Dave Snowden in his address on Social Computing & KM during the KM India summit brought about a point on how current organizational structures are not suited for creating social networks and hinder performance. Dave explained this with the Matrix Organizational Structure where people have multiple reporting relationships and no one is sure which way their loyalties should be.

Dave talked about the “Crew or Military Model” of team formation which he termed as more adaptive in nature based on the concepts of  “Role” & “Expectation of role”. He explained this with an example of how teams are formed in airlines or ships. People who may or may not have worked before come together to form a team and work as a team based on an understanding of what each persons role is and what to expect from that role.

In the IT industry this model, in intent, is a model that most software development organizations ‘aspire’ to implement while creating teams for developing software. I believe that in theory this is a good concept but there are several questions that need to answered and various soft aspects thought. For example

• “Crew” model would work for teams where the tasks are repeatable, tasks which have little room for variation and have to be done “the same as before way” on time. Tasks which have the procedures defined and the job of the person doing is to just follow the procedures and do it.

• For example, airline crew. pilot, co-pilot, air hostess, stewards, checkin counter assistants. The kind of tasks involved are routine, repeatable, well documented, and need to be performed with precision every time.

• In the software industry, for example each development project is unique and the development life-cycle is ‘not predictable‘ to say the least.  To compound matters, skills required may not be available and training may have to done while on the job. This is not the case in crew model where almost all the times things are predictable and follow a predictable sequence.  For example, in an airplane you can predict what would happen from the time you take a boarding pass and go to your seat to the time you get down from the flight. It is all very very predictable, linear & sequential. There is no room for variation — unless it is a private chartered russian flight

• Though one may say that even in software development we have roles like PM, Technical Leads, DBA’s etc etc and we know what is expected of that role. However, the reality is that software development is an iterative, some what chaotic, emergent process. There is a complex interplay between all stake holders to create the ‘intangible’ software that people want. Now by very nature of their business, airlines/ships can’t have an iterative, some what chaotic, emergent process to the nature of work that teams do there. Imagine a team of  air hostess emulating an iterative, some what chaotic, emergent process to serve the passengers.!!!

• Another important element is the “customer engagement” in the whole development life-cycle itself where requirements are fluid and can keep changing. Now one could argue that even in a ship or a airplane there is engagement required with the customers, but that engagement and the choices available and hence the options that the crew can exercise are from a limited set that is almost well known in advance.  It would be only in an adverse situation of a ship capsizing or a plane mishap (e.g. hi-jack) that the engagement model between all the participants becomes fluid and relatively unknown.

• The most important aspect I feel is the “nature of work” itself.  By very nature, software engineering calls for continuous learning & updation of skills while on the job. This is not necessarily true for airline or ship teams. Not to say that they don’t need to learn or improve their skills but that is within a very narrow band and at a slow pace than in software engineering. This aspect leads to totally different  behavioral, motivational, aspirational & emotional factors within individuals that then influence people, teams & how they work.

• I also think that teams in crew models the teams need to “coordinate” with each other to perform the task whereas in software development teams need to “collaborate” with each other to perform the task. These two things may look similar but call for totally different actions, engagement models within teams.

The above are just some of the many questions out there. What do you think?

Would ‘Crew or Military’ models of team formation work effectively in software developments? What could be other challenges and opportunities?

Let me illustrate what I mean by 2 examples:

#1: Some time back I had posted about alleged malpractices of Skoda India and so did many other bloggers around India. This incident had nothing to do with me personally and was just my views on what I had heard on an automobile forum. I do not (and don’t intend to) own a Skoda car and yet someone from Skoda India read my blog and here is the comment they posted on my blog and the emails they sent to me had the following (name/email/phone number masked to prevent misuse):

“Please get in touch with Mr. XXXXX from the Skoda after sales department on xxxxx@skoda-auto.co.in or 0240 xxxxxx to resolve your concerns”

Now this action on behalf of Skoda India an act of reaching out just for the sake of reaching out. It has no value at all and just be reading it shows the lack of sincerity that is obvious in the interaction. Here I saw presenting my views and I don’t even own a Skoda and how would reaching out to  “Skoda after sales department” help me ??

