1. Explorers, whose work is study and research, and whose work-product is discovery and insight
2. Interpreters, whose work is mentoring and facilitation, and whose work-product is understanding
3. Inventors, whose work is imagining, and whose work-product is ideas
4. Designers, whose work is crafting, and whose work-product is models
5. Generators, whose work is creating and building, and whose work-product is ‘goods’ and services
6. Nurturers, whose work is cultivating, and whose work-product is well-being
7. Menders, whose work is sustaining, and whose work-product is regeneration
8. Actors, whose work is re-creating, and whose work-product is fun
9. Connectors, whose work is distributing, and whose work-product is cross-pollination

I also proposed to take the various published lists of ‘green’ jobs and jobs that meet real needs of the 21st century, and classify them into these nine categories, to help people identify their Purpose (what’s needed in the world that they care about).

Quite a few readers of the book have told me that, while they love the concept of the three circles and the Sweet Spot where they intersect, they have two practical problems using the model. First, they say that the exercises in the book to help them find their Gifts, Passions and Purpose don’t ‘work’ for them — they’re too conceptual and require more self-knowledge and more knowledge of what the world needs than they, or the average person, can be expected to have. Second, they assert that most of what they think fits in their Sweet Spot (work that they love doing and are good at, and which meets a real need) is not ‘valued’ highly enough for them to make a decent living at it — either it’s something (art, literature, software, music, design etc.) that so many people do (or which is so easy to copy) that the market price for such work is nearly zero, or it’s something (e.g. legitimate, practical health, mental health, and geriatric health products and services, and healthy, unpolluted foods) that their desperate customers are too poor to afford.

As I thought of this, I began to realize two things that I should have noticed earlier:

• People learn (including learning what they love doing and are good at doing) by doing things, not by thinking or reading lists of ideas or types of jobs.
• The entire economy is shifting, fairly quickly and radically, from the unsustainable Industrial Economy to a post-industrial Natural Economy characterized by high prices for scarce materials and low prices for labour. [At a conference of financial forecasters I attended yesterday, I heard that this will be a long-term trend. That means lower prices (as in free) for non-commodities and services, and hence an increasing struggle for entrepreneurs (anyone who isn't subsidized by government handouts, payoffs and bailouts)].

Learning-by-doing is in fact how most Natural Entrepreneurs I know discovered their Sweet Spot. So, my workbook will be light on intellectual exercises (like thinking about what tasks in your life you’ve been most praised for, or most relished taking on) and heavy on real-life adventures (like going and observing and talking with the owner of a small, local business you admire, with a list of questions to talk with them about, or taking up a new hobby or volunteer role you’ve always wanted to do, or at least thought you did). My hope is that, just as my friends Paul and Grace had their aha! moment about their Sweet Spot (helping the world eat better) after they made an excursion to Tibet, encouraging people to just get out and try stuff they’ve never thought of doing, might help a lot of readers really discover their Gifts and Passions, those they might never have considered if they’d stayed inside the confines of their house and workplace.

Another thing my Workbook will offer is a way to take some of the research activities discussed later in my book, and apply them earlier in the process of discovering your Purpose. Many people, I’ve discovered, don’t see unmet needs that are staring them in the face and which offer wonderful entrepreneurial opportunities, because they don’t know how to look for them, recognize them, research them and ask the right questions to surface them. As I explain in the book, you can’t just ask people what they need, because usually they don’t know. (I described a product much like an iPod to people in 1971 as part of my university thesis work, and respondents looked at me as if I were from Mars.) Surfacing needs that you can turn into entrepreneurial opportunities is an iterative, emergent process that comes from exploring and prompting and imagining possibilities with the people who will become your customers. The same thing applies to discovering your Purpose. You’ll never discover it inside your own head, no matter how knowledgeable and imaginative you may be. So the workbook will take a much more externally-focused, conversational, research-based approach to finding your Purpose, and hence ultimately your Sweet Spot.

The issue of how our economy is shifting, quietly but tectonically, from an Industrial Growth economy that rewards wealth, size, ruthlessness and political connections, to what I am calling a Natural Economy characterized by much lower prices (except for scarce resources), generosity, reciprocality, trust, modesty, responsiveness, responsibility, sustainability and the importance of relationships, is staggeringly important, and I’m kicking myself for not recognizing the signs of its emergence earlier. Chris Anderson’s book Free demystifies the phenomenon that has delinked price from value and obsolesced hoarding of intellectual capital. The proportion of a car’s ‘dealer cost’ attributable to labour is expected to plummet from 70% to 30% within a decade. Generation Y is justifiably complaining that their wages are subsistence with little hope of improvement, and the returns for fledgling entrepreneurs, no matter how lucky or bright, don’t look much better to them.

This is a world that no longer pays fair.

Unions will wail. Overpaid executives and fat financial industry Ponzi-scheme artists, recently or soon to be laid off, will sell their sports cars and buy taxi licenses. And the poor, working long hours in multiple jobs for pathetic wages, will become even poorer. Not fair, but it’s here to stay. Five billion people vying for jobs means labour supply is so much higher than demand that your work is worth next to nothing.

What’s good about this is that much of what we want and need now will also soon cost next to nothing. Your income will keep dropping, but so will a significant proportion of your costs of living. It’s called deflation, and while it’s currently being hidden from consumers by price-gouging corporatist oligopolies who are stealing the labour savings as obscene profits and more obscene bonuses, it’s only a matter of time before wage-earners run out of money and stop buying products with outrageous markups, opening the way for new providers who will disintermediate the corporatists and offer their products and services for next to nothing. For a short while these may well be Chinese providers, but as oil and commodity and resultant transportation costs soar, the providers will ultimately be mostly your neighbours. We are headed for a relocalized, community-based Gift Economy, with low prices for most things, and low wages. Such an economy will not respond to advertising or hype. It will be based on trust, generosity and reciprocity, and those who try to exploit it will be quickly identified and ostracized. It’s already begun, as Chris’ book explains.

Just as Generation Y has blurred the distinction between work and non-work activities, they are learning that sustainable work is inseparable from a sustainable life. With that worldview, the Sweet Spot no longer identifies just the work you’re meant to do, it identifies the way you’re meant to live. So, instead of complaining that the work in their Sweet Spot (what they love to do, and are good at doing, that meets a real need in the world) doesn’t pay enough, Generation Y is beginning to look at how much they need to earn to do what is in their Sweet Spot, essentially turning my whole model on its head. Some retirees with inadequate pensions are doing the same thing. They are looking not only to find work that is sustainable, responsible and joyful, but to find a way of life that is sustainable, responsible and joyful, of which work is an indistiguishable part. This is part of what Thomas Princen calls The Logic of Sufficiency, and some of us now get it, and a lot more will soon have no choice but to follow.

My workbook then, will not just help readers discover the work that is in their Sweet Spot, but help them to determine how much they need to earn, and what they need to do in their non-work lives, to “afford” that work. It will explore, for example, the paradox that often an extra dollar of income can actually ‘cost’ (in taxes, higher clothing, transportation, child-care, late night fast-food meals, etc.) more than a dollar, and that conversely accepting a lower income can actually increase both your quality of life and your net wealth.

The workbook will be, in short, not only a more practical guide to discovering how we can discover the work we’re meant to do; it will be a guide to discovering the life we’re meant to live.

A couple of years ago I posted some mid-year and year-end “intentions”, to distinguish them from “resolutions”. Intentions are not aspirations; they are things we are in the process of doing, achieving, or becoming. They are what we’re meant to do, and who we’re meant to be. We have already begun to realize them. They are, as the word’s etymology implies, what we are “stretching towards”.

I later shifted from intentions that are results-oriented (goals) to intentions that are process-oriented (practices), because I realized that all of the things that are worth doing for a lifetime are complex, and can never really be completed. There is no mastery, there is only the practice.

More recently, I described the importance of aligning our long-term intentions (what we are meant to do and be for what’s left of our lives) and our short-term intentions (what we are meant to do and be right now, today, this week). Until they are aligned, we will continue to live in this unreal space, in the knowing/doing disconnect — we know we should be doing X (we are good at it, we love doing it, and it is needed in the world), but we keep on doing Y. We do Y because it is urgent, because it is easy, because it is fun, or because we don’t think we have any choice. Things are the way they are for a reason, and until we understand what that reason is, we will not be able to change it, or adapt ourselves to it. We will keep on doing Y, and X will never get done.

If our long-term intentions are X-stuff, then when we identify short-term intentions that are also X-stuff, that are “stretching toward” the same place, we will see starkly the disconnect between it and the Y-stuff we’re actually doing. Something then has to shift. Either we stop doing (some of) the Y-stuff to make time and space for the X-stuff, or we acknowledge that we don’t actually intend to do X at all. We’re merely dreaming about it, or hoping it will happen magically. Recipe for unhappiness, self-dissatisfaction and a life wasted. If we were able to hear our future obituary, and it was all Y-stuff, would we see it as a life well-spent? And if not, what’s holding us back from doing the X-stuff? And if it’s lack of time or money holding us back, are we really intending to do X?

Example: One of my long-term intentions is to create working models of a better way to live and make a living. I’ve written a book about how to create sustainable, responsible enterprises. I’m working on a novel/screenplay that depicts what life in a sustainable world 200 years from now might look like, to help us imagine possibilities. Right now I have James Kunstler’s book World Made by Hand sitting beside me — airplane reading as I make my way to visit my father for the Thanksgiving weekend. In this, my long-term and short-term intentions are aligned.

Second example: Another of my long-term intentions is to work with others to stop the Alberta Tar Sands. I have a book, Andrew Nikiforuk’s Tar Sands sitting beside Kunstler’s, but beyond the vague idea of some kind of Open Space event, to brainstorm with others creative ways to disrupt and close down this ecological nightmare, I have no short-term intention stretching towards that longer-term one. Worse, I’m anxious about the longer-term intention: I have no passion for this kind of work (though I have great passion for helping others do it), and I know people whose lives have been devastated as a result of having been arrested, for nothing. No question this is holding me back, and that my intentions in this area, if that’s what they are, are out of alignment.

This brings me back to practices. It occurs to me that, when I retire (soon), I will be best able to align and stretch toward both my short-term and long-term intentions by allocating specific time blocks to three kinds of practices every day (though I recognize I’ll have to be flexible on the times): (a) Reconnecting practices, (b) Capacity-building, activism and model-building practices, and (c) Reflecting practices. Or, put more simply, sensing (mornings), doing (afternoons) and thinking and playing (evenings).

Starting with these three blocks of time, I developed the chart below that shows my long-term intentions, the long-term practices that “stretch toward” those intentions, and the short-term, daily intentions (exercises) in alignment with the longer-term ones. The long-term practices tie into the nine steps in my What You Can Do graphic above, and the colour (red, yellow, green) is from my ‘scorecard’ and shows how much work I have to do on each.

What I discovered in putting this chart together was that (a) many of the things I do today, things which take up most of my day, really don’t contribute at all to my intentions, and (b) when I reallocated time in my day to these three blocks of time (right column), it required a lot of thought, imagination and work to come up with a list of short-term intentions (exercises and projects) with which to usefully fill that time — exercises and projects that would stretch toward the long-term intentions. And even with retirement, I suspect “freeing up” six additional hours a day for intentional work will be a challenge — it will mean less time on e-mail and casual reading, for example (i.e. getting away more often from this computer).

The third column of this chart is new and tentative and incomplete, but it’s also for me a personal breakthrough. I am not sure whether this is the solution, for me, to the knowing/doing disconnect and the tyranny of the urgent over the important — the real formula for Getting Things Done.

But I intend it to be. With practice.

