Jon Husband is an old friend, and I have been planning to involve him in Socialogy since I started the project, but the timing hadn’t worked out until now.

About Jon

Jon describes himself in this way:

I am a coach, consultant, writer and public speaker regarding the structure and dynamics of organizations and the struggles to move past industrial-era assumptions towards the deep engagement of knowledge workers.

I have been studying the structural, sociological and psychological aspects of collaborative knowledge work for the past 35 years. I have been a practitioner as a consultant and a coach for the past 25 years.

The Interview

Stowe Boyd: I believe you’re the source of the wonderful term wirearchy. I wonder if you could summarize the term, and its applicability today?

Jon Husband: Yes, I am. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out that today we’re in conditions that are effectively very new for most human beings on the planet. You and your readers know them as well as do I .. interconnectivity, hyperlinks, pervasive computing, cloud, big data, Internet of things, algorithmization, robotization, etc.

The suffix ‘archy ’ signifies the principles and rules or the arrangements for power and authority for large widespread social systems. Only one of the ‘archy’ words - hierarchy – is also found in nature and elsewhere than in the arrangements of social structures. Socially-situated hierarchy has been with us since humans began grunting at each other and trying to get things done. Hierarchy isn’t going away.

More generally, the « archy » words represent the general rules for large social systems, which are derived from statements of architectural principle. There is no commonly-accepted statement of organizing or architectural principle for the patterns, shapes and impacts we are beginning to witness in all areas of human activity due to hyperlinks, connected people and information flows.

However, as David Weinberger famously said 15 years ago, “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy”. Since the mid-90’s and the arrival of the browser and applications of IT in many areas of human activity, we’ve been speaking of living in a wired world (and yes, that includes wireless). One day 15 years ago when I was thinking about all this, I realized that the conditions we were facing would continue to evolve and spread (futurists had been talking about the Information / Knowledge Age for a while by then). I played with combining ‘wired’ and ‘archy’, and voilà! Luckily given 20 years of prior work with the methods used to design organizational hierarchies, I had some sense of what it may have meant.

I heard IBM’s general manager of design speak at an IBM event in New York City recently, and I was impressed by his observations about trying to inject design thinking into IBM’s product planning. In a NY Times Preoccupations essay, Gilbert explains how to use diversity and inclusion to get better results from product ideation efforts. 

The sad truth is that we are wired in certain ways — both psychologically and culturally — that can lead to groups not processing information effectively, which leads to bad decisions. 

One of the most fundamental barriers to effective group ideation is a cognitive bias known as sharedness bias, and a second is called preference bias. These are explained by Ulrich Klocke, the author of How to Improve Decision Making in Small Groups: Effects of Dissent and Training Interventions, in this way. First, sharedness bias:

Groups communicate predominantly about information, which all or most group members share before entering the discussion, and neglect unshared information, which only one or few members have initially.

[…] group members individually judge shared information as more important, relevant, accurate, and influential than unshared information. This bias seems to have two reasons: First, shared information can be confirmed by more than one group member. Second, individuals evaluate their own information as more valid than information from other members. Thus, unshared information, even if mentioned in the discussion, is not seriously considered by other group members and therefore has less impact on the final decision than shared information.

Second, preference bias:

Even when all information necessary to identify the correct solution is exchanged during discussion, individual group members often stick to their initially preferred wrong solution. People bias their information processing to favor an initially preferred alternative. Other studies show the same phenomenon at the group level: Group decisions can often be predicted by the initial preferences of its members. If a majority favors a certain alternative before the discussion, the group seldom decides to chose another alternative. Thus, frequently, group discussions are superfluous, and groups would be better off using a decision shortcut like an immediate vote or an averaging procedure.

The counter to these problems is creating a situation where all information — whether shared or not — is treated in a consistent fashion and not evaluated by preference. This is best handled by techniques like Gilbert employs at IBM:

I used to lead start-ups and have found that the same basic meeting practices can be used no matter what the size of a company. These strategies are effective with design thinking because they not only unleash everyone’s creativity but also give voice to every idea.

It has been my experience that the biggest impediment to getting people to think about what’s possible — instead of what’s not possible — is the difficulty in exposing everyone’s ideas to the broader team. So we focus on two things: getting everyone to contribute and letting everyone’s contribution be heard.

That doesn’t come naturally. Sometimes organizational hierarchy might prevent a good idea from being considered because it wasn’t shared. So at IBM, we intentionally assemble teams that span skills, levels of experience and points of view.

Gilbert — without talking about the biases specifically — is clearly attacking the two biases head on. His techniques include diversity and inclusion: a team with many different perspectives, and practices that lead to all participant’s observations afforded the same consideration, even if they aren’t shared.

