P4051057e01
Originally uploaded by ljw7189.
Very cool dive, Utila Aggressor, Bay Islands, Honduras, April 2006.
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The Subjective
Posted on April 18, 2006 by Lee White
"Subjective" gets no respect in the English language. It is only an adjective. "Objective" on the other hand is an adjective AND a noun. What’s up with that?
Organizations thrive on dealing with "the objective". MBA stuff, the objective gives direction, it is measurable. Good ones are short, to the point and motivating. Just what every good organization wants, a tool for driving the troops. …and I believe in all this!
Problem is that a data -> information-> measurable -> dispassionate approach to decision making looses the richness of subjectivity. The fact is, there is never really enough information to make any decision on a purely objective basis. Organizations should instead embrace subjectivity as a compliment to objectivity, as opposed to pretending that subjectivity is a bad thing.
Now for the cool tie-in. Web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is the institutionalization of subjectivity. Conversation, community, networks are all examples of the nature of subjectivity. An infrastructure based on those principles will allow organizations to leverage subjectivity and make it a true compliment to the objective tools already in use.
With that in mind, I am lobbying that "subjective" be coined as a noun. It could mean the conversation we hope to achieve as an organization.
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Design by Community
Posted on March 23, 2006 by Lee White
Acknowledgment to Russ Ackoff. This post is essentially a paraphrase of of his work.
- Guidelines, policy, organizational direction should be defined by consensus of those impacted.
- Decisions should be made by empowered individuals.
In my experience, most organizations get it backward. Most policies seem to be handed down from on high, based on recommendations of the "experts". Most decisions try to achieve consensus or must be pushed UP for final approval.
Design by Community / Decision by the Empowered Individual makes much more sense.
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Celebrating Failure
Posted on March 20, 2006 by Lee White
You often hear this phrase when people talk about how to build better organizations, but something always bothered me about the phrase. Even though the intent is to turn the negative connotation of "failure" into a positive, it still pays homage to the dark side by keeping the term in the lexicon. How about honoring unexpected outcomes?
"Success" and "failure" have such strong connotations in our culture that trying to bend the meaning will not work. In organizations we talk about outcomes, and there are two flavors: expected and unexpected. We tend to celebrate the expected ones because it "means we were right" and we disregard the unexpected as "due to some unforeseen circumstance".
The idea behind celebrating failure is looking harder at the unexpected outcomes, because that is where we can learn the most, let’s just change the way we talk about it…
Honor your unexpected outcomes.
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Asked and Answered
Posted on March 10, 2006 by Lee White
I have had a block lately. I can’t seem to find what to write about. I go through these phases where all the thoughts get jumbled up on top of each other and I think there is some connection to it all, I just can’t seem to pull it together. So today I just decided to start writing and see what comes out.
I have been catching up on my reading, though it took a while. It seems that when I get behind my newsreader and the Unread list grows, I avoid it, you know the viscious circle. Anyway I got caught up. I find that I am narrowing who I enjoy reading, and the others I am just cruzing through. The top of my list right now is Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users, followed closely by Jory DesJardines at Pause.
Kathy put up a couple of posts recently, Don’t forget square one…, and How to be an expert, that have connected for me. Basically she says that to be great, you have to return to the basics on a regular basis to keep improving.
I am trying to tie that concept to "how do you improve an organization’s competence?". I am beginning to think that part of the problem is that it is hard to clearly define what an organization’s basic competencies are. I run into this often as a project manager. When a new project starts, everyone loves to jump in talking about solutions. In fact the project is often described in terms of its solution. What I usually find is that everyone is finding solutions to different problems, where the solution happens to look similar. In this case, getting back to basics may mean agreeing to what is the question.
Ask any project team what their objective is and odds are that their answer will be the description of a solution: "to build a bridge" or "to reduce our vendor cost". Neither of these responses provide any insight as to who this helps or why they might want it. Russel Ackoff refers to this distinction as the difference between efficiency vs effectiveness, in his book Re-Creating the Corporation.
I want to develop a set of basic questions that will help me work with my clients and allow them to more clearly see their own objectives. I will post my questions as I come up with them.
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Democracy in Business
Posted on February 15, 2006 by Lee White
I have always been troubled by the notion that if democracy is such a great institution, why is it not practiced within commercial organizations? The answer I always seem to run into is that the process is too slow to be pragmatic in a fast-paced commercial setting.
