Amped up and charged: the Wikified Organization

The wikified organization is a proposal for the ultimate in ‘flattening’ of an organization that was pushed, in most business schools, so heavily during the 90s.

A wikified approach is a suggestion box amped up; it is empowerment to do something about ‘it’ - whatever ‘it’ is. It is about sharing: power, knowledge, responsibility, and wealth.

At its heart, it is about communication - wide-open, no-holds-barred, for-all-the-marbles, inclusive communication. The kind of communication that will wake most managers from a restless nights sleep...the kind of openness in operational communications than has never been possible in an organization before.

Idea, Commitment, Connection, Results, Repeat

This is a new concept. The Wikified Approach is neither well understood nor fully formed. The kernel of the idea is that a team – business, friends, organizations, governments, and others – forms around a single, unifying concept. They, as a collective unit, pool ALL of their (spare) capital – time, talent, and treasure – around this topic. As a result, the team grows significantly faster than a similar team organized around the typical hierarchy found in most organizations. It has more assets from which to draw: social contacts, capital, brain cells, enthusiasm, and equipment. It is simply better at self-organization than any organization that has existed prior.

An enthusiasm grows, and this innate enthusiasm is the reason their projects succeed. When the team is emotionally committed they evangelize the idea, and the idea spreads, more people become emotionally invested, and the cycle continues, even more quickly during the next iteration.

The best definition, so far, is simply this: a team forms around an idea, pools their assets, gives a damn about the result, and because of their success, they tell other people. Then they repeat the process for growth. They achieve their goal, and continually expand from the original core concept that was the founding idea. In essence the recipe is this simple: Idea, Commitment, Connection, Results, Repeat.

Survival is not mandatory

While it is hard to imagine what ‘Web 3.0’ will look like, there is a certainty that it will occur. And when it does, the wikified organization will have to adjust to that, too. In the meantime, getting revved up for ‘Web 2.0’ should be more than enough challenge for any team.

If the current manager of a team is not nervous about this wikified approach, then it is a safe bet that management:

a) doesn't fully understand,

b) doesn't fully appreciate, and/or

c) isn’t fully committed to the complete organizational transformation that is about to occur.

With or without you, your organization will change. It will change because it will be stronger, faster, and smarter than any similar non-wikified, static, organization. There will be more commitment, buy-in, and enthusiasm.

But you don't have to agree. As Seth Godin has said, survival is not mandatory.

Moving from ideas to causes

Big deal, right? You could simplify your life and post a suggestion box, and go back to business as usual.

The difference here is that these ideas are fundamentally different, in quality, ability to execute, and in wisdom. The difference, this time, is that the people have the power, wherewithal, and commitment to see the suggestion bear fruit. These ideas come from people who are passionately concerned about the success of the idea, and they have the ability to tap into the network to fulfill the idea.

We all have ideas, every day. Maybe they are even ‘good ideas.’ The problem isn’t in the raw numbers of concepts, but in discerning what's helpful in moving the organization forward from what will hinder the organization. Once you identify the helpful ones, then action needs to take place. Most ideas - even good ones - die there.

With a wikified approach, the team can take up the task of a ‘good idea’ because other people take it on. At that point, an ‘idea’ graduates into a ‘cause.’ And a cause has a life of its own. Often a cause is unstoppable – if the idea that spawned it is ‘good’ enough. Later, a cause, if it has enough energy, capital, and direction (read as steerage and guidance), can become a movement. And a movement can change the world.

Leadership and the facilitation of collaboration

_Don't be surprised if leaders you never considered before bubble__to the surface …………_

..…….for this approach takes a different form of leadership than you might be used to. It is a leadership by encouragement and inclusion. Dictatorships won’t work in this environment.

In this world, executive sponsors will be faced with the responsibility of promoting participation and ensuring consistency to organizational Mission, Strategy, Vision and Values. Simply, your role will be to ensure that people work together.

This will require the reconciliation of differing goals and agendas. In the transnational organization, national and cultural boundaries will require bridging. Your expanded role will include recruiting, fostering, and developing relationships that are entirely outside your organization.

Developing and selling solutions for a business is based on recognition of an anticipated problem and the creation of a solution to satisfy an anticipated need. Since the receivers/benefactors of the solution are the customer, the problem and need perceived to solve the problem must be centered in the customer’s domain.