Lately I’ve wondered whether it might be possible to create an online workbook to accompany the book, one that would include exercises to discover your Gifts, Passions and Purpose, and find the Sweet Spot at their intersection. Rather than starting with the industrial classifications, the way most career counselling guides do, I thought it might be more appropriate to start with the types of activities that go on in a Natural Economy and Natural Society. My first attempt to delineate these (which was part of the research for my novel) is illustrated above. Nine “meta-careers” are identified:

1. Explorers, whose work is study and research, and whose work-product is discovery and insight
2. Interpreters, whose work is mentoring and facilitation, and whose work-product is understanding
3. Inventors, whose work is imagining, and whose work-product is ideas
4. Designers, whose work is crafting, and whose work-product is models
5. Generators, whose work is creating and building, and whose work-product is ‘goods’ and services
6. Nurturers, whose work is cultivating, and whose work-product is well-being
7. Menders, whose work is sustaining, and whose work-product is regeneration
8. Actors, whose work is re-creating, and whose work-product is fun
9. Connectors, whose work is distributing, and whose work-product is cross-pollination

I developed this framework in the context of essential work of a post-civilization society. These are all things that are needed in a community, and which we offer to others (because no individual is self-sufficient), to make the community self-sufficient. They cut across all of the modern, specialized ‘disciplines’ that have become our modern economy’s strait-jacket: we think of disciplines like ‘sales representative’ or ‘engineer’ or ‘musician’ or ‘athlete’ as the only way collective effort can be divvied up and parsed, because it is the only way we have ever seen work categorized. So, for example, the work of a scientist can entail all nine of the work categories listed above, as can the work of an artist or a programmer.

My belief is that our natural affinity is more for one or a few of these nine work categories, than it is to a modern ‘specialty’: People who are good at designing could be as useful designing shirts as designing recipes. People who are good at mending people (e.g. doctors) could be as useful and passionate about mending trains (e.g. mechanics). So I think it might be useful to think about what we are meant to do using these nine meta-ways of being of use, that draw on similar natural Gifts and similar Passions.

In thinking about my own Sweet Spot, I generally identify “reflecting” and “imagining possibilities” (category 3 activities) and “writing” (a category 4 activity) as being what I’m meant to do. I am passionate but not especially gifted at facilitation, conversing and demonstrating (category 2 and 9 activities). I am competent but not especially passionate about research (category1 activity). And I am neither competent nor passionate about category 5-8 work, though I recognize their great value and would not start an enterprise that didn’t have partners who were both gifted and passionate about such work.

When I look at wild creatures, I see evidence of learning and practice of all nine of these categories of essential work. The need for us to be social, to associate and collaborate and, together, to do all nine types of work effectively, transcends history, geography and species.

Another thing I like about this categorization of essential work is that it demonstrates the uselessness of a lot of the work that is being done today by millions of highly-paid people, and hence might give pause to young people drawn to these ‘professions’ simply because they’re easy and lucrative. Lawyers, stock-brokers and insurance agents come to mind, for example. None of these professions produce anything of essential value. They are parasites of the current, unsustainable and dysfunctional industrial economy. The post-civilization world will not need anyone to do these things.

So if I were to develop a Finding the Sweet Spot workbook, to help people discover the work they’re meant to do, I would be strongly tempted to use this nine-category classification of essential work as the basis for doing so, and to re-cast the exercises about discovering your Gifts, your Passions, your Purpose and your Partners (those with complementary Gifts who share your Purpose) accordingly. So, for example, in listing the dozens of possible and needed ‘green’ careers in Roberts and Brandum’s book Get a Life! I would reorganize them into the nine categories above.

I’d welcome your thoughts on this plan. Is this way of discovering what you’re meant to do too conceptual for most people? Does it require a degree of self-knowledge and the workings of an economy (Natural or Industrial) that is beyond most people’s capabilities? Is it counter-intuitive?

Although the book has not been a popular success, I still think it could be very valuable to young people about to embark on their careers, boomers about to ‘retire’ from their first careers, and frustrated and underemployed workers of all ages. I’m just trying to figure out how to make it accessible and useful enough that it gets the attention it deserves.

I‘ve been using the word resilience to describe the capacity — of individuals, communities and organizations — to improvise, to respond well in the moment. But I think resilience is the wrong word — it is from the Latin meaning “springing back”.

Humans try to be resilient, acting as if everything is temporary, or cyclical, and as if it will always eventually possible to go back to the way things were before a challenge arose. That’s why so many of us live in misery, in false hope. While we aspire to move back to the way things once were — after the desertification, after the forests and fish have gone – the rest of all-life-on-Earth is moving on, forward.

What we try to do instead of adapting to the changes in our environment, is to try to change the environment to suit us. We’ve become very good at this, but it’s unsustainable. What we’ve created in human-made environments is fragile, shabby, and ineffective. Much of human employment today is fixing all the human-made things that constantly break, and break down. Much future employment will be cleaning up the mess we’ve created with the human-made, non-biodegradable broken stuff we’ve thrown away.

We try to be resilient, and to force changes in our environment, because, after learning that our cultural “software” can adapt very quickly (in as little as a generation), we discovered too late that our biological “hardware” adapts over millions of years, not decades. Today we’re racked with epidemic rates of diseases of maladaptation — notably immune system diseases, cancers, and mental illnesses. Our bodies just can’t adapt to stress, the malnutrition of the modern processed monoculture food system, and the toxins in our air, water, soils and foods. They’re still designed for life in the uncrowded, abundant and unpolluted rainforest.

Alas, there’s nothing we can do about our bodies, nor is there anything sustainable we can do to our environment. Resilience is, in fact, futile — we cannot expect things to change back to what they were so that we can bounce back to what we were. And in Darwin’s sense we cannot evolve either — at best we can unschool our descendants to acquire the capacities that we lost, or never had — like the ones depicted in the charts above. We’re probably too late, those of us over 30, to learn them all effectively ourselves now.

What we can do, however, is adapt and improvise.

Evolution and adaptation are not about springing back, but rather springing forward. Evolution is from the Latin meaning “rolling out”, but it is worth noting that Darwin avoided the term he is now so associated with, and instead in his books used the term “descent with  modification” (descent in the sense of ‘descendants’ — change only occurred with the passing of genes ‘down’ from one generation to the next). Adaptation comes from the Latin meaning “fitting in” (hence to Darwin “survival of the fittest” was not about strength or intelligence but about adaptability). Improvisation comes from the Latin meaning “[responding to the] unexpected”. These are the only effective responses to change in complex systems.

Wild creatures have this ability to adapt and improvise: to fight, to flee, to change what they eat, where they live, what they do. They migrate, they hibernate, they adapt to different foods, neighbours and environments, as well as changes to members of their own community. Evolution helps them do this, by selectively favouring that capacity — those that can’t adapt and improvise, perish.

So how do we, poor maladaptive and conservative creatures that we are, learn to adapt (“fit in”) and improvise (“respond to the unexpected”), and can we help our communities and organizations do so as well?

Last week I visited with one of the most adaptive and improvisational organizations I know, one that I profile in my book, called Mountain Equipment Co-op. It’s a true one-person-one-vote cooperative, that began with 6 members and which now has millions. Only a tiny proportion actually participate in MEC’s decisions, but it’s enough to know that if they started doing things the members didn’t like, that could change very quickly. They generate only enough ‘profit’ to cushion them through economic downturns — any other surplus is returned as a cash refund to members based on their annual purchases. The people I’ve met like working there, and they really do care about being of service, offering excellent products (made in Canada whenever possible), and doing excellent work.

As I spoke with and visited them it occurred to me that, compared to other, profit-for-shareholders companies that sell sporting goods, MEC is culturally more adaptive and resilient in 18 ways:

1. Less dependence on growth: they would thrive in a steady-state economy, because there are no external shareholders looking for revenue growth and ‘share appreciation’ (each member gets one voting share, which is always worth $5)
2. Fewer levels of hierarchy to connect and move: MEC is a very flat organization, so when something needs to be changed, everyone knows and everyone works on it
3. More distributed decision making: customer-facing workers have the authority to satisfy customers and improve processes without having to go through approval policies
4. Built-in job/supply redundancy: less efficient but more effective: you never hear “that’s not my department” at MEC; their people know a lot about everything in the store, so if someone’s away there’s someone else who knows what they do, and so people get variety in their work and a chance to learn what others do; and if a supplier fails or is unable to meet demand, there’s another available to take up the slack
5. Less debt: big corporations take on debt to provide leverage that allows profits to rise faster than revenues (and exposes them to commensurate drops); MEC is not in the business to make profits, so it doesn’t acquire needless debts
6. More autonomy in decisions: less dependence on outside investors; the members own the company, and no outsiders have a say in what gets done, or doesn’t get done
7. Less need to create demand: MEC responds to real customer demands, rather than advertising and marketing to create artificial ones
8. More connected to members/customers/suppliers: you’ll find MEC people on the slopes, on bike excursions, and in campgrounds, where customers show them what they need and they show customers what they have to offer
9. More connected to community: MEC invests extensively in community activities, because it makes sense to do so; for example, a percentage of sales from bike products go for advocacy for more bicycle lanes and facilities in the cities the company is located in
10. Less vulnerable to downturns: when sales drop, the refund to members drops, but everything else continues
11. Less dependent on government largesse: MEC needs no big corporate subsidies or bailouts like the auto makers, the banks, the steel companies, the energy companies, the agribusiness industry, and all the other big, unadaptable, unimprovising profit-for-shareholder giants feeding at the government trough
12. More diverse people: MEC has one of the youngest and most diverse workforces I’ve seen
13. More collaborative, less competitive: the people I saw there work in teams and are always talking and consulting with each other
14. More “safe-fail” innovation: they test a lot of products with small customer groups first, so they can, as Dave Snowden puts it, “safe-fail” instead of having new products be “fail-safe”
15. More socially responsive and responsible: MEC’s decision to pull its popular bisphenol-A laden polycarbonite Nalgene water bottles off the shelves shook the Canadian government and the industry into reviewing all the toxins in plastic containers; they did it without fanfare, and they did it because the members told them it was the right thing to do
16. Less vulnerable to disruptive innovations: the company is so close to its members, who have their pulse on what’s happening, what’s new and what’s needed in their industry, they’re unlikely to be caught off guard by competing innovations
17. More risk-adapting than risk-mitigating: big corporations try to mitigate risks by playing it safe with new products, by selling a wide range of different quality products at different prices, by offshoring etc.; MEC constantly monitors what’s in demand and what isn’t and uses lower more frequent order quantities to adapt to changes, even though this means not taking advantage of volume discounts
18. Better reputation: the company’s products are not cheap, since they insist on quality, and they are astonishingly candid (their blog confesses that it’s a constant struggle to manufacture in Canada because if manufacturing plants pay generous wages to assemblers and sewers, customers complain that the product prices — and remember these have no profit margin — are unaffordable)

Here are 10 other things that organizations can do to be adaptive and improvisational, that I’ve seen some Natural Enterprises (especially cooperatives) do (I don’t know whether MEC does any of these, but it would be interesting to find out):

19. Contingency planning: be aware of and assess the risks and sensitivities of the organization, and discuss with everyone what you would do if and when these issues arose
20. Scenario planning: imagine the longer-term scenarios that the organization might face, and explore strategies that will work under multiple scenarios or which can be implemented as soon as there is evidence an unexpected scenario is beginning to come to pass
21. Simulations: run computer or “table-top” simulations or organization-wide “practice runs” that can help you imagine and anticipate unexpected occurrences ($200/barrel oil, 10% inflation or 4% deflation, a collapse in the $US), their impact on your customers and employees and hence on your organization, and how you might respond to them
22. Analyze narrow escapes: the swine flu was, fortunately, not virulent, but studying it can help you understand what would happen if it has been, and what to do if the next one is; what other narrow escapes have you had that you can learn from?
23. Recruit emotional intelligence: find people who have the ability to live comfortably with ambiguity and anxiety, and who know how to achieve consensus and resolve conflicts amicably
24. Study nature’s improvisational ability: have someone in your organization who understands how natural ecosystems work and how to use biomimicry to advantage in your organization
25. Stay ahead of the curve: understand and constantly reassess what differentiates you from other organizations in your industry; never stop innovating your processes, products and tools
26. Self-manage: encourage everyone in the organization to self-assess their “sweet spot” (what they do well for the organization that they love doing and which meets a need they care about), their intentions, and their own performance and success on their own terms, and share that candidly with others
27. Early-warning pattern-recognition: encourage your people to be constantly thinking about “what might come next”, and what the early indicators of each major change might be; track those early indicators 
28. Manage “on principle”: since decisions aren’t made on the basis of “maximizing shareholder value”, what are the principles that guide you instead when you have to make quick decisions in response to changing circumstances?

