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XPLANE Culture Map

Every company has a culture, but it can take time to learn, and the stated culture can often differ significantly from what people actually experience.

At XPLANE we have created a visual map of our culture, to guide our teams in daily decision making and help them make choices that are consistent with what we stand for and who we want to be.

While there isn't one right culture, just as culture is tough to compare across organizations, there are certain common elements of organizations that do well with these types of initiatives. Charlene Li sums it up best: "be open, be transparent, be authentic".

It found that 43% of those surveyed described their company's culture as based on command-and-control, top-down management or leadership by coercion-what Mr Seidman calls "blind obedience". The largest category, 54%, saw their employer's culture as top-down, but with skilled leadership, lots of rules and a mix of carrots and sticks, which Mr Seidman calls "informed acquiescence". Only 3% fell into the category of "self-governance", in which everyone is guided by a "set of core principles and values that inspire everyone to align around a company's mission". The study found evidence that such differences matter. Nearly half of those in blind-obedience companies said they had observed unethical behaviour in the previous year, compared with around a quarter in the other sorts of firm. Yet only a quarter of those in the blind-obedience firms said they were likely to blow the whistle, compared with over 90% in self-governing firms. Lack of trust may inhibit innovation, too. More than 90% of employees in self-governing firms, and two-thirds in the informed-acquiescence category, agreed that "good ideas are readily adopted by my company". At blind-obedience firms, fewer than one in five did.

We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. * We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. * We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.* We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. * When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows. * We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments. * We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses. * We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model. * We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner

I had intended writing a series of blog posts in the run up to the pilot launch of  The Smart Work Company's social learning platform in September. Turmoil in global financial markets, with the downgrading of the US credit rating and simultaneous shenanigans in the Euro zone, gives focus to the topics I want to explore.
The series, Smart Working in Turbulent Times, will include themes that I have talked about before in previous blog posts in a random way. My hope is that this series will pull topics together to create a rationale for smart working, to explore what it is, to make the case for why now (urgently) and to show how smart working practices can be enabled, drawing on researching new ways of working over a fifteen year period and years of practical experience of helping senior executives make the transition to new ways of working.
Themes
Off the top of my head, the themes will include:
What?
Context: turbulent times past and present - there are lessons
How organisations work (and don't) - relationship dynamics, power, culture, conflict, alliances, psychological needs, performance environments etc
Smart principles underpinning design for:
Viability (including emotional and psychological well-being)
Adaptability
Autonomy
Integration
Collaboration
Wirearchy
Distributed diversity
Collective intelligence
Social skills
Thinking skills
Leadership skills
Learning skills
Performance environments, including:
Cultural and social environment
Online place
Physical space
Whole system of leadership
How?
All this research and good practice that others have found effective in specific contexts and at specific times cannot be be copied or rolled out. What to do?
Draw out principles and interpret for your own situation
Create hypotheses about what is happening or what you want to happen
What might work?
What might enable or prev

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.

Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of rather interesting and insightful blog posts that have been covering IBM's journey to become a social business. A journey that started back in 2001, but that it had its main roots well substantiated within the company for much longer. Interestingly enough, when everyone was starting to think about going social within the enterprise, IBM had already well established, and recognised, since May 2005, the well known Social Computing Guidelines that soon became an industry standard in setting up a reliable and trustworthy governance model and guidelines for knowledge workers to engage with both internal and external social networking tools. However, fast forward to 2011 and I still get asked, every so often, how is IBM doing in the social business space, not just from a vendor perspective, but also from its own internal social transformation. Are we there yet? Have we already made that transition successfully? What has been the experience like so far?

Well, I could probably summarise it all with a single sentence at this point in time: It's been a long journey, indeed! We have learned a lot, we have become much more efficient and effective at what we do, but we still have got lots more to be done! Like for almost everyone out there, becoming a social business is a tough job, for sure, we are not discovering anything new in there, there needs to be a significant cultural shift, a change of mindset, a change on how we do and conduct business, but the good thing is that the trip to provoke such social transformation has been worth while all the way coming from a Globally Integrated Enterprise into a Socially Integrated Enterprise (a.k.a. SIE)

Marcia Conner's classic learning culture audit. A benchmark for working smarter.

I forked yesterday for the first time. I'm pretty thrilled. Not about the few lines of code that I posted. If anyone notices and thinks the feature is a good idea, they'll re-write my bit from the ground up.* What's thrilling is seeing this ecology in operation, for the software development ecology is now where the most rapid learning happens on the planet, outside the brains of infants.
Compare how ideas and know-how used to propagate in the software world. It used to be that you worked in a highly collaborative environment, so it was already a site of rapid learning. But the barriers to sharing your work beyond your cube-space were high. You could post to a mailing list or UseNet if you had permission to share your company's work, you could publish an article, you could give a talk at a conference. Worse, think about how you would learn if you were not working at a software company or attending college: Getting answers to particular questions - the niggling points that hang you up for days - was incredibly frustrating. I remember spending much of a week trying to figure out how to write to a file in Structured BASIC [SBASIC], my first programming language , eventually cold-calling a computer science professor at Boston University who politely could not help me. I spent a lot of time that summer learning how to spell "Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh."
On the other hand, this morning Antonio, who is doing some work for the Library Innovation Lab this summer, poked his head in and pointed us to a jquery-like data visualization library. D3 makes it easy for developers to display data interactively on Web pages (the examples are eye-popping), and the author, mbostock, made it available for free to everyone. So, global software productivity just notched up. A bunch of programs just got easier to use, or more capable, or both. But more than that, if you want to know how to do how mbostock did it, you can read the code. If you want to modify it, you will learn deeply from

