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  Jeroen Sangers 9:00 am on May 16, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, collaboration networks ( 7 ), communication ( 32 ), communication 2.0 ( 60 ), internal communication ( 23 ), multidisciplinary collaboration ( 5 ), productivity ( 22 ), team management ( 29 ), teamwork ( 23 )   

  Working out loud 

  Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

  I’m a freelancer working from home. A large part of my day, I don’t have anyone near, but I don’t work alone. On a daily basis, I’m in contact with my clients, my providers, and my partners with whom I collaborate on various projects.

  However, at times I miss the office’s coffee machine, where I could comment the latest news and laugh with my co-workers. These co-workers were also a major source of feedback related to my work.

  But there are also things that I don’t miss, like weekly meetings to discuss the status of projects.

  Now I only have my partner to have coffee with and comment the news. The rest of my communication has gone digital.

  Collaboration 2.0

  Nowadays, there are many tools to collaborate without needing to be in the same location, from email and Twitter—I still remember the interface at the beginning that went: “What are you doing?”—to complete platforms like Zyncro.

  When partners and co-workers aren’t in the same location, internal communication becomes even more important to generate results.

  Whenever I collaborate in projects remotely, I apply two habits that Bryce Williams identified in his post When will we Work Out Loud? Soon!

  Working out loud = Observable work + Narrating your work

  Observable Work

  This concept simply implies that the intermediate result of my work can be accessed by my co-workers. Instead of saving the document I’m writing in the folder My Documents on my computer, I use online platforms where my partners can see and comment on the progress and even edit the document.

  Based on this feedback, I can correct the focus of my work as soon as possible, and get better results in a shorter time.

  Modern collaboration platforms display in real time what each member of the team is working on. Each time I edit a document, my colleagues can see a notification in the system, even a summary with the changes made. What’s more, all the material is centralized and indexed in order to find the required information quickly.

  Narrate Your Work

  Similarly, I keep a public diary (blog or micro-blog) where I explain openly what I’m doing, what problems I encounter, what solutions I have found, and how I feel. I also share relevant articles I have found and obviously there is space for a joke once in a while.

  Finally, when working on a big project, I try to communicate each day at least these points:

  1. What I have done today
  2. What I have been unable to do
  3. What are the risks I have identified that will affect the project planning
  4. What my plans are for tomorrow

  During the day I keep a document open where I gradually answer these points. At the end of the day, I just have to publish it.

  If everyone in the team narrated their work openly, we wouldn’t need any meetings to assess project status and we would gain a lot of time.

  People who are already familiar with collaboration tools perfectly understand the benefits of working out loud. Others simply need to try it for a while to learn that they can collaborate efficiently remotely.

  Jeroen Sangers (@JeroenSangers) is personal productivity consultant and author of the blog El Canasto. He specializes in modern techniques to manage time, actions and attention, and provides training, consulting, and keynotes on a more intelligent way to work and live.

  If you want to enjoy the benefits that collaborating has for your productivity too, why not try Zyncro free?

  
  
   

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  Jose Miguel Bolívar 9:00 am on May 14, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, collaboration networks ( 7 ), culture 2.0 ( 10 ), knowledge ( 8 ), knowledge management ( 6 ), organizational change ( 7 )   

  Knowledge Networks: Life After the Organizational Chart 

  Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

  Editor’s note: The new ways of the enterprise 2.0 transform companies and mean a change that affects even hierarchies and organizational charts. Today we’d like to share with you this post that José Miguel Bolívar posted a few days ago on his blog which we think is highly interesting. Thank you, José Miguel, for letting us share it.

  In a recent post, Ximo Salas asked himself where is my organizational chart? and, among other things, he stated that “organizational charts haven’t died” and suggested the need to invent an organizational chart 2.0. Unfortunately, it’s true that organizational charts aren’t dead… Yet.

  However, without knowing exactly what Ximo understands as being “organizational chart 2.0” and what type of organizations need one, I think the concept “organizational chart”, or at least in its traditional sense, has no place in the type of organizations we talk about and that we undoubtedly will become, no matter how slow we are in becoming one or how far away they seem at present.

  On the other hand, the death, present or future, of the organizational chart is not a new topic. Much has been written, and well done at that. Like for example this post by Manel Muntada and this other one from Pedro Muro.

  However, apart from the above, the big question for me continues to be: are organizational charts necessary or not in post-industrial organizations or, as I prefer to call them, in knowledge organizations?