Market, competitive and consumer insight research results in vast amounts of data that requires consolidation and interpretation by specific areas within a company to determine how a “solution” should be researched, developed, marketed, sold, delivered, serviced, and measured for success.

The collection, assimilation, and analysis of this information provide the direction for a business to market, sell, deliver, and operate in a solutions environment. This is typically approached in a serial process with each functional group within a company performing its unique function in the life cycle that will hopefully come together in a solution that a customer will buy and derive value.

This serialized process had its merits in the past business world and functioned relatively well until the pace of change and information flow rapidly increased in the information age.

Each of the functional areas above had their place in the solution market.

But now, greater collaboration and integrated efforts of cross functional teams is required by business, continually employing customer feedback loops in their processes. Now, instead of suppliers anticipating customer needs, the customer dictates the need with suppliers working to satisfy the need with a solution. This change is a reverse solution life-cycle that is customer-driven. To succeed, it must be collaborative, agile, and adaptive.

Wikis and the evolution of the serial paradigm

In the serial paradigm era, each function had specific tasks to address. They built their deliverables to be reviewed by other stake holders within the value chain. Typically, end-consumers were at the end of the value chain and linked into the sales, delivery, and support processes.

The solution creation was driven by market research and collective ideas related to trends or perceived needs. Customer feedback loops were built into the process but were loosely connected with the actual customer issues. When the solution was developed and ready for market, often needs had changed or the perception of the market and opportunity shifted.

The accelerated pace of business has further exacerbated the challenges of collaboration, shared insight and shared learning in a serial process. What is needed is a collaborative working environment and technology that will compress timelines while strengthening the value chain by facilitating feedback and shared insight.

The Wiki Solution Ecosystem: the customer is part of the team

The wiki construct enables customers to pose business problems and scenarios they are experiencing to enable the teams to help with. Teams then collaborate around a specific issue and work to develop the solution to this issue by leveraging their existing areas of expertise and learning from the collective efforts of the contributors as the process executes.

In this scenario, other customers/consumers may rally around a specific issue or problem and create within the environment the need and market in a dynamic fashion. The solution team then collaborates with each other and the customer to produce the solution result and provides a means for exposing the solution to other customers with the similar need or problem.

This enables the team to anticipate the need and create the market driven by collective value for the client while deriving value from each other along the way. It also sets precedents for the tearing down of the silos that comprise the serial process and find improvements within the cycle to speed up and maximize the efforts and delivery.

Creating competitive advantage: From dependence to interdependence

The “What’s In It For Me” paradigm must be dissolved into a larger whole of “What Can We Create Where We All Derive Value”.

Wiki Solution Ecosystems are a new business paradigm that are centered in the construct of Web 2.0. The tools are now available for executing these collaborative efforts. It will be up to forward thinking companies and groups of alliance partners to embrace these concepts and work in a win-win collaborative fashion.

It will take time and effort to move on this path. All things will not be easy, and there will be learnings along the way. The amount of effort produced will determine the quality of the result in the rapidly moving information collaboration market. Those that don’t adopt and change will move to the sidelines and have to let the real innovators through.

The Wiki Solution Ecosystem Concept is Contributed by Ron Long

Best and brightest will NOT rise to the top…

The genius/wizard/geek that never keeps notes or is sloppy in their organizational skills is practically a cliché in many fields. That means that the people with potentially the most to add to the body of knowledge that is the heart of a wikified organization, are potentially the least likely to impart that experience to the organization.

…Unless they can engage others with their ideas

So steps must be established to pull this experiential knowledge out of them, codifying it for the benefit of the larger team. Access to this brainpower will become increasingly critical to your success. The wikified organization presents a solution.

The Emotional and the Rational

Encourage emotional responses to these changes. There will be many, and varied, emotions within the team. Some of these will be hostile. Reinforce positive reactions. There will be people who test the waters to find out the level of commitment that management has in this effort. Connect with and endorse the ones that rise to the challenge. These will be your crop of leaders.

Rational consideration will take root once your team sees that this is a serious venture. That is when you know that the approach is working – because you will start to see collaborative work accomplished through this tool.

The role of Administrators and Leaders

Axiom: “He who writes the minutes of the meeting, controls the outcome of the meeting…”

With every tool, there is a way to misuse it. Wiki writers have a tremendous influence over the organization, simply because they are the ones that impart their ‘knowledge’ to the rest of the team. Biases and agendas are a natural state for thinking, opinionated people. They have the power to slant and control the ‘history’ of the meeting.