The general principles of this rapid-learning ecology are pretty clear. First, we probably have about the same number of smart people as we did twenty years ago, so what's making us all smarter is that we're on a network together. Second, the network has evolved a culture in which there's nothing wrong with not knowing. So we ask. In public. Third, we learn in public. Fourth, learning need not be private act that occurs between a book and a person, or between a teacher and a student in a classroom. Learning that is done in public also adds to that public. Fifth, show your work. Without the "show source" button on browsers, the ability to create HTML pages would have been left in the hands of HTML Professionals. Sixth, sharing is learning is sharing. Holy crap but the increased particularity of our ownership demands about our ideas gets in the way of learning! Knowledge once was developed among small networks of people. Now knowledge is the network.

It would be far too ambitious to try to summarize this book in the space of a blog posting (even my long blog postings).  So let me attempt to tease the reader with a few key messages from the book that I would summarize as follows: We are in need of a fundamental reassessment of our learning models New learning models will embrace and institutionalize tension Imagination and play are the fuel that will sustain learning

As enterprises gradually decentralize their operations and new networked business ecosystems start to find their way into profitable niche marketplaces, virtual, networked business teams gradually emerge as the wave of the future.

To be successful, virtual, networked business teams need a strategic framework in which to operate. They also need good planning and in-depth project analysis, effective and accessible technologies, constant coaching, systematic fine-tuning, feedback processes and the full understanding that their success cannot be determined by a pre-designated set of communication technologies by itself.

But, until now, projects supported by virtual business teams have not been brought back major successes. Virtual teams are having major problems and managing their progress has been a superlative challenge for most. Organizations face for the first time the need to analyze and comprehend which are the key obstacles to the successful management of effective online collaborative business networks. Though the answer is not simple, the solution is to be found in examples that are closer to us than we have yet realized.

Virtual collaboration for networked business teams is a complex and challenging activity in which there are major important components to be accounted for.

Virtual business teams DO NOT operate like traditional physical teams, as their requirements reflect a whole new way of communicating, working collaboratively, sharing information and mutually supporting other team members. The new technologies and approaches required to achieve this are completely alien to most of our present organizational culture. And this is why they fail.

Cooperative processes are not the automatic results of implementing collaborative, real-time communication technologies, but the result of a carefully designed and systematically maintained virtual team development plan.

For those of you who have alread

REX is the Relationship Economy eXpedition. The next social and industrial order has more to do with abundance and trust than with scarcity and stickiness. The key assets are trusted relationships. Here we'll build key elements of the Relationship Economy, playing out what it means for business, culture, society, governance, education and more, because its effects will be far-reaching.

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."

Even though most large corporations have a training and development function they are always somewhere on the periphery.   For employees, managers and executives alike, training and development is looked on as a nice to have luxury and not as an essential tool of business strategy execution. The general belief is that it helps individuals get better, not the organization as a whole.

In the American and many other Western cultural contexts, individuals are supposed to develop themselves and take responsibility for their own career advancement.  The firm has little responsibility to develop employees, relying on the competitive nature of employment and learned self-sufficiency to provide any needed skills.  Individual employees as well as managers operate under the belief system that those who take the initiative to learn will and should get promoted.  However, reality is often very different with personal prejudices and organizational politics dictating more promotions than merit.

To be successful and truly collaborative, knowledge-sharing systems require intuitive tools that connect people, reward participation, and align well with existing work and communication patterns. After IDEO's two-year internal development effort to create and implement "the Tube," their enterprise-wide intranet system, we gained new understanding and experience in balancing technology possibilities with behavior realities. The unique success of the Tube comes from the insight that effective knowledge sharing is a social activity that is enabled by technology, rather than a technological solution bolted onto an existing work culture. Now IDEO's Knowledge Sharing Team shares a set of design principles for building online collaboration systems that really work.

Based on the experiments results I would like to recommend the following way forward (for my team, but likely for any team): Don't formalize narrating your work and don't make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn't like about the experiment. Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don't share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture. We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about "Learning Innovation". If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the "Learning Application Portfolio" and so on.

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.

Gratton outlines five forces that will shape the future pattern of work: Technology (think 5 billion people, digitized knowledge, ubiquitous cloud). Globalisation (think continued bubbles and crashes, a regional underclass, the world becoming urban, frugal innovation). Longevity and demography (think Gen Y, increasing longevity, aging boomers growing old poor, global migration). Society (think growing distrust of institutions, the decline of happiness, rearranged families) Energy resources (think rising energy prices, environmental catastrophes displacing people, a culture of sustainability emerging).

The more connected networks become, the more likely it is that leaders have redundant value. This is one dimension of the leadership crisis today, exacerbated by the fact that the more asset redundant leaders become, the more irrelevant they feel and the more control they exert to restore ego equilibrium. Reality is, in networks leaders can gain unique value in at least two ways. They create unique value when they create a niche of unique value for themselves. And they gain unique value when those in their network intentionally leave them a space of value uniqueness that no one else takes on. This is a huge culture shift to see the value of leaders as equivalent to the uniqueness of their real time knowledge and skills relative to their networks. It is a shift that requires us to question the value of positional power that leaders assume in their leadership roles.