#2: Sometime back I along with few friends went to a reputed/upscale restaurant for dinner and since we had landed up there without reservation we had to wait for a table. After some time of waiting we were given a table and a smartly dressed, smiling, english speaking waiter came to the table and asked us if we would like regular water or mineral bottled water. We mentioned our choice and he went away and brought water and even poured for us.
As we settled down, the manager came to our table and mentioned that we were given a table that was actually meant for some one else  (a family that had been waiting for some time now) and would it be possible for us to wait for another table and have that family take this table. He made a sincere request and we all agreed and we told the waiter that we will wait  for a table. After some 10 minutes or so we got a table and we settled down there.

Now the same smartly dressed, smiling, english speaking waiter comes to our table  and asks us this question: “would you like regular water or mineral bottled water sir”. we were like zapped..!!! That person, just 10 minutes ago had a conversation with us and had taken our preference and even poured water for us and how come he doesn’t even remember what kind of water do we want???
He was just smiling and that smile just said one thing… “fake smiles & customer service — just for the sake of it”…

Let me put in a disclaimer first: I am no innovation & creativity expert and firmly believe that innovation needs to be embedded in our thought process in everything we do.

However, I have been involved with and seen quite a few aspects of innovation, creativity etc from close quarters and have interacted with the so called innovation SME’s from the industry quite often.

Few days back, some of my friends were discussing about innovation & role of ‘innovation experts’ and an interesting case of  an ’self styled, keyboard’ innovation expert came up. She was working as an innovation expert and was responsible for creating an innovation culture within the organization.  It came about that all she did was bitch about how the organization was not ready for innovation & no one listened to her & how that organizations innovation strategy was all wrong, etc.. etc. Now, think of it, she was responsible for doing all this.  If all this was already there and the organization was ready and things were rosy, then why did the organization even need her in the first place

Friends from that organization mentioned that all she did in that organization was read books, blog, attend conferences, confuse people with theories, use jargon and project herself as an innovation expert. “she was happy talking about innovation rather than helping with/demonstrating innovation” was what people told me.

Here are some of the key points that came out of an intense discussion about these so called/self styled “innovation experts”.

• Most of the times these innovation experts have NO CLUE to what they are talking about and are far removed from reality/business context
  • The irony is that these experts try to cover this aspect in the name of innovation/creativity to be as blue sky as possible
• Most of the experts have read a couple of books on innovation etc and then use jargon’s from these books to ‘demonstrate’ their know how as innovation experts
  • In the process these so called innovation experts have become “keyboard” or ‘armchair” experts doling out advice
• Most of the experts are REAL experts in scanning the internet for news/articles that talk  about innovation and then these ‘keyboard’ innovation experts try and show which technique was used and how a great idea it was
  • Here they refer to books that they have read to justify their theory and techniques used
• The above 2 (reading books & commenting on techniques used in articles) creates a self fulfilling cycle where the only work these so called ‘innovation experts’ are doing is the above 2
• Most of these experts have not done ANY innovation in their own domain/work areas. ZILCH is mostly what you will find. All they like to do is “talk” and not “do”. Most of their talking/writing is also almost always about ‘past’ and seldom about future. At best their future talk is very ‘general’ and of very low value

It is also important to mention that there are some great “innovation students” who are not called “innovation experts” but have managed to learn and appreciate about the role of innovation/creativity in their core work area. I know of a couple of such ‘innovation students’ who are very very technically competent and in senior positions and are successfully trying to mesh innovation/creativity into their every day work and things they do.

My money on furthering the cause of innovation lies in such ’students’ rather than the  ‘experts’… These experts are nothing but the One Eyed Kings in the Land of the Blind…

A series of interesting and very powerful real life events are unfolding that are showing the power of a well know online community vs corporate muscle power.

