructed those young graduates we just employed to make the tea and hang out on social media. But instead we should be creating opportunities for them to mentor us so that we can learn about how they see and understand the world. If ‘yesterday’s cutting edge is today’s dust bin’, as JSB argues, then we need to be embracing the mindset, energy and inquisitiveness of those new to the workplace in order to stay as close as we can to the s-curve.

We need to ‘leverage the edge’ in the exponential age

Echoing the practice and language of lean startups and entre/intrepreneurship, JSB highlights the need to create now and seek forgiveness later. Leveraging the exponential power of social media, easy access to computing power and micro-financing and crowd-funding, JSB argues that the aim should be to excel on the edge and use this success to draw the core towards us. This is another way of escaping old ideas and making sure we are at the start of the new s-curve rather than on the tail of the old one.

So there you have it, a whistle-stop tour of some of the concepts and ideas that will shape – and are already shaping – our future. It’s scary to think that my skills are already slightly more out of date than they were when I began typing this article…

How reputation and ownership affect knowledge sharing

Here's the thing: I regularly share information on LinkedIn with a network of contacts, most of whom I've never met. And unless one of these people offers me a job, none of them are in a position to give me any financial reward for sharing. So why do I share?

And here's the other thing: I don't share this information internally in my organisation, with people whom I have met, some of which are at least in a position to reward me financially for sharing. 

So if money isn't an incentive for sharing, what is?

Dan Pink has demonstrated that money only can only motivate to a certain point, and that beyond this point financial reward actually de-motivates people. Even if a company would offer such an incentive for sharing, the promise of a promotion or a pay rise can only be delivered infrequently. So what else might be going on?

Reputation

Why do we share information on LinkedIn? Or Facebook? For example, why am I sharing this post on LinkedIn rather than on my company's intranet? If we don't share for financial gain, one incentive may be to do with enhancing our reputation - and our influence - in our personal/professional network. If someone shares a cat video on Facebook it is usually to make people laugh, but the flip side of this is that it increases their reputation in their network as someone who has a sense of humour.

But why doesn't this compulsion to share extend to sharing work-related knowledge on a company intranet? Perhaps we don't consider this kind of knowledge to be sufficiently interesting and therefore not worth sharing. Extending this logic suggests that we don't think that this knowledge will enhance our reputation or influence in our network, or - worse still - that my internal reputation may even be damaged by sharing what others might perceive to be 'boring' information.

So 'what people think of me' is potentially more valuable that financial reward. In other words, I share on LinkedIn so that other people in my network think that I am informed, insightful and useful. It is their perception of me that is valuable, as it increases my reputation, influence and social capital. And that's not to say that reputation is without financial value; reputation is increasingly becoming as important as profitability as a key strategic driver, hence the growth of the reputation economy.

But why are people more inclined to try and increase their social capital and reputation externally and not internally? Why are we inclined to share information outside of our organisation than within it? Is it because there are no official 'structures' in our personal network? Harold Jarche notes that structure drives behaviour in large organisations, but perhaps in our personal networks it is a lack of structure that drives behaviour. What is different about sharing our knowledge and expertise on social media, but not within our own organisation? One important reason is because our personal network 'self-organises' - I.e. the lack of hierarchy means that knowledge is free to travel between any individual in the network and does so based on factors including how interesting/topical/humorous/insightful it is.

Ownership

Alongside reputation, 'ownership' also plays an important role in driving sharing behaviour. When I am sharing on my own social media channels I 'own' my communication, and I alone reap all benefits gained from my increased visibility. But within the walls or an organisation it is primarily the organisation that benefits from employees sharing their work, not the employees themselves.

An example of this could be the resentment generated from organisations not sharing revenue and profits fairly amongst employees. Although this would appear to run contrary to the above argument against financial incentives driving behaviour, it is actually 'resentment of inequality' that brings disengagement. And few things reinforce the sense of inequality than an overly hierarchical structure.

A good example of this can be heard in the HBR podcast 'Are robots really coming for our jobs?' which tells the story of weavers in 19th Century America. As technology developed, the weavers were able to use their skill to bring about a significant increase in profitability for their organisations, but the weavers' wages remained stagnant for some 30 years. This highlights the problem of the 'them and us' mentality, a problem which can drive employees to feel disengaged and disconnected from both their work and their organisation.

If employees feel a greater sense of ownership over their work, it is likely that they will be more engaged and feel more invested in the success of the company. And this greater sense of ownership may make them feel more inclined to share their work in order to help colleagues.

If the goal is to increase knowledge-sharing, the challenge is to move away from an 'us and them' mentality. A greater sense of ownership and clearer reputational benefits to an individual's social capital are two key factors that are likely to drive greater participation and engagement in internal networks.

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