His tools are sticky notes and silence: members of the group write — silently — until all information they think is relevant to the issue or design has been captured, and affixed to a wall. Later, meeting leaders might array similar or related ideas, and all reflect. As Gilbert wrote,

Then, the team leader groups the sticky notes into overlapping and logical areas. People take it all in, reflect, and then they disappear. They are free to leave the room — or the building — to brainstorm with colleagues face to face, on the phone or via a group texting tool. This opens up the playing field to less-vocal members of the team who are more apt to speak up online.

After this freestyle brainstorming, the group returns to the room, sometimes after minutes but it could be hours or even days. Invariably they bring at least a couple dozen new ideas.

This cascading of ideas coming out of the meeting also leads to members cooperating to improve ideas and come up with new ones, and all are free to do so in the ways that best suit their character and inclinations.

Note also that Gilbert does not push for convergence or consensus: he allows a period of time — minutes, hours, or days — where there have been no decisions, and no voting. The group remains in a questioning mindset, and doesn’t attempt to quickly come to an answer.

As he concludes, 

When you give voice to more people, the best ideas win, not the loudest ones.

And to make that happen, you have to design around our cognitive blinders by changing the way we process information and make decisions.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Last week I had the opportunity to spend a day with a group of IBM execs — and a nearly equal number of analysts and influencers — dedicated in principle to reimagining work. I came away with a better understanding of the company’s product strategy, and the pressures within the business to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world. But even with a great deal said and much interaction, I also came away with several large unanswered questions.

What will the world be like when every business moves to making decisions based on analytics instead of gut?I believe that Watson technology is going to open up the power of analytics in a truly revolutionary way, allowing business people to attack their growing data to create new business value, and to do so in ways that would have been unaffordable or impossible even a few years ago. And this will not require PhD level data scientists, but simply a reasonably tech-savvy user with spreadsheet data. This will be accessible to small and medium businesses, and making Watson a web platform means that companies will be able to pay for only the analytics horsepower they use. But left unsaid is the question: what will the world be like when every business moves to making decisions based on analytics instead of gut? What we didn’t get enough of in that one day event was the reimagining of people’s work in the near future. Too much was left unsaid, or maybe defaulted to the assumption that the near future will be like the present, only more so. I wonder if this is based on ambivalence, or uncertainty? 

Alfred North Whitehead once wrote

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

It’s unwise to merely extrapolate from today’s present, and I wonder if there is too much of that going on in the discussion about today’s technologies, where we simply envision a near future where everything is the same except we have faster phones, cheaper computing, and smarter AI.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous. - Alfred North WhiteheadOn the cloud computing front, IBM is working to bull its way into the business of hosting applications and virtual computing with Bluemix and Softlayer products. And the company is trying to build the componentry to make the transition for its customers as simple and gentle as possible. However, the competition — most directly Amazon and Microsoft, and the other computing titans trying to gain a foothold in the cloud, like Dell, HP, and Cisco — are not standing still. When you stand back a few feet and dot the lines, the convergence toward very small margins seems inescapable. Perhaps IBM is investing a great deal of money and effort into a market that will rapidly become unattractive for any but the largest two or three vendors, and even there the profit margins of 2020 might be only a few percent, like grocery stores. However, the company might make billions helping companies make the transition from back office servers to cloud-based computing, even if they once again wind up spinning off the hardware business.

And on the work technologies side of things, IBM unveiled Verse, a new people-first social collaboration tool. Unlike the contemporary model of so-called ‘enterprise social networks’ — like Yammer, Jive, and IBM Connections — Verse embraces email instead of trying to displace it. A very retro strategy in 2015, when it will be in general release.

Verse may find a receptive marketplace. Lord knows email isn’t dying, by any means. However, I think that email is increasingly a medium used to communicate with people that we don’t know well, or who don’t know us well. One trend I have been tracking in work technology has been the rise of work chat, where small working ‘sets’ of people communicate frequently and reciprocally, using tools like Slack, HipChat, or the like. This is unlike ESNs or email, in which larger numbers of people interact less frequently and there is more non-reciprocal (broadcast) communication going on. 

The rapid uptake of work chat parallels the adoption of chat in our personal lives, and the stratospheric valuations that WhatsApp and others have been getting.

The only sustainable leadership is thought leadership. - Bill TaylorSo, again, Verse raises more questions than it answers. Isn’t Verse a competitor to IBM Connections? I can’t imagine a company using both. How will IBM differentiate the two when Verse is generally available? Does Verse mean that IBM’s social product team believes that email is here to stay, or even more critically, is email no longer considered a broken and unfortunately widespread means of communication that should be replaced? 

The answers to some of those questions are likely to emerge from IBM and the marketplace in the near term. But one overarching question that I have been asking for over a year is this: what is IBM’s method for gaining foresight into the future, and how can we market observers get access to it? 

The most palpable manifestation of IBM’s views of the future might be in the products that the company rolls out or acquires, but of necessaity there has to be more internal debate and headscratching going on. I would really like to see more of that discussion, and perhaps participate in it. Of course, some aspects of what companies are up to has to be kept confidential, but on the other hand, as Bill Taylor recently said, 

the only sustainable leadership is thought leadership.