“Mr Harish has been an unfortunate recipient of Skoda’s appalling standards of service. His only fault? That he spent 12 lakh rupees on the wrong brand. His Skoda had parts worth a whopping 4.0 lakh rupees replaced by counterfeit ones by Skoda’s official dealer / representative; fake parts that could have taken a toll on his family’s life (e.g. fake brake discs installed in his car). Now, Skoda is busy fighting him in court. Not to mention, his Skoda Octavia has yet not been returned to him. IN A YEAR!

Instead of apologising and making up to its so-obviously-wronged customer for their dealer / representative misdeeds, Skoda continues to fight the poor gentleman.

Harish turned to Team-BHP for support and posted his entire Skoda ordeal here (Skoda dealer changes parts in my car = Consumer Court = Car not returned in a YEAR!) with FACTS and supporting pictures.

Skodas response: Threaten the community and trying to curb freedom of speech.

Obviously, this has created a stir within the Team-BHP Community. Members are angry and united against Skoda.

Follow the full story here:

http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/indian-car-scene/54881-skoda-dealer-changes-parts-my-car-consumer-court-car-not-returned-year.html

http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/indian-car-scene/55796-team-bhp-stands-truth-but-skoda-wants-instigate-team-bhp-its-users.html

This is going to be a big one and will show the power of online communities in the digital age.

Does an organization need a dedicated and separate KM function in order for it to do KM?

If one looks at great organizations like Google, Apple Yahoo (who are considered to be great Knowledge led organizations), they don’t have dedicated KM functions. What’s important is that the basic tenets, ethos and culture of KM needs to be part of the organizations ‘being’, the way of life — akin to the breathing process, doing it continuously without even realizing it.

All the above organizations (and many more) are role models in the knowledge era. The great thing about these organizations create processes & structures that truly embody the spirit of the ‘needs’ of the knowledge worker and through that they are able to attract the best talent and provide them with an environment that goes to the core of what knowledge management espouses.  They don’t do KM for the sake of KM and saying ‘oh, we also do KM and realize the importance of it and hence we have dozens of knowledge managers supporting KM’…

I personally believe in the approach taken by the Google, Apple Yahoo type organizations as an effective way of doing KM.

For the ‘regular’ organizations I believe that creating a dedicated KM function is a good thing to bring ‘focus’ on KM and giving it legitimacy. This will send the right signals and help get going.

However, for KM to be truly effective in those organizations, over a period of time, the KM function should strive for  enabling the different parts of the organizations to do KM themselves and not rely on the KM function. This is where KM needs to be part of the organizations ‘being’, the way of life. This should be the role and end goal of CKO’s and they should also be measured on this aspect. Once the above has started to happen (and this should happen in a measurable/definite time frame) then the KM function should be considered for  dissolution and the charter of the KM function should become to just oversee it’s disbanding

The above may look good in theory but there are practical challenges like (just some of the many…):

• Over a period of  time the person leading the KM function can get attached to it and can find it difficult to let go.
• KM has overlap with almost all functions and in the beginning there is less conflict and at a conceptual level people agree for KM to work on the areas of overlap and make progress. As clarity emerges and overlap areas gain traction, the different functions start voicing or thinking about what do these overlaps mean and start questioning this.
• This creates ground for small battles in bigger organizational ‘turf wars’ and results in various functions/departments further entrenching in their beliefs/positions and the organization opting for ’status quo’ approach to please all.

It’s sad but a true mirage and we continue to rely on “Knowledge Management needing the KM Function to be successful” approach…

A recent book that I was reading reminded me of a yet to be published book that has been lingering in my mind for a very long time.

We have the seminal book — ‘my experiments with truth’ by Mahatma Gandhi and for long I have desired to read a contemporary and a corporate version of that message. A version that has been written by a great corporate leader, talking about ‘moments of truth’ from a corporate context. A journey through the tough moments in the corporate world with all the human elements of their right and wrong decisions, human failure, temptations, greatness, etc. The book would NOT be about the ‘company/organization’ but about the business leader and their ‘moments of truth’.

