Rethinking enterprise issues.

I have already shared a summary of my one-day TEDxBoston experience on this blog.  If you are interested in tracking the TEDxBoston activities, you can become a Facebook fan, track their Twitter feed, or just visit their web page.  I’m going to highlight the talk that Melissa Withers gave about the work she is doing at the Business Innovation Factory — BIF.  When you have a quiet 20 minutes, watch this video.

This video moved me; I trust it did the same for you.  I want to share a few thoughts as it relates to thinking and rethinking.  I know very little about elder care.  I am grateful that my parents are healthy and living independently in their home as they get advanced in years.  I was too young and geographically distant to experience the aging process of my grandparents.  But elder care is important — and it is in our future as human beings — and the complex issues and needs are increasingly relevant and timely.  We will be taking care of elderly people — and we will be elderly ourselves.  For those of you who have first-hand experiences here, I’m sure the idea that people are really working on making this system work gives you hope.

As I watched the talk, I was drawn by the details of the ethnographic and system design processes used to understand this environment.  So I wanted to step out of the topic of elder-care and just talk about the thinking process.  Near the 5 minute mark Melissa talks about the complexity of the aging process and the journey between various institutions of care — and she remarked “Being older is no less circuitous than being younger.”  We simplify processes that we are not familiar with, but when we look more closely, we are amazed at their complexity.

Near the 6 minute mark Melissa makes another keen observation — that most of the thinking about elder care starts from the perspective of the institutions that provide services and support to elders.  Melissa’s team took a different approach — to put the elder experience at the center.  She says

“When was the last time you heard from an elder what their experience is? It’s really absent from the conversations.  You wouldn’t design a sneaker without asking a 14 year what they thought about it.  But we have no problem designing  whole environments for elders without asking them what they think.”

This line startled me, because it was so obvious at that moment that she was right, and yet a moment before when she spoke about the “institutions that provide services and support to elders” I thought “of course they are looking at this from an institutional perspective — you got to follow the money to understand the real story.”

One of the lessons I learned at work is “Same people plus same process yields same results.”  I coined this simple rule after I found the same team sent by their managers to correct the problems they created in the first place.  To get different results, you need different people, or a different approach to the problem.  In some cases you need to change both. Changing people (swapping out team members or retraining work habits) is a big deal — you don’t want to loose expertise. Changing process can be very difficult too. Processes evolve – and therefore have inertial force.  But a changes in thinking changes results too.  By redesigning a process from the perspective of the “user” – you can radically improve it.

Let me bring this back to the discussion of Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management.  Last week I spoke with two organizations who had “KM problems”.  In both cases they found that associates were not filling out all the information into their system of record.  What resulted was an inability to look back at older cases and extract “knowledge” about the process to help train new associates.  It’s a common problem — associates were never motivated to fill out forms and stuff SharePoint with documents.  They were motivated to bring open cases to closure efficiently. Their respective approaches to the problem was to get new tools or to figure out new ways to mandate compliance.  I told both companies that their approach will not work and I explained why.

My inspiration was this rethinking that Melissa suggested in her talk on elder care.  Without understanding the workflow from the perspective of the associate at work, I assert that it is very difficult to find real change with the same people and process.  It’s somewhat obvious to me when I  see the problem from the outside.  But one of my clients could not understand why a management edict in the form of “Thou shalt upload all documents to SharePoint in a timely manner” would not work.

What did I suggest?  I won’t go into details, but it was also inspired by my last blog post — about behavioral nudges.  What do you think of this?  Let me know.

Tagged as: conference, Enterprise 2.0, innovation, knowledge management, presentation, success story, workplace