Virtual water cooler
by chet ~ July 2nd, 2008. Filed under: Boyd's Theories, Business Strategy.Tom Peters once wrote that the real work of any company is done around the water cooler and coffee pot. In an era of globalization, virtual companies, flex time, and work-from-anywhere, what’s a water cooler?
Tim Leberecht has an idea on News.com today: blogs, but with a twist:
Make it mandatory for every employee to keep an internal blog and post at least once per week. Depending on their role, employees can blog about customer experiences, sales tactics, strategy, product improvements, organizational design, competitors, market trends, and even gossip. Potential productivity losses are outweighed by the value of knowledge that is being generated and shared.
“Potential productivity losses?” Relax, he’s thought about that, too.
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:44 am
Partially agree. A ‘blog is more “broadcast” than “dialog”, so unless the requirement also applies to reading (and responding to) comments, it is still less preferable than the water cooler.
That said, “Twitter” and other IM-related chat tools give temporal and cognitive (if not spatial) connections, and in our schools have allowed the “clique communiques” to move beyond just the lunch room or hallways into the classrooms and homes.
So, how is “Orientation” affected when you have a strong cognitive bond with superiors, peers and subordinates in a non-continguous battlespace? I think I feel a ‘blog post coming…. :-)
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:05 pm
deichmans,
You raise an interesting question: How much Einheit / mutual trust / cohesion / common outlook can a non-contiguous organization have? No matter how well it does non-spatial interactions, will it be at a disadvantage to an organization that also has the benefit of face-to-face communications, particularly in an unstructured, idea-generating format, as at the water cooler?
Can the emotional bonds formed by intense personal contact, which form part of group Orientation, be replaced by strong cognitive bonds? Perhaps the most competitive organizations of the future will be those that can exploit both aspects, install real as well as virtual water coolers.
Anxiously awaiting your post …
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:50 pm
People first — they use their brains, but technology plays. Suggest you look at RC#17 Part 3/4: Teams of Leaders - Potential Disaster Operations Force Multiplier. (http://blog.projectwhitehorse.com/)
The mad doctor von Lubitz and I are exploring the proper balance, if you will, in Orientation of people and network enabled capability to include the “team of leaders” concept presented by Bradford and Brown. Most intriguing and I dare say speaks to your virtual watercoller. In part:
Attainment of these attributes among all members of the collaborating leader teams transforms the latter into High Performing Leader Teams whose concerted activity modifies the previously top-down structure into a bottom-up/side-to-side knowledge and “best practices” generator. In the process of that conversion, the pervasive nature of the generated exchanges demolishes organizational barriers, promotes socialization, and fosters mutual confidence and trust among members of leader teams. As the cumulative result, Teams of Leaders emerge, and the previously physically or organizationally isolated individuals and groups convert into “swarms” converging and dispersing accordingly to the requirements of task and mission at hand.
July 3rd, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Personality types, ala Myers-Briggs, would be a differentiation; “Es” seem to have greater preference for the physical water cooler; Movies have stereotyped “geeks”, frequently with very strong “I” orientation.
I had gotten blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network in the late 70s and early 80s … at the time there was a lot of pontification hypothesizing such benefits for the technology (the internal network was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime summer ‘85).
Somewhat as a result, i got a researcher that was paid to sit in the back of my office for nine months, taking notes on how I communicated. They also got copies of all my incoming and outgoing email … as well as logs of all instant messages. The information turned into a research report on computer mediated conversation (also used as Stanford PhD thesis, joint between language and computer AI) … as well as some number of subsequent papers and books.
I would somewhat contend that having online access … including online terminal access at home since mar70 … significantly contributed to being involved in the activity.
One of the observations from the period was that large organizations tended to have people that acted as information hoarders … also frequently information gateways … attempting to enhance their corporate stature by careful management of information.
Online computer conferencing tended to cut across all those lines (significantly increasing information sharing) … somewhat obsoleting such individuals.
July 5th, 2008 at 1:26 am
For a hilarious discussion on the consequences of the sort of non-voluntary blogging brought up in the original article, check out the video of Dr. David Vaine on Corporate Blogging (called Forced Blogging, or “Flogging” for short) here:
http://www.greenchameleon.com/gc/blog_detail/david_vaine_on_corporate_blogging/
July 5th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Steve –
Thanks! Funny as hell …
Sure - anything can be abused by a top-down focus. Tom Peters (again) noted that most companies area about as democratic as North Korea, so one can imagine how well this approach would work in them. I have visions of senior managers frozen for hours at their keyboards, sweat rolling off their brows, while they try to decide how their blogs will play with those higher up the chain. Serves them right - but those companies are sitting ducks to leaner, more agile competitors anyway, so why worry about them?
But if you’re using Auftragstaktik / mission orders, then communication becomes part of your mission. This is simply another way to do it.
Part of the folklore of maneuver warfare is that the real reason the Blitzkrieg was successful was that Guderian was a signals officer in WW I.
July 5th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
I recently came across a commencement address by John Seeley Brown that basically describes “water cooler” based technical communication via creation and telling of stories (http://www.cgu.edu/pages/1528.asp).
Brown is noted for early papers on situated cognition (http://www.exploratorium.edu/ifi/resources/museumeducation/situated.html) but has a wealth of information on communication and learning (http://www.johnseelybrown.com/) related to globalization and technology.
Telling people to blog likely doesn’t work. Giving them a simple means to share micro-stories as they go by might. It’s a change in perspective.