Reasoning by analogy is a powerful tool; it's much easier to explain that problem X is like problem Y, aside from a few differences. It's explanation by exception, showing you something new by explaining how it's different from something else that you already know. ‘We're Google for video’, ‘Star Trek is wagon trains to the stars’ or ‘Like a milkshake, only crunchy’. Analogies are powerful because they play to our tendancy to see patterns all around us and make connections between them: this is like that or these two are not the same.

Present a group of people with a problem and you'll find that they each latch onto some analogous problem from their past, a problem that they successfully solved and which they feel is similar to problem in front of them. They've lept from problem directly to solution, skipping over analysis. The debate that follows is really an argument over which solution is ‘the best’. The team becomes paralysed, arguing over the pros of cons of each solution, unable to realise that they might be assuming that they're trying to solve very different problems. Finally someone calls out ‘analysis paralysis’ and a decision is forced.

Present an individual with a problem and you find that they can become stalled, unable to find an analogy in their past that is similar to the problem in front of them, or finding too many that might fit. They slice and dice the information they have, applying decision frameworks and solutions that they've used in the past, hoping to find something that is familuar, something that they recognise as a problem that they've already solved and something which provides a clear call to action. That is until someone points out that they're stuck in ‘analysis paralysis’ and they're forced to pick a direction to head.

Analogies are a great shortcut to understanding a problem, except for when they're not. Sometimes X looks like Y, but it's not really, and by associating X with Y we might be ignoring important facts that can mean the difference between a bad and a good solution. The challenge is to be aware of your own thought processes and realise when you're leaping to conclusions prematurely; metacognition is an under apprechiated skill. If you apply some structure to the path from problem to solution then it will be easier to manage the journey.

Scan, focus, act is a consulting trick that has been around for a long time, but it still does a good job of managing the journey from problem – through analysis, design and planning – to solution.

Scan. Review what is known about the problem, how it is similar to other problems and where it is different, and how these other problems have been solved in the past (or how the proposed solutions failed).

Focus. Enumerate the possible solutions to your problem, drawing from what was learned during Scan. Test each solution, measuring it against your particular problem to where it works and where it fails in this context.

Act. Pull the best elements of each solution from Focus, and synthesise a new solution that integrates these elements to solve your specific problem.

Sometimes the journey will be quick as the analogy we first thought of really does hold. Other times it may take a little longer, when you realise that your analogies were sending you down the wrong path, and you need to pull ideas from a range of sources to create a new solution. Its these times when your judgement (something many people are loath to apply) tells you to take the longer path that you create the most valuable solutions, the new tools to solve new problems built from the best parts to the existing tools you already had at hand. Refusing to use your judgement, however, will leave you stuck in the mud, arguing over the details of solutions that are not really relevant.

Cloud, globalisation and social tools are changing the way Enterprises operate. Enterprises are going to be revolutionised and look extremely different in the future. How that looks will drive the success of new start-ups in the Enterprise space.

David Gildeh was Founder/CEO of SambaStream, an online collaboration tool for SMEs, which was acquired by Alfresco in 2011, the worlds leading open-source Enterprise Content Management system, where he currently leads their new Cloud business.

People – similar to ogres – are like onions as we’re built in layers. Shoes with sandals? Should you blow you nose on you sleeve or on a hanky? Is the priority the group, or the individual? Java or Ruby? Is information power, or something to be shared? We accrete expectations (preferences and prejudices) layer by layer as we find our way through life.

We are the sum of our expectations: genetic expectations, cultural expectations, social expectations, career expectations, job expectations, task expectations, and even the daily expectations we hold we start our commute to work in the morning. Starting from the time we’re born new experiences are either lain over old. Experiences that align with our expectations meld with and reinforce them. Experiences that clash with our expectations are (usually) rejected.