So IBM needs to lead the discussion about reimagining work through a deeper and broader discussion about the near future world of work, one that may start with products but ranges far beyond them.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

In a recent post — Unhappy At Work? You Are Not Alone — I explored recent research that detailed the degree of employee unhappiness, and it’s a serious problem. Only 21% feel appreciated at work, according to a TINYhr study. Perhaps more ominous is the fact that 49% are not satisfied with their direct supervisor. 

There is new research suggesting that your boss may be the largest factor in work happiness, or sadly, unhappiness.

The labor economist Benjamin Artz of University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and colleagues published a working paper, Boss Competence and Worker Well-Being, that shows a direct link between worker happiness and the competence of their bosses.

The team looked at a survey from 1990 given to 6,000 young US workers, that asked ‘Overall, how satisfied are you with your job?’ They correlated the responses with two general signs of boss competence: had the workers’ bosses started the company, or had they worked their way up. The assumption was that ‘working your way up’ is an indication of competence. The result? A ‘strong correlation’ between worker happiness and boss competence.

In a second study, they reviewed data from a UK study on 1,200 workers, and found a second correlation based on competence. That study asked workers if their boss could perform the worker’s duties in an emergency, which is a proxy for competence.

In related research, psychologist Matias Brødsgaard Grynderup of the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University found a strong correlation between worker depression and a perception of being treated unfairly by their immediate supervisors. Personally, I consider that a related sort of incompetence, since the primary job of managers is managing others effectively, and making them depressed doesn’t get there.

I believe it was Peter Drucker who suggested that management is a necessary evil, and there should be as little of it as possible. It’s clear from these studies that a great deal of the stress and strain in work is directly attributable to various sorts of incompetence by bosses.

The takeaway? Businesses would do well to assess the competence of people they make managers in a formal way, and carefully assess the happiness of workers as a key component of that. Given the levels of unhappiness, businesses are falling short in that.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

A recent report published by TINYhr, based on over 200,000 anonymous employee responses to ongoing engagement surveys, paints a pretty bleak picture of employee happiness.

Some highlights from the report, if you want to call them that:

• Only 21% feel valued at work.
• 49% are not satisfied with their direct supervisor.
• More than one in four do not think they have the tools to be successful.
• 66% of all employees don’t feel they have strong opportunities for professional growth in their current organizations.
• 64% do not feel they have a strong company culture.

Let’s examine the financial implications of unhappy employees. Alex Edmonds, a Wharton business school professor, examined the companies on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work for in America” between 1998 and 2005. Those companies returned 14% on their assets, while the overall market returns 6%. An 8% gap, which could represent millions, depending on the size of the company. Edmans said, 

One might think this is an obvious relationship — that you don’t need to do a study showing that if workers are happy, the company performs better. But actually, it’s not that obvious. Traditional management theory treats workers like any other input — get as much out of them as possible and pay them as little as you can get away with.

We have to build a way of working where the people doing the work matter as much as the work being done.That thinking — which treats workers as if they are gears in an industrial machine — is wildly out of step with today’s reality: a workforce performing creative and non-routine work, and not rote assembly line processes.

Consider the 64% of employees that feel they lack opportunities for professional growth. Yet this is one of the strongest motivators for engagement and loyalty, especially among millennials. My sense is that this is part of a larger trend: people are so busy doing work that they have no time for deep learning or time for reflection. 

Deep learning — where new ideas are examined, mixed with what we already know, and then leading to new understanding about the world, or some aspect of it — is potentially disruptive. It’s not the same as incremental learning, where skills are honed by practice, perhaps on the job. 

In a recent Harvard Business Review post, Gianpiero Petriglieri wrote about learning being the most neglected activity at work. He wrote, 

Transformational learning rarely builds up so smoothly. It does not just make us more knowledgeable. It reveals what mastery prevents us from knowing. It does not just refine our skills. It changes our perspective. And it is not just a matter of time.

A class, a reading, a difficult conversation with a colleague, may take 1% of our time. And yet they may radically alter how we approach the other 99%, raising questions that jolt us into learning new things from everyday experiences. A challenging assignment, conversely, may take most of our time and yield little new insights.

Take your job’s design. Does it leave space for you to process your experiences and draw a few conclusions or imagine alternatives? Do you have access to people who see the world from another perspective—or just to good old feedback? How often does your team have open conversations about your work together?

[…]

We seldom visit the periphery of our knowledge and competence—the region where transformational learning happens—without feeling threatened, exposed, or ashamed. (That is why when we meet a friendly, forgiving face out there—which makes learning easier—we cherish it. We call that a mentor.) People like failure only in inspirational speeches. In real life we endure it, at best, and come to value it only if and when its lessons become clear. Workplace pressures and norms just turn our instinct to steer clear of failure into a habit.