The book can be written by a business leader, looking back at his/her own corporate journey(from a ‘moments of truth’ perspective) or can be a compilation of chapters from all the great business leaders of this country(or the world).

I am sure that the young professional would benefit immensely from such experiences. Too often we have books that portray our business leaders as heroes but very few, if any, that talk about their being human and their ‘moments of truth’ in a corporate context. I also know that this is a very sensitive subject and not many people would be willing to share their ‘moments of truth’…

eb2.0 & Automotive portals? wow..!!! As a passionate automobile enthusiast and a firm Web.20 believer, it represents the best of both worlds for me.

I have been following the auto portal scene in India from the late 90’s and have seen them evolve, stagnate and fade away. Have witnessed portals such as indiacar.com, cybeersteering.com, bsmotoring.com come and stagnate in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

When ‘AutoMartIndia‘ (now called ‘FirstChoice‘) was launched in early 2000’s, as an automobile enthusiast I was excited as it represented a paradigm shift in the way Indians bought & sold ‘used cars‘. In fact, the term ‘used cars’ came into existence — at least in India after that only. Previously ‘used cars’ were always referred to as ‘second hand‘ cars.

In the last one year or so, I have been very impressed by carwale.com. The way these folks have approached about building an auto portal is simply great. They put in one feature at a time, must have analyzed user behavior to ensure that it was working spot on, and then built on the simple web2.0 premises of usability & simplicity tied together and anticipating user needs. Once you looked at carwale.com, you realized — why the hell did other auto portals not think of it? This is exactly what I as a user wants.!! Features like used car prices to the granular level of models/city and mileage are a great boon to users. carwale perfected this with tapping into it’s user base to come up with city/model specific indicative pricing for used cars. There are a number of other features that one can go on and on about the value proposition that carwale.com provides — both to end user(car buyer) and car sellers (individuals & used car dealers).

Of late numerous auto portals that are replicas of carwale.com have come up. In my opinion, while this is testimony to the fact that carwale.com is successful and good, is also resulting in mee-too auto portals‘ whose value proposition is exactly same as that of carwale.com. While this can also be termed as expansion of market, this leads to stifling of innovation & new business models. These mee-too auto portals are doing exactly what the auto portals of late 90’s did — copy each other.

Don’t believe me: Just look at the home pages of three different auto portals(carwale.com, carazoo.com, driveinside.com). It would be very hard for a user to distinguish one from another.

In the ‘print’ media, auto magazines like Overdrive, Business Standard Motoring, Autocar, etc cater to the motoring enthusiast of the country and all of these are very successful print magazines. For years, these magazines have been the sole medium for the auto enthusiasts to keep in touch with the passion they are mad about — automobiles.

Similarly, in the ‘television’ space, literally every channel worth it’s name is having it’s own ‘auto’ show  — at times with tie-ups with the ‘print’ magazines. These ‘auto’ shows on television have their ‘experts’ who are very knowledgeable and respected in the motoring world and very often these ‘experts’ are also the experts/editors of the print magazines. These experts often do the following:

• Answer queries on issues/problems that viewers face with their  vehicles
• Recommend which vehicle to buy to their viewers depending on their needs
• Analyze the auto industry for happenings and trends
• And other things – like international motoring scene, product launches, motor sports etc.

In the ‘internet’ space, as far as ‘automotive business websites/portals’ go, there seems to be a vacuum w.r.t websites/portals that can be termed as successful and having a broad user base (with the exception of carwale.com – a late entrant).  Many of the internet websites/portals aimed at the automotive segment were even backed by big names of the tv/print media – autocarindia.com from the Autocar stable, bsmootoring.com from Business Standard, Indiacar.com, cybersteering.com, overdrive.in from the Overdrive magazine.