So much for organizations wanting to be adaptable and improvisational. What about communities and individuals?

Communities (small towns, villages, intentional communities and neighbourhoods within cities) are a form of co-operative organization, the only difference being that they have a wider and more essential set of products and services, and have members instead of customers. But many the same principles of adaptation and improvision apply: autonomy, steady-state, diversity, built-in redundancy, non-indebtedness, collaboration, non-hierarchical connection, risk awareness, self-management “on principle”, emotional intelligence, biomimicry, contingency planning (including scenarios and simulations), candour and responsiveness. The town I live in tries hard, but they’re zero for fourteen on these measures.

Individuals are of course part of communities and organizations, but there are also some things we can each do as individuals to be more adaptive and improvisational in our lives: be autonomous (not dependent on those outside your community), live within your means (a life of sufficiency and comfort, not one dependent on tomorrow’s income being more than today’s), get debt-free, self-manage, build emotional intelligence and other personal capacity, collaborate, plan for contingencies, always be honest, stay healthy, be good to yourself, and be open, attentive and responsive.

Whew. That’s enough lists for a lifetime.

Those familiar with this blog know the fundamental factors that differentiate complex from merely complicated systems. Mechanistic, complicated systems (like an automobile) have many moving parts, but they can be fully identified and understood with study and effort. By contrast, complex systems (like the world’s climatic system, or a community) are never completely knowable. They have too many variables to ever fully map, and the n-to-n connection between those variables is too manifold and nuanced to fully appreciate. Further, in complex systems, causality is never determinable; one can never separate cause and effect. So while a dysfunctional automobile can be ‘fixed’ by assessing the cause or causes of the dysfunction, we can never hope to do this with the world’s climate, or with community interactions or other social systems.

Nature’s way of ‘dealing’ with complexity is to make these complex systems self-managing. A balance is found, and as the infinite number of variables constantly and inevitably change, the entire system itself collectively seeks and finds a new balance, a new equilibrium. The physical and social systems of our world are complex because, in Darwinian terms, they work. They are less brittle than simple and complicated systems — cars break down much more easily and frequently than ecosystems and societies. If an ecosystem has a quintillion components, it makes far more sense to have all these components working collectively to resolve their problems (the resolution is then said to ‘emerge’), than expecting a single superior intelligence, or even a single species, to try to manage the system and impose ‘solutions’ on it.

In her work, Charlene summarizes the work of many social complexity pioneers and then presents what she calls the Discovery Model, which recognizes that groups learn and perform optimally when the people, the environment and the capacity for self-organization are in sync, and when information, interaction, and adaptability are present and working to enable the group to continuously transform itself into one sustainably suited to dealing with the issues of the moment. The facilitator’s role in this dynamic is to open up, unblock, encourage and enable the group to be fully functional. S/he does this through coaching, inviting, drawing out, connecting, challenging, articulating, and building personal and group capacities.

This is a huge task, and while I do agree that the role of a skilled and present facilitator is essential to effective group function, it’s my belief that this is largely because we have been indoctrinated to believe that mechanistic, complicated problem-solving is the answer to every situation (hence organizational hierarchies, and the simplistic and dysfunctional decision-making methodologies that have prevailed throughout our civilization), so we have never properly learned (as I believe indigenous and non-human societies do from birth) to self-manage, to allow resolutions to emerge naturally.

Reading Charlene’s work and talking with her got me thinking about the model of social fluency that Chris Lott and I co-developed, which is illustrated above. Here’s a brief re-cap of what it says:

Just as individuals’ social fluency is a function of these capacities, so is that of groups. The best facilitators have the awareness and skills to recognize the capacities and incapacities of the people in a group s/he is facilitating, and those of the collective group.

It’s been my experience that groups are more or less dysfunctional depending on the presence or absence of certain preconditions. The work of Dave Snowden and John Kotter supports this. These necessary preconditions for functional groups include:

1. a shared purpose;
2. a shared sense of urgency;
3. the presence among at least some in the group of each of 12 core capacities (I describe these in my book Finding the Sweet Spot): excellent instincts, critical thinking, imagination, creativity, attention, communication, demonstration, learning, collaboration and self-management skills, and a strong sense of responsibility and of intention;
4. sufficient information about the subject to have a context for learning and understanding (this is described in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds); and
5. a shared passion.

So my sense is that the role of the facilitator in dealing with complex issues should include the following:

I’m not suggesting that competent facilitators don’t do this already, just that there is a tendency for some facilitators to take the inherent problems of missing preconditions and incapacities as a given and hence not explicitly reflect them to the group, and also a tendency to make that the facilitator’s problem rather than the group’s. It seems to me that, while the facilitator may be able to get the group started in this self-assessment and self-management process (i.e. to facilitate it) the process itself should be directed and managed by the group. This is the very essence of managing social complexity.

For example, in my experience dealing with senior executives, they have a propensity (often reinforced by others) to exaggerate their own competencies and knowledge and to be blind to their incapacities and areas of ignorance. In facilitated sessions, they tend to dominate groups of subordinates and rush to conclusions. In such cases I have tried to research their possible and perceived incapacities and areas of ignorance in advance, and pull them aside before the session to urge them to recognize the value of them holding back judgement, listening, and helping draw out the knowledge, perspectives and ideas of others (almost making them quasi-co-facilitators, to disable their dominance, infallability and judgement behaviours). On rare occasions, an executive will even lead off by confessing his/her incapacities and ignorance as a means of leveling the power playing field and eliciting active participation of others. On occasions where the group explicitly acknowledges their strengths and weaknesses, the session can be very productive. A team aware of its individual and collective strengths and weaknesses will generally outperform a team that isn’t.

Likewise, I have found that business groups in particular often suffer from imaginative poverty, and that there is great value in doing some quiet advance brainstorming with creative and imaginative people, and then pre-seeding some provocative and credible ideas to selected group members, so that these ideas emerge as their ideas during the session and not mine as facilitator. Even better, if the group acknowledges this (or any other factor) as a collective incapacity, it can enable them to collectively invest more attention and effort on that area of weakness, or bring in others who have that capacity, or even follow a course of study or practice to acquire that capacity.

Having spent many years in research, I’ve also found that groups tend to think they are more knowledgeable about issues than they really are. In particular, there is a tendency for bad news and information about problems not to be communicated vertically in organizational hierarchies. For that reason it can be helpful to have the organization’s research staff (or group members with that competency) do an ‘environmental scan’ around the issue, and pull together and present an objective and uncensored precis of applicable facts and perceptions.

Of the three sets of elements of social fluency, in my experience the one that is most often lacking in groups I have facilitated is communication/attention skills. Many people come to these sessions with their minds made up, but an inability to articulate the reasons for their belief coherently and compellingly to others (often they don’t particularly care if others understand and share their viewpoint). As a result they may convey their ideas, information and perspectives poorly, or not at all, and disengage and be distracted when others are speaking. There is no simple answer to this significant challenge, but being aware of it, and recognizing it as a challenge explicitly, is a first step. It is then largely up to the group to deal with this, and I have seen groups do so very effectively. There is a technique, for example, of requiring each speaker to summarize the point made by the previous speaker before making their own point. The group can use a ‘talking stick’ to focus attention on the speaker and the importance of courtesy and attentiveness. And if a point is poorly made, asking clarifying questions can help, and can also teach the speaker how to be more coherent and responsive in future. Some facilitators use mindmaps displayed on a screen at the front of the session to ensure the points made are captured coherently and collectively understood.

I know that many readers of this blog are facilitators, and would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how you have enabled groups suffering from lack of necessary preconditions for effectiveness, or lack of social fluency, or even total dysfunctionality, to become aware of, name, self-manage and resolve these issues themselves. The word facilitator literally means ‘one who makes things easier’. How have you made it easier for groups struggling with incapacities to make it easier for themselves?

Thanks to Charlene for inspiring this post, and to Charlene and Galen for their wonderful hospitality.

1. Public websites that don’t reach customers
2. Intranets (internal content management systems) that serve up content almost no one uses
3. ‘Groupware’ tools (like SharePoint) designed to improve internal collaboration, that actually discourages collaboration

Now, we have a host of new tools available, called variously Web 2.0, KM 2.0, social networking tools, social media and social software. Many organizations and software developers are trying to cobble these on to the three lemons above to try to make these lemons less useless. Because these lemons are so tainted in the minds of users, the new add-ons don’t stand a chance.

At the same time, we have a new generation of workers (Gen Y or Gen Millennium) who have become comfortable using free, commercial Web 2.0 tools, and are using them in the companies they join — only to run into ferocious opposition from the IT security czars in these organizations, who consider them a threat, shut them down and censure the young staff who use them. Not to be defeated, the Gen Y’ers simply use their own portable hardware to work around the prohibitions. The war escalates.

So what are you, as the manager leading a Web 2.0 initiative, IT department or KM group, to do? How can the three giant lemons be fixed? Which Web 2.0 tools can be introduced effectively and usefully, and how? And is there a solution to the generational culture war that Web 2.0 has provoked?

I. What’s Wrong with Corporate Websites, Intranets and Groupware?

an unnavigable, unfathomable website from an advertising agency, profiled by websitesthatsuck.com

Most corporate websites simply ported the sales and marketing material that used to be distributed manually to a flat website with a bewildering array of ‘pages’, accessed through either ‘frames’ or ‘menus’. Tools to allow online ordering are often bolted on. Often the user has to use a search bar to try to find what they are looking for, and usually that’s such a discouraging process they give up.

The bigger problem with corporate websites is that most of the customers they’re trying to reach simply don’t use websites to buy stuff. They prefer a more personalized, interactive buying experience. So who ‘uses’ corporate websites? A study done by one large multinational organization discovered their actual user audience comprised, in order:

Needless to say, since the website was designed for customers, it wasn’t reaching its intended audience, and wasn’t meeting the needs of its actual audience.

Some organizations were persuaded that, because the number of ‘unique visitors’ to their site was substantial and growing, their site must be useful. But if they dug a little deeper they would discover that the average amount of time these ‘visitors’ spent on the website was as little as three seconds! As soon as these ‘users’ arrived, most of them quickly realized that this was not what they were looking for.

The situation with Intranets is no better. Intranets provide a place for ‘content providers’ in various parts of the organization to ‘house’ their content somewhere visible to the whole organization, that they can point to and say “I produced this; I’m doing productive work”. They don’t generally know (or, often, care) whether that content is of any use to anyone else in the organization. People put content on Intranets because they can (and sometimes because they are rewarded for doing so), not because it’s useful.

What’s worse, the same problems with menus and frames (usually designed by ‘taxonomists’ who organize information in ways that makes sense to content providers, rather than content users) mean that users have to resort to the dreaded search bar on the Intranet, too. Most people I speak to use this only as a last resort, and rarely find anything useful — they quickly give up and look for a real person to provide what they’re looking for. There’s a whole discipline in KM for taxonomists and ‘enterprise search’ experts, and these people are busily employed like librarians indexing and filing books in a library that nobody visits unless they’ve exhausted every other possible source of information.

