Bridges To Knowledge: A Blog by Barry Camson

A Day Of Collective Impact

Collective Impact has come to Israel as I pointed out in a previous post.(Hebrew version) There are already a number of Collective Impact efforts going on or in the process of being developed in Israel.

Today, I attended a workshop put on by the Joint Distribution Committee which has its main Israel offices in Jerusalem. The JDC Israel or the "Joint" as it is called "deals with the advancement of quality of life, equality of opportunities and reduction of gaps in Israeli society. The organization works among populations irregardless of religious, national or political identity."

I spoke with a number of people in between sessions to get a perspective on what Israelis see as important about Collective Impact and the challenges of pursuing Collective Impact in Israel. Here is what I learned along with my own comments.

Getting To Seamless

In my last post, I set out a comment from a speaker at a recent event held at NASA. The quote was:

"The future of Open Government is allowing seamless conversations to occur between thousands of government employees and thousands of others."

I think this is what we are now calling a network. In this post, I would like to explore the ideas in the quote a bit further and also ask for your input.

Open Government Event at NASA

Today, I attended via the Internet an Open Government event held at NASA in Washington, D.C. The speakers included an astronaut and representatives from the Department of Transportation and the Department of Agriculture.

The speakers spoke about Open government in terms of the three pillars of technology, policy and culture. Both technology and culture were described as force multipliers. Particular attention was directed at the need to focus on culture. Open Government was described as much about culture change which is seen as the hardest factor to effect.

It was suggested that for some organizations that have difficulty relating to the concept of Open Government, initiatives be set in the context of innovation. One piece of advice is to seek out innovation champions within an organization.

There was a discussion of the importance of enabling the voices of employees to be heard and that there are tools that can accomplish this. People should be empowered who have stories to tell so that they can connect with the public in conversations. In fact, the future of Open Government was described as allowing seamless conversations to occur between thousands of government employees and thousands of others.

Social media technologies could be utilized to have these conversations without having to create gigantic infrastructures. It was suggested probably regarding managers and the IT function that no one stand in the way of inspired employees willing to use technology. The overall goal is to leverage the media to connect though the form that channels of communication could take, e.g. twitter, facebook cannot be anticipated.

There was discussion of how to communicate with those outside of the organization. Organization should have open and collaborative conversations with stakeholders. Efforts shold be made to connect with school kids and the public. Relationships sould be established with partners.

I like this image of Open Government or government in general as seamless conversations between government employees and others. I don't know what models of doing business or governing this would lead to, but it seems to me that this would be an exciting exploration.

Open Government IS Cultural Change

I recently delivered a training program for the U.S. Intelligence Community on how to effectively transfer knowledge. This program was delivered during the period of time when the Intelligence Community was migrating from the Cold War mentality of "need to know" to the 21st century mentality of "need to share." 

Government as a whole is about to embark upon a similar change to that which the Intelligence Community encountered. This is as a result of the President's Memorandum on Open Government. The President's Memorandum calls for openness, participation and collaboration in government organizations. The culture of government organizations will have to change. This cultural change includes the behaviors, attitudes, assumptions, values and norms of these organizations. The President's Memorandum on Open government makes tangible what will be required for government to succeed in the future.

Seven Enduring Principles of Change Management Applicable to Enterprise 2.0

There have been a variety of valuable presentations, posts and conversations lately as a number of us have been considering what are sound approaches to help create wider Enterprise 2.0 use in organizations. These are conversations about what is generally called "change management." In these conversations, many of us are speaking about the Enterprise 2.0 tools as well as the ways of working and structuring work that support optimum use of these tools. These ways of working and structuring include increased participation and collaboration and flatter organizations to name just a few.

I have been involved in large-scale change projects for many years. In most of these efforts, there has been a focus on implementing state-of-the art technological tools as well as on how to create a high performing, more collaborative organization. These two goals have been seen as mutually supportive. This is pretty much in line with the goals we are speaking of for Enterprise 2.0.

I would like to set out what I believe are some enduring principles of change management that were value-adding in the past and which remain so today. Discussing these cannot be accomplished in a single post, so I will cover them over several posts. In this post, I will set out the overall principles.

These principle are:

1. Respect the existing people and system.
2. Utilize an encompassing approach.
3. Have a clear path forward.
4. Increase participation by enabling many people to contribute to the change effort.
5. Provide active, visible and sincere leadership support.
6. Seek deeper personal engagement.
7. Factor in contemporary models of change.

Some People Believe.......A Story of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption and Use

Some people believe that all that is necessary for successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption and use is for everything to be built into the technology, itself. Their view is that all of the issues of deployment and adoption can be addressed by how the technology is designed. They hold that an organization can be moved to be a more "Need To Share"-type organization by virtue of what is embedded in the technology.

Other people believe that technology is only the nuts and bolts and is limited in what it can accomplish by itself. These people hold that what most influences deployment, adoption and successful use are organizational changes to the processes, behaviors, configurations and the resulting culture.

Six Important Conversations To Have To Bridge The Enterprise 2.0 Cultural Gap

There appears to be a growing recognition that successfully dealing with cultural issues is a critical success factor in the deployment and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools and the changes in ways of working related to these tools. Many of the presenters at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston spoke of the importance of culture in Enterprise 2.0 deployment in organizations. A common comment was, "it's not about the tools, it's about the culture."

The change management challenge is to move the organization deploying Enterprise 2.0 tools from what may be a traditional, hierarchical, command and control culture to one that is less hierarchical, and more collaborative, agile, open and transparent - characteristics which are more congruent with Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Here are six conversations that I recommend occur in your organization that will help your organization bridge the cultural gap between the status quo and the organization as an effective user of Enterprise 2.0 tools. This builds on a previous post where I stated that "to optimize the technology and achieve improvements in organizational effectiveness...a focus on the overall organization is important."