This is what makes unlearning so hard; we are not just discarding some random recently collected fact, we might be invalidating some expectation nestled deeply within our personal onion. Rain is annoying if the weather forecast had us expecting sun. It’s frustrating when the work of a colleague does not meet our expectations for best practice. A setback at work makes us angry as we were expecting to be given the resources or recognition for ourselves. Point out to a management team who worked their way to the top by accumulating headcount and budget that the future lies in smaller, leaner organisations with OPEX based operating models puts you in direct conflict with their career expectations. Dealing with a socially awkward foreign colleague can be intensely embarrassing when they don’t follow expected polite behaviour.

Critical thinking can help as it can provide us with the tools to measure, question and evaluate what we already know[2]. Unlearning, however, is a cultural problem. We need to consider when we need to reevaluate our expectations, not just how to reevaluate an individual expectation.

To create a sustainable approach to unlearning then we need to shape our response when our expectations are not met. Luckily Linda Beamer[3] has provided us with a five step process to help us unlearn old cultural norms and relearn new ones.

1. Acknowledging diversity—awareness of difference.
2. Organizing information according to stereotypes—asking questions to stereotypes—asking questions to increase knowledge and examine stereotypes.
3. Posing questions to challenge the stereotypes-asking questions to increase knowledge and examine stereotypes.
4. Analyzing communication episodes-increasing competence through analysis of communication in specific instances. Deeper understanding.
5. Generating “other culture” messages –an understanding which enables the person to communicate within the culture.

Rather than applying critical thinking to every fact, attacking every idea or solution on the off-chance that it might be a sacred cow, we should focus on those times when we see dysfunctional communication – times when different stakeholders read the environment around us in different ways – as chances to unlearn. Critical thinking is important, but we need to acknowledge that unlearning, like learning, is a cultural process, and that no culture is static.

Successful unlearning is a question of finding the best tools and techniques to manage the evolution of our expectations, our culture, as we are, after all, expectation machines.

References

1. Unlearning is the most important thing @ PEG↑
2. Harold Jarche, Networked Unlearning↑
3. Linda Beamer, Learning Intercultural Communication Competence in The Journal of Business Communication July 1, 2011 48: 231-255↑

It doesn't really matter which which way up you put the organisational pyramid the statically defined, stable organisation is looking quaint and increasingly irrelevant.

There are a lot of conversations rattling around the Internet at the moment on which is the best way to structure your organisation: with the leaders at the top, or at the bottom[1]. Some – many would say the old school – lead from the top in organisations that have strong command and control structures where information flows up and commands flow down. Others – the new school – lead from the bottom, focusing on empowering the team to get the job done and pushing roadblocks out of their way, with information flowing down and guidance floating up.

Both of these approaches have their merits. Of the two I personnally like leadership from the bottom; some of my more productive times have been when I have had a good manager keeping the roadblocks away from me, allowing me to get on with the job. Though command and control has also been shown to work in many circumstances, all the way back to Henry Ford and Frederick W. Taylor.

However, the environment we operate in today is a lot more fluid than the environment of the past, the environment where the vast bulk of our current organisational theory was formulated. Information flows much more rapidly than it used to while the world seems to change every year rather than every generation. The traditional static view of the organisation – one where it has a well defined and stable structure (someone leads, others follow, even if you're leading from the bottom) – is starting to look a bit long in the tooth.

Static structures are good when you know the challenges ahead and can plan and organise accordingly. Responding to today's unstable market can require a different approach.

Organisations have become porous and our teams increasingly heterogeneous. It's common to find yourself working on a problem side-by-side with colleagues, partners, suppliers, and even customers and competitors. Our organisations have shrunk, flattening as we've outsourced functions or even simply handed responsibility to our existing partner and supplier network. Even the composition of these teams and departments has become more dynamic, as we find ourselves needing to reconfigure our organisations to accommodate market demands, new capabilities and technologies, and changes in the market in general. Most departments that used to focus on doing things are finding themselves driven to focus on planning and organising for things to be done while handing the doing over to a community of partners and suppliers.