  The model used by organizations in the Industrial Era as the backbone is the hierarchy, in other words, a structure that arranges its elements according to criteria of superiority or subordination between people.

  This structure starts from a model, bureaucratic administration, that assumes the division of work as its principle of efficiency, expressed as the division of roles and responsibilities and that hence, seeks as its primordial objective to optimize the transmission and execution of orders or instructions.

  If we think about the traditional assembly line, the model makes sense. There are people whose responsibility is to think, assess the alternatives, find solutions, assess the risks and propose options. Other people are responsible for making decisions and taking risks. Others are responsible for transmitting those decisions quickly and effectively and supervising that they are carried out to the letter. And others, finally, are responsible for carrying out those instructions.

  What’s more, to make it easier, the information travels in a single direction, without return.

  But what happens when, apart from “doing”, all people in the organization must also “think” and “decide”? What happens when we want the information to travel in multiple directions and in real time?

  In these circumstances, the organizational chart is not only no longer useful, but it becomes one of the main obstacles for organizational performance.

  Anyone who knows how a knowledge organization works “from the inside” knows that nowadays the organizational chart has become a decorative and costly element; an organizational relic serving the ego of a few; a bastion of the paradigm of control that perpetuates mediocrity and hinders innovation.

  Today, having a specific position on an organizational chart does not indicate how much you know nor how valuable you are as a professional. It only indicates how much you can manage to bother the rest of the organization if you set your mind to it.

  Organizational charts today are Snow White’s looking glass of a management class in the process of extinction. The carrot of “some day this will all be yours” for too ambitious newbies. And little more.

  The future is going elsewhere. In a world with an overabundance of information, of knowledge in transit, organizations will become progressively more complex while, paradoxically, more flexible and dynamic.

  After some years “leveling out” the organizational charts, it turns out that the organizational future is multi-dimensional. Knowledge networks that cross over and superimpose each other, in constant mutation over time.

  Knowledge networks that are generated from a shared interest, like for example learning (sharing and generating knowledge) or a project (applied knowledge). What’s more, a single person can play not only one but many roles and these roles can be the same or change according to the network. Different roles in different networks… The antithesis of the organizational chart. And of course, all in constant change.

  I’m talking about a future focused on people and not on structures, unlike current organizations, in which people are dependent on the structures (and the processes and technology).

  A not-too-distant future in which the most important thing is not how much power you have, rather what you know (you personally and also through your networks), and above all, what you know how to do with all that knowledge and how you are demonstrating it.

  In that future, and the need for tools that help tonavigate knowledge networks fluidly becomes evident.

  Be it a profile directory, a social search engine, or any other technology solution, we need tools that tell us in real time what people know about a specific subject, in which networks they are operating, on what projects they are working, and how to contact themto in turn weave new networks.

  An image that produces vertigo in anyone allergic to change, in organizational zombies, in those addicted to the predictable. But that’s life. Diverse, complex, unpredictable, and constantly evolving.

  Fortunately, there is much life after the organizational chart. What’s more, I’d say that the future is ahead of us…

  Jose Miguel Bolivar (@jmbolivar) is Artisan Consultant, ICF coach, lecturer, researcher, speaker and author of the blog Óptima Infinito, in which he has been writing about Innovation in Productivity and GTD methodology since 2008. With a degree in Social Psychology and Political Analysis from the UCM, a master’s in HR from the Centro de Estudios Garrigues, José Miguel has extensive experience as an executive in highly competitive environments such as HP or Life Technologies. Currently, as Artisan Consultant and Coach, he works to increase competitiveness in organizations, improving individual and collective productivity of its employees.

  
  
   
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  Joan Alvares 9:00 am on May 10, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, collaboration networks ( 7 ), collaborative environments ( 8 ), collaborative work ( 14 ), multidisciplinary collaboration ( 5 ), project management ( 12 ), team management ( 29 )   

  Liquid teams for liquid times 

  Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

  There’s one question that is usually repeated when you get up to present your company: How many of you are there? At times I say there are three of us, others that there are thirty odd, according to the need to be impressed I see in my interlocutor. And in both cases, I’m telling the truth, because at Poko we work with a basic core of project managers and a liquid team that adapts according to each project.

  I’m one of those who thinks that to do something that makes sense, a team needs to be adapted to the project, not the opposite. Because when a company refuses to leave its comfort zone, when it doesn’t feel the need to involve external talent and explore beyond its own knowledge, normally it’s because it is doing something that already exists, more or less prescindible, that expires, easily Chinesed.