Look past the rhetoric and you will find signs of the neglect of transformational learning everywhere. In the workplace as well as in many business school courses, with their emphasis on tools that can be taught in a weekend and applied on Monday morning. The learning that we privilege is the safer, incremental kind. Learning that makes us better at what we do but hardly frees us up to revisit why we do it that way or what, say, we may want to do next.

I believe that this is a critical — perhaps the most critical factor — is the disengagement of most senior professionals, bit other factors contribute as well.

A survey by the Energy Project revealed that 70% workers do not have regular time for creative of strategic thinking.

One consequence of not having time to reflect is burnout. In a recent survey of business leaders, Srinivasan S. Pillay, a psychiatrist and a professor at Harvard Medical School, found that nearly all of his 72 subjects showed some signs of burnout.

Tony Schwartz and Christine Parath, who led the study for the Energy Project, believe that they are four factors that collectively lead to — or block — happiness at work:

Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions; mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their most important tasks and define when and where they get their work done; and spiritual, by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling connected to a higher purpose at work.

Turning that around, all these surveys show that companies are doing a bad job of meeting the needs of workers, principally because workers are treated as assets, and not as human beings. The best companies are inherently people-focused, and their leaders are committed to the principle I wrote about in 2013, businesses that are based on how people operate when they feel most free, most creative, most engaged, and most needed. We have to build a way of working where the people doing the work matter as much as the work being done.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

I’ve been watching Lisa Gansky’s work from afar for years, and after stumbling on her Mesh Manifesto recently, I decided to contact her. This is the result of that interaction.

About Lisa Gansky

I lifted this bio from TED, where she spoke in 2011:

Lisa Gansky is the author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, and the “instigator” behind the Mesh Directory (http://meshing.it). She often speaks on the topic of technology, social currency and business platforms and models.

For more than 18 years, Gansky has been an entrepreneur and environmentalist focused on building companies and supporting ventures where there is an opportunity for well-timed disruption and a resounding impact. A founder and CEO of several internet companies, including GNN (the first commercial web publication) and the largest consumer photo sharing and print service, Ofoto (now Kodak Gallery), Gansky’s attention is on sustainable ventures with positive social impact. Gansky currently serves as a Director of Dos Margaritas, an environmental foundation focused in Latin America.

The Interview

Stowe Boyd: I read the Mesh Manifesto with great interest. Mesh is your synonym — or perhaps improvement — of the term Sharing Economy. You outlined six reasons that the Mesh will trump the Ownership Economy:

1. Mobile equals local and fresh — mobile means we can connect with where we are.
2. Let’s snuggle up — the argument for increased density in our habitation of earth.
3. Hidden costs unveiled — meshed businesses decrease our common carbon exhaust.
4. Now you see me, now you don’t — sharing leads to deeper connection and customer data.
5. Make their day, do  it again tomorrow — Mesh customers get better products and services.
6. There’s more to life than money — Community and purpose are more important than stuff.

Ok. I’m down. Where do I sign up?

I only wish you had shared a few paragraphs about the forces that have led to the emergence of the Mesh, to set the big picture. Could you do that, here?

Lisa Gansky: Of course. The manifesto and my book were written in 2009 and 2010 (obviously the book and one or a few or more of my talks delve more deeply into context and forces that set up for the Mesh or the Collaborative Economy shift)

To put it succinctly, I see that there are 6 forces which together drive us towards this fundamental work/life shift. They are:
- Global Population Growth and relatedly, Urban Density - as of this morning we are 7.17B people on the planet rapidly growing to 9.6B. And, for the first time in history, 2010 marks the moment that we became a predominantly urban rather than rural global society.

- We are more connected to more people and our things than ever before. Pervasive penetration of smartphones (handheld, GPS, IoT and web enabled devices + connection (social networks and access); these devices have allowed us to find each other and things much more readily and essentially help to take the friction out of sharing.

- Distributed power - tools & spectacular examples of the power of individuals and self organizing communities to ignite, create, prototype and share ideas, tools and make change.

- Climate change concerns & actions - in communities, corporates and governments a rising concern for our planet’s natural systems are provoking a rethinking and redesign of how we use resources & what we consider ‘waste’.

- Rise of distrust of formerly highly regarded brands, industries and institutions. Banks, energy companies, many large corporations have proven that they are focused on their futures, not ours. This break has created an opening where many more people are seeking out new ways of living, working and are keen to explore brands that they have never heard of.

- Economic Brakes of 2008 - 4+ years ago, the recession caused much of our ‘reliable economy’ to unravel. Individuals, businesses and governments questioned their practices and began to realign true cost with true value. This caused many to identify ‘unused value as waste’ — a core principle of the Mesh or the Collaborative Economy.

