Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

Since 2004, the terms Social Media, “Web 2.0″ and The Architecture of Participation, have been about getting the masses to provide full engagement, and are taking leaps and bounds as a dominant means to put publishing on the web into the hands of the common public.

Brought into an Enterprise context, its sister “Enterprise 2.0,” now promises to provide a similar revolution in the way firms compete: engaging the heart, souls and minds of the many as a viable and credible means to distribute many other tasks into the hands of the common worker.

This short article glimpses at two US Navy papers simulating combat using “Edge Organization” structures that I, (Martin Cleaver,) think are in many ways like the Enterprise 2.0 tools of today and the community-driven Knowledge Management tools from over the last decade.

The authors have been involved in over 40 studies using these designs, including the oversight of graduate theses at the Naval Postgraduate School, problems addressed in and beyond Project Albert International Workshops, and studies for DoD clients.

So, in truth, I don’t know what the US Navy use put in practice, but these studies show at very least sustained interest in the paradigm.

Command and Control and Organizational Rigidity

The nature of Social Media is to create community around a problem, to leverage the benefits of the Wisdom of the Crowds, such that mass numbers of people can view an issue, make comments, get feedback from one another and collectively decide on the best course of action. Contrast this with typical companies where hierarchy and authority “declares the best” course of action and everyone else is “required” to follow.

Leaders often lament that their workers are not engaged in their jobs. In many firms, workers “show up”, do the task at hand and go home. Sooner or later intelligent workers become disenfranchised by contained task roles with many resorting to career moves to gain a new level of autonomy. In turn, most companies suffer from organizational rigidity and lag and stumble in the markets in which they compete.

What is regrettable is these companies don’t make use of the observations and insight of their workers, and don’t provide toolkits for maximizing the intelligence within. Enterprise 2.0 is a shift towards mass collaboration that can significantly help.

Management Theory

For decades, Management literature has been awash with patterns for structuring the organizational hierarchy, with the Matrix Organization recently popular. Lately management theory is following more organic models that might better correspond to Web 2.0: (Wikipedia)

The chaordic model of organizing human endeavours emerged in the 1990s, based on a blending of chaos and order (hence “chaordic”), comes out of the work of Dee Hock and the creation of the VISA financial network. Blending democracy, complex system, consensus decision making, co-operation and competition, the chaordic approach attempts to encourage organizations to evolve from the increasingly nonviable hierarchical, command-and-control models.

Similarly, emergent organizations, and the principle of self-organization.

Decision Making in Critical Situations

Making decisions that people will follow goes from “nice to have” to critical when life-and-death is at stake. An interesting field to look at is the military, as they have a reputation for being extremely hierarchical yet they must make the most use of every resource they have in combat, regardless of the rank of the person.

In Exploring Edge Organization Models for Network-Centric Operations Adam Forsyth, Susan Sanchez, Hong Wan, Kok Meng Chang and Paul Sanchez cover creating a Computer Simulation of Command and Control vs. Social organizational methods:

Armed forces around the world are considering radical transformations to their structures and strategies because of the information revolution and the changing global environment. Senior leaders continually face decisions on how best to structure, modernize, organize, and employ forces in an increasingly uncertain future. To support their decision-making efforts, defense analysts must explore and provide insight into how future network-enabled forces would perform across a broad range of threat capabilities and scenarios.

Interactions, Sense-making and Group Dynamics in the Military

This corresponding powerpoint pdf by Adam Forsyth nicely illustrates a set of corresponding dynamics:

more, after the jump.

Within Edge Organizations (page 8 of the text)

In the edge organization, there is a common portal where an agent can choose to post factoids he discovers. All agents in the organization can access the common portal to obtain factoid information posted by other agents. This approach of information exchange can be thought of as a ‘push and smart-pull approach’ inherent to a robustly networked environment(Alberts and Hayes, 2003), made possible by the advancement of information exchange technology. This portal is similar to the shared-awareness of the organization in the context of network centric warfare (Alberts, Garstka, and Stein, 1999).

In the edge organization, the agent may discover different types of factoids. Upon discovering a factoid, the agent can decide to post it to all the members in the organization using the common portal, share the factoid with some of his selected peers, or completely hoard the information. There are factors that might influence the agent’s propensities to post, share or hoard the information. For example, by hoarding the information the agent may end up being the first one to solve the problem. This may mean that an agent interested in becoming the ‘winner’ might withhold necessary information and increase the time required to solve the problem. Other factors like individual agent characteristics, relationship with peers, the organization’s reward policy, task criticality, peer pressure, organization culture, etc., will also influence the agent’s decision.

The Social Web

As I see it, many using the Social Web aim at getting as close as possible to a Fully Networked Web of information:

Under the hypothesis (page 9) that:

• Shared information leads to better performance
• Broader or earlier information sharing leads to better performance as individuals have common picture […]
• Full connectivity leads to better performance
• Perfect is preferable to degraded communications

Lastly consider the difference:

In the hierarchical model observers decide WHO to send to and push it up the hierarchy in the hope that it becomes accepted as part of the collective wisdom.

In a hierarchical structure, there are also common portals where agents can post factoids they discover. However, each agent can discover only factoids according to their specialized type. For example, an agent who specializes in the what problem will only discover the what type factoids. This models the specialization and decomposition characteristics of a hierarchical structure. Similarly, an agent can only access the portal belonging to his own specialization group. Upon discovering a factoid, there are fewer incentives for an agent to hoard or share information, as the primary task of the agent is to discover factoids and pass the information to his leader. There are minimal (if any) interactions between agents of different sub-groups.

The reward system of a hierarchical structure also encourages the agents to find as many factoids as possible and pass them up to their leaders

(page 9)

In the collective Social Media organizational design, there is plenty of noise as nothing is filtered out. However, the task of taking action shifts from the commander to any agent. This affords autonomy and allows the military squadron to simultaneously move on as many fronts as needed while coordinating through the website:

Application in Business

The majority of mid level and upper managers have worked long and hard to win their positions in their firms. And, social media promises to help the cream rise to the top as fast as possible. So, if you a manager nearer at the top of the organization, and Enterprise 2.0 changes the role of mid-level managers by reducing their coordination activities, are they going to embrace the paradigm shift or vote to hold on to the old way for dear life?

For sure, some will hold on. Some leaders will accept what their managers want. But bold leaders, the change agents they are, will weigh up the battle of manager control vs. the war against competitors and realize that Social Media is the very same weapon identified by the military as the Edge Organization.

Militaries, (the choice to be at war aside), get good at winning wars. They think experimenting with this organizational structure has merit.

So too should your firm.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Business I.T., Web 2.0, Complexity, Social Media, Knowledge Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.