  Today the best restaurants in the world are just that because they had brought cusine closer to fields as diverse as art, science or industrial design; to do that they needed to involve the best professionals in these fields. A talent that a fixed structure surely could not have paid, and that would not make sense having permanently in a kitchen. Tomorrow’s project will be different to today’s, and it will force us to find collaboration with different professionals

  In a constantly changing world, the Internet enables us to build big companies without the need to be big structures. The idea is to create talent ecosystems, capable of detecting challenges in a project and capturing the best specialist to respond. The Internet invites us to discovery, disintermediation, cooperation among professionals with different talents that work in different parts of the world. It’s up to us to accept that invitation.

  In your organization, do you also use collaboration networks for different projects? When you collaborate with disperse team, you need great communication to ensure everything works like clockwork. How about using an Enterprise Social Network for this? Try Zyncro!

  Joan Alvares is founding partner of Poko and lecturer at the Istituto Europeo di Design

   
   
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  Ana Asuero 9:00 am on March 26, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, collaborative environments ( 8 ), collaborative intranet ( 2 ), collaborative management ( 25 ), collaborative work ( 14 ), team management ( 29 )   

  The 12 habits of collaborative organizations 

  Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

  Yesterday I read that Virginio Gallardo said on Facebook that “the Enterprise Social Network awakens sleeping talent in organizations”. Enterprise Social Networks open a direct and permanent communication channel and facilitate collaboration among your employees, making it easy to share knowledge, tips, doubts and ideas, and waking up personnel in your company.

  Eva Collado Durán replied to Virginio’s thread, pointing out that “they also awaken authentic opinion leaders who are far from higher hierarchical positions .” It’s true. Horizontal communication provided by Enterprise Social Networks places all employees in the same situation and gives them the same opportunities to share their valuable knowledge with colleagues.

  If you don’t share what you know for fear of losing your position, you’ll end up completely isolated. In a scenario where almost everyone is convinced that you work better and achieve goals faster and more easily by working in a team and sharing knowledge, whoever continues to jealously guard their knowledge will end up lagging behind.

  Companies that understand this new situation have become social companies, have implemented collaborative habits in their daily operation. But what are those habits? We’ll give you some of them here according to an interesting article posted by Jacob Morgan (@jacobm).

  1. Individual benefit is just as important as the overall corporate benefit (if not more important)

  Don’t focus on the overall corporate benefits when communicating collaboration with your employees. They also care about how collaboration will impact them on an individual basis. How will it make their jobs and lives easier?

  2. Strategy before technology

  Before rushing off to implement that new collaboration platform, focus on developing a strategy which will help you to understand the “why” before the “how” . Having a strategy is crucial for the success of any collaboration initiative. You don’t want to be in a position without understanding “why”.

  3. Listen to your employees

  We talk a lot about the importance of listening to customers but what about listening to your employees? If you are going to talk about collaboration, it is important you involve your employees from the outset. Listen to their ideas, needs, suggestions and incorporate their feedback in your strategy.

  4. Learn to get out of the way

  Learn to support and empower your employees and get out of their way. If you try to supervise everything, you’ll stifle collaboration in your organization. Give some guidelines and best practices, but let your employees do what they need to do.

  5. Lead by example

  If the leaders in your organization don’t use collaborative tools, why should employees? Leaders are a very powerful instrument for facilitating change and encouraging desired behaviors.

  6. Integrate collaboration in the work flow

  Collaboration should never be perceived as a task or an additional requirement for employees. Instead, it should be integrated naturally into their workflow.

  7. Reward teamwork

  If your organization focuses on rewarding employees for individual contributions as the driver of success, it will be quite hard to encourage employees to share and communicate with each other. There is nothing wrong with rewarding your employees for personal results, but it is equally important to recognize and reward collaboration and teamwork .

  8. Measure what matters

  There are a lot of things that an organization can measure, but that doesn’t mean that everything should be measured. Focus on the metrics that matter in your organization and analyze how you do there. Some focus on metrics like comments sent or groups created; others prefer to focus on the commitment and passion of their employees with the company and the task they perform.

  9. Persistence

  Converting your organization into a collaborative environment will take time and effort, but it is important to be convinced that that is the right direction and to go for it. No giving up, no going back.

  10. Adapt and evolve

  The need for collaboration in organizations is here to stay. This means that your organization must be able to adapt and evolve as tools and strategies demand. Being aware of what is happening in your industry and in your organization. This will also enable you to innovate and anticipate changes successfully.