The one-every-year-or-two reorganisation we used to endure seems to have become a constant reevaluation of our organisation's structure as we struggle to ensure that the right people are leading and the right people are following. For many companies the organogram describing their organisation now has little relevance other than to record who gets paid what. The real organisation structure – the one that involves work being done and goals achieved – is the constantly changing informal bonds between the individuals and teams who are the focus of the organisation's current efforts, and the others supporting them. There are, however, other models that cope much better with this rapid pace of change.

It's not uncommon on an operation conducted by the British SAS (Special Air Service) to be led – at least for a time – by a junior member of the team. While the majors and generals might provide direction over the longer term, in the middle of an operation the SAS has the sense to ensure that the best person for the job is leading the team, even if this means having senior personnel (sometimes very senior personnel) under the command of the junior members. When the unexpected happens often the best way to respond is to put the individuals best equipped to solve the problem in charge and follow their lead.

Something similar happens in World of Warcraft. While the long term objectives of a guild might be set by the guild's more exerienced members, raiding teams form organically, attracting the individuals with the skills and resources that the team feels will provide it with the best chance of success. Leadership of the team may also pass from individual-to-individual during the raid itself, as the team recognises that different skills are required at different phases of the operation.

Surviving, succeeding or even thriving, in a rapidly changing world involves bringing the right skills to bear on the problem in front of us. Often the individuals with the skills required to lead us to success in the short to mid term might not be the same as the people responsible for the oversight of the organisation. Leadership should sit with whomever who is best equipped to lead at the moment. This is not simply leading from the bottom, empowering the team and stepping back; the senior members of the organisation might find themselves working under the direction of more junior staff.

When social media burst onto the scene the old guard found themselves at a loss, forced to rely on the direction of more junior staff. Empowering the staff in the field to solve customer problems can result in management not just supporting their staff, but also following their direction on how to respond to a problem. An operational problem on the shopfloor is often best solved by the team on the ground, with management following the team's direction.

Leadership is no longer part of a job description: something anointed on the chosen few. Leadership is a role to be adopted when needed, and then passed on when the need has gone. It's a dynamic thing, moving around the organisation, reshaping the organisation as it passes from individual to individual, team to team.

The mark of a good team (or community) is versatility. Mandating restrictive and unresponsive organisational models on our teams – the extended collection of knowledge workers who represent a disproportionate proportion of our value – is starting to look quaint and may just make your organisation irrelevant.

References

1. Paul Bennett (November 2012), Curious about … hierarchy @ Curiosity Chronicles↑

The world is changing and we’re all struggling to keep up, searching for that new tool, technique or idea that will provide an edge and help us to survive in a world that seems to lurch from one problem to another. How do we find these new ideas and learn how to use them?

Learning, however, appears to be quite hard. Most of us spend our teens and early twenties accumulating a body of knowledge which we expect to use for the rest of our working lives. Then the majority of our twenties is spent in a learning arms race as we struggle to keep our skills current. Even this isn’t enough though as many managers are starting to think that in today’s rapidly changing work environment that the useful shelf life for our hard won knowledge is around eight years and, consequentially, that by the time you’re thirty you’re considered to be in terminal decline and no longer worth the premium price.

This view of the world has the problem backwards. It’s not learning that is hard; it’s unlearning that we struggle with. Picking up a new skills that fit with what we already know about the world is not particularly difficult. New skills that don’t fit into our view of the world – skills that don’t fit with the assumptions and expectations that we’ve accumulated over our lifetime – are a different matter.

Sometimes learning something new requires us to first unlearn something old. We are all expectation machines, and any fact or technique that aligns with our expectations is easy to learn as it reinforces them. Anything that goes against our expectations is more problematic. Learning a new technique might require us to set aside our assumptions about what is the right thing to do. If we can’t set aside these assumptions – if we can’t first unlearn – then we can’t learn.

We spend our lives accreting knowledge, integrating facts, figures and techniques into our view of the world. By the time we reach our mid-twenties we’ve accumulated a significant body of knowledge that we can use to solve a wide range of problems. We’ve also accumulated our own predilections and prejudices. Some of our predilections and prejudices are based on our genetic heritage: deep seated knowledge that is virtually impossible to shift. Some are based on the cultural traditions we grew up with. And some are based on our personal history.

