Dysfunctional work silos. More on Trust in the Social Enterprise. Note: This is the seventh in a series of posts about the Social Enterprise and the Big Shift. The first post provided an introduction and overall context; the second looked specifically at collaboration, working together; the third looked at optimising performance, enjoying work, working more effectively. The fourth, Doing By Learning, looked at how work gets done in the enterprise, and provided the context in which such flows should be seen. The fifth delved into the subject of flows in detail, and introduced the concept of enterprise social objects. The sixth looked more specifically at the role of trust in the social enterprise, and raised the possibility of using social objects as catalysts for building tacit trust. This [hitherto unplanned] post continues with that theme. Background I wasn’t planning to write this post. Virtual Communities and Trust Social psychologists, sociologists, and historians have developed useful tools for asking questions about human group interaction.
The Flight From Conversation. At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done. Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work.
A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.” Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. The connected company. Many thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the many conversations that inspired this post. The average life expectancy of a human being in the 21st century is about 67 years. Do you know what the average life expectancy for a company is? Surprisingly short, it turns out. In a recent talk, John Hagel pointed out that the average life expectancy of a company in the S&P 500 has dropped precipitously, from 75 years (in 1937) to 15 years in a more recent study.
Why is the life expectancy of a company so low? I believe that many of these companies are collapsing under their own weight. The statistics back up this assumption. This “3/2 law” of employee productivity, along with the death rate for large companies, is pretty scary stuff. I believe we can. Historically, we have thought of companies as machines, and we have designed them like we design machines. 1. A car is a perfect example of machine design. It’s time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. 1. Personal InfoCloud.