  11. Employee collaboration also benefits the customer

  Your employees’ collaboration has a tremendous value for your customers. Your employees will be able to give the best support experience if they have the information, resources and experience of internal experts . A employee may not always have the reply the customer needs, but they will have access to the knowledge of the entire organization to resolve the problem .

  12. Collaboration can make the world a better place

  Perhaps the most important principle of collaboration is that it can make the world a better place. Sure, collaboration can make your employees more productive and also benefit your customers. It makes your employees to feel more connected with their co-workers, reduces stress, makes their job easier, gives them more freedom, and in general, makes them happier people, not just at work but at home too.

  And in your organization, what collaboration strategies have you put into action? What are your habits for becoming collaborative organizations? Tells us about it!

   

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  Billie Lou Sastre 11:09 am on March 25, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, customers ( 4 ), enterprise social network ( 68 ), interview ( 15 )   

  ‘We want to implement Zyncro for our more than 4,500 partners (employees) at Starbucks’ 

  Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

  Today we have the pleasure of presenting our interview section where we speak with companies that have already implemented an Enterprise Social Network successfully. Here we have our interview with Diana González, Organizational Development Manager at Starbucks Mexico. Diana is responsible for personnel development processes, working environment, and the Starbucks enterprise social network communication project called “PARTNET”.

  How did the need to implement an enterprise social network arise?

  It emerged from the need to have an interactive communication medium that could reach across the entire organization uniformly, migrating unidirectional communication media to bidirectional media for more than 4,500 partners (employees).

  How did use of Zyncro start at Starbucks? What projection do you see for it in the organization?

  We started with a pilot group of directors and middle managers totaling approximately 50 people, communicating formal and informal information about their daily activities between them. Today we have almost 600 users: directors, executives and middle managers. Our aim for 2013 is to reach more than 4,500 partners (employees) in the organization within 6 months.

  

  Of all the functionalities in Zyncro, which one would you highlight?

  The versatility to generate formal and information communication: “Corporate news”, “personal news”, “groups”

  What benefits did Zyncro bring Starbucks? In what way are you encouraging the use of the Enterprise Social Network?

  We are encouraging employees by:

  • Providing a calendar of cultural activities where they can share their experiences and facts about their work spaces.
  • Creating groups with formal information – Organizational communications.
  • Creating groups with informal information – Bidirectional communications to share experiences and best practices.

  What has Zyncro meant for managing internal communication at Starbucks?

  It has resulted in a change in the communication method in the company. Now we have a bidirectional communication channel, currently targeting middle management in the operation.

  “The goal of implementing an Enterprise Social Network at Starbucks is to establish a dynamic bidirectional communication channel that reaches the entire organization, including operational positions.”

  And what about you? Have you tried Zyncro? Did you know you can start to use it free and work collaboratively in your company?

  Try it free here!

   

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  Rafael Garcia-Parrado 9:00 am on March 1, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, collaborative management ( 25 ), collaborative work ( 14 ), cooperation, HR 2.0 ( 3 ), human resources ( 26 )   

  The need for cooperation in new companies 

  Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

  The continuous changes which organizations undergo due to technology advances have become a key trend that generates uncertainties regarding the function of HR in organizations. The function of HR is at a crucial situation as the backbone of the organization and a promoter of change. Market requirements, the wave of constant change, short-lived trends… are some of the reasons for new organizational structures that allow organizational adaptability in the new way of understanding relations in companies.

  The vision of HR as a static or hermetic department must become a thing of the past, transforming it into the first line of internal contact in companies, guiding employees towards opportunity, and supporting intra-entrepreneur figures to ensure the success of the change.

  Cooperation must be a shared pattern throughout the company and therefore requires employees’ involvement to favor a collective constructivism that improves efficiency. And to favor that cooperation, we need to facilitate decision-making and do away with hierarchical structures, because imposed hierarchy can prevent the conversion of ideas emerging from the heart of the organization. By removing this hierarchy, companies will be able to escape from the standardization and the bureaucratization of processes.

  But who said that drawing together all that knowledge was easy? Leading the change, being the organizational glue, requires HR having a method to ensure success. Let’s look at some aspects that need to be taken into account:

  • Organizational transparency, a suitable communication must be the shared pattern throughout the organization.

  • The use of tools 2.0 will enable reinvention in the new scenario, guaranteeing a sensitivity towards new trends and advances to bring organizations closer to the external customer.

  • Learning as a goal of the organization for constant improvement of the production processes, enabling a moldability that guarantees survival over time.