Anytime that we’re attempting to learn something new this new thing is measured against what we already know. If we put more weight on what we already know, on tradition and our inherited past, then it will be harder to learn the new. The standard which new learning is measured against will be tougher, and we’ll be less willing to set aside our existing assumptions and accept new knowledge if it contradicts what we already know. If we put more weight on what we’re seeing today – on new data – then learning something that conflicts with our assumptions will be comparatively easier, as we will place more weight on what we see than what we remember and we’ll more willing to change our assumptions.

Our nature – our bias towards an inward focus based on tradition and the past, or an external focus on what we’re seeing around us – cuts across age. Those of us who are willing to question our assumptions will find that we can unlearn (and relearn) at any age. Those who put more weight on what they already know will struggle to change at any age. Today’s digital native will be tomorrow’s digital dinosaur if they are unable to unlearn. That bleeding edge agile practitioner who dogmatically insists that they won’t work with you unless you follow these four (in their view) essential agile practices has more in common with their older colleagues still clinging to waterfall methodologies than they are comfortable admitting.

The world is changing more rapidly than ever, making it increasingly import for us to adapt if we want to remain relevant. While learning is important if we want to keep up, unlearning is what really enables us to adapt and remain relevant.

Updated. Just in case you think I’m making words up, here’s a dictionary definition of ‘unlearn’ that I’ve just stumbled across.

unlearn |ʌnˈləːn|
verb ( past and past participle unlearned or chiefly Brit. unlearnt ) [ with obj. ]
discard (something learned, especially a bad habit or false or outdated information) from one’s memory: teachers are being asked to unlearn rigid rules for labeling and placing children.

Governance isn’t a process, and adding more processes won’t necessarily improve your governance.

Governance is a question of decision rights:

• who gets to make the decision
• what information should be considered when making the decision
• who can influence the decision
• who needs to be informed of the decision

‘Process’ is just a tool we use to manage the decision making journey.

OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

It seems that I’ve shared this with four or five different groups of people over the last couple of weeks, so I thought it worthwhile putting it on the blog. Plus this is one of those instances where the Wikipedia page is not the best launching point.

Anyway, OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act)[1], shown above, is a learning framework created by John Boyd[2].

Colonel Boyd was an interesting bloke who had a huge influence on military tactics. One of his key insights was that success in a rapidly changing environment depends on your ability to adapt to the environment as it changes about you. The successful army is the one that can adapt as the world changes around it, and not necessarily the army with more resources at its disposal. This is interesting as the evidence is in and it shows that – for the vast majority of businesses – your competitors have very little influence on your success or failure; the largest factor is your ability to adapt and stay relevant as the market changes around you. Think Nokia, RIM and the iPhone. Or think in terms of high speed rail and point-to-point buses vs. discount air travel in Europe. The complication here is that today’s environment is changing so rapidly that your art – your product – might only have a shelf life of six months or so.

The OODA loop is Colonel Boyd’s attempt to capture what it takes to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. He also pointed out that the best place to put pressure on the enemy is Orient: behave in such a way that they they struggle to understand what is happening around them. And the best place within Orient to attack is Analysis & Synthesis, by presenting forcing them to reconcile New Data that conflicts with their existing beliefs (Previous Experience, Cultural Traditions, and Genetic Heritage).

So success in a rapidly changing environment depends on your ability to learn, which many people will find unsurprising. What’s more interesting though, is that unlearning, setting aside past beliefs that are no longer relevant, is actually much more important and much harder.

In many ways, its your ability to unlearn that drives your long term performance.

References

1. John Boyd, The OODA LOOP, The Essence of Winning and Losing, slide 4 @ danford.net↑
2. A John Boyd Biography @ danford.net↑

• Can I use something, rather than configuring something, rather than customising something?
• How will the solution support the (social) community who will use it?
• Is there a reason why I can't buy the solution ‘on-demand’ via SaaS?

