Rowan's blog

One Tribe at a Time

It is Remembrance Day. In line with my interests in change management and building constituency, I read "One Tribe at a Time: A strategy for success in Afghanistan" by Major Jim Gant. My understanding of the War in Afghanistan in 2009 when this was written is very basic... but based on the information presented, this is the most compelling strategic change plan I have read.

The scale and complexity of the challenges, along with the brutal realities of failure in a war environment, put the digital/social change project I spend time thinking about into perspective! The external technology revolution we are all experiencing with digital/social communications - and the internal transformation organizations must go through to keep pace (the subject of many of my posts) - now feels like a walk in the park on a warm spring day with an ice cream. Having said this, I do see parallels.

My take on it:

• The vision is; To disrupt, dismantle and defeat the terrorist network, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To prevent the return of al-Qaeda in either country in the future and to facilitate security and prosperity for the Afghan people.

• A key cultural factor is the fundamentally different structures of America and Afghanistan: a central governance model vs a distributed tribal system.

• Major Jim Gant's strategy involves working with Pashtunwali tribes; one 'Tribal Engagement Team' building constituency with one tribe, eventually scaling to reinforce existing tribal structures right across the country, to partner with them against al-Qaeda. This makes sense because the Pashtunwali tribal system is centuries old - it's all they know - and they are likely to resist foreign intervention (like attempted structural change) to the death.

Implementing the proposed strategy would require institutional change and a shift in leadership style:

• Approval to pilot the strategy would require imagination and trust from leadership.
• Aligning with this approach at full scale would require transformation of the US Army, including a significant paradigm shift.
• Communications would need to be overhauled from command and control to, perhaps, Social Architecture, slide 6.
• Approvals processes would need to change - some efforts would need to go ahead with no approval.
• 'Trust and approval' would need to be agreed upfront (sounds a little like having Social Computing Guidelines, e.g. my employer IBM's).
• The risk-averse nature of staff would need to change - they'd need to be willing to 'get out there', partner and collaborate with the tribe/constituency to co-create value.
• Staff must be allowed to go 'native' and interact with external tribes at all levels (can staff in your organization openly collaborate with people externally about their non-confidential work e.g. on a blog, LinkedIn Group or via Twitter).
• Funding models must be streamlined, so staff have the power to do what makes sense (to draw a parallel with digital marketing and communications, this might be investing in new listening capabilities, developing locally relevant content for a key constituency in market and funding ongoing metrics and analytics to derive actionable insights). 
• Likely resistance from US ground commanders (I think all change agents can relate to that one).

Major Gant listed this familiar sounding challenge: "Identifying, attracting and training personnel who could perform this type of mission would be a daunting task". This seems to come back to the need for a new (or, perhaps, old) predominant style of intrinsically motivated, transformational leadership:

• More parallels here: Finding leaders with integrity, 'Strength and Honor' who can 'build constituency': incl. building rapport across cultures / cross-function, listen, empathise, understand, learn, then 'influence without authority', plus continually assess the status against the vision and successfully iterate on the strategy and implementation over time.
• Initial leaders would need the imagination to go against the grain of what the institution rewards, be willing to pilot it (start small and think big).
• Importantly they'd need the commitment/perseverance to stick with it, to allow the project to benefit from the 'Chinese bamboo tree' style phenomenon described on p37 (little growth in first years, explosive growth / return in five years). They might need to influence up too, to ensure their project was provided ongoing support.

 

Major Jim Gant, you say you're not a writer, not a strategist, not an academic - but I found this very thought provoking from the perspective of strategy and change (and applied cultural anthropology). Plus I was compelled to read to the end. I hope others do too.

I'd love to hear what has happened since 2009 - and what was learned along the way. I vaguely recall hearing from David Meerman Scott that the US Army is transforming in line with the digital/social communications revolution, perhaps along the lines of parallels drawn above? I wonder if this might have helped.