What Intranet designers and managers fail to appreciate is that the principal way people share information hasn’t changed in centuries — people get it through real-time conversation with people they respect and trust. This gives them comfort that the content they’re given is current and authoritative, and through the conversation they can also appreciate the context behind that content, and ask questions to make it more useful to them. The original idea that Intranets could save the time of experts by reducing the number of conversations needed to convey that information effectively, simply failed to understand human nature and how information without context is worthless.

The final lemon in our trio is groupware (though the term, which is now disparaging, is rarely used). Groupware, of which the most notorious example is SharePoint, was designed to facilitate ‘communities of practice’ (CoPs). The idea was that (a) if the Intranet became too large to find content, there would be an alternative content repository for smaller collections of specialized content that members of a CoP had deemed useful, and (b) certain ‘collaboration tools’ (mostly those that allowed people to e-mail all members of a CoP) could be bolted on to the groupware tool, so that members could be notified of new content and ‘converse’ asynchronously about this content.

Again, none of this has worked as planned, and most of the failures were predictable if anyone had actually bothered to talk to users. Most groupware tools are so horrifically over-engineered and bloated with ‘features’ that they require full-time IT resources to manage, and to set up and ‘authorize’ new CoPs. Most of the ‘features’ that are added to the tool were added because they could be, not because they actually provided any useful functionality for more than 1% of users. The result is that you need to take training courses to learn how to navigate and use the groupware and CoP repositories and features. This is 19th century design — users today simply won’t use a tool that is unintuitive unless they are coerced to do so. Unless you use these tools often, by the time you need to apply what you’ve learned, you’ve forgotten it.

More fundamentally, asynchronous e-mail and ‘forum’-style ’conversations’, which were the basis for the first generations of groupware, are simply not the way most people communicate. If someone is looking for information, or has something useful to convey, they will generally prefer to walk down the hall, or pick up the phone, and ask or offer, in a real-time conversation that is, like the best information communication, context-rich and interactive. What groupware delivers is essentially another way to throw context-free content into a shared repository that quickly becomes obsolete clutter, and to send group e-mails to a large number of people already suffering from asynchronous information overload.

II. Can They Be Fixed?

In order to assess whether these three lemons can be re-engineered to be useful organizational tools, it’s necessary to look at the problems they are trying to solve.

Corporate websites were designed to allow customers (current and potential) to learn more about an organization’s products and services, without having to go through a sales representative. At least for another generation, this isn’t a need in business-to-business organizations, who have to, or prefer to, go through a sales representative, and generally will buy enough to warrant the company’s face-to-face investment in that customer. The best examples of business-to-customer websites, like Amazon, eBay and Etsy, all offer a range of products and services you can’t get in a store — they aggregate products from many different, competing vendors, and/or offer a vastly broader range than would fit in a single physical shop. So they succeed because they offer customers something they can’t get anywhere else. Other than copycats and wannabees, they have no competition.

If a customer wants to comparison shop, they will go to an objective comparison shopping site, like Consumer Reports, not to a whole bunch of competing sites all out to paint their company and its products and services as the best.

So what’s the best model for a corporate website? If it’s for customers, that depends on what the segment of your customers who actually research or shop online need and want. If you make the effort to identify this segment, and go out and talk with them, I think you’ll be surprised at what you learn. You might discover that the best thing you can provide is a directory of names and direct line phone numbers of real individual people in your company that your customers can talk to, without having to go through your god-awful automated switchboard (“if you know the extension number of the person you’re calling…”). [And know that while the technology exists, they're probably not ready, yet, to talk with you through their computer speaker.] And if you want to design a taxonomy to index your products and services so that people can browse online (if in fact they tell you they want to), design the taxonomy around the problem the product or service solves, the job it does, not by its industrial category. You might find that some tool that lets users self-assess their need for your product or service meets a need, but be careful — this requires a sophisticated online customer, and you have to avoid hyping your product.

For more advice, talk to your prospective online customers. Don’t assume you know what they want. It’s changing, constantly. My guess is you’ll find that the website that meets their needs will be much simpler, cleaner and cheaper to maintain than what you have now. And remember, your website is about them, not about you.

Just don’t forget those other categories of people who prowl your public Internet site. If you care about them, send them to a separate corporate website designed for their specific needs — and talk to them about what those needs are.

Intranets are tougher to salvage, because they really were a bad idea to begin with. The concept of having information inside a corporate firewall that is different from what’s available to your customers is a bit bizarre. So to some extent, you need to do the same thing to fix your Intranet that you do to fix your corporate website — identify the different constituencies of potential users and ask them what they need, and deliver on that.

My guess is that what most will be looking for is the same directory of specific people to talk with that your customers want. When I worked as a senior executive of a multinational organization, more than half of the calls I received were from people asking me for the name (and sometimes an introduction to) someone in the organization that could help them with a specific problem, need or assignment. Don’t expect your employees to self-manage this ‘corporate directory’ — there’s a completely different dynamic at work than exists in voluntary communities of interest where there’s a shared passion driving behaviour. Instead of replicating the organization chart, explore what kinds of questions employees are looking for answers to, and design and maintain the corporate directory accordingly — by the problem to be solved and the job to be done, not by department and hierarchy. Make it easy for people to find the right people, and easy for them to contact them, in real time.

The other need you’re likely to find in most organizations is for access to company policies and procedures. This is mundane administrative stuff, but it’s important. Think from the perspective of new employees — what policies and procedures are they going to want to look up, and how can you make it easy to find them.

From my experience, you should question the need for everything on the Intranet beyond directories and policies. In my experience most of the rest of the mountains of information in Intranets costs more to maintain than it provides in value. I’ve looked at a lot of so-called ‘best practice’ repositories on Intranets, and in the absence of context and contact, they’re a waste of server space and maintenance effort.

So what about groupware? A little study will probably show that the vast majority of the groupware/’community’ content, just like most of your Intranet content, is unused and possibly obsolete (and hence dangerous). And you’ll probably find that the vast majority of the CoPs are more or less dormant, or defunct. There are Web 2.0 tools — simple, disaggregated, free — that do everything groupware tries to do more effectively. So my groupware legacy system advice may sound extreme, but this is it: Seriously consider just closing it down. Stop wasting time and money on it. Don’t be sucked into adding Web 2.0 bolt-ons to salvage it, because that just makes an overly-complex tool even more unwieldy. There are better ways.

III. Which Web 2.0 Tools Should You Introduce?

Blogs, wikis and document sharing, IM and twitters, multimedia tools, canvassing tools, sensemaking tools, risk management tools, personal content management tools, environmental scanning tools, story collection tools, desktop videoconferencing, simulations and scenario planning tools, proximity locators, affinity detectors, e-learning tools, unconferencing tools, mindmappers, virtual world tools, and mashups customized to suit your particular business — there are dozens of different types of Web 2.0 tools to choose from. How do you decide which ones are best for your organization?

In my experience, you have to follow five steps, which I’ll get to in a moment. This will be a lot of work, and will entail a lot of conversations with a lot of people (it is ‘social software’, after all)! My advice is not to introduce anything just because it’s easy, or just because one of your vendors has thrown it in for free. Introduce a few tools, pilot them first, and then, if they succeed with the pilot group, show the rest of the people in your organization how they work and why they’re useful. Don’t teach them, don’t tell them, don’t sell them — show them.

In one of my previous consulting contracts I ran a successful pilot using a desktop videoconferencing and screensharing tool. When I suggested it be used in another department, I was warned that the department head was a total luddite, and didn’t even like telephone conference calls. So I asked her if I could demonstrate a new tool the next time she was running a lengthy audioconference (which she did often, but only because she couldn’t get the budget to fly people in regularly for face-to-face meetings). Just before the meeting I gave her the URL of the videoconferencing “meeting room” and asked her to e-mail it to the others on the conference call. The call was to edit, paragraph by paragraph, a new government policy paper. She had the previous draft on her computer and was making changes as they were discussed by the other participants. Unbeknownst to her, as she made these changes, the other participants were immediately seeing them on their screens, through the screensharing feature of the software I was demo’ing. They started saying how useful this was, and as they discovered the other features of the software (notably the IM backchannel) I could hear the users enthusiastically saying “wow!” and “why didn’t we use this before?” After a few minutes of this, the department head covered the phone, said “OK I get it!”, and motioned me to go. All audioconferences in her department now use this tool, and it’s spreading throughout the organization, with no marketing, and no training.

A few years ago, I started using a mindmapping tool on my own machine to keep personal notes on what was being decided during meetings I attended. One day one of my colleagues asked me to project my ‘map’ of the meeting so that all of the participants in the room could see it. The organization I was presenting to was so impressed with this real-time, shared capture of the essential discussions and decisions of meetings that they now use it for all of their meetings. And when those meetings are virtual, they use the mindmap in combination with screensharing so that everyone in the meeting, everywhere, can track what is being decided. 

These aren’t sophisticated Web 2.0 tools, but they’re simple, free, and useful. They’re the best candidates to start your Web 2.0 pilot program. And the best way to introduce them is to just demonstrate their value in a live application, in real time.

Here are the five steps you need to go through to make sure your Web 2.0 projects and tools will be the right selections:

1. Try out the various tools out there. Pick a half dozen or a dozen Web 2.0 tools and just start using them — you’ll learn a lot more about their value than if you just research them or look at comparative specs. Be prepared to be surprised — the most popular social networking tools aren’t necessarily the ones you’re going to find to be of any value in your organization. Some of the simplest tools are the best. And the value of these tools bears no correlation to their cost.
2. Talk to prospective customers. Discover which of your prospective (and current) customers actually spend significant time online, other than answering internal e-mails, and what they do during this online time. What do they need that isn’t already available to them? There are two industries developing a lot of new applications that will soon be used in other businesses: gaming and dating. Explore some of the applications these industries are using, and imagine how they might be tweaked to improve the user experience and social connectedness of your customers.
3. Talk to your employees. Understand what they do, and how they spend their online time. What do they need that they aren’t already getting? Who are the most ‘connected’ people in your organization, and what tools are they using to stay connected?
4. Talk to senior management. They are probably disconnected from the people on the front lines of the organization, and their needs. You can help to articulate these needs in ways the executive team can understand. At the same time, you can discover what is keeping senior management awake at night, and if you can develop social networking applications that alleviate that executive insomnia, you’ll buy a lot of leeway to introduce innovations that have broader applicability across the organization.
5. Talk to young people. Finally, talk to the kids inside and outside your own organization, and ask them what’s out there and free that they use, that can be adapted for your organization’s use. Have them show you how they use these tools, because it’s often hard to understand their value without a demonstration. The subject matter of their conversations may not be relevant to you, but it’s likely the same media they use for what’s important to them, can be used to facilitate conversations in your organizations on matters that are important to you.

When you go through these steps, you’re actually following the same research process that good R&D departments use. You’ve identified your potential customer ‘segments’, scanned to see what’s currently available and how it’s succeeding, doing secondary (online) and primary (face-to-face interview) research, and then drawing together an making sense of all this information to establish a ‘portfolio’ of unmet needs. The final two steps are to discover (before you go designing a new social networking application) why someone else hasn’t already invented it (there may be cultural, technical or cost barriers you’re not aware of), and to make sure you have the skill set and resources in your organization to effectively introduce the social networking application to your enterprise. Your focus should always be on the needs portfolio, however — as long as you’re working on solutions to problems that your customers (internal or external) have acknowledged, you’ll avoid the problem most organizations encounter: providing solutions nobody wants.

What you should end up with is a set of perhaps 3-5 unmet needs that lend themselves to social networking applications. You’re likely going to be able to identify off-the-shelf, simple, commercial software tools (probably free of charge) that will address 2-3 of these needs. In one or two cases, you’re going to actually have to build the application yourself, probably using open source applications (APIs) with a bit of custom code to ‘mash’ them together and tweak them for your particular needs. There are thousands of young tech-savvy programmers out there who can do this for you. Writing custom software applications is much easier, and cheaper, than it used to be.