I was having a couple of beers with Peter Williams[1] the other day, and the topic turned to what are the important questions to consider when you're looking at purchasing some large and expensive enterprise application. Pete had three questions; two of them were ‘where does cloud fit into it’ and ‘what's the social angle’, while the third eludes me at the moment. Rolling the list over my mind in the last week though, I've decided that I like ‘can I simply use a solution, rather than heading down the expensive customisation path?’

Whenever we begin the journey toward buying some enterprise solution we usually fall back onto old habits: the acquisition, configuration, customisation and installation of some expensive on-premises enterprise application. This made sense in the comparatively slow moving business environment of the past. It makes less sense in today's rapidly changing and uncertain environment[2]. However we don't want to simply pounce on the new-new thing whenever we have a problem to solve, as the new-new thing is not necessarily the right thing to do in every circumstance. We need a more measured approach.

In a changing environment the challenge is not just to learn new ideas, but also to unlearn old ideas which are no longer relevent. It's these old ideas – ideas which are no longer compatible with the environment we're working in – that prevent us from adapting. One way to unlearn is to question our assumptions, and these three questions seem to be a good place to start when we want to determine if buying a traditional on-premises enterprise application is the right thing to do.

First, there's the shift from acquiring technology to simply using technology[3]. Do we any to buy, to acquire, some technology? Or is it simply a tool we want to use?

Our success used to rest of having the very best tools we could find as – in a slowly changing business environment – if our tools failed then we fail too. Consequently we spent a great deal of time investing in our tools, configuring and customising them to ensure that they met our particular requirements, creating complex and narrowly focused solutions that would support us in the challenges we knew we would face in the future.

In the today's rapidly changing and uncertain environment, however, our survival depends on our ability (re)combine the tools we have to create new and novel solutions. When the market shifts we need to be able to adapt, reconfiguring the technological environment around us so that we can respond to the new and unforeseen challenges we face. We want simple, flexible solutions, solutions that we can just pick up, combine and use, rather than solutions that are narrowly focused on a single task.

In terms of enterprise applications, this means adapting our business to the process and the tool that supports it, rather than worrying about configuring the tool to support a highly customised business process. In a uncertain environment the value in a organisation rests in its ability to handle and resolve exceptions, not in the straight-through process[4]. We need simple and uncomplicated business processes, and simple and uncomplicated applications to support them, with clear points in the process where the team responsible for it can intervene and respond to exceptions.

For CRM (as an example, though we could just as well use General Ledger or Supply Chain Management) we generally only need two things: a sales pipeline (including customer records) and a sales methodology to enable us to configure the pipeline. We could engage in a long requirements gathering gathering process as we map out our unique sales process and its integration into our web of existing transactional systems. Or we could pick a ‘best of breed’ solution and pay for the Miller Heiman[5] or Holden International[6] modules. Not only does this provide us with a configured pipeline, it also enables us to call on the training and expertise of the community engaged with the sales method, a solution we would rather pickup and use rather than acquire.

Second, we want to consider the solutions support for the community of users who will flock around it. Does the solution provide social media features out of the box? Or, and even better, does the solution integrate with the social media tools that your team is already using, tools such as Yammer[7] or Jive[8].

As the value in our organisations has moved from the transactions it processes to the problems it solves, empowering our team to effectively communicate and collaborate is one of the most effective interventions we can make in our organisation. When confronted by a problem, a business exception or opportunity, our team needs to have the tools to communicate and collaborate within themselves, across the organisation, and even with partners, suppliers, and even customers, as they work to solve the problem. John Boyd called this ‘making snowmobiles’[9], reaching around the organisation to find the ideas, the processes, data, abd (most importantly) insight required to synthesise a solution to the problem at hand.