SB: The ‘economic brakes of 2008’ might be systemic indicators of us being in the ‘postnormal’ era. If it’s not a temporary hiccup, and instead more like long-term secular stagnation, what are the impacts on the Mesh economy?

LG: Richer personal and community experiences. Less waste & less stress and increased resilience for ourselves, communities and the planet. The Mesh or Collaborative Economy invites a tighter, more meaningful connection between us. From a business perspective, I expect more modular and ‘node’ based ways of scaling ideas, designs or brands. As we are more able to find each other and relevant ‘value’ in the right moments, I certainly see a more resilient, self organizing network of people and systems. In many ways, where we’re heading would give Frederick Taylor the shivers! 

SB: You’ve written a book (The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing), launched a social network (http://meshing.it/) and a conference (http://www.letsmesh.co/) all directed toward informing and building a community of Meshimites (Meshoids?). What’s next?

LG: Ah. The research for my book started in 2007 and the book was published in 2010 so, many things which I speculated about in the Mesh are already playing out nicely. Two of the key tenets of the Mesh or Collaborative Economy are:

Unused value = Waste 
and
Access Trumps Ownership

Both remain central I think. With respect to the latter, I expect to see a lot of innovation and experimentation around shared forms of ownership. For me personally, there are many cauldrons being stirred! We plan to produce another by invitation, Mesh event next year. These are a highly effective way to bring global ‘instigators’ together and take note of where we are, rub each other the right way and make good things happen faster. Secondly, we’ve been selectively funding a few ventures who are experimenting with new models. This is, by way of confession, necessary for me to be part of startups and continue to bother other entrepreneurs. Lastly, since my book has come out, I have been very focused on urban innovation and how to accelerate that. We have several projects in the works which will be launched in early 2015. 

SB: Where and when will the 2015 Mesh event be taking place?

LG: We haven’t decided that yet. The primary focus will be on distributed power, particularly in the form of infrastructure. We are considering hosting instigators in Copenhagen, Barcelona, Milwaukee, Miami or … Stowe, we’re open for inspiration. We’ll define & announce the event in Q1. For now, we are with an ear to the ground — so, quite keen to hear from you and your community as well as the other folks who’ve thus far been vocal.

SB: Do you think that the Mesh will colonize the ownership economy a bit at a time, or do you think there will be some rapid point of inflection? And if the latter, what will it be?

LG: I love your choice of words, Stowe! Well, the movie in my head is more that we will have far more opportunities to experience each other, places and things beyond what we own now. This alters what we aspire to. We can already see this taking shape as Millennials’ relationship to home and car ownership has conspicuously altered the way that these products and related services and products are marketed. (for example, insurance companies in the U.S. have traditionally used auto insurance as a lost leader - a way to identify new customers, give them a sweet deal on car insurance and then stick with them through life for home, liability, life and other types of insurance people have historically purchased as they mature and presumably acquire more things.) So, I already see this as a thread that unravels the whole sweater! We are pulling on several key threads around the rock star formerly known as the ‘consumer economy’ — and we are not only impacting cars and home purchased, but also then, all that goes with it. (insurance and home furnishings as 2 examples.) 

I fully expect that we, as a global community, will continue to reshape our economy to a more shared and balance form of capitalism. Our collective collaboration is at the center of this shift and it’s beyond exciting!

SB: I guess those two are huge, but proceeding from different causes. Home ownership decline may be driven by tightening credit and the wealthy buying up property in many urban areas, while car ownership seems more of a lifestyle choice. Although worsening finances of the middle and lower classes is also a driver, right?

LG: There may be different tensions driving this change. One thing is certain, it isn’t only a Millenial thing — older people who are ready to downsize are choosing to cash out of their home and take their act on the road as well. Others are shifting from homes with extra owned space to much smaller private spaces with shared common areas. We are seeing the latter take shape in urban infill homes where tenants or homeowners have 400 square feet of less as their living space and then share a brilliantly outfitted kitchen, equipment, studio space, etc. In NYC, Graham Hill of Treehugger fame, has launched Lifeedited — they are rolling out several projects with tiny spaces and built-in share based services. Very meshy. Overall, with the urban population growing as it will, we’ve got to shrink our homeprint — most people want to do that without reducing the richness of their experiences. Of course, many of these strategies are far more advanced in Europe and other cultures who are more mature than we are, as North Americans. There’s so much that we can learn from each other and an incredible amount of ingenuity and optimism being unleashed for our shared future!

One more thing, when I started to research all of this in 2008, I began building a directory; it grew to 1201 before I decided to write the book. The directory is now nearly 10K thanks to many around the world who have added to it over the last few years. It may provide some of your readers with more ways to explore who’s doing what…

SB: Thanks for coming out to play!

LG: Thanks, Stowe for instigating this conversation. I’ll look forward to hearing from you and your community more…

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

In today’s world of business, we have come to consider teams as the default way for almost all work to be managed. However, given that engagement at work has been assessed at being low — around 30% by Gallup and 35% by Towers Watson — the practices that are most general, rather than being the foundation of productive work, should actually be suspect.

