"Back To The Future" - Collaboration In The 21st Century

I have been reading up on Cisco Systems and its CEO, John Chambers lately. This was prompted by references to Cisco's leadership in utilizing Web 2.0 tools at Cisco. What I have been learning about in addition is how Chambers is transforming the Cisco organization in the direction of what some have called Management 2.0 with very positive results.

I have been most impacted by Chambers' description of how Cisco is running the company using collaboration and councils. For example, 26 councils a year now take a leadership role in innovation in the company and in moving various project ideas forward. This replaces the command and control approach that had been utilized previously. Chambers describes that when an idea or issue surfaces - sometimes at the initiative of members of the organization, he forms a council to work on it.

The council that has been formed is handed a concept and a vision. The council develops the differentiation strategy and execution plan, tweaks the vision and then executes. Chambers comments on how the development cycle has been greatly reduced in time and the number of such innovation efforts have increased. "Speed and scale," he constantly says. There is also greater delegation of authority and collaboration. Currently, there is no single head of engineering. Instead, Cisco has a council of nine top engineering heads at the company.

Part of this transformation is Cisco's use of their home-grown versions of social networking, wiki, and blogging tools and especially telepresence which appears to my eyes to be a sophisticated approach to video conferencing.

This brings to mind some of the points made by Gary Hamel in the February, 2009 Harvard Business Review article, "Moon Shots for Management," in which he describes 25 challenges facing management in the future. Among these are:

• Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy.
• Reinvent the means of control.
• Redefine the work of leadership.
• De-structure and disaggregate the organization.
• Share the work of setting direction.
• Create a democracy of information.
• Expand the scope of employee autonomy.
• Enable communities of passion.
• Retool management for an open world.

While I am thus far impressed with the efforts of Chambers at Cisco, I do have to remark that a fair number of these are not new in terms of management challenges or goals in at least some organizations.

Back in the 1980's and 1990's, we were doing a lot of work with socio-technical systems design (STS). Though an open-ended methodology for organization design, the predominate end-state was flatter organizations, more participation by lower levels of the organization, use of groups to manage aspects of the organization, various degrees of autonomy in teams, including cross-functional teams, and greater collaboration. All of this ended with the growth of re-engineering. Now, apparently much of this is being rediscovered by well-respected leaders like Chambers.

Of course, now there is a significant new twist which is the existence and growth of Web 2.0 interactive tools. These tools accomplish a number of things.

• They embed the "Moon Shot" approach to management into the IT infrastructure of the organization, hopefully making the change process more effective and long-lasting.
• They, in themselves, create and require a much higher degree of collaboration and constitute such a "reality on the ground" that they make opposition by the old guard seem nearly futile.
• They enable a multi-layered kind of global collaboration which is both intellectual and personal in nature through use of multiple types of media.
• They potentially help the bottom line by increasing productivity, agility and scale and by reducing the costs of operation and expenses such as travel. Chambers has reported that collaboration tools and Cisco's telepresence technology saved the company $150 million in travel expenses.
• They support the motivation of younger employees who are accustomed to using such tools outside of work.
• They build a culture which supports the ongoing sharing and use of knowledge.
• They lead to new innovative business models.

Hopefully, the combination of Web 2.0 tools with "discipline and process" and Management 2.0 approaches will open up a new age of organizational life.

If you have examples of Management 2.0 approaches or Web 2.0 approaches wedded to Management 2.0 in your organization, I would love to hear about it.

Comments

[Barry Camson]

Bernard, I agree that there are many new approaches that we have encountered and been using since the days of Socio-Technical Systems. Strength based approaches and Appreciative Inquiry are certainly one very helpful category of these. You describe a synergy that will be very interesting to pursue in the future in terms of the marriage of Web2 interactive tools and evidence-based practices. One example might be, "Tweet what you see going well in the organization." As tools progress, it will be possible to thematize and retain these as the basis for future action.

[Bernard Mohr]

Barry - thanks for a helpful, informative and thought provoking piece! The connection to our work (in the 70's 80' and early 90's) in Socio-Technical Systems driven organization design is an important one, insofar that the outcomes,as you clearly write, were very consistent with the moonshot goals that Hamel proposes. Of course much has changed since then and at the same time much remains the same. In the "what has changed" category, the shift towards the importance of conversations in a knowledge economy is significant. With this in mind, the potential marriage between Web2 interactive tools and the evidence based practices supporting strength based innovation is a compelling possibility!- Bernard Mohr