We need to consider how any solution we're considering supports and integrates into this group conversation. The solution needs to expose its data and its processes so that they can be referenced, referred to and discussed. This needs to be done in a open, standards complient way (i.e. via URLs etc) rather than ActiveX and other embedded proprietary controls, allowing the converstation to skip across platforms and involve (potentially) the entire organisation.

The solution should support a range of social media platforms, some which might be bundled with the solution (such as Chatter[10] with SalesForce.com[11]) or others which are standalone products or part of a platform provided by other vendors. It might also provide, or integrate with, visualisation tools to enable users to view and manipulate the data it contains.

In our CRM example we want to empower our team to discuss problems, customers, opportunities and leads, proposals, transactions, and even closed deals. This discussion might span a range of departments, from Sales, Operations, Customer Support through to partners, suppliers and even customers. The same can be said for General Ledger, as the team collaborates to resolve exceptions and issues as they work to close the books, Supply Chain Management as the extended team works to resolve disruptions in the supply chain, etc.

Third, we need to consider how we want to consume the technology. Is it possible to consume the solution on-demand, wherever our users are?

Traditional enterprise applications have a well defined lifecycle. There's the large up-front CAPEX charges required to fund development, configuration, customisation and installation of the solution. There's ongoing OPEX to fund maintenance of the solution and to support expansion as the business grows. And then there's another CAPEX gulp down the road to renew the solution when either our needs change or the solution becomes too expensive to support as it is.

On-demand delivery models – of which SaaS is the most visible member – convert large CAPEX costs to much lower OPEX costs, and they have a much shorter time to capability. My back of the envelope calculations have SaaS CRM typically being installed in a couple of months and for less than ten percent of the cost of a traditional on-premises solutions. We also end up with fairly simple per-seat charges that can simplify our own internal accounting. This reduces the effort required to provision and support the application, freeing up resources to be focused on more important problems, problems which will have a larger influence on the business success than a commoditized enterprise applications.

The ability to rapidly field and then scale a solution make the difference between responding to an opportunity or a problem, or watching it pass by. During the aftermarth of the recent Christchurch earthquake, for example, the Christchurch council need a solution to help coordinate the huge community of contractors and volunteers involved in the clean-up efforts. Vendors were contacted, solutions evaluated, and the council commissioned a traditional, on-premesis project portfolio management solution. The complex effort to source the software and engage the contractors, procure the hardware and install it in the data centre, configure and test the solution, and train the stakeholders, soon fell apart under its own weight. Under intense time pressure the council decided to change courses, engaging a lightweight SaaS solution. This time the effort to provision and rollout the solution took around two weeks, a solution which went on to successfully support the recover and redevelopment efforts.

IT executives are under intense pressure to not just do more with less, but to also respond to a market where the pace of change seems to be constantly increasing, social media is dominating more and more organisations marketing agenda and big da/ta. The new-new thing has a lot of potential but which of our solutions should be migrated away from legacy? Just because something can be done doesn't mean something should be done. On the other hand, we can't ignore the new-new thing and keep doing what we've done in the past.

Taken together these three questions – ‘can I simply use a solution, rather than heading down the expensive customisation path?’, ‘what's the social angle’ and ‘where does cloud fit into it’ – can help us to navigate the path between the legacy IT that we still run the majority of our business on and the new-new thing.

References

1. Peter Williams (@rexster) is the Chief Edge Officer in the Australian branch of Deloitte's Centre for the Edge↑
2. Peter Evans-Greenwood, The New Instability, Exating↑
3. The North–South Divide @ PEG↑
4. BPM over promised and under delivered @ PEG↑
5. MillerHeiman.com↑
6. HoldenIntl.com↑
7. Yammer.com↑
8. JiveSoftware.com↑
9. The role of snowmobiles in innovation @ PEG↑
10. Chatter by SalesForce.com is a messaging service that enables users to collaborate around data and applications provided by SalesForce.com and its partners.↑
11. SalesForce.com↑

LexisNexis have kindly made an extract available, which you can find below via a Scribd embed. If you're interested then head over to LexisNexis (or I suppose we can catch up for a coffee or something).