It has often been said that teams are a means, not an end. Establishing principles that encourage individuals to align themselves with a performance-oriented work ethic sets context for both individual and team work, and is of greater importance than a team-oriented work structure. That mindset trumps teamwork, since even when we work in teams there is always a need for solitary work.

Even though there is widespread use of teams in business, it is astonishing how little time is actually spent on considering how effective teams work, or how little time is applied to the conditions that are necessary for teams to work effectively.

J. Richard Hackman defined the conditions for teams to be effective, and once noted in an interview that many team members disagree as to who is actually on the team:

It may seem silly to say this, but if you’re going to lead a team, you ought to first make sure that you know who’s on it. In our recent book Senior Leadership Teams, Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss, and I collected and analyzed data on more than 120 top teams around the world. Not surprisingly, we found that almost every senior team we studied thought that it had set unambiguous boundaries. Yet when we asked members to describe their team, fewer than 10% agreed about who was on it. And these were teams of senior executives!

Knowing who is — and isn’t — on a team is the first of Hackman’s conditions for making teams work. Here’s the full list, as a series of questions:

real team — are there clear boundaries, interdependence among members, and at least moderate stability of membership over time

compelling direction — is there a purpose that is clear, challenging, and consequential and that focusses on the ends to be achieved rather than the means the team must use in pursuing them?

team structure — does the task, composition, and core norms of conduct enable rather than impede teamwork?

team’s social system context — does it provide the resources and support that members need to carry out their collective work?

coaching — is competent coaching available to help members get over rough spots and take advantage of emerging opportunities, and is such coaching provided at times in the team life cycle when members are most ready to receive and use it?

In my experience, these questions are seldom asked in a formal and open way, and little time is spent to ensure the conditions are met.

There are a host of other misconceptions about teams that almost guarantee that teams will generally operate sub-optimally. For example, consider the premise that teams should work together harmoniously, but the evidence suggests that’s wrong.

As Ulrich Klocke showed in How to Improve Decision Making in Small Groups: Effects of Dissent and Training Interventions, dissent is a good predictor of group performance, because it can lead to a deeper discussion of the factors involved.

Alex Pentland wrote, in Why Startups Should Steal Ideas and Hire Weirdos:

When everyone is going in the same direction, then it’s a good bet that there isn’t enough diversity in your information and idea sources, and you should explore further. A big danger of social learning is groupthink. To avoid groupthink and echo chambers, you have to compare what the social learning suggests with what isolated individuals (who have only external information sources) are doing. If the so-called common sense from social learning is just an overconfident version of what isolated people think, then you’re likely in a groupthink or echo chamber situation. In this case, a surprisingly good strategy is to bet against the common sense.

As a maxim, here’s an important takeaway:

the more important a decision, the broader the diversity of opinions that should be sought to apply to the decision, and the greater the attention to active and comprehensive dissent.

And actively promoting dissent runs counter to harmony, because it can be oppositional, with different team members taking different stances. But that tension leads to better decision making.

Team leadership is another area where we seem to step on our own feet. The job of a team leader must be to foster the conditions that enable teams to be effective, rather than charisma, decision-making skills, or a directorial personality. Perhaps most important is the capacity to be able to extract from any current situation the factors that are most relevant to the team’s goals, and the ability to close the gap between the current state and what the team should be doing. And a great deal of emotional maturity is needed, since effective teamwork can lead to high anxiety for all involved.

Hackman pointed out that team leaders need an additional characteristic: courage. Bucking groupthink and common sense, and actively promoting dissent does not lead to every team meeting feeling like a day at the beach. But it is much more likely to lead to meeting the team’s reason for being, even when there’s friction involved.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Americans have a well-known obsession with productivity. In recent research I am involved in we found that personal productivity is the highest aspiration in the use of work technologies. But perhaps this focus is not necessarily the best for us with regard to other aspects of life and work like well-being and creativity.

I’ve been reviewing Andrew Smart’s Autopilot: The Art & Science of Doing Nothing, in which he makes a strong case for spending more time idle. As he puts it,

Psychological research has shown that humans, especially American humans, tend to dread idleness. However, this research also shows that if people do not have a justification for being busy, on average they would rather be idle. Our contradictory fear of being idle, together with our preference for sloth, may be a vestige from our evolutionary history. For most of our evolution, conserving energy was our number one priority because simply getting enough to eat was a monumental physical challenge. Today, survival does not require much (if any) physical exertion, so we have invented all kinds of futile busyness. Given the slightest or even a specious reason to do something, people will become busy. People with too much time on their hands tend to become unhappy or bored. Yet as we will see in this book, being idle may be the only real path toward self-knowledge. What comes into your consciousness when you are idle can often be reports from the depths of your unconscious self _and this information may not always be pleasant. Nonetheless, your brain is liker bringing it to your attention for a good reason. Through idleness, great ideas buried in your unconsciousness have the chance to enter your awareness.