 

Interested to hear others thoughts too.

 

P.S. Tip of the hat to Luc Galoppin (as he would say) for telling me about the ebook.

The Power of Open: 2.0 Public, Private and Community Sectors

In September, the Open Government Partnership formally launched with a series of high-level meetings highlighting the transformative nature of open governance.
 
Events included a day-long multi-stakeholder discussion, "The Power of Open," that brought together governments, civil society, industry leaders, academics and the media in a series of panels and networking events. The launch page states, these were “focused on the role of openness in improving responsiveness, fostering accountability, creating efficiencies, promoting innovation and growth, fighting corruption, improving performance, and capturing dispersed knowledge in support of smarter policies.”

As part of this, Eight nations (Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the US) formally endorsed a broadly-worded Open Government Declaration, all of them openly asserting that their goal is to achieve “greater prosperity, well-being, and human dignity in our own countries and in an increasingly interconnected world.”

This is something I feel incredibly hopeful about - I see increased 'Openness' in the public, private and community sectors as a huge step towards ethical, sustainable, agile progress. Last year I had a (somewhat radical) rant on the need (and possibilities) for crowd-sourced democracy here.

Watch President Obama’s opening address from the meeting, along with comments from multiple countries:


Highlights:

• The UK has ambition to be the most transparent government in the world. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, gave an extremely articulate speech and call to action (at 46:59).
• Rakesh Rajani, one of the civil society representatives used his moment well.
• President Obama's closing remarks included a pertinent comment on the challenge of being a human being in a position of power.

Read Susan Crawford’s detailed blog post on the topic, including how you can get involved in the US: http://scrawford.net/blog/

In the private sector:

• The power of the consumer is well known and is being leveraged in the marketing space ('Customer-made' became a trend back in 2006).
• In the B2B space, collaboration between internal and external experts, prospects and clients is becoming commonplace too.
• In large organisations, 'jams' are providing opportunity for internal crowdsourcing, for example, IBM's ValuesJam in 2003 gave its workforce the opportunity to redefine the core IBM values for the first time in nearly 100 years.
• These initiatives have generally been led from the top.

The community sector now has the power to lead and drive big change from the bottom up:

• Nathan Winograd made San Fransico the first 'no kill' state for shelter animals in the United States and went on to make the same change in other places (see 01.45 in video).
• A different example of community leadership is the collaborative, bottom up, coordinated research effort of the distributed http://occupyresearch.net project. Anyone can participate. A team led development of the wiki, which describes itself as "an open, shared space for distributed research focused around OccupyWallStreet / OccupyTogether". They are sharing ideas, research methods, tools, datasets, with a view to writing, analysing, discussing, codesigning new tools, and otherwise developing theory and practice together.

 

So, becoming more open (and finding ways for people from all sectors to collaborate on shared interests, beliefs, ambitions) is perhaps inevitable, since everyone now has a voice and anyone can drive change.

I see two keys to smooth progress in this area - the exact two challenges mentioned in my previous post; imagination and leadership. Scalable technologies have emerged that permit collaboration top down and bottom up. The question is, can a leader find constituents including experts who share interests, beliefs or ambitions - and lead them to;

• define a shared vision that represents ethical, sustainable progress (a 'win' for all constituents)
• and then work towards it in a coordinated way?

The project leader and participants would need imagination and leadership (internal and external) to commit to the possibility of a shared vision and to willingly, consistently collaborate and coordinate with each other over time to achieve win/win progress.

If you’re interested in hearing what OpenGov experts and enthusiasts have to say, feel free to follow this OpenGov Twitter list.

Lets hope the power of 'open' culminates in constituents with expertise collaborating to drive ethical, sustainable progress more transparently and democratically in all sectors.

Brain size correlates to size of social network

Lets start with the monkeys...

I've just been watching David Attenborough's 'Funky Monkeys' documentary on TV. I learned that monkeys brain sizes directly correlate to the size of their social group, or social network.

