I recently attended a conference in Prague and had the
pleasure of listening and getting to know Luis Suarez. No, not the footballer,
but a Luis who works for IBM and who has some crazy ideas about social media,
email and Twitter. You can look him up on YouTube under his name but make sure
you add ‘Social Media’ otherwise you’ll be looking at videos showing the other
Suarez scoring goals for Liverpool or about his potential transfer to
Barcelona.
What the social media Suarez has done is to get rid of email
and use an internal social media site inside his organisation for communication
within and Twitter for communication without. His main reason for doing this is
to enhance learning and communication in IBM, which he believes is inhibited by
email. If people want to discuss something in private he suggests they use the
telephone although it seems to me they could use email for that. The internal
social networking site involves everyone and people can chat, post information,
send links to interesting sites, discuss issues and make decisions. It is what
we do with email but it is open.
Luis claims the results are astounding in terms of
creativity, sharing, participation, decision-making and learning. I can attest
to the latter because I have taken to using Twitter and it is amazing the
amount of information, connections and, indeed, learning that is available out
there. As he told me when I expressed my doubts because of the rubbish stuff
you get on Twitter, ‘You have to choose your tribe’. And he is right. I
communicate largely with education people and we share and talk about learning
stuff. If I want the social chit-chat I use Facebook and I keep the two
separate.
I am not surprised about Luis’ claims. For years I ran
strategic planning exercises for organisations. The key problem areas that came
up were always, yes always, poor communication, lack of information and low
participation. Nowadays we are calling this employee engagement- a term I think
is most apt. And the literature confirms that employee engagement is, by and
large, poor in most of our organisations. Something many CEOs are not aware of
or perhaps don’t think it’s important. Well, low engagement is costing them
lots of money.
We know that open systems function much more effectively
than closed systems, especially in a turbulent or even chaotic environment,
which we are definitely in right now (have been for 30 years but people often
don’t notice). Open systems are aware of their environment, monitor it and are
able to react to changes. To this end, they organise themselves internally by
making sure that everyone in the organisation is: engaged with the
organisational vision; able to provide feedback about what is going on in their
area of expertise; is an ambassador for the organisation; is active in
decision-making; has all the information they need to do their job to a high
level; recognise expertise and enable it; and tend to be flat in terms of
decision-making. The essence is that an organisation is organic and that every
part of it (every person) creates an opportunity for adaptation.
Most managers find this a difficult concept. It is much
easier to centralise information and decision-making in the hands of a few. It
is just too hard to get people together, to manage democratic participation, to
harness all the forces in the organisation. Delegating this to a series of
line-managers makes it more impossible because of control issues, even though
intuitively is seems the right thing to do.
Using the Louis Suarez approach makes it easier. The only
thing standing in the way is, wit, will and fear. The fear that management will
lose control, that the crazies out there will have a voice, that it is time
consuming and messy, that only senior managers have the good ideas. Let me tell
you that it is the crazies in your organisation that are most likely to have
the ideas that create success. If a manager has neither the wit nor the will
then they should not be in a management position.
None of these are good reasons for not adopting an open
systems approach. And now we have the technology to make it easy. If that’s too
hard then think of all the massive corporate mistakes made over the previous
100 years by organisations that could have been avoided had they been able to
think outside of the box and not had concentrated decision-making. And then think
of Apple- not without flaws but an open system, at least for now.
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