  • Transmission of the business strategy to the entire organization, which helps focus all activities towards achieving the main act of faith or raison d’etre of the organization.

  In short, companies become liquid to adapt to the new changing scenario that prevails in the market and to its requirements, and new organizational structures emerge. But despite the wave of constant change that invades business today, we need to remember that adapting the organization to change is not immediate, rather for large companies, a major investment of resources and time is required. But thanks to those necessary changes, collaboration will become a key base for companies and will enable them to assume the challenge of the new organizational capillarity required for success in the new scenario.

  Rafael García works as a consultant at the company Índize and writes his own blog, which at Zyncro we highly recommend: La Factoría Humana.

   
   
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  Ignasi Alcalde 9:00 am on February 20, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, collaborative intelligence, collaborative management ( 25 ), enterprise 2.0 ( 90 ), enterprise social networks ( 95 )   

  Collaborative intelligence: Beyond collective intelligence 

  Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

  Editor’s note: Ignasi Alcalde has given us permission to use this article from his blog in which he reflects on the path towards collaborative intelligence. We wanted to post it as we share his interest in technologies 2.0 as tools for working the collaborative and horizontal side of communication. At Zyncro we believe that enterprise social networks encourage creativity and shared learning and we see them as the best opportunity for collaboration and exchange. What do you think?

  A few days ago I read in La Contra an interview with Jeremy Riffkin in which he made some curious comments about electricity. He said “what is revolutionary is its combination with the internet: the network brain. Authority will no longer be vertical, but distributive. The true revolution will spark when energy is transmitted by network and collective intelligence regulates its use.” When I read it, I instantly though of a quote by José Ortega y Gasset: “a civilization only endures if many contribute in the effort. If everyone prefers to enjoy the fruit, civilization collapses.”

  According Wikipedia, collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals or living beings of the same species, which is a term generalized by cyberculture or the knowledge society. In fact, he sees it as consensus decision-making, as it has been done effectively in the past by bacteria, small animals and insects like bees or ants… and it is framed academically within the field of Sociology, IT science and behavior of the multitudes, a field that studies the collective behavior at quark level to bacteria, plants, animals and human society.

  Extrapolated to people, Tom Atlee describes that collective intelligence can be encouraged “to overcome ‘groupthink’ and individual cognitive bias to allow a collective to cooperate on one process while reaching a higher intellectual performance” and George Pór defined the phenomenon of collective intelligence as “the capacity of communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, through such innovation mechanisms as differentiation and integration, competition and collaboration.”

  For me, a difference should be made between collaborative intelligence and collective intelligence, which represents a specific case. In collective intelligence, a final product emerges from actions of a group of persons who do not interact among themselves. Collaborative intelligence looks after problems where individual experience and different interpretations of several experts are critical for solving problems.

  A clear example of this application are practice communities, where professional groups and interested collectives exchange knowledge to develop a specialized knowledge, sharing learning based on shared reflection on practical experiences. Both types of intelligence are intimately related with the so-called Web 2.0 and more specifically, with some applications such as Management 2.0, E-Learning 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

  On the other hand, in both types of intelligence, there is a series of nuances clearly expressed through the concept “Power Law of Participation” from Ross Mayfield. Mayfield lists a series of activities through which the transition from collective intelligence to collaborative intelligence is made, characterized by greater involvement. These activities include: read, tag content, comment, subscribe, share, network, write, refactor, collaborate, and lead. Wikipedia represents the most paradigmatic example that illustrates collaborative intelligence.

  Collaborative intelligence also can be classified according to the degree and type of collaboration that individuals give to the end product. There are many modes of collaboration. For example, the “fusion mode” where each individual contributes something to the end product where that contribution is fusioned (as is the case of collective writing of articles in a Wiki system). Also there is the “molecular mode”, used in a book written by several authors where each contribution is maintained in its relative entirety within the bigger entity; the “collection mode” where each contribution is made to a greater whole that may be open (as is the case with YouTube, Flickr or blog systems like Blogger or WordPress); or a “agregator mode” , the most simple case being comments on a post in a blog, or on articles on news sites.

  As Ramón Sangüesa and Irene Lapuente from Co-Creating Cultures point out, technologies 2.0 enable you to work the most collaborative side or horizontality of communication as experts and non-experts can coexist on the Internet. They also say “the Internet has provided an opportunity for mass collaborative exchange, but it is also true that over time, we are witnessing an inflation in purely commercial applications in the social media. What we are interested in is the initial value of a part of this collaborative technology and what we do is hybrid this collaborative work impulse, with participative design methods, to create a learning opportunity. This new reality can be brought to other levels and start knowledge exchange projects and the capacity for reflection and empowerment, giving many people a voice, and enhancing the capacity for creativity and learning”.
  