One explanation is that the larger groups, (for example a hundred monkeys living together) are more complex, therefore a monkey must be exceptionally smart and politically savvy to rise to become an effective group leader. Groups that become unmanageably large split into smaller groups. Scientists can accurately determine the size of the monkey's social group directly from its brain size, before even knowing what kind of monkey it is.

How does this correlation between brain size and social network size relate to humans?

According to Dunbar's number, the size of human social networks has been approx 150 for at least tens of thousands of years (incl. today's online groups). Our brain sizes have also stayed much the same. Dunbar theorized that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, which limits group size ...the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained." David Wong wrote a pretty entertaining article about it.

However some humans social networks are much larger than average - and some people care about far more than 150 people. Based on the thinking in David Wong's article, that would be a good thing!

One factor that could explain this is that some people are extroverts (as opposed to introverts), so they might naturally hold more information about 'people' in their brains (instead of other kinds of knowledge).

Another idea is that some humans have 'outsourced' a large quantity of information (potential extra brain size?) to collaborative information storing and sharing facilities on the internet (e.g. storing / relying on knowledge in Wikipedia instead of trying to remember it in our heads, or storing information about people in databases or sites such as Facebook). Might this be our way of evolving faster than standard biological evolution (our brain size) permits?

Yet another factor might be that some people choose to believe in all people being equally important, even the people we don't yet know. In other words, choosing to see the humanity in, and therefore have consideration for, every person in the world.

So, I am pondering whether the combination of: a. an individual's biological brain size/intelligence + b. their personality type (extrovert or introvert) + c. the amount they leverage the 'global outsourced intelligence' of the internet + d. the degree to which they choose to be considerate of every human  correlate to the size of their social network?

What do you think? Are any assumptions wrong/debatable? What other factors would be involved? Wouldn't it be good if humans perceived all humans as being a broader, but equally important part of their network? Will tools like Facebook and LinkedIn help?

Google, can you find my slippers?

I've been really busy lately. Not just like the 'busy' I was before.

I guess this is what happens when you set yourself a big mission at work, (which recently turned into an official global role) involving lots of o'seas travel, start a part-time post grad course and commit to moving house from Sydney to Canberra (for my husband's work).

If I have any available free time in Canberra, at least I will be able to entertain myself by suggesting to Canberians that polititians replace themselves with crowdsourcing (see my previous post). That should get some classic reactions ;-)

I have another idea on how to use the additional capacity of the National Broadband Network; augmented reality search engines. I've been complaining to Google for a long time that they don't help me find my lost horseshoes. Soon I will be adding plenty of household items to that list (e.g. the items hidden in box 38, located at the bottom of the pile of boxes in the storage room, waiting to be unpacked).

Given the world is becoming smarter with billions of data sensors in products, wouldn't the natural next step be to design tiny microchips (smaller than the ones designed to track rubbish) that could be placed on all your items (or inserted as part of manufacturing), then build an augmented reality app search engine to find them... Kind of like this app which IBM built for Wimbledon, but enabling us to find our kettles, misplaced iPhones, favourite slippers (which my dog likes to take into the garden) and keys...

Would this be useful to anyone else out there? Who do you think will provide this solution and how long do you think it'll be till we get it? Hopefully I will have had time to find my slippers by then...

 

Isn't it time we replaced political parties with crowd-sourced democracy?

ZDNet just revealed the Australian Lib's National Broadband Network (NBN) policy to be yet another half-baked, shambolic effort. Some of the background is in my blog posts from last year.

