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Three diagrams that synthesize the issues and causes of the current transformations



We need to better identify the transition taking us from an industrial to a post-industrial society if we want to make effective use of the tools that can help us better manage the new complexity.

Here are one hundred events which define the turbulent period we have experienced from 1980 to 2009. In this 30-year period we have watched the societal rupture that we are currently living through develop from a range of causative factors. The list of events is accompanied by a list of one hundred researchers and authors who are the witnesses to these events and whom we have cited in this document.

We can better understand the changes we are seeing and feeling if we analyze the activities through three filters : a technological dimension, an economic dimension and a societal dimension.

An important book for taking stock of one's aspirations. Personal strategy development tools. "The Personal Enterprise Plan" aims to help individuals make the best use of their freedom inside institutions.. Freedom allows us to identify ourselves, to express our potential ad aspirations and to use the resources of the institution to realize ourselves or to change institutions if the resources cannot be provided."

The Ten-Year Forecast Program provides a distinctive outlook on the changing global environment for a vanguard of players in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. Focusing on the next three to ten years, the program anticipates discontinuities and emerging dilemmas--discontinuities because they challenge business as usual and dilemmas because they demand new ways of thinking about complex problems. Together, discontinuities and dilemmas provide a vista of new practices and points of view that will shape tomorrow's organizations and today's choices.  

  Kathi Vian | Director, Ten-Year Forecast Program

conversations about change

The two HR bomb throwers argued that employees should be measured on output, not hours. And that the face-time culture was utterly out of place in the digital age. Their ultimate underground project-one in which you never had to darken the doors of the workplace if you didn't want to-radically changed the culture at Best Buy.

The Gore model changes the traditional role of the leader. The leader's job is to make sure the culture is healthy: Is it working as a system? Are teams coming together? Are we getting diverse points of view? Are the best ideas rising to the surface? Our leaders have to be comfortable with not being at the center of all the action, with not trying to drive every decision, with not being the most strategic person on the team or the one with the most thoughtful ideas. Their contribution is to help the organization scale and be effective.

Maybe your boss is nervous because he understands the potential of social media all too well. Once people learn that they can find each other, share their knowledge and work together the roles of many managers will change if not disappear. This is frightening. However the good managers will make the effort to adapt and will continue to add value in the more networked world we are moving into.  Many of them will be old enough to have children active on the web and may not be comfortable talking to them about it. Or they may get the point of social tools outside work but not see how to map them to the business context. Why not help them? Why not help your boss to understand the benefits for their business and them as individuals of getting to grips with the social network world? There is a real danger that we assume that our boss knows everything. Often they don't and may be embarrassed about admitting this. Make it easy for them to do so.

Following are my getting back to basics recommendations: Face reality that email is not going away.  It has 100% utilization for employee collaboration & communication.   It becomes an epicenter for collaboration. The ability to post social content, receive notifications, receive activity digests must tie into email and SMS.  If your activity stream could fit into an Outlook window - even better. Recognize that collaboration doesn't just happen inside your company's walls.  Collaboration crosses many boundaries from time, distance and corporate firewalls.  Employees are using multiple tools and multiple networks both outside & inside.  Adding one more tool to the mix doesn't make life easier. Consider deploying a content/collaboration aggregator to simplify employee's ability to manage various content flows & networks both inside & outside the firewall (Example: Xobni Enterprise) Collaboration is now form factor agnostic: No longer is one device utilized.  Content & collaboration needs to flow across whatever mobile, tablet, desktop, laptop- eventually smart TV device - that an employee utilizes. Ubiquitous collaboration needs equal opportunity.  For example, If employees can get email, internet access, Facebook, Twitter on their mobile devices but only access social collaboration on their laptop- then those most available will be the top collaborative tools.  Your internal social platform needs equal access, otherwise it will continue to be Cinderella locked in the attic during the royal ball. Your intranet should be one in the same with your social platform.  If an official portal is the place to get news, updates & find information - your social platform must seamlessly be an integral part of that experience.  Don't ship off your employees to a separate site to socially engage & collaborate. The intranet should become the personalized collaborative workspace for employees "one stop shopping." Rid yourself of multiple employee prof

The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow.  