A principle value in the wiki as a tool is its simplicity and ease of editing. You wield this power – equally – with the rest of your team. The ‘edit sword’ swings both ways. In its worst incarnation, sabotage and malicious content can be inserted – effortlessly. The trick, however, is to catch the malware before it can corrupt the efforts of the team. Yet more innocently, a simple mistake (more common than intentional damage) can easily propagate among the team.

Care needs to be taken in vetting and approving content uploads. It must be stressed that this is not a gatekeeper position. Do not give in to the temptation to be a bottleneck or throttle on the creative engine of wikified collaboration. Rather it is nothing less or more complicated than peer-review and evaluation, and perhaps, comments prior to posting.

The Creative Engine - the role for Everyone else

In the book Wikinomics, the concept of “Net Generation”, with all of its unique characteristics, demographics, and psychographics, was established. This is the group that will empower the transformation your team is embarking on. Wikinomics truncated that term to “N-Generation”. The Wikified Approach truncates this further, and modifies its meaning a little to “N-Gen”.

Or engine.

This engine is what will drive your effort forward. These people, the ones that initially embrace the concept of a wikified organization, will be the ones that help you reach your goals. This engine will take cross-training, and cross-pollination to a wholly different place in a wikified organization than is possible in a typical, hierarchy-driven, organization.

The engine will:

• create ideas
• brainstorm
• consider, evaluate, test, vet, approve/deny
• marshal the resources and complete the project

The engine will accomplish this.

If you let it.

The role for ‘thinkers’…

If the rule in a wikified organization is to share, then the person that simply sits, puzzles, doodles, runs simulations, and figures out solutions – in isolation – is going to be in trouble. There is not much use in avoiding this problem. Some people just don’t fit in a wikied environment. Some people, no matter what you do, will not want to work with the rest of the team.

If someone says “I can’t” or “I won’t”, you should consider whether this person really belongs on your team.

. . . Unless they can translate their thoughts to words and action.

On the other hand, there is tremendous value in this person – to you and to everyone on your team – as long as they communicate their thoughts to the team. Upload their doodles. Post their spreadsheets. Let people ‘look over their shoulder’ while they run their simulations. And when they come to a conclusion, go over how they arrived at that conclusion. Determine the process they went through – and document it, so that your future, up-and-coming geniuses can have the benefit of this knowledge and experience.

Get their ideas out of their head, and into the wiki. Then, you get their ideas into the heads of everyone else on the team, and the team can co-brainstorm along with your genius. You never know where the next lightning will strike. But if you can harness the collective power of your team, you may generate more lightning . . .

Plan for it – or pay for it

You cannot possibly predict where this will lead. Don’t spend a lot of time in strategy sessions or brainstorming meetings. You have no idea what will happen, once you uncork the bottle and release the genie. It will go and grow however and wherever it wants.

Consider guidance and steerage. Post your key concepts. Wikify them. Use some core documents and some basic rules of conduct – all editable and modifiable by the team – and some common courtesy and common sense. Then turn it loose.

How to become more human in a virtual world - or not losing humanity...

In this faster and faster centrifuging world, we already lost most of the population on the road. Why? Too fast. We lost many 30+ and financial people who cannot plan and budget any projects any more because all the time "improved".
How could we:

• recuperate those who are lost?

• not get lost in an accelerating web operation?

• get the job done?

Humans are not made for this virtual exercise. They are made to hunt, farm, love, swim, dance. Surf, blog, wiki, grow fat in front of a flatscreen whole day... but what about my personal sustainable accomplishment (a big rising societal issue)?

We have to consider seriously the human evolution inside this revolution. He will be sustainable only if he finds his physical, emotional and psychical equilibrium in his particular position. It can only pass through a connection with heart and body. Impossible in front of a screen. The importance of a balanced life is a historical issue too. The more you are balanced, the more productive you can be on wikis, and the more connected you can be with what's going on in the networks. Meeting in virtual rooms needs to balance with a stronger connection with nature - with your nature.

There are many ways to reconnect. Not to escape wikiland, but to enter more fully in who you are, in your inner capacities to better contribute to the world's evolution.

Verbal communication: 7%

Non verbal communication: 93%

Is there not a huge risk to lose the benefits of supersonic web because we stick to verbal (the only way to enter the web)?

What about connecting the non verbal (by definition offline) - and enter more fully into the game afterwards?