Do you work in an organization that is slow to adapt? Do you feel constrained by inept IT and HR policies? Are there deep impenetrable departmental silos within a non-collaborative culture? Is innovation and change painfully slow? If you answered yes to any of these, what can you really do from the inside?

Cartoon by Hugh Macleod @gapingvoid

What’s working in social business in 2012? This is the question that CMSWire asked me to write about. In my opinion, technology sales, marketing campaigns and the speakers circuits are doing well. Implementation and organizational change are lagging far behind.

Like the knowledge management and e-learning hype phases of the 90′s and ’00′s respectively, social business is being led by software vendors. Some are even the same vendors that MIT’s Peter Senge said co-opted the field of knowledge management. I watched as e-learning moved from hope for ubiquitous learning, to the overproduction of self-paced online courses, also known as “shovelware.”

My focus on social business stems from a background in training, knowledge management, performance improvement and social learning. I have learned that the hard work comes after the software has been installed and the initial training sessions are over. Then comes the question, what do we do now? ...

In complex environments, weak hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle. One good example of complexity that we can try to fathom is nature itself. Networks thrive in nature. As Howard Bloom stated in a speech at Yale University:

One the many lessons bacteria teach with their colonies of trillions is this. When it comes to groups, Nature does not favor tribes, she favors size … She favors humongous social groups that network their information so well that they form a high-powered collective intelligence, a group brain. ...

There are few best practices for the network era workplace, but definitely many next practices to be developed. A good place to start is with an integrative performance framework that puts formal training and education where they belong: focused on the appropriate 5%.

Jay Cross calls the new performance environment a workscape:

Workscape: A metaphorical construct where learning is embedded in the work and emerges in “pull” mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. Learning emerges as a result of working smarter. In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive and fun. It involves conversation as the main ingredient. ,,,

Everyone talks about collaboration in the workplace today but what does it really mean? How do you get from here to there? Every snake oil salesman is selling socialsomething: enterprise social; social learning; social CRM; etc. For me boils down to three principles.

Narration of Work: This means actually talking about what you are doing. It’s making your tacit knowledge (what you feel) more explicit (what you are doing with that knowledge). Narrating your work is a powerful behaviour changer, as anyone who blogs regularly can attest. Of course, I mean personal or professional blogs, not writing articles just to...

“What Sanofi is doing is reducing its own internal research capacity,” he said. “The days when we locked all of our scientists up in a building and put them on a nice tree-lined campus are done. We will do less of our own research. We’re not going to get out of research. We believe we do certain things well in research but we want to work with more outside companies, startup biotechs, with universities.”

Over the past year I have been working on change initiatives to improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing with two large companies, one of them a multinational. In each case, implementation has boiled down to two components: individual skills & organizational support. Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making. I have also learned that changing work routines can be a messy process that requires significant time, much of it dedicated to modelling behaviours. 

My Internet Time Alliance colleague, Jane Hart, notes, ” … as for the... 

A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the workplace. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models.

There was a most interesting thread on Twitter today. Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) in a series of tweets, said [paraphrasing several]: “Senge’s five disciplines provided instant utility for learning to organizations in 1990, yet learning organizations remain rare to this day. Hierarchy kills all learning. Our social systems are not designed to cope with complexity. Organizational learning is fundamental change. Today’s organization is not fit for organizational learning. Therefore, we need total redesign. Social and transformational architecture encompasses complexity and emergent change.”