I’ve been pondering Self-selecting, Self-Management…kind of like we are all freelancers in the workplace. But what happens when you can’t find tasks yourself, is there a back-up plan to keep you working inbetween tasks

Work group fatigue : level of effort vs funded, or transform the organisation!
http://bit.ly/5Er21D

You say that if I’m arguing against systems that I’m arguing against the existence of systems at all.

Not so.

I agree that systems exist. In the natural world, Weather patterns, for example are systems. As are termites, ants, bees, birds, fish and other phenomena in the natural world. I think that human beings can use tools and systems together, without becoming systems themselves.

The problem is that we have come to think of organisations as sysems and then wonder why change management efforts don’t work – they don’t work because they assume organisations are systems and would respond to the kind of leverage and interventions a car would respond to – but they don’t.

I hope that answers your question.

However, what I am saying is that organisations and other social phenomena (i.e. where humans are interacting with each other) are not systems.

As a point of reference, emergence applies not only to the resulting environment but also to the process of facilitating the means to emerge. That is, technologists often err on not using emergent techniques to establish the non-blank possibilities. These are also not just 1-time techniques…they’re continuous.

This goes then goes from the blank page to the non-blank page to the continuously morphing non-blank page. They’re all different.

I have about 5 more in the queue that range from a top 5 pharma to the folks over at http://www.rustopedia.org where they are trying to tie together a scientific and activist community around solving a plant disease before it inflicts widespread famine.

The ones that I think are most pertinent to our discussion here are NHS, ShoreBank, KUKA and “European Pharmaceutical Group.”

A common theme I see is fear of the blank white page. With no structure and organizational cues, most folks have a hard time putting their collaboration-toe in the water. Give them a starting structure – a set of cues that suggest certain types of desired contribution, hopefully enhanced by management approval and preference for using the social software as a replacement for traditional communication approaches – and then folks will know just how to get started and can build and bend the system from there.

Take a simple case at KUKA where they started off by using the platform to identify, track, comment on, and resolve issues. They found that they needed to balance issue reporting with benefit reporting. Modifying the sections in the interface and adding a tag for this was simple. Another case there was when an Auditor asked if he could easily find every issue which could have a financial impact. They added a tag, and it was done.

At every turn, TeamPage offers the option for structure (tag and section templates, draft/publish moderation, control over who can edit articles or use tags) but never requires it outright. This allows it to serve the generally desired case where there is total freedom, but also means you can meet the universe of needs which inevitably come up (e.g. when an HR group has to suppress the ability for most people to read intermediate edits of a policy or a Customer Support group has to make an FAQ base that can’t be freely modified by any or all customers)

Creating a medium where people can simply communicate without the rigidity of down-to-up corporate structures opens the barn doors to self-organization. Without this, the necessary lines of communication between self-organizers block the activity. Adding initial structure to the style of communication can give a baseline use case that prompts faster adoption and more wide-spread use, but does not imply that the structure can’t change.

I think when talking about structure, the concept most people have is a process driven Lotus Notes DB or an Enterprise DB App like a CRM, both of which may be hard or impossible to change in a meaningful way – if you don’t follow a process, they break. The structure debate seems to focus on totally free form apps as the polar and ideal opposite. Based on all my experience, the deployments that do something in the middle – offering structural cues on “what to do” in a workspace but allowing all the freedoms you’d expect in any wiki/blog type system – is the happy medium where value is unlocked most effectively and quickly.

Are you willing to tell me something about that some time?

From what I’ve seen of discussions around emergent systems is they don’t allow for planning and coherence building. That is, self organizing often works better when there is some starting structure.

My best analogy here is a city planner. Most cities would be a disaster without a plan that helps dictate where commercial, residential and other types of structures and communities may exist. They help define codes for architectural standards and plumbing. Within that set of plans and codes – self organization takes root and excels.

We can’t plan for everything, and ideas + action + time force evolutionary and revolutionary changes with respect to the plan. So, the plans may change when the results of self-organization demand it – or present opportunities.

I think this plays well in the E2.0 scenario and just about every deployment I’ve worked on confirms that theory. Offer structures but don’t force them, allow any entry to exist in any context, and you have all the flexibility that the self organizing, emergent needs of people doing their daily work demand.

If you’re arguing against systems, then by definition you’d also have to be arguing against their existence at all (or you’d have a losing argument on your hands, at the core). An entity cannot participate with something and not become part of it, or validate its existence by the interaction.