I know that my most creative moments generally come in a state of half-sleep, using in the early morning or following an afternoon nap. And there is significant evidence that intentionally deciding to delay making a decision, and letting it simmer on the back burner while we do other things — like sleep, or other work — can lead to better decisions (see Being distracted — multitasking — can lead to better decisions). 

Smart cites the work of Marcus Raichle, who discovered the ‘resting-state network’ of the human brain in 2001. This is the network that is active when we aren’t focused on anything in particular:

Raichle noticed that when his subjects were lying in an MRI scanner and doing the demanding cognitive tasks of his experiments, there were brain areas whose activity actually decreased. This was surprising, because it was previously suspected that during cognitive tasks brain activity should only increase, relative to another task or to a “flat baseline.” This led Raichle to study what the brain was doing in between his experimental tasks. What he discovered was a specific network that increased activity when subjects seemed to disengage from the outside world. When you have to perform some tedious task in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) experiment such as to memorize a list of words, certain areas of your brain become more active and other areas become less active. This does not seem peculiar. However, if you are just lying in the scanner with your eyes closed or staring up at the screen, brain activity does not decrease. The area of activity merely switches places. The area that deactivates during tasks becomes more active during rest. This is the resting-state network.

Most parts of the brain are dedicated to certain sorts of cognition, and are excited by singing, or reading, or doing math. But it appears that the ‘aha!’ moments of insight and creativity occur most frequently when the RSN is active: that is, when we aren’t trying to be creative, but we are letting our minds wander where the autopilot wants to take us.

Note the brain isn’t shutting down in RSN time: it is active. Again, Smart says, 

Rather, the brain is perpetually and spontaneously active. It is maintaining, interpreting, responding, and predicting.

The brain use more energy when we are on autopilot than when we are doing math, for example.

What is increasingly clear is that our intuitive — or culturally-imposed — understanding of the human mind is woefully wrong. We naturally would imagine that concentrating hard on a math problem should take more energy, but it turns out that spacing out is more of an energy hog. 

Looked at from a physics perspective, more energy should lead to more of something else, and it seems that all that energy makes the brain temporarily more organized: different brain centers are communicating, exchanging information, and erecting a dialogue about our self and the world. 

I’ll leave out Smart’s description of the various centers and what they add to the soup that is being made as we daydream, but as Smart says, 

In a nutshell, when you are being lazy, a huge and widespread network in your brain forms and starts sending information back and forth between these regions. The butterflies only come out to play when all is still and quiet. Any sudden movements and they will scatter.

And when we are working on a spreadsheet, checking our task list, or even sitting in a brainstorming meeting, that network is asleep.

Those with Alzheimer’s disease or schizophrenia appear to lack well-modulated autopilots, and that explains the nature of their impediments.

So it’s time to move past the stigma attached to laziness, to wool-gathering and staring out the window. To reclaim what makes us unique we need to recapture the daydreams of childhood, and dedicate time to actively turning our thoughts away from the affairs of the day.

This flies in the face of what has become the orthodoxy of busyness, but we need to accept the heterodox paradox: to be deeply productive these days rests squarely on creativity, not brute focus. So, take that walk, take that nap, turn on the autopilot.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

I thought several of the finalists for Techcrunch Disrupt 2014 SF had compelling value propositions, but I was expecting to see more oriented toward work.

PatternEQ is a clear business play: using data analysis and predictive insights to support better decision making without having to program anything. This is the tool I thought should win, since the market for better decisions is infinite.

Partpic is a service that allows users to identify parts — like the hose under your sink — in order to replace them. This has business application, but is more likely to be used by individuals. The argument against this service is the logistical complexities in getting the world’s billions of parts registered into the database.

Shipstr is a cloud service that streamlines the commercial shipping labyrinth, and that is a business issue, albeit a fairly tightly focused one. 

Stack’s Alba is a smart lightbulb that adjusts itself based on ambient readings of its sensors. Might be used by businesses, I suppose.

Vinli provides technology to make almost any car smart. Vinli is a bluetooth device that connects to the car via the ODB II port — the data port on all cars made since 1996 — and a smartphone via bluetooth. Numerous apps are available, like a safe teen driving app and a OnStar clone. Could be used by businesses, in car fleets or trucks, but seems like it’s oriented toward the individual.

This Disrupt’s winner was Alfred, a consolidation service that coordinates a variety of on-demand and local services for house cleaning, food buying, and dry cleaning. The premise is that individuals would much rather have a single service managing all these personal services rather than dealing with each individually. I buy that reasoning, but it doesn’t seem very disruptive: it seems obvious, and nothing more that a baby step away from the various services themselves. I’m not even sure that a housecleaning service or dry cleaning delivery is disruptive, for that matter. At any rate, the winner is not work related.

