.. and getting things done.

Organizing and providing the capabilities for getting things done in an environment characterized by constant flows of information and people connected to each other in ever-shifting and intersecting Venn diagram-like spheres of influence is a hearty challenge.  It happens organically, more or less .. this much at least we have learned from the growth of the blogosphere, LinkedIn and a range of social networking applications that have come, gone and sometimes come again or shifted to a more receptive social space (Orkut's popularity today in Brazil comes to mind, though this may be an overused example).

Why is it a hearty challenge ?  Organizations are not designed for organic growth based on cross-fertilization of ideas and knowledge via conversation (even though that happens all the time .. social network analysis (SNA) has proved this, I think).  It has been clear for some time that the social networks that operate in most organizations are significantly different than the responsibility, status and power relationships formally presented buy organization charts, titles, job descriptions, reporting relationships and the other trappings of organizational life that have been derived from the design principles that informed the industrial revolution and its primary idioms ... mass assembly, mass production, division of labour derived from a quest for maximal machine-like efficiency, and the treatment of labour inputs as a cog or a part of a machine, with a depreciating useful life.

These assumptions did not foresee well what we today call "knowledge work" and have not changed much ... in spite of Drucker and a host of other management theory luminaries arguing for significantly different treatment of these ideas.  People are no doubt going to argue with me and suggest that knowledge work is effectively covered off by the fundamental assumptions of today's management 'science", but I see little real evidence of that.  Yes, I do see a better understanding (sometimes) of white-collar productivity, and I understand that there is greater understanding of creativity and right-brain dynamics in today's workplace / management punditry.  Nevertheless, the same structural design principles developed in the early 1950's operate today in job evaluation practices  (no, NOT performance evaluation but job evaluation .. a job's size and weight, and accordingly its place in the organizational pecking order, or as per a phrase in common usage today, one's "pay grade"), and it is these practices that determine an organization's pecking order and reporting relationships (and thus, much of the management responsibility for getting things done).

However, increasingly today's knowledge work is about several people, working on projects in teams, stitching and seaming information together to create something or to get something done.  Dave Pollard articulates this clearly in today's blog post titled The Short Shelf Life Of Information (And The Long Life Of Memes):

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Here are six important discoveries I've made as a result of fifteen years' work in so-called 'Knowledge Management':

- Almost none of the 'just-in-case' archived content of most corporations gets used at all, and the older it gets the less likely it is to be used
- Most public Internet sites are used mainly by job-seekers and by students for homework, not by customers or even the general public
- What is valued is know-who (not know-what) – connection not collection
- What is valued is just-in-time knowledge acquired through context-rich interaction (i.e. conversation)
- But even most conversations are only valued by their participants, and only until a few days after the conversation has passed (by which time it has either been internalized or forgotten)

What is valued is information to which value (meaning, suggested action) has been added through visualization, synthesis and analysis

I don't think any of these discoveries should come as a surprise to anyone, yet we blithely continue to behave, in most organizations, as if they were not so. The cost and energy that goes into acquiring 'raw' information, organizing, presenting at and attending conferences, and populating and maintaining Intranets, public Internet sites, document repositories, groupware etc. is staggering, even though most of this work has little or no value.

What does have value, but only for awhile, are these five types of content:

1. Conversational content -- face-to-face, Open Space, phone, Skype, desktop videoconferencing, IM, blogs, podcasts -- mostly of value to the participants in the conversation (who have the necessary context to understand it), and only until they have internalized it (shelf life: maybe a week)
2. Visualized and otherwise synthesized, filtered and analyzed content -- the work of information professionals that (like the example visualization above) tells readers/listeners succinctly either what something means, or what should they do about it (shelf life: maybe a year before it's obsolete)
3. Project content -- the organized collection of stuff relating to an active project, in wikis, file folders or other places accessible to the full project team (shelf life: the duration of the high-activity stage of the project)
4. Know-who directories -- the (rare) up-to-date lists of who knows what (not to be confused with internal phone directories or organization charts, which are generally valueless unless you are studying how management wishes things worked) (shelf life: as long as they're relatively complete and current)
5. Stories -- context-rich anecdotes about things that have actually happened, from which we can learn, and which can provoke good ideas to respond to (not to try to change) those realities (this includes cultural anthropology stories -- direct observations of and conversations with customers 'in their native habitat') (shelf life: as long as the culture that gave rise to the story remains unchanged -- usually a long time)

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It will not be a surprise to anyone who has read my blogging before, or who may read it somewhat regularly, that I believe that we will live and work in a more participative and interactive environment from now on (as always, I must say here "for better and for worse").

We need to design work and organizations for the "archy" of being "wired" ... wirearchy ... not the archy of being higher or lower on  chart that purports to represent the vertical acquisition and use of knowledge, expertise and experience. Yes, that knowledge, expertise and experience play a role in effectiveness and getting things done.  No, that is not (increasingly) how work happens or how we should be designing work and the organized groups of people in which and with which work happens.

More and more often work and getting things done is happening horizontally, by node of knowledge "X" getting together with idea "Y" and getting-it-done-through experience node "Z" ... these nodes negotiate with each other as to when, what, how, and then these nodes and their other connected nodes interact, distribute information, and  putting layer after layer of information together to create actionable knowledge.

We need to design wirearchies, which will include or incorporate negotiated just-in-time or just-for-results hierarchies when and if needed.

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Tags: hierarchy, wirearchy, let's call the whole thing ...

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