Organisational change

Green shoots? It's a year to the week since the global financial system seized up, and recovery is what's on every decision-makers mind. Will it be U-shaped, V-shaped, L-shaped, or J-shaped? My answer is: none of the above. The only recovery that matters is M-shaped.

Design and "design thinking" is gaining recognition as an important integrative concept in management practice and education. But it will fail to have a lasting impact, unless we learn from the mistakes of earlier, related ideas. For instance, "system thinking", which shares many of the conceptual foundations of "design thinking", promised to be a powerful guide to management practice, but it has never achieved the success its proponents hoped for. If systems thinking had been successful in gaining a foothold in management education over the last half of the 20th century, there would be no manage by designing movement, or calls for integrative or design thinking.

In management, failure seems to be the only way to get to insight. Whatever the level of experience we have built up in the past, as soon as we have to make decisions in a new context, we tend to forget most of the basic rules. Perhaps, this simply is the way we move forward.

While discussing the pros and the cons of different methodologies, we often tend to forget that the methodology will only be a minor part of the whole solution. Therefore, in most cases, the choice of a certain methodology will not be a real choice but merely the logical consequence of an existing context.

A former Harvard Business School professor says companies must commit to 'I-space' and collaboration, not financialization and administration

The credit crunch has forced people across many sectors to rethink their assumptions about how they do business, the roles of the individual in the larger system, and the very future of the system itself.

A recent survey conducted by Proofpoint found that 8% of companies had terminated employees due to social media usage (common causes including sharing sensitive information on a network). And while the statistic seems significant, it only underscores one of several upcoming challenges nearly every organization will face as changes in people, process and technology fueled by the collective movement we call social media begin to transform business. Here are a few challenges that every organization should be planning for right now. If you aren't you will be.

"Bye, bye, organization guy." Those words start the first chapter in the estimable Daniel Pink's Free Agent Nation, published in 2007. In that book, Pink observed how increasing numbers of people in the US are choosing to work as independent contractors, temps, and on a project-to-project basis.

In a recent post I promised that I'd lay out a blueprint for building a company that's as nimble as change itself-and I will, but first I'd like to share an anecdote about a simple experiment in workplace freedom.

Last week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It's one of my favorite events, primarily because so many online friends attend from around the world and I enjoy their company. Despite overwhelming good will among participants, the conference exposed gaps between expectations and reality that continue to plague the Enterprise 2.0 world.

More than ever, Enterprise 2.0 is the talk of the town. However, the discussion remains difficult due to a continuing bias towards tools and technology. Therefore, an attempt for a real look at the internals of Enterprise 2.0, the dark forces of collaboration.

Social media is most transformative when used inside the company, says Web 2.0 expert Leon Benjamin - and the implications are far reaching...

Thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 and Corporate Culture Change

"I'd like to talk to you about a big project," the woman told me on the phone. "We need to change our culture."

Social Media has demonstrated in many ways capable of meeting or exceeding the deliverable output of many traditional industries such as advertising, marketing, journalism, human resources, design, community organizing, education, and social vetting.

"Gas-guzzling S.U.V.'s, cigarette boats, no-income mortgages and private jets should be relegated to the junk heaps of history, or better yet, put in a museum dedicated to never forgetting the greed and avarice that led us so far astray."

I can't tell you how many companies I have worked with that have encouraged or tolerated a large degree of geographic dispersal among employees and management teams. "We're virtual, and proud of it," one told me. "It doesn't matter where you live anymore," many employees of virtualized companies have argued. "We travel all the time anyway," has been another frequent mantra.

The latest data emerging on how enterprises are using Web 2.0 tools in the workplace this year is painting a picture of a sea change in the way those businesses conduct collaboration and communication amongst their workers, and to a lesser extent the rest of the world.

The talk of heterarchy is taking me back to Gerard Fairtlough's book on The Three Ways of Getting Things Done (hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy) - but this mention of systemic organisations leads neatly to Bill Tate's new book on systemic leadership in the systemic organisation.

Many questioning about enterprise 2.0 these last weeks. How to make it work, how help companies to understand it, how to calculate the ROI ? So many questions that, at the end, can be summed up in only one : undestranding how these new logics can integrate into the existing and add to it. Without that, it's obvious that either companies don't dare either they will dare with overcautiousness and won'tbe able to get the most from their initiative, either will dare in a bad way and things will be counter-productives.