So much time has been wasted - as with almost all major government projects. The political system drives me nuts. So here is an alternate, half baked (but much broader) idea:

Why don't we create a new system for developing and managing Australian national projects whereby:

• Members of the Australian public who are qualified*, collaboratively co-develop policies/projects/solutions within their area(s) of expertise with the aid of neutral, monitored facilitation. *One idea would be to 'qualify' people via an online test, through which they must demonstrate balanced understanding of the points and history surrounding the issues.
• All the policy/project/solution initiatives developed collaboratively, nationally, could be submitted, presented and sorted by Australians via voting tools into a country priority list.
• The Australian public could then collaboratively vote in a Project Leader to implement each priority project (based on the leader's proven ability to successfully implement similar complex projects).

In other words, why don't we develop a system to crowd-source national policies/projects/solutions, so we can make 'politicians' obsolete?

Yes, that idea is half-baked - there would need to be a lot of detail ironed out behind how it could work... back-end infrastructure, privacy, making the collaboration & voting tools secure and facilitation neutral etc, but surely this is all possible now that we live in the time of the inter-webs?

Frankly, I think piloting this kind of approach, starting small and learning and refining it until it is workable on a broad scale would have to be worthwhile... Pretty much any system that focuses on developing an excellent end solution for the country would be better than having multiple competing parties made up of bipartisan politicians working on it?! 

What do you think?

(I have not missed the irony that we'd probably need the NBN to be in place to facilitate this kind of solution on a broad scale... ;)

Managing change in the digital environment

I don't often talk about my work on this blog, but initiatives at work over the past few months have renewed my interest in managing change, which I do want to talk about - and request your support with!

At work, my role is Digital Strategist / Leader for IBM, Growth Markets (officially within 'Brand System', working closely with Demand Programs and Market Management, which all sit within IBM Marketing and Communications). Back in June 2009 I started to work on overarching digital strategy guidance for the Growth Markets - and the business process management around it.

Digital: Strategic approach

An implementable strategy covering all Growth Markets would not produce optimal results, since the market conditions in countries such as China, India, Korea, Sth Africa, Russia, Poland etc are fundamentally dissimilar (incl. IBM prospect/clients use of digital tools, media and technologies). Also, local objectives are different in each country - in fact the breadth of IBM's offerings mean IBM's objectives are different for each audience within each country. So I created a 'Digital Planning Roadmap' which each country / Program team can follow to build a solid, locally relevant digital strategy & locally implementable plan.

The idea is that this digital plan should sit, embedded in the centre of the broader local marketing plan. Digital tools/tactics relevant to the audience in the market would be interwoven into the overall contact strategy for that audience. (I should add that this was already happening in many places, but a consistent approach had not been formulated.)

Digital: Business process management

Ideally, many parts of the business would be involved in the creation and implementation of a locally developed digital plan (because digital is relevant to many parts of the business). Therefore, the next step was to create a Cross-functional Digital Lead in each market. This person's role is to drive effective, coordinated use of digital in their market cross-function using the 'Digital Planning Roadmap' approach - and optimise their country's use of digital over time. Essentially, this person will be the 'Digital change agent' in their market.

A global 'Digital Community of Practice' has been set up to enable and support these individuals, utilising Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technologies (plus the good old conference call)! The objective of this de-centralised community is "to eliminate redundant efforts, to amplify learnings and best practices across IBM and to build the critical mass of talent and energy that will command more focus and funding".

The number of community members has passed 60 140 1,000 and is ever-growing - as is the wealth of experience, expertise and guidance the community members are able to share with one another. It has been very exciting to bring this to life and it is gratifying to watch the community start to develop its own momentum as community members use the forums to reach out to one another.

Why am I requesting support / information?

I just read Rawn Shah's article in Forbes: "Enterprise 2.0 Changes What Kind Of Leader You Need To Be". His article prompted me to write this post, because, while I think it is fair to say I meet his definition of "one of the new leaders" (not necessarily people with titles and management authority; rather ones who fuel group efforts to produce results), this is something I want to get better at. If you happen to be doing something similar, I would love to compare notes!