IV. Dave’s Faves

There is no set of social networking tools that is right for every organization. Much depends on your business, your size, and your organization’s culture. But everyone always asks me for my own favourites, the ones I have introduced or am working to introduce in companies I work with. So here are my current eight favourites. The first four are off-the-shelf commercial tools. Nothing exciting, just fast, inexpensive improvement to work effectiveness. The second four are leading-edge, and would probably need some custom coding, but could be career-making improvements if you can pull them off. All eight, I have to stress again, are responses to identified needs from one or more of the four constituencies I regularly speak with: customers, employees, management, and young ‘pathfinder’ users. And all eight are about connectivity, context, conversation and communication, not content.

1. Real-Time Conversation: IM + Google Wave: For all its hype, Twitter is really nothing more than an IM tool tweaked so that the recipients, rather than the sender, determine who the message goes to. Most groupware now incorporates IM bolt-ons, but they’re cumbersome and unintuitive, and for security reasons usually unfriendly to recipients outside your firewall. So whether or not you have an internal IM tool available (it’s probably not used much anyway), consider enabling all your employees to use a free commercial tool like GMail’s GTalk. A large multinational company I worked for introduced it several years ago, with no announcement and no training, and discovered that within ninety days it had become the principal communications medium for the company’s thousands of Latin American staff. Why? Because in many of those countries, long-distance telephone is expensive, and telephone service is unreliable. E-mail is asynchronous and too slow for real-time needs. IM met the need perfectly. At a government agency I worked at recently, the young staff used it almost to the exclusion of E-mail, drawing on their networks (including cohorts in university, at previous employers, and online friends) to get immediate real-time text and voice-to-voice answers to every question they faced during their work day. 

2. Virtual Presence: Screensharing + Document Sharing: Face-to-face meetings are nice, especially for groups that don’t know each other, but they’re becoming an unaffordable luxury. Free, simple screen-sharing applications like Vyew and Dimdim let you set up a meeting or training session of 2-20 people instantly, share your screen, upload and download files, see who’s online, and backchannel chat. You can even use VoIP and your webcam (though I find these technically awkward bandwidth hogs and prefer to use a separate teleconferencing line and use .jpg’s of participants instead of full motion video of speakers). 

3. Mindmapping Tools: Mindmaps are a simple, graphical way to document the results of a group discussion. By displaying a mindmap of the discussion in real time at the front of the meeting room, or to remote participants using screensharing, everyone can follow the consensus-making process, and differences of interpretation of what the collective decisions and learning have been during a discussion can be immediately surfaced and discussed. At the end of the discussion, you get a printed record of these decisions with a single click. And mindmaps can provide hotlinks to supporting materials, so you can even use them as the framework to communicate sophisticated ideas and information. The simplest mindmaps are just tree diagrams with links, like the one made with a free tool called Freemind, illustrated above. Another free tool, Mind42, allows groups to collaborate in the construction of a mindmap. 

4. Blogs for E-Learning and E-Newsletters: A weblog is essentially a diary or journal that chronicles its author’s stories, thoughts, or learnings, generally available for others to ‘subscribe’ to (so they receive new ‘articles’ or ‘posts’ automatically). While blogs have been an enormous popular means for personal expression and informal communication, they have been largely unsuccessful in business applications. The most effective business use of blogging software in my experience is for the creation and publishing of courseware and newsletters. In such applications, the concept of a blog is ignored, and the tool is used as a framework for managing content that is fed to users one article at a time. Blog tools are designed to allow simple ‘publication’ of articles, such that as each article is published, older articles automatically drop down lower on the page and eventually into ‘archives’ that can be retrieved using an electronic calendar. This structure is ideally suited to delivery of both e-learning curricula and e-newsletters, which are generally released to users according to a set schedule or calendar. 

5. Canvassing Tools: Some of the earliest and most popular social bookmarking tools, like del.icio.us and Digg, use a combination of voting (thumbs up or down, or the number of people ‘pointing’ to a web page) and folksonomy (tags selected by the users themselves), to canvass ‘the wisdom of crowds’ for the best or most interesting pages on the Web about particular topics. But suppose you want to canvass your own ‘crowd’ (your customers, or employees, for example) to get their consensus before you make an important business decision, such as a new product launch? What you can do is use a simple, free survey tool (like SurveyMonkey) to do so. But beware — read James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds first, to avoid asking the wrong questions, asking them incorrectly, or asking the wrong crowd. The chart above shows the five types of questions that Surowiecki says best lend themselves to such ‘collective wisdom’ canvassing, and a process to decide exactly how to put the question to the crowd, and aggregate and assess the results.

6. Simulations and Scenario Planning: The world is full of what Clay Shirky calls “cognitive surplus”, mental energy that’s just looking for an outlet that is more interesting than the idiot box. If you can engage that cognitive surplus you can create things like Wikipedia, or Second Life. You can create a simulation or set of scenarios that will tell you what would happen to your business if oil spiked back up to $200 a barrel, or inflation rates jumped to 15% or fell below zero, or a virulent global pandemic hit tomorrow. You can’t predict the future, but you can prepare for it, become more resilient to possible changes. Scenario planning is an interactive social activity — the more informed people involved, conversing with each other about future possibilities, the richer and more valuable the scenarios. I still like Peter Schwartz’ Art of the Long View, a low-tech guide to strategic conversations and scenario development. The gaming and ‘virtual world’ industry has brought the cost of computer simulation way down, but even without such tools you can conduct sophisticated ‘tabletop exercises’ that simulate crises (natural, man-made, or competitor-induced) and help your organization prepare for and mitigate them. And in the process you’ll learn some fascinating lessons about teamwork, collaboration and human nature.

7. Proximity/Affinity Detectors: Google bought the pioneer proximity detector, a dating site called Dodgeball, and then closed it down. But the idea of being able to ‘see’ which of your friends, colleagues or want-to-meets are in your physical vicinity, has just migrated to the iPhone. The new contenders include Loopt, Dopplr and Plazes. The idea is simple: log in and tell the network where you are (or let your phone’s GPS do it for you automatically). If you wish, Twitter what you’re doing there. Identify others in your networks. Then you get a map showing who’s in your vicinity and what they’re doing. Perfect for impromptu meetups with people you really care to meet. 

8. Problem-Solving Facilitation: The more I learn about social complexity and effective facilitation, the more I believe that collective problem-solving, using expert facilitators, will probably be the most important business skill of this century. Today’s complex problems just do not lend themselves to top-down or outside-in ‘expert’ solutions. Increasingly, our collective understanding of problems and solutions co-evolves. This means you need a method that will identify who needs to be in the room to address the perceived problem, and to enable them to self-organize and collaborate effectively to come up with viable approaches to the problem. Probably the best known method for doing this is Open Space Technology, but there are a variety of other techniques that can be used, and an effective facilitator can help you find the ones best for any particular situation.

V: Mediating the Gen Y Cultural War

I suggested earlier that there’s a war brewing between the IT security people in many organizations and the youngest recruits, Gen Y’ers, in these organizations. More generally it’s a generational culture war. The baby boomer generation that currently runs most businesses were largely rebels in their own time, but they’ve come to believe in security, hierarchy, expertise, and what I’ve called a cult of leadership. By contrast, according to Gary Hamel, many in Gen Y, as the above slide suggests, value experimentation, peer-to-peer collaboration, learning from failure, and effort over results. It’s a collision course, but not much different from inter-generational differences we’ve seen before.

The key to keeping the peace, and security, is, not surprisingly, information-sharing and communication. If the CEO had any idea how quickly and powerfully some Gen Y’ers can design, develop, test and implement effective new tools that can make a major difference in innovation, connectivity and work effectiveness in their organizations, they would just get out of the way and let them happen. And if Gen Y’ers knew that some seemingly-innocuous information leaks can expose organizations to legal problems serious enough to cause stock prices to plummet and business leaders to end up in jail, they’d be a lot less casual about creating information sieves in the process of working around seemingly nonsensical security restrictions.

These generations literally speak different languages. Our job, as people who appreciate the value and perspective of both generations, and value diversity, is what Nancy White calls “building bridges” — translating Gen Y’s ideas and requests into language “the man” can understand (value creation and ROI), and translating the boss’ and IT’s restrictions into language that Gen Y’ers can understand (the risk of catastrophic financial loss, loss of business reputation, and insolvency). The best way to build these bridges is by telling stories — of history, of unexpected and astonishing success, and of unintended consequences.

Conclusion

This presentation has suggested an approach you can use to gently move your organization from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, without a lot of expenditure, other than in energy to actually talk to the users (not the suppliers) of information and connectivity tools in your enterprise. In the process, I think you’ll find some ways to reduce the cost of maintaining legacy sites and systems that no longer provide value, get yourself some recognition as a shrewd and focused innovator, and have a lot of fun helping the people in your organization to work a little bit smarter.

I welcome your questions, suggestions, ideas, and personal stories. Thank you.

I‘m in Denver for the weekend at the annual conference of BALLE, the international network of community-based sustainable businesses. The reason I’m here is more about looking for ideas than personal networking. One of the mandates I’ve taken on in my current work is to make our association (the Chartered Accountants of Canada, equivalent to CPAs in the US) champions of entrepreneurship and of new, sustainable enterprise formation.

The reason we’re championing entrepreneurs is that no one else will. It’s an interesting paradox that the North American economy is driven by entrepreneurs (virtually all new net employment in the last decade has been in the entrepreneurial sector), not by big corporations, but all the money and attention flows to the big corporations. Entrepreneurs don’t get bailouts, massive incentives to locate in your community, or big unpublicized government subsidies. Universities say they teach entrepreneurship but what they do is the minimum (‘intrapreneurship’) lip service to get big corporations to fund ‘chairs in entrepreneurship’ that let them hire and retain professors. Economic Development Offices of governments at various levels are designed to attract businesses (i.e. property and business tax revenues) so their work for entrepreneurs is mostly low-budget, low-value work like providing names of lawyers and accountants and telling you how to get business licenses, incorporate and file taxes.

Accountants and lawyers (especially the smaller ones) will take on entrepreneurs as clients, but generally are unenthusiastic and not terribly helpful for businesses at the critical start-up stage. Bankers (with the notable exception of credit unions) generally avoid entrepreneurial businesses, and lenders of last resort are usually vultures who create more problems for entrepreneurs than they solve. BALLE founder Michael Shuman has written about these challenges in his book The Small-Mart Revolution.

What’s worse, in some progressive circles, the very word ‘entrepreneur’ is suspect — it’s almost as if profit and enterprise are considered necessarily exploitative.

If you’ve read my book, you know that what entrepreneurs need, more (and sooner) than they need accountants, lawyers, marketers or financing is:

1. Help to determine what kind of work they’re meant to do (something in their ‘sweet spot’)
2. Help to understand how business fundamentally works (and how that’s changing very quickly)
3. Help to find the right partners (not expensive consultants and suppliers with no stake in the enterprise)
4. Help to learn to do excellent market research (to surface real unmet needs)
5. Help to learn to innovate (so they do something sufficiently different from what’s already being provided, and hence are commercially viable)
6. Help to establish strong business networks and relationships
7. Help to cope with unexpected problems, and to become more resilient 

Most of this assistance that prospective entrepreneurs need is educational, but it’s not the kind of learning that you can get sitting in a classroom or reading a text. You learn this through conversation and collaboration with other entrepreneurs, and you learn it by doing it, and making (inexpensive, early) mistakes.