  To do this, Design Thinking is a concept that is becoming more widespread in the business world, and more specially, in the areas of competitivity. It is linked with the way in which professional designers think, approach problems and reach solutions. It is an attitude towards problems and the challenges that the limits impose in problem solving.

  Ignasi Alcalde (@ignasialcalde) is a Graduate in Multimedia from the UOC and holds a Master’s degree in the Information and Knowledge Society. He is consultant in IA and teaching consultant at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He shares his thoughts on collaborative work on his blog and his twitter feed.

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  Manel Alcalde 9:00 am on February 15, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, collaborative environments ( 8 ), innovation ( 34 )   

  Creating environments for innovation 

  Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

  I don’t know about you, but I have the feeling that when I tune into one of the TV channels specialized in nature documentaries I get at home, 90% of the times I find myself faced with one animal gobbling up another or about to do so. Without a doubt, the aspect of the natural world that sells is the savage fight for survival and (at least when watching TV) what fascinates us about natural selection is the part of competition and not less so, adaptation. I won’t deny that the African savannah is a bloody place and somewhat horrifying, especially if you are a lame or somewhat unfit gazelle, but I’m a bit fed up with inners and corpses and I would prefer to think about the history of the natural world as a history of innovation, in which collaboration has given rise to the adaptive evolution of the species.

  Steven Johnson contemplated this idea a few years ago in his book “Where Good Ideas Come From” focusing on the ecosystem of the coral reefs, examples of what has been called the “Darwin paradox”: despite the reefs settling in nutrient-poor waters, they host an amazing number of species and forms of life. The paradox is due to the fact that these formations are environments in which there is great innovative connection among organisms, enabling reefs to overcome the theoretical sterility of the scenario, generating a rich ecosystem where one would not have thought could exist.

  The fundamental idea following Steven Johnson’s approach is that, like coral reefs, there are climates that stimulate the capacity to generate new ideas and they do so because they comply with a series of patterns that already exist in the natural world. I thought it interesting to draft a short list of tips based on the patterns identified by Steven Johnson. How can we, according to the author, build more innovative environments in our organizations and even in our personal lives?

  • Encouraging exploration. The most innovative environments are those that pose a number of components and encourage us to find ways of recombining them. We need to maximize the number of “doors” within our reach and encourage ourselves to open all of them. The limits of the “adjacent possible” will extend as we explore.

  • Becoming flexible. A good idea is not something isolated, generated by art of magic, rather a network of neurons that connect at a given moment and transform reality. It is important to promote liquid environments, which enable the circulation of ideas, and that, above all, are capable of adopting new forms when these enter into contact.

  • Feeding and connecting hunches. Most good ideas are simple hunches at start, which haven’t yet connected with their “other half”. That “other half” usually can be found in someone else’s head, also in the form of a hunch. Creative spaces with high connectivity are environments with high information density, which facilitates the emergence of those “proto-ideas”, the slow boiling of ideas and the meeting with the “missing part”.

  • Embracing organized chaos. When nature tries to innovate, it favors fortunate accidental connections. In the same way as when we dream, when our brain establishes connections that we would be incapable of performing awake (in “organized” mental state), open work environments with a certain chaos cause individuals to have more possibilities to leave the “immediate task” and find themselves in an associative state more inclined to creativity.

  • Valuing error. As Seth Godin says, “All the creativity books in the world won’t help you if you aren’t willing to have bad, lame and even dangerously bad ideas”. Being right is nice, but it won’t make us move forward. When we aren’t right, we don’t have any option other than to find new paths. Making mistakes is important and an innovative environment must be a free space where we can make fertile errors.

  • Breaking barriers and recycling. Nature has the innovative instinct to take old components and find new uses for them. In the area of human creativity and innovation, it occurs in spaces that allow the convergence of different specialized fields. Ronald Burt, sociologist and professor at the University of Chicago who investigated into the origin of the ideas in corporations reached the conclusion that employees who are in contact with people outside their department or immediate environment are more productive than those that are not.

  • Letting others to build on our ideas. Ideas don’t come out of nowhere. We create from what others had created previously and the history of innovations is the history of a collective and progressive contribution to an emerging platform that grows continuously. This only happens when we see ideas not as physically independent or untouchable elements that must be protected, rather as links in a type of group and infinite “work in progress”.