Democracy, as it is practiced in a govermental setting, is inherently a slow process because it’s outcome is typically long-standing policy. The typical outcome of commercial enterprise is not long-term policy, but short term-profits (other things too, but for the sake of this discussion…).
When people say that democracy is too unweldy to be used in a commercial space, I would argue that they are looking at the process related to one instance of democracy and not the underlying concept of democracy, which I believe is the integration of opinions of all stakeholders.
I believe that democracy can be leveraged to effect in comercial organizations, we just need to rethink the process. The tools available to us today can be the great facilitators to make this happen. We just have to change our own self-limiting assumptions about how we can use these tools to make better (and fast) decisions.
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We are all turning into DJ’s
Posted on February 2, 2006 by Lee White
Some one said this the other day and it struck me that this statement is a powerful metaphor for today’s environment. Of course the conversation was about iPods and who got or gave one for Christmas (just about everyone). Everyone around the table was a "Baby Boomer" and the whole iPod thing is a little foreign, so I found the observation that we are turning into DJ’s particularly insightful, even though it was meant in a literal sense.
The insight is that the power of information flow in our society is shifting away from those that deliver information to those that receive (or more accurately "seek") information.
More to say here, just no time. So until later…
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Back again…
Posted on February 2, 2006 by Lee White
I have been out of the game for a while. Firstly due to the holidays…add a 1-year old, a 2-year old and Christmas together and you don’t have much time left. To complicate things further, my Dad suffered a mild stroke in December and spent the holidays in the hospital. We brought him home to 24/7 nurse care. He passed away on January 15, 2006.
Blogging has not been my first priority, but recently the jucies have started to flow again…back into the fray! Though my Dad would have had no idea what blogging is, he would have understood the passion and energy behind it. So as I return, I do it with my Dad’s encouragement…and his ubiquitious question, "What does digital mean?"
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The RSS Organization
Posted on December 9, 2005 by Lee White
Lisa Haneberg refers to it as a BKE (Breakthrough Experience) in her essay in More Space. All the pieces seem to fall into place. The picture is unclear, and it is hard to articulate, much less coherently explain it to someone else, but you know it is a significant transition point.
This particular BKE started a week or so when I read People Subscriptions on 43 People, by Lee Lefever. Something clicked, the idea of creating an on-line identity by aggregating all the feeds from all of your activities. I realize that this is not a fundamentally new idea, mainly just newly synthesized in my head. But the part that has me really excited is applying this concept to communications within organizations.
Look at how most organizations communicate internally now:
- Hierarchical cascade through the chain of command
- email to anyone and everyone you thinks needs to know in order to CYA, not that they really care
- newsletters, virtual and hardcopy
- townhall meetings and other big venue presentations
…you get the picture. This is all "push". The content producers try to control the message by pushing it to everyone whom they hope to influence. Unfortunately only a small percentage of the information ever makes it through the filters. And oddly enough there are usually people that want the information that never see it. All in all not very efficient, but a world we all know and unfortunately accept.
What if we change the paradigm. What if organizations operated primarily on an information pull approach? Control shifts to the seekers of information. Let every project, every department, every process (basically any and every entity) that exists within an organization manifest as a virtual on-line entity with tags and RSS. (Let’s ignore for a minute the fear and chaos this is likely to cause and assume the necessary skill sets broadly exist.) As a project leader or a department head, I stop focusing on who I need to influence and start focusing on delivering an excellent outcome. Every bit of content the project/department produces gets tagged and syndicated. If my project has value it will be found. Those that want to contribute will be able to do so, Open Source Operations.
I realize that this is worlds away from operations in most (shall we say all) organizations today, but just think of the gains in productivity that could be made with this type of approach. Transparency and integrity are inherently incorporated into the system. Central control, and with it bureaucracy, goes out the window. The best ideas move to the forefront effortlessly. Bad ideas, no matter what power structure conceived of them, quietly drift away.
OK, maybe I am a bit of a dreamer and an idealist, but hey, isn’t that what blogs are all about, the freedom to put your two cents on the table…more to come!
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First Flickr Post
Posted on December 2, 2005 by Lee White
P1020395
Originally uploaded by ljw7189.
OK, so this is not in line with my main theme, I just wanted to try it out. I took this picture january 2002 in Fiji.
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Inside Conversation 