One can safely assume that auto experts were involved with these websites and they would have shared all their experience. Why were these internet websites not able to catch the users attention in India and become successful? All these websites seem to have the ‘obvious’ and ‘seemingly right’ set of features available to make them successful. Most of the websites offer the following:

• News from the auto industry & editorial articles
• Compare vehicles
• Buy & sell vehicles
• Road Tests
• Ask the experts
• Prices of vehicles

It seems that most of the print magazines don’t know how they can leverage the internet and create communities of auto enthusiasts. At most, these print magazines view their internet websites as the place to advertize about their print magazine and few other add-ons. These magazines are not taking a strategic view of how ‘building communities’ can increase the sales/subscription of their  print magazines. It can offer a whole new paradigm of distribution channels, business models and extremely great competitive advantage.

In a subsequent post, I will talk about a auto website/portal that is successfully ‘building communities’ and is perfectly poised to leverage the user community into a great competitive advantage.

Why do all experiments conducted on software/professionals fail? In my post on the wisdom of crowds experiment, I wrote on an experiment conducted on approximately 150 computer professionals.

Coincidentally, I attended a conference where Richard Gabriel spoke on ‘In Search of Beauty’ and expanded on Christopher Alexander’s work: ‘Timeless way of Building’.

In one of the slides he had images of 2 carpets kept side by side and asked the audience as to which one was ‘more beautiful, more like an image of themselves, more human’. About 1/3 of the audience choose the one on the left and 2/3 choose the one on the right.

He mentioned that this result was a conclusive proof that we all were computer professionals. ONLY in this sample group did the results always come up this way and in all other sample groups – doctors, psychologists, biologists, lawyers, normal people etc, 9 out of 10 people choose the carpet on the left.

This raises a question: Is it something to do with software/computer professionals – all experiments that seem to work on ‘normal people’ fail on them?

Quite a few experiments, like counting the number of coins in a jar & guessing the weight of the cake have been conducted to test out the ‘wisdom of crowds’ concept. Recently I got a chance to conduct an experiment at a gathering of approximately 150 people — all software/computer professionals

We put up a jar filled with éclairs and asked the audience to guess the number of éclairs in the jar and note it down on a piece of paper and hand it over to us. Obviously, we were excited to know the results – if the experiment worked, did someone guess the correct number?

Here are the results:

We had responses ranging from 25 éclairs to 786 éclairs. The actual number of éclairs in the jar was 204. Out of the 134 responses, only 1 person got the number right. The average, the ‘collective wisdom’ of the ‘crowd’ was 161.4 – an accuracy % of 79.14.

The results have left me wondering as to why did the results not concur with the ‘wisdom of crowds’ theory. After all, the following elements of ‘wisdom of crowds’ were present in the experiment:

• There was enough diversity among the participants. even though all the participants were software engineers, they came from different project teams, had varying levels of experience, roles etc.

• Each person was making his/her own independent choice and was not influenced by any other member

• There was means for us to collect and aggregate the responses.

The fourth element ‘Decentralization — people being able to specialize and draw on local knowledge’ can be debated to be missing from the experiment. How can we assume that there were people specializing in guessing the number of éclairs in a jar? How could they draw on local knowledge?

In Galton’s experiments, there were people who were butchers and farmers who one can assume to be specializing in ox/cattle. In ‘Guess the weight of the Cake’ experiment, people could feel the cake in their hands, there were people who were traders and hence one can assume that ‘knowing the weight of an object’ was something that they were familiar with.

The ‘guess the number of coins’ experiment was an online experiment and had no option for people to see, to feel the jar, hold it in their hands. Similar aspects were present in the experiment we conducted – we just showed people the jar filled with éclairs. We did not have people holding the jar, touching it, feeling it. Could such seemingly insignificant things allow people to make more informed choice? I don’t know.

BTW, ‘Guess the weight of the cake’ experiment was 99% successful even though it had just 120 participants whereas ‘guess the number of coins’ experiment was just 88% successful even though it had 1760 participants. This indicates that while the sample size could be a factor, but it does not seem so in the above examples.

I am wondering if aspects of ‘cognition, cooperation, coordination’ are present in such experiments?

What about the sample composition itself – all software/computer professionals? Do they bring diversity or are software professionals just not the right sample for any kind of experiment?

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