  In short, ideas need to come into contact, mingle, reinvent themselves. To do this, they need a context full of stimulation, governed by free circulation and connectivity. The “secret to business inspiration”, as Johnson says, is to build information networks that allow individual intelligence and collective intelligence to meet, environments fertilized for innovation. Where do you think enterprise social networks fit in all this?

  Manel Alcalde is a creative writer, audiovisual producer and a digital communicator. In his personal blog, Nionnioff, he writes about creativity, communication and narrative.

   
   
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  Ignasi Alcalde 9:00 am on January 24, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, enterprise 2.0 ( 90 ), enterprise social networks ( 95 ), organizational culture ( 13 )   

  Effective Collaboration: Beyond Enterprise Social Networks 

  According to Forrester Research, the international software business for creating and managing enterprise social networks will grow annually by 61%, reaching a turnover of approximately 6,400 million USD in 2016. In other words, it supports the obvious trend that enterprise social networks are becoming the central communication pillar for businesses, promoting collaboration, cooperation and synergies between employees.

  The change from static intranet to enterprise social networks is a reality, and they will become the main communication tool in companies over the next few years. This, in my opinion, is due to two key reasons. The first is that static intranets have a closed and organized structure based on departments, units, areas, folders and services, often organized according to ICT logic. This is a reflection of a relationship model designed for production, based on the division of work and the exhaustive control of operations. At this stage of the 21st century it is obvious that in the current environment of an information and knowledge society that is in constant evolution, has global interdependencies, and which is digitalized and hyper-connected, businesses cannot base themselves solely on these types of model.

  The other reason they will end up clearly becoming part of the business environment is the tools in the “cloud” concept. Apart from being more economically attractive than company ICT structures, the cloud facilitates the ubiquity and accessibility in real time of company information to employees and customers.

  But let’s look a little bit beyond the obvious. Recently I gave a workshop, together with Laura Rosillo, at the Madrid headquarters of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, called “The 3Cs: towards a culture of collaboration in companies”, where, over three days, we reflected with a group of HR professionals on the advantages of promoting collaboration within organizations to be more competitive in the new economy. We mainly explored the reasons of “The Economy of Collaboration”, the why and how of sharing within organizations. It is obvious that knowledge is in people and is strictly personal, and that it is based on information, its understanding, implementation and the accumulation of subsequent experiences and learnings.

  This is well defined by Maite Darceles in her book Guías para la transformación (Guidelines for transformation), in which she explains that “what surrounds people is information, not knowledge. Books in libraries, all types of information on the internet, reports in our archives, statistics, scientific publications… All of it is information that, through the knowledge of people, obtains value in multiple forms… Information and data can be systematized, procedural, but knowledge can’t. The relevant fact will be its use in the organization, in other words, how people learn and how they act using their knowledge, in a continual flow, interaction and recursiveness”.

  And there lies the challenge, beyond the tool is a business culture change, which leads to a transition in a purely transactional and hierarchical environment towards relationship spaces of people, ideas, experiences, knowing if we really want to progress towards the economy of knowledge and therefore be innovative and competitive.

  Ignasi Alcalde is a Social Business Advisor and teaching consultant at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. His also publishes his reflections on collaborative work, on his blog and on twitter

  
  
   
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  Jose Miguel Bolívar 9:00 am on January 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration, culture 2.0 ( 10 ), enterprise 2.0 ( 90 ), organizational change ( 7 )   

  10 Traits of Organizations 2.0 

  Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

  The general situation with regard to the changes we could include under the ’2.0′ tag continues to progress in the right direction.

  Although it is true that this evolution is in fact much slower than many of us would like and, above all, than is necessary, it does seem as though the conditions necessary for its definitive acceleration are appearing, and for the change to occur across the board.

  I mean, of course, organizations whose raw material is knowledge, not necessarily solely but at least partially. In other words, a growing percentage of organizations in developed countries.

  If we look back four or five years, we see that we have gone from a situation in which hardly anyone in a position of responsibility in an organization was aware of what ’2.0′ was all about, to one in which three large and very different groups have appeared:

  1. The first group, probably the largest, is made up of people who still don’t dare to make a move in order to be part of the change, but who are increasingly more aware that they need to.
  2. The second group, the smallest, is made up of people who, admirably show sufficient courage to actively contribute to change. They are our great hope and an example to follow
  3. The third group,which is fortunately becoming smaller and smaller, includes different tribes: cynics, skeptics, unbelievers, the ignorant, the proud, egomaniacs and other organizational specimens, who continue to show active passiveness, if not open resistance, based on the absurd belief that no change is a viable option and that this way they will protect their status quo.