This is not a newly identified problem.  Those of us working on social collaboration efforts for a while recognized that integration is imperative from the beginning.  At the beginning, I clearly outlined integration as one of three foundational pillars for our strategy.  Unfortunately, various forces created challenges in this space. Social collaboration applications have been immature in this area for years (even after fierce calls for faster integration- i.e. CMS). Enterprises faced fork lift integration efforts to knit applications together.  Fork lift efforts get the budget axe when push comes to shove.  We managed to do the normal IT deployment model - the very model I fiercely advocated for us not to do.  We deployed just another tool amongst a minefield of other collaborative tools - without integration.   To make it even harder, we underinvested in transition change management.

alternative performance reviews

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

The status-update era is changing the annual performance review.


Peter and Maria Hoey
With many younger workers used to instant feedback-from text messages to Facebook and Twitter updates-annual reviews seem too few and far between. So companies are adopting quarterly, weekly or even daily feedback sessions.

Not surprisingly, Facebook Inc. exemplifies the trend. The social network's 2,000 employees are encouraged to solicit and give small nuggets of feedback regularly, after meetings, presentations and projects. "You don't have to schedule time with someone. It's a 45-second conversation-'How did that go? What could be done better?" says Lori Goler, the Palo Alto, Calif., social-networking company's vice president of human resources. More formal reviews happen twice a year.

For most companies, employee reviews are still an annual rite of passage. Some 51% of companies conduct formal performance reviews annually, while 41% of firms do semi-annual appraisals, according to a 2011 survey of 500 companies by the Corporate Executive Board Co., a research and advisory firm.

And increasing frequency may not make much of a difference if the performance appraisals are ineffective to begin with, say some. One academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies found that two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given. "Why is doing something stupid more often better than doing something stupid once a year?" asks Samuel A. Culbert, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the co-author of the book "Get Rid of the Performance Review!"

Some firms have found that the traditional once-a-year review is so flooded with information-appraising past performance, setting future goals, discussing pay-that workers have trouble absorbing it all, and inst

Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the (In)Formal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results, by Jon R. Katzenbach, a senior partner at Booz & Company, which publishes strategy+business, and Zia Khan, vice president for strategy and evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation. They take a much more fine-grained approach to managing that is based on finding the right combination of the "logic of the formal" and the "magic of the informal."

In the three-part book, the authors focus on how individual managers can use informal connections and conversations to enhance the formal incentives and structures of a company - and, in the process, motivate individual performance and mobilize organizational change. Managers who can draw on both the formal and the informal as required have a high "organizational quotient" (OQ). This is a combination of intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) that balances disciplined and spontaneous actions, and rational and emotional thinking, depending on the demands of the situation.

The objective is consilience, which literally means a jumping together of the formal and the informal, a creative integration of "both...and" that harks back to Mary Parker Follett, the early-20th-century pioneer of organizational theory. This is the first of several evocative metaphors that the authors use to describe one of the most desirable but elusive phenomena in organizational life - those times when decisions, actions, and emotions jibe with strategic intent, when dynamic routines are constantly being improved upon, when employees are proud of their company, and when the company as well as the members of its ecosystem (partners, suppliers, and customers) all succeed.

Katzenbach and Khan stress that a managerial focus on the informal is not just a matter of being nice. People work and perform much better when they are treated with care and respect as individuals. The c

When I ask Hamilton, skeptically, if it is possible to conduct a conventional business meeting in a virtual environment, he answers that of course you can - but why would you? He is convinced that the zaniness of virtual environments plus the steep learning curve of making your avatar function from a keyboard is an effective icebreaker, especially important when partners need to overcome differences in cultural traditions, languages, work ethics, and political systems in order to complete a project together. Second Life's oddities lend an improvisational quality to interactions that it's harder to achieve in formal business meetings. "Playing in a band I learned that you need to leave spaces for others to fill," Hamilton insists. "Given this opportunity, people step into the gap. Talented teams connect, commingle and co-create."

Tiffany Schlain's film, Connected. Trailer, video, 2.31

Company Overview
The Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre is a global management consultancy specialising in the benchmarking, measuring and development of creative behaviors for organizational value.

Committed to developing human capital in organizations, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre collaborates with its clients to help them realize their organizations' visions to create tangible value.

With deep expertise in management innovation and a broad global network of academics and practitioners with proven experience in consulting in this space, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre can mobilize the right people, skills, alliances to realise your organization's key drivers for success.

Using the theories of organizational economics and its own unique IP, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre benchmarks and measures the key elements of the organization's key drivers for success - its management innovation infrastructure and its creative ecology.

The overview   

Provides a holistic view of the organization as a creative system
Benchmarks the organization's management innovation capabilities and capacities in that syste
Identifies critical areas with potential for development and improvement
Recommends and delivers interventions to drive value, success and growth.