As I’ve written before, I’ve spoken to many universities about a course curriculum that would entail students going out and visiting with successful entrepreneurs, engaging in Q&A with the entrepreneurs on how they addressed the seven issues above, and then putting together and launching their own enterprise. No lectures, no classrooms, no examination — the measure of the course’s success is whether the students’ enterprises succeed or not. The professors I know are enthusiastic, and I’ve had no trouble finding entrepreneurs who’d love to volunteer their time to talk about and show off their businesses. The problem is that the universities’ business model is about filling expensive class buildings with large numbers of students, and finding work for, retaining and paying tenured professors, and my proposal flies in the face of that, so when I talk with university Deans and department heads, they are uninterested.

Same problem with high schools. You all know my opinion on the school system — it’s anti-learning, bureaucratic, and propagandizing. Most of those incarcerated there are bored, disengaged, impatient and often angry. Even if we could get a good program into the high school curriculum (which is doubtful) it’s unlikely that the students would pay attention or trust that it would be of any use to them. My father is an honorary lifetime member of an organization called Junior Achievement, an organization whose objective is to introduce high schoolers to the fundamentals of business and entrepreneurship. It’s been around forever, and a lot of volunteers have spent years working to make it a success, but it’s still marginal — it’s just too counter to the high school culture.

There is no political party in North America that authentically shares the interests of entrepreneurs. There is no money, influence, public sentiment or political advantage to be gleaned from this cohort. Like the working poor, entrepreneurs are disenfranchised and have no seat at the tables of lobbyists and decision-makers.

So what are we to do? If governments and politicians don’t care (they don’t yet realize that their economies rise and fall with the success and failure of sustainable small enterprises, and that support for these enterprises has 30 times the return on investment of large corporation subsidies), big businesses are hostile, and schools and universities can’t help, who are the prospective sustainable entrepreneur’s allies? Who cares, or should care, about entrepreneurs?

The short answer is: people in communities. Sustainable community-based enterprises create and keep local jobs, keep the money in the community, provide goods and services customized to local needs, and cause less pollution and waste than the multinational corporate oligopolies. They also contribute more to the GDP (if you think that’s still a useful measure of anything).

The problem is that people in communities aren’t organized, aren’t wealthy, and aren’t informed. Most don’t appreciate that they could succeed (by every measure) in their own small sustainable enterprise far better than in their current wage slave job. Few know how important small enterprises are to the economy, or can imagine how uninnovative our society would be without the impetus of entrepreneurs. What can you do to address a need that hasn’t been recognized by those who need it?

To launch a true sustainable entrepreneurial movement, we need to figure out three things:

• How can we teach millions of people a survival skill (namely, how to make a living for yourself) that many groups don’t want them to learn (they want us kept helpless and in thrall to the job market), and that most don’t even realize they need?
• How do we then help these millions to self-organize into Natural Enterprises?
• How do we avoid successful entrepreneurs quickly cashing out their businesses as soon as they get a lucrative offer from a member of a multinational corporate oligopoly?

I don’t think books are enough to solve the first problem. Nor are social networking tools the answer to the second.

The truth about human nature is that we don’t change our minds or our behaviour until we believe we have no choice. When the economy really collapses, wiping out whole industries, currencies, and wealthy conglomerates, the choice for millions, as it was in the 1930s, will be between entrepreneurship and starvation. Only when this happens will people scramble to find ways to learn entrepreneurial skills, and to find business partners.

We are heading into a period of great economic uncertainty, turbulence and volatility. The job market for the next two decades is likely to go “wildly sideways”. By that time, the centenary of the last Great Depression, other crises like the End of Oil, the End of Water, global political upheaval and climate change will combine with the crisis of an overextended economy (unsustainable personal, corporate and government debt levels, exhausted natural resources, whipsawing interest, inflation and currency rates, and plunging consumer spending and confidence) to produce a prolonged economic inferno. The resultant massive unemployment will spur an entrepreneurial explosion out of desperate necessity. After some initial stumbles, we’ll see a change as profound as the Industrial Revolution. The community-based economy will be born, and it will be entrepreneurial by default.

That doesn’t mean my association’s championing of sustainable entrepreneurship now is futile. People may ‘get’ the ‘sustainable’ part (and make their businesses, of all sizes, greener, simply because it makes good business sense), without getting the ‘entrepreneurship’ part — and that would be much better than nothing. And enough people (especially boomers and new entrants to the job market) will make the effort to learn entrepreneurial skills because, for these substantial cohorts, wage slavery is already ceasing to be an option — the wage slave jobs are rapidly being offshored. When they realize that MBA schools don’t teach entrepreneurship (and change too slowly to start doing so), they’ll use online and real-world resources and relationships to teach each other the necessary skills, and self-organize. And my association will be poised to provide a platform and resources for them to do so.

One way or another, a sustainable, community-based entrepreneurship revolution is coming. Sooner or later, we’ll have no choice.

(P.S. lots of twittering going on at #BALLE)

I‘ve been asked to be a panel member at a conference on Thursday with the intriguing theme What’s Next? My role on the panel is to talk about What’s Next in Business. So I thought I might rehearse what I might say there, here, and get some comments from you, dear readers, before I make my presentation.

The interesting thing about forecasting What’s Next is that, usually, forecasters simply project that the future will be like today, only more so. There is little perception of possible upcoming discontinuities, and little imagination for what might follow such discontinuities. So if three years ago I had predicted that the Dow would be at 8000, the major American banks would all be substantially broke or nationalized, and that almost every major newspaper chain would be failing, my audience would have laughed me out of the place.

Today, however, despite the constant drumbeat of pundits proclaiming the end of the recession and the return to growth as normal, those who predict radical discontinuities might be afforded a little more attention and credence.

In that light, here’s what I’m thinking of listing as the ten most important current trends in business:

1. The dawn of an age of uncertainty, and a refocusing on business risk and sustainability: What we have witnessed recently — turbulent markets, vacillation between good news and bad news, and growing skepticism over the veracity of what we’re being told — is actually a historical normal state, but since the 1960s we have experienced such a protracted period of invariability that we have come to think of it as normal. It is not. We can look forward once again to astonishingly rapid and unpredicable cycles of boom and bust, collapse and reinvention of corporations and entire industries, the fall of empires, belief frameworks and conventional wisdom. Our whole approach to health care and education, on which so much of our tax money is spent, is poised for revolutionary change. Insurance may soon become so risky to insurance companies that the industry disappears. Mexico may well fail as a state, and become as dangerous and expensive to keep in check as Afghanistan — and a lot closer. We will probably witness environmental phenomena that are almost unimaginable — hurricanes, droughts, flooding, hail and ice storms on a massive scale. And when a real, high virulence, high transmissability flu pandemic hits (and it will, we just don’t know when), a simulation done by Homeland Security says it will cause business disruption on the order of the Great Depression. As a result of this there will be a growing realization that the primary purpose of business is sustainability. This is not to say that all businesses will become green. It means that there will be a huge new emphasis on risk management as Job One in most businesses, and an appreciation that short-termism, the propensity to obsess about short-term profits over longer-term viability, is extremely dangerous. It means that climate change will be discussed in board rooms not because the company wants to be seen as socially and environmentally responsible for PR reasons, but because executives and directors realize that if the planet is sick and depleted and constantly coping with catastrophes, every company is imperilled too. More than trying to mitigate their emissions and waste, companies will be struggling to figure out how to adapt themselves to what comes next — when they don’t know what comes next. Competent scenario planners and experts in simulation will be in popular demand.

2. Rethinking the religion of growth: In business guru Charles Handy’s book The Age of Paradox, Handy interviews the natural entrepreneur who owns a top-rated winery in California. He writes: “After one sun-drenched day in the wine country of California I asked the owner of the winery about the future. He was passionate about their winery, he said; they were putting back every cent they could into its growth. ‘Where can you grow?’ I asked, looking around at the valley where every inch of land was now fully planted with other people’s vines. ‘Oh, we don’t want to expand,’ he said, ‘we want to grow better, not bigger’.” Natural entrepreneurs understand that your business doesn’t have to grow to succeed, and a lot of companies whose future has depended on double-digit annual profit increases to placate their investors, are now looking at ways they can thrive by simply being better, and staying the same size, so that even when we move to a steady-state economy, these companies will stay prosperous.
3. The new business model: Your basic product/service is free: This is the world that marketing whiz Seth Godin describes in his books and blog, and was to some extent predicted by Clay Christensen and Mike Raynor in The Innovator’s Solution. And it’s beginning to force every company to re-examine its business model before some competitor comes in and prices its bread-and-butter product or service at zero dollars. The ‘freemium’ model (“Give your product or service away for free, acquire a lot of customers virally, then offer premium priced value added or enhanced products and services to your most loyal customer base.”) is no longer limited only to software firms. For the next few years, this business model innovation is likely to change what we buy, how we buy, and what we pay for virtually everything in the marketplace.
4. A ‘World of Ends’ for business: In their famous treatise explaining the Internet phenomenon, Doc Searls, Dave Weinberger et al said that what made the Internet so powerful and so resilient was that it had no control ‘centre’ and no hierarchy: All the value was added, by millions of people, at the ‘ends’. And if someone tried to disrupt it, these millions of users would simply work around the disruption. There is growing evidence that the same phenomenon is happening in businesses, which have long suffered from diseconomies of scale and bureaucracy that stifle innovation and responsiveness. Think of this as a kind of ‘outsourcing of everything’ (parodied in the cartoon above). Already companies like Levi Strauss make nothing at all — they simply add their label to stuff made by other companies, and distribute it (largely through independent companies they don’t own either). The Internet can allow this fragmentation to be carried to its logical limit — R&D, manufacturing, sales, logistics and service can all be done by different companies, cutting out the ‘management middleman’ entirely. And even beyond that lies what is called Peer Production, that even blurs the line between these ‘suppliers’ and the customer, such that the customer ‘invents’ what she wants and then works with various partners to produce it. I described this in an earlier article:
• Suppose I want a chair that has the attributes of an Aeron without the $1800 price tag, or one with some additional attribute (e.g. a laptop holder) the brand name doesn’t offer? I could go online to a Peer Production site and create an instant market, contributing the specifications, a bunch of technical links available online about just what makes this chair so special, and, perhaps a maximum price I would be willing to pay. People with some of the expertise needed to produce it could indicate their capabilities and self-organize into a consortium that would keep talking and refining until they could meet this price — and, if not, they might counter-offer something close. Other potential buyers could chime in, offering more or less than my suggested price. Based on the number of ‘orders’ at each price, the Peer Production group could then accept orders and start manufacturing. The possibilities are endless — somebody might want customization or some other attribute, to which the same or some other Peer Production group might respond. Another Peer Production group might self-form and come in with a lower price, perhaps creating a new or larger market. People might ‘subscribe’ to this market to watch bids and offers progress, or put in ‘silent’ bids if the offer fell to a certain point. Perhaps Herman Miller (maker of the Aeron) might enter the bidding itself, meeting my bid and offering the intangible value of their brand as well. Perhaps eBay would chime in with used Aeron chairs that meet my specifications at an even lower price (in fact eBay would be a natural host for these virtual instant markets), bringing their reputation systems into play.

  The intellectual capital associated with this instant market becomes part of the market archive, available for everyone to see, stripping this intellectual capital cost, and the executive salaries, dividends and corporate overhead out of the cost of this and other similar product requests and fulfillments, so that all that is left is the lowest possible cost of material, labour and delivery to fill the order. And the order is exactly what the customer wants, not the closest thing in the mass-producer’s warehouse. See a fashion design by a big-name designer on FTV that you really like, but which sells for $10,000? Get a generic for $200, with your own custom modifications, before the big-name designer can even get the originals into the stores.