I am in my element when I:

• can work on a big game-changing opportunity (in this case, 'how do we embed Digital into the marketing mix to best effect, to meet our specific objectives')
• have the freedom to develop / sell the approach and 'rally the troops' (in this case, global as well as Growth Markets marketing teams)
• am facilitating the process (making things easy).

BUT I would not call myself an expert in large-scale organisational change management. I am hungry to learn more.

Long term, I'm keen to hone my leadership and change management skills so that I can make a larger impact with projects that involve digital (my area of specialty) and change management within IBM & the corporate world. I'd also like to be able to contribute in the area of animal protection (my other passion) / social issues.

I'm starting a Graduate Certificate in Change Management at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) in Sept. Meanwhile I found a wealth of information on the topics of digital and change management (shared below)*. If you share my passion for this area and/or know of people, organisations, blogs, initiatives etc that I might be interested in, please leave a comment / get in touch!

Many thanks.

*Resources on Digital and Change Management (in no particular order):

• Presentation - Managing change in the digital environment (IdeaGarden)
  
• Lots of presentations on Change Management on Slideshare
  
• Groups covering Digital and Change Management on LinkedIn
• Ashoka (Innovators for the public)
• Ashoka - article on Games for change
• Games for change
• Altimeter Group blog
• Groundswell blog
• Drink Digital - talks
• Heart of Change (book) site
• McKinsey Quarterly
• Social change group on Vimeo (I created the group, please add relevant videos)!
• 'Tribes' by Seth Godin

Note: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my husband, my dog or any company including employers or clients.

'Join the revolution'

I stumbed across this (now old but still) interesting post about the Kazaa 'Join the revolution' campaign which I worked on in 2003.

Reading it brought back so many memories. I miss those days of optimism!

Shift happens 4.0

An educational video for teachers was created in the US in 2006. The objective was (and still is) to come up with a system of education for our children that prepares them for the 21st century.

The video (about the pace of change, focusing primarily on globalisation and the information age), became an internet hit in 2007. See my earlier post. As with its subject matter, it's changing rapidly.

Version 4.0 was recently released on YouTube. It's worth a look.

You can get involved via the Shift Happens Wiki.

Student Insights on Smarter Cities

IBM held a Smarter Planet University Jam, a massive online collaboration event where nearly 2,000 students offered their progressive take on what would make a better, smarter world. 

The students from over 200 universities in 40 countries discussed a number of topics, including the environment, education, work skills, and healthcare.

"Students are confident that their future will be a smarter place – a world where they will drive cars that get 100 miles per gallon, learn in virtual classrooms connected with students across the globe, and where they can run their businesses on a secure, energy-efficient and interconnected grid. They are boldly challenging the industry to transform that vision into their reality, and IBM is committed to meeting that challenge," said Jai Menon, vice president of technical strategy and university programs, IBM.

“The Smarter Planet University Jam was one of the most exciting and innovative experiences I have ever been a part of. IBM is setting the standard for the corporate world to start learning from the people that depend on them,” said Taylor Vogt, a student majoring in political science at Pace University.

Much of the jam focused on progressive and smart-growth ideas related to water management, healthcare, universities, open source technology, and city building.

“This kind of free-flowing forum is extremely vital to the sustainability movement, where far too often good ideas are never shared or worse, never listened to. I was proud to be a part of this experience,” said Vogt. 

Sounds like it was a success. Read the full details in the 'News In Business' article.

Jeremy Hodge + a couple of the interns at IBM, Daniela Retelny and Michelle Morrison put together a short video reflecting the results from the jam as well as another survey they conducted independently among a group of college students. The video is now on the 'Building a Smarter Planet' blog.

*The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

TED talks: Clay Shirky

I just came across this video from the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference. It's an excellent presentation by Clay Shirky on the media transformation caused by Web 2.0.

It covers examples including the earthquake in Sichuan province, the issues China is now facing in terms of trying to control the Internet - and why Obama gets it.

Many more videos on ted.com.