  In spite of all this, it appears that there is still a certain amount of confusion about which traits define an organization 2.0. Being an organization 2.0 goes beyond “having” communities of practice, enterprise social networks, internal wikis and a presence on social networks.

  Being an organization 2.0 is, above all, about “showing” that a series of so-called values 2.0 have been understood, adopted, interiorized and begun to be expressed, and also proving that it has evolved, overcoming the bureaucratic traditional administration model, towards new forms of understanding the role of people, processes, technologies and structures in organizations, which allow answers to be given to the needs arising from this new situation.

  There are probably more, so these ten points are just a starting point. So, here are the 10 traits of organizations 2.0:

  1. Netarchy: This is an indispensable requirement. An organization cannot be considered genuinely 2.0 until it has overcome the paradigm of control. By definition, an organization 2.0 is a network organization that is merit-based, rather than hierarchical. Meritocracy replaces the organizational chart. Painful as it may be for some, hierarchitis and groupitis are organizational diseases typical of a bureaucratic administration model. As Eugenio Moliní rightly points out, “the network is the only configuration where it is possible to shine with your own light at the same time as others”.
  2. Distributed: An authentic netarchy doesn’t need physical structures to obtain its identity. Large corporate infrastructures make no sense in a network world where connection replaces physical presence. In the Knowledge Era, work is what you do, not somewhere you go. The work centre and working hours are two relics of the past which are anachronistic to an organization 2.0. In a world that is increasingly more globalized, structures must be flexible, dynamic and delocalized.
  3. Fluidity: We live in fluid times and organizations 2.0 cannot ignore this reality. They must therefore be flexible in configuration and size, leaving behind the obsolete concept of job position and focusing on projects. This means changing from understanding the organization as an institution to understanding it as a platform.
  4. Connected: BYOD is the bridge towards a new environment in which each node of the network is an autonomous and independent person responsible for the technology he or she uses. In an organization 2.0, being connected is critical. Nodes of the network must be able to share information and knowledge at any time and under any circumstances, immediately and efficiently. Technology must be understood as a means of uniting people and not become a permanent obstacle to collaboration, as occurs currently in the large majority of traditional organizations.
  5. With a purpose: A large number of organizations have currently stopped being a means and have become an end. Hierarchies are looking for ways to perpetuate, even at the cost of sacrificing the reason for which they were established. In organizations 2.0 sensemaking cannot be brushed aside. Organizations 2.0 don’t need an empty mission, vision or values, but a real and shared “for what”, representing the interests and values of their nodes.
  6. Innovation: To innovate is in the DNA of any organization 2.0, to point where it must form part of its purpose. Innovation is understood to be an essential requirement for adapting and survival. The objective of the people, processes, technology and structures of an organization 2.0 is to encourage and facilitate continuous innovation.
  7. Diversity: One of the main obstacles to innovation for traditional hierarchical organizations is the lack of diversity. The typical groupitis of hierarchies becomes single thought. Diversity, the hybridising of experiences, knowledge, characters and perspectives that are different and complementary, are the essence of any organization with a vocation for innovation.
  8. Open: In line with this vocation for innovation, organizations 2.0 are open. If, as it appears, it is true that there is such a thing as collective intelligence, why not use what our customers, suppliers, friends and even competitors can contribute. In an organization 2.0, the desire to learn and collaborate in order to innovate must always come before the interest to compete and win.
  9. With a human voice: There is room for all voices and opinions in an organization 2.0, not only because they are enriching but because otherwise it would cease to be an organization with a human voice.
  10. With productive people: The challenge for organizations 2.0 is to become networks of productive people who innovate. The increase in productivity must be understood as the aggregate result of the increase in the personal productivity of all of the nodes in the network. The performance of an organization 2.0 is only possible if the people in it are productive at an individual level.

  What features would you add, change or delete? Do you know any organizations 2.0? Feel free to continue the conversation with your comments.

  
  

   Jose Miguel Bolivar holds a degree in Chemistry and a degree in Sociology, and has a Master’s degree in Human Resources and Coaching. He is the author of the blog in Spanish, Óptima Infinito, a collaborative space where he writes about Innovation and Productivity for a World 2.0 as seen by individuals, networks, and organizations, and where you can find the original publication of this post.