5. A shift from ‘free trade’ to ‘fair trade’: Free trade is a euphemism for unregulated trade, and it’s been a colossal failure for everybody except multinational corporations and a few third-world workers. Its cost has been the collapse of the middle class in many affluent nations, horrific working conditions in many struggling nations, and massive environmental destruction everywhere. As WTO talks dissolve in disarray and we begin to see NAFTA for the social and environmental disaster it truly is, we will start to see trade regulated to ensure protection of working-class jobs and local environments. This will be a huge boon to local and green employment and businesses opportunities, that will far outweigh the additional cost of imported junk.
6. Growing oil scarcity: Our economy — from the fertilizer that produces our food to the energy that accounts for virtually all the ‘productivity’ improvements we have benefited from since the dawn of the industrial revolution — runs on oil. There is no way to reengineer our economy quickly, even at a cost of trillions of dollars, to wean ourselves off it before its availability begins to plummet. Once it becomes scarce we will have to decide between closing down factories and letting people freeze to death. Even if we were able to find enough new oil, even at the cost of creating more environmental holocausts like the Alberta Bitumen Sludge Mines (sorry, the “oil sands”), the cost of that oil will quickly soar to $200 and then $2000 per barrel by simple supply and demand. What’s worse, climate scientists tell us that even consuming half of the known oil and coal reserves of our planet will push atmospheric CO2 past the 350ppm tipping point and produce calamitous climate change by the end of the century. 
7. Growing water scarcity: Next to oil, our economy runs on a staggering level of consumption of fresh water. The Western half of North America, according to agronomists, is losing its fresh water supply so quickly because of glacier melt that they will face severe rationing within 10 years and absolute shortages — to the point where, as happens now in many struggling nations, the water supply will only be turned on for a hour per day, and each household and enterprise will be limited to a fraction of what we now use. You don’t want to know how much water the Alberta Bitumen Sludge Mines use, and turn into toxic ponds, already.
8. A three-stage entrepreneurial boom: Even before the recession, in the 1997-2007 period Canadian businesses with more than 500 employees created less than 20% of net new jobs, and in the US the situation was and is much worse. If you’re young, or a boomer looking for a ‘second career’, chances are you’ll either have to start your own business, or work for someone who recently has done so. Last month virtually all of the sudden surge in job growth was entrepreneurial. I’ve been watching the entrepreneurial market for years, and I’ll make a prediction: In twenty years, working for a large company will be rare. But there will be major hiccups in the transition to an entrepreneurial economy. The first burst of entrepreneurs will almost all fail for one reason: they will be sole proprietors who try to do everything in their business alone. They will find this so difficult that they’ll burn out, or run out of money, or scurry back to the job market as soon as they see a recovery. The second wave will be younger — educated new graduates who are too impatient or idealistic to claw their way up the increasingly steep corporate ladder. They will fail because they have to fail to learn. Many, unfortunately, will fail badly and find the experience so unnerving that they’ll lose the heart and confidence to try again. But the third wave will be educated and experienced at failing quickly and inexpensively, and they will blaze a trail for others to follow that will be transformative. It will become the norm for new graduates. It will reduce the big corporate oligopolies and the big professional associations to minor players in the economy.
9. The Gen Y phenomenon: There is something fundamentally different about those coming of age in the 21st century, as Don Tapscott has documented for the past decade. This generation is very sociable, connected, trusting, collaborative, and protective of each other. They’re comfortable using technologies the rest of us haven’t really got the hang of, and they’re fearless and masterful at finding workarounds when corporate policies or restrictions or firewalls or bureaucracy get in the way of them doing their job the way they know is best. They’re going to work, on average, in 12-14 jobs over their lifetimes, so they aren’t as easily cowed, dictated to, or influenced by bribes or threats as previous cohorts of workers. You won’t be able to tell them what to wear, when to do their work, when to do or not do ‘personal stuff’, what tools they must or cannot use, or where they must work. They know none of these rules make a difference to their performance, so get used to it. But also know this: Unless they’ve worked as entrepreneurs, they won’t have the faintest ideas what ‘business’ is really about. You’d better be prepared to tell them, show them, explain it in terms they can understand, because if you don’t, they won’t be able to help you do what’s important to your business, and its success.
10. A shift back to basics and real value: There’s nothing like a recession or three to make you refocus on what’s really important in your life. There are already signs that people are valuing their time more than they have for decades, and that may mean that workers will seek careers that allow them time to do what’s more important than their jobs. Fewer hours and less overtime means they’ll have less disposable income, and that means they’ll do more things themselves that they used to ‘outsource’ — less eating out, more do-it-yourself home and car repairs, purchase of clothes and other durables that are well-made and timeless, more self-made entertainment and recreation (good for your health and creativity!), less willingness to commute, less tolerance of low-quality goods and services, preference for locally-made and hand-crafted products, more saving and less spending in general. That means companies that are depending on a rebound of frenzied consumer spending after each recession will not fare well, and those that help customers to be self-sufficient, to connect with each other, and to learn, those which have a reputation for quality and attentiveness, and which get most of their business by word of mouth, will flourish.

Oh, and in the process, twelve tools that you are getting used to in your business will disappear. They include corporate websites, Intranets, e-mail, groupware, cell phones, classrooms, ‘best practices’, and most of the types of boring text-based documents you love so much.

More recently (Nov. 19, 2007), I reviewed Michael Raynor’s book The Strategy Paradox, which recommends using scenario planning to manage strategic uncertainty (keep doors open and be aware of and ready to commit to various alternatives as they emerge), to create strategic options (make small risk-conscious strategic investments, each of which will pay off big if that scenario plays out), and to get operating divisions to commit fully to certain short-term strategies (by giving them sufficient resources and indemnifying them from blame if the scenario their efforts are predicated upon does not play out). The idea is that competitive advantage will accrue not to the companies that assume the status quo will continue unchanged (because change is inevitable), but rather to those that take strategic risks across of a whole range of plausible future scenarios.

I’m working currently on a project with Michael to envision and think about a range of options for the 2010-2014 period, that businesses can use to anticipate and prepare for discontinuous risks and opportunities that they might otherwise not consider.

Last week my friend Dave Snowden chimed in with a post on scenario planning in complex environments. In an earlier article, he had proposed three important principles for managing organizations in these new environments:

• Distributed Cognition: using the capacity of diverse networks to contribute to decision making
• Granularity: small things (blogs, anecdotes, crews) are more adaptable and hence useful than large things (books, treatises, organizations)
• Disintermediation: eliminating layers that separate unfiltered information from decision-makers, to improve context and opportunity for important pattern-recognition

As Euan Semple has pointed out, these are aspects of organizations that can be effectively managed — using and encouraging networks, increasing the granularity of information and organizational structures, and disintermediation, are all things that management can actually do, that will improve work effectiveness and enhance decision-making.

In his latest article, Dave says that scenario planning is designed for complicated environments (where one can reasonably anticipate all possible future outcomes) not complex environments (where prediction is substantially impossible). He summarizes the basic scenario planning approach (his diagram is shown above): brainstorm future possibilities; cluster them into a framework; produce a full narrative for a few plausible scenarios at the ‘corners’ of the framework; monitor to detect whether these scenarios are coming true. And, of course, decide what you would/will do if each scenario does appear to be coming true. In my work with Michael, our framework is based on the predominant economic outcomes (positive or negative) and the degree of economic volatility, to create four ‘extreme’ but plausible future economic scenarios; our assumption is that the actual economic future will be somewhere within the bounds of these four scenarios.

Some of the dangers with scenario planning that Dave identifies:

• empirically, it has been shown to expand employee thinking about possible future events, but not to improve resultant decision-making
• the risk of premature convergence on one intriguing idea or well-articulated framework, with most of the brainstormers not thinking critically or creatively about other possibilities
• insufficient consideration of unlikely, discontinuous and unforeseen events (“black swans”) that, if they did occur, would have extraordinary consequences
• failure to look at events outside the business environment (e.g. external political events, resource constraints, changes in suppliers) that could nevertheless significantly affect the business
• lack of diversity in the brainstorming group (and commensurate tendency to groupthink)

Dave argues that instead of trying to anticipate (predict), organizations need to increase their level of “anticipatory awareness” (capacity to imagine, envision and assess how they might deal with, different futures, so that the organization is more resilient — not caught by surprise — and able to react quickly when occurrences that have at least been imagined occur).

To achieve this “anticipatory awareness” Dave suggests increasing the number of people canvassed for their ideas on future possibilities, and the number of future possibilities (“micro-scenarios”) considered, and then using techniques to assess (“signify”), index, and search for patterns in these micro-scenarios. You can see the use of his Distributed Cognition and Granularity principles in this approach. When “monitors” are put in place to early-detect symptoms of any of these micro-scenarios, managers will have a basis to continuously assess the likelihood of each of these micro-scenarios occurring, and the consequences if they were to occur, and make decisions on how to mitigate or adapt to the risks each micro-scenario presents accordingly. So, as Dave explains, even a maverick can proffer micro-scenarios that will capture management attention when the “monitors” suggest those micro-scenarios are becoming more likely — in most organizations, the mavericks with the boldest ideas and predictions tend to be filtered out by middle managers before senior executives hear of them.

After reading Dave’s article, Vera B, one of my readers, commented:

Vera’s comments resonate with my own: That because of our imaginative poverty, and our inability to really understand and follow nature’s model of self-management, we are unable to conceive of, let alone develop “anticipatory awareness” of, discontinuous future events. We can recognize patterns, we can do environmental scanning and constantly watch for ‘weak signals’ that forebode changes ahead, we can extrapolate and project, and we can even (though too rarely) recognize the recurrence of patterns from our past history. But we, and our man-made systems, don’t have the resilience, the sheer numbers of data-providers and of data to draw on, or the billions of years of experience at mitigation and adaptation that nature does, and we can’t hope to. Just look at most science fiction, which presumes that all sentient creatures everywhere in the universe, throughout all time, have and always will look, feel, communicate and act astonishingly like humans today, and will deal with problems depressingly like we do today.

As John Gray tells us in Straw Dogs, our species is preoccupied with the needs of the moment, and despite our fascination with stories about the future, it is just not in our nature to do nature’s job of managing complexity. I read about the inevitability of us using geophysical engineering to “solve” the climate change that our ignorance of complexity has caused, by seeding the upper atmosphere with millions of tons of heat-reflecting metal particles, and I shake my head and sigh. The apes have been left in charge of the laboratory for far too long.

One of the most important things I’ve learned in the last few years is that, except for senior management, no one in most organizations really understands what the business of the organizations is all about — how decisions are made, what information is used and how, etc. And, at the same time, senior management really has no clue about what goes on at the front lines of their organization, or outside their organization — what potential new recruits think, what customers really think about the organization, etc.

This should be obvious, if you think about it. Senior managers are insulated from the front lines and customers. No one wants to tell the boss what’s wrong with the organization — it’s a career-limiting move. And senior managers are too busy to spend much quality time with either employees or customers. To the extent they interact with customers it’s with the senior managers of those customers, who are likewise unenlightened about what is going on in their own organizations. So decisions are made, often, in a vacuum, based on deficient and filtered information.

As for the line employees, they usually have never been exposed to or taught about what goes on in other parts of the organization, or how managers make decisions. This is getting worse: The current generation of young employees are likely to work in 12 organizations in their careers — not enough time to really figure out “the business of the business” in any of them. The tragedy is that often neither they nor their senior managers think they need to know what the business is all about, unless and until they become senior managers themselves. So most employees spend their entire careers feeling under-appreciated, disconnected, unconsulted, and annoyed at stupid instructions and useless information requests from management. An they have a ton of very useful information about customers, operational ineffectiveness, and what’s going on in the world and the marketplace, that is never solicited, and never proffered.

I care about all this because I have spent about 1/3 of my career in an area called Knowledge Management. This discipline began about 15 years ago, and has largely followed the track of other business ‘fads’ like business process reengineering and total quality management — a flurry of investment and enthusiasm, followed by disenchantment and finally abandonment.