There were only a handful of work-oriented companies at the show. I wrote about one — Rallyteam — in Can we consumerize everything inside businesses? saying this:

Imagine if everything in a company were managed as open marketplaces. First to get them funded, and second to make a marketplace to connect employees with projects, basically providing an internal platform that is something like what Elance-oDesk does for freelancers.

Strangely enough, yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt I found a company that is trying to do that, called Rallyteam, although the financial side — payment for the services — isn’t taken to the logical conclusion. Rallyteam assumes that employees have a salary, and the work that flows through its platform doesn’t change that. But my vision is that in the future employees might have a base salary for a core job, but that other compensation could be dynamic, based on the internal work market. But obviously we have a transition before that comes to be.

I guess the flurry of interest in building work technologies is waning, and the consumer side is becoming 80% of the Techcrunch Disrupt companies.

Perhaps that shift is due to other factors rather than the attractiveness (or unattractiveness) of work technologies to the judges and crowd at Disrupt. Perhaps the initial selection weeds out work technologies, or work technology start-ups go elsewhere, like Y Combinator and other incubators, or directly to Vcs and angels.

But I have an alternative theory. The Dropboxes and Yammers of the near future are coming, but we need to get past the current state of the practice. My bet is that in the near term the traditional model of ‘collaboration’ and enterprise social networks will increasingly be viewed as out of step with the way work is actually being done. This will provide new incentives and new opportunities for established players and startups alike. We’ll see both market shake-ups — like the consolidation going on in the file sync-and-share market — and the mainstreaming of tools that the early adopters have glommed onto ahead of the majority, like contextual conversation tools like Slack.

So maybe next year’s Disrupt may have more grist for my mill, and the winner could be a breakthrough in work tech. Lord knows, we need more of them.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Brian Chesny’s interview yesterday by Techcrunch writer Ryan Lawler provided a good insight into the company founder’s changing perceptions about the hospitality industry disruptor, but it was somewhat confusing to hear a series of positions the company has had over the years in close proximity. Nonetheless, his sincere desire to provide a good experience for the end users — those that are renting rooms or homes through the service — and to work closely with the network of partners — those that are providing the rooms or homes — came through loud and clear.

In contrast with Uber’s Travis Kalanick, Chesny comes across as low key and mild-mannered. He related an anecdote about the company’s first fiasco, the famous apartment trashing incident back in 2011. He described the help he received from Mark Andreessen, when he showed him a draft blog post that had a $5,000 guarantee for hosts, and investor and mentor Andreessen added a zero, making the guarantee for $50,000. He thought Andreessen’s support and guidance was critical for him at that difficult turning point.

While Airbnb is a disruptor, challenging the cozy status quo agreements between traditional hotels and municipalities, Chesny demonstrated that you don’t have to come off as a pirate, intent on blowing things up. Instead, he seems to suggest a different way to change things, by working with the municipalities to collect rents and impose insurance policies, and to police those hosts that are really scooping up apartments and homes to rent and driving out locals. 

At the outset he related an early positioning of the company, where he was deflecting a direct comparison with hotel companies:

Chesky: Valuation comparisons with hotel chains don’t really work. We’re more like eBay. eBay of space. #TCDisrupt

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd)

September 9, 2014

But at the end of the interview  he settled on being a hospitality company, not the eBay of Space, and therefore, direct comparisons with hotel companies would be sensible, after all.

Chesky: we are a hospitality company, not a hotel company #TCDisrupt we are providing experience with heart

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd)

September 9, 2014

Chesny talked about various experiments going on, where they are trying out dining in homes, tours, and other ways to enhance the experiences of travelers.

Chesky: What business are we in? Homes? Space? No, we’re about trips. #tcdisrupt Tours, dining in homes. Many experiments going on.

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd)

September 9, 2014

He also mentioned he is planning a conference — by invitation only — of 1000 or so ‘super hosts’, so the company can learn how to better help those partners.

Ryan Lawler posed a tough question, one larger than Airbnb can answer:

"Is the 1099 economy good for the world?" @ryanlawler @TechCrunch #TCdisrupt

— renée berry (@rfberry)

September 9, 2014

Well, it may not be good for the world at a macro level, but at the micro level, it is good for the kinds of partners that Airbnb is working with: those that want — or need — an additional 1099 stream of revenue from renting their rooms and homes to others. And of course, the travelers who get a different and lower cost experience when renting through Airbnb.

As a business traveler, I have found it very useful to use Airbnb, especially when visiting a city for more than a single day or two. I grow weary of hotels, and seeing a city from the point of view of a local is much likelier when starting out from a guest room in a home than the 14th floor of a towering hotel in the business district. And of course, it’s more economical, too. And I confess, I feel better knowing that Airbnb is working with the local governments so that appropriate regulations are in place.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.