The problem with KM is that the people charged with introducing it into organizations were mostly front-line back-office people — middle managers with a background in library management, IT or training. Few of them really knew how decisions were made and resources allocated in their organizations. The library people saw KM as a content management exercise. The IT people saw KM as a set of technology projects (intranets, extranets, groupware). The training people saw KM as an e-learning vehicle. Senior managers were mostly unenthusiastic, worried that it would spawn more IT bureaucracy like e-mail, and not seeing any new value provided by it. Their hope, tragically, was that KM might automate some back office functions and allow cost savings (e.g. blowing up the corporate library).

We might be able to understand the reasons for KM’s failure if we looked through the eyes of senior managers, front-line employees, and customers, at the value of information to organizations. The diagram above shows how this looked in the days before ubiquitous computers — say, in 1975.

At that time, internal memos, typed up by secretaries, instructed front-line and back-office employees what to do, and required them to report production data that managers could use for making decisions. Written information flowed vertically, not horizontally. Managers talked with other managers, and employees talked with other employees, and occasionally with outside colleagues, to learn their jobs and share what they had learned. A few employees had started using the Internet and other electronic sources of information for research, but most research was done using the internal library or outside journals. Customers received printed marketing material from the organization, and submitted their orders. These were the principal information flows in organizations at that time.

This actually made a lot of sense, when you consider how senior managers saw, and operated, their organizations. The job of senior managers was and is to make the organization sustainable. Managers do this by making critical decisions, issuing instructions, capturing performance data, and tweaking those decisions accordingly. The variables they need to watch and make decisions about are:

1. Cash flow: The net result of sales, investments, loans and share issues, government incentives, operating expenses, R&D, dividends, and capital expenditures.
2. Share price: Investors’ assessment of future growth in cash flow, which is critical to obtaining low-cost capital.
3. Risks and opportunities: Threats from new and existing competitors, a variety of threats to reputation and business continuity, regulatory changes, rate changes, supply changes, frauds, disasters, and opportunities to innovate, make acquisitions, outsource, reorganize or change capital structure

To manage cash flow, they pressure employees to find ways to increase sales and reduce costs. Budgets, resource allocations, and monthly targets and reporting are their levers for doing so. To manage share price, they need to ensure that cash flow is always steadily rising. When cash flow from operations fails to meet targets, they look at layoffs, outsourcing, capital budget reductions, increasing government incentives through lobbying, cutting dividends or reorganizing (e.g. divesting unprofitable operations).

To manage risks, they will acquire, sue or out-advertise competitors, hire PR firms to whitewash and greenwash their social and environmental misdeeds, put controls in place to reduce risk of fraud, buy insurance and hedges to reduce exposure to rate changes and disasters, lobby against new regulations, lock in or acquire suppliers, outsource non-critical operations.

To manage opportunity, a few will invest in innovation, but for most larger organizations, it is much safer to acquire small innovative companies, to use leverage (borrow from the bank) when interest rates are lower than profit margins, and through planned obsolescence by constantly forcing customers to replace or upgrade, and locking them in to the organization’s product.

This is what senior managers do. It is not surprising, therefore, that they tend to see IT, KM and training as “non-value-added” activities. They were getting the information they needed before the advent of computers, so why should they invest in new IT and KM projects? And since they expect and receive little loyalty from employees, why should they invest in training them, when the essential knowledge they need must be obtained “on-the-job” anyway?

In the 1980s and 1990s, most organizations invested in three new technologies, mostly reluctantly: fax, e-mail, and intranets. Fax was a faster and cheaper way to send marketing materials to customers and to receive orders, and send instructions to and collect performance data from remote operations, and it was not an expensive technology to introduce. Its heyday was a mere decade.

E-mail and corporate intranets were introduced in most organizations in the 1990s. Senior managers expressed concerns that e-mail would be a scourge, and many attempted to limit its use. They were right about it being a scourge, but not successful in limiting its use. It was a stealth success — permitted because it was not that expensive, but quickly used for mostly inappropriate purposes. Corporate intranets were used at first to automate the two dominant types of shared organizational information: policies and procedures, and directories. Eliminating hard-copy manuals and directories was a welcome change, but intranets quickly became massive repositories for millions of context-free archived documents that were of almost no use to anyone but the author. The consequence has been an explosion in complex server technologies, taxonomies and search technologies — for information that almost no one finds to be of any value. Documents touted as ‘reusable best practices’ were dumped into the corporate intranet and abandoned. Some organizations ended up hiring intranet ‘garbage collectors’ to remove the most useless and obsolete content.

To try to connect to customers, many organizations in the 1990s and 2000s have invested in ‘extranets’ (websites that only customers had access to) and sophisticated, interactive public websites. They found to their chagrin that decision-makers in most organizations were too busy to visit their websites, and that most of the people browsing the web pages they had so carefully crafted were job-seekers, students doing papers, the competitors, and the media.

So here we are in 2009, and the principal information flows in most organizations are still exactly what they were in 1975, as depicted in the chart above. What’s changed:

• Instead of typed memos, instructions are now sent to employees by e-mail; performance data is sent back up to management by e-mail, or captured electronically automatically.
• Peer-to-peer conversations are still mostly real time and face-to-face or voice-to-voice (or IM); asynchronous conversations in e-mail threads are arguably the least effective. E-mail has allowed more conversation with colleagues outside the organization, and with young workers much learning occurs through such conversations, though IT security in most large organizations prohibits many of the social media used by young workers to communicate outside the organization, nullifying much of this advantage and creating considerable animosity.
• The library has been largely supplanted by the Intranet, but it is now much harder to find things and there are fewer information professionals able to help you find stuff, so searching takes longer and is less effective. The Intranet in most organizations is still used principally for the same two purposes: looking up policies and procedures, and directories. Most other Intranet content is unused or in some cases misused.
• E-mail has allowed a massive increase in the amount of work delegation between employees in most organizations. It is easier to delegate work when you don’t have to face the person you’re asking to do it, even though the chance of it being done well is less. E-mail also allows much more procrastination in organizations — people send requests for information to others Friday afternoon, as an excuse to put off working on a project until the next week. There is considerable evidence that e-mail has had a significant negative effect on productivity and work effectiveness, because there is no accountability to the sender for time of the recipients that has been wasted, and because it costs nothing to send an e-mail to an unlimited number of recipients.
• After a period of disintermediation (people doing their own on-line research instead of having librarians, assistants or information professionals do it for them) there has been a swing back to reintermediated research, as most employees learned they lack the significant competencies needed to do quality research. Young workers tend to still do their own on-line research, but only until they find an appropriate intermediary and reach the level at which they are permitted to delegate research.
• Most marketing material is now sent by e-mail and also duplicated on the organization’s public Internet site, but in these electronic forms it is mostly unread.

In other words, in adding to the volume and complexity of information systems, we have added relatively little value, and in some cases actually reduced value. The reason for this is simple:

1. We have not done anything to substantively improve the ability of senior management to manage the business (i.e. to manage cash flow, share price, risks or opportunities). 
2. We have not done anything to substantively improve the effectiveness of any of the information flows (arrows in the above diagram) that matter in organizations, or the quality of the information.

We have, in short, implemented a solution that addressed no problem. We introduced new KM tools because we could.

If that were the end of the story, we could just shrug off KM as another business fad and move on. But there is something happening in organizations today that is beginning to improve the quality of information and the effectiveness of information flows that matter, something that creates a second opportunity for KM people to actually do something useful.

What is happening is that people are beginning to manage their own information, and information processes. They are finding workarounds to the dysfunctional processes in the organizations they work in. They are finding ways to draw on people in their growing online networks to do their jobs better. They are realizing that, if tomorrow’s workers will end up working in a dozen different jobs in their lifetimes, they need to take responsibility for their own learning and their own knowledge, and take it with them from one job to the next. Increasingly, they are keeping their knowledge in their own personal repositories, and in their own personal networks.

I have written before about what I call Personal Knowledge Management, which is an attempt to enable workers to do this more effectively. My problem was that PKM is impossible to sell to senior management, because it has no value for them. I toyed with the idea of trying to sell it front-line workers directly, perhaps by starting a magazine called Working Smarter. The problem with this is that everyone is at a different stage in their evolution towards PKM, and there are no standard answers or approaches — we each have to muddle this through for ourselves, based on our own ‘knowledge set’ and information behaviours.

But perhaps if we outlined a future scenario of where this PKM trend is headed, we might be able to evolve an approach that would accommodate the needs of both individual workers and the organizations struggling to cope with this phenomenon.

To this end, let me start with a story of a young business analyst named Jon:

This is a composite of a number of real cases of young people working around dysfunctional information systems I have witnessed in the last two years. I expect it’s going to become more and more common.

Let’s suppose that, in twenty years, Jon’s information behaviour becomes the norm. Eventually organizations will have to face the problem, and end the guerilla war that is brewing between the IT security people and Gen Y in a growing number of companies and institutions. I think it is unlikely that most will be able to resolve the perceived security threats in such a way that they could allow the Jons of the world to do what they want inside the firewall. What is more likely is that, just like the calculator and telephone, the laptop (soon to become even smaller and more powerful) will evolve to be a ubiquitous personal device that people will carry with them everywhere. At that point having redundant computers (and phones) on everyone’s desk will become absurd, and IT security can start to focus on protecting confidential data from being accessed, rather than trying to lock down employees’ appliances. At that point, the role of the rest of IT, and KM, will have to change completely. Here’s a scenario of how I think it might look:

Major information flows in organizations, c. 2025?

In 2025, every individual in every organization uses their own personal computer for both personal and work applications. Almost all information is Web-based, with organizations’ proprietary information only accessible through authorization software. E-mail has disappeared, replaced by a virtual presence application that includes instant messaging, screensharing, voice/videoconferencing, filesharing, calendaring, tasklists. Employees maintain a Company Sector on their machines in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 by other employees. Most people also maintain a Public Sector on their machines in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 or subscribed to by anyone in the world (this has replaced blogs and applications like Facebook), and Community Sectors in which they put information that can be accessed 24/7 by other members of that Community. The aggregation of the Company Sectors of all employees of an organization replaces the corporate Intranet of past generations; it can be viewed by anyone in that organization. The aggregation of the Community Sectors of all members of a particular community replaces the community tools (forums, wikis etc.) of past generations; it can be viewed by anyone in that community.

The IT department is still responsible for maintaining security around the organization’s proprietary information, but very little content is left in this category. IT also checks that the information in employees’ machines’ Company Sectors is appropriate for sharing, and auto-replicating properly.

The KM department still manages the purchase of external information, though almost all information in 2025 is free; information producers have realized that their business model is to apply that information to specific customers’ business environment, in consulting assignments, rather than trying to sell publications. Most of the mainstream media were nationalized after they went bankrupt using their traditional business models, and now operate as public services.

Most of what the KM department does now is trying to facilitate more effective conversations among people within the organization and with people outside the organization, including customers. They facilitate many meetings that use the virtual presence application, especially those that involve more than five people. That facilitation includes organizing the meeting, distributing advance materials, facilitating the discussion (conflict resolution, staying on schedule etc.), and even recording, editing and publishing the meeting as appropriate. They run courses in effective conversation, meeting and presentation skills.

In addition, the KM department conducts environmental scans and conducts research in areas the organization wants to focus on, and publishes and runs short video presentations on the results. They also browse the content of the aggregate of the Company Sectors of all employees of the organization, notifying managers and employees of content that may be worthy of follow-up, and they assist employees to manage their subscriptions to people’s Public Sector content. And, when the organization holds sessions and conferences on strategy, risk, innovation or customer relationships, the KM department is on hand to do advance and just-in-time research.

.     .     .     .     .

If you’re in KM, or in a business that has a KM function, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this. I’ve been known to be a bit ahead of my time in thinking about the future of business and technology, but I think this scenario is quite feasible. The organizers of this fall’s KM World conference are looking for some thought leadership in this area, and I plan to use this article to provoke some ideas from those who have been working in this area as long as I have. So tell me what you think.