Cloud Citizen

What if you had a socially constructed operating manual that reliably delivered sustained strategic superiority?

Of all the thinking exercises a company goes through, the most important concerns that which sustains the competitive advantage that keeps its customers loyal and prevents them defecting to rivals.

So, if a company’s strategy is its life-support system, the most important question any business must answer every day is, is our strategy working?

It is said that a strategy must become an organisation’s way of life, but of course this is so only if the answer is yes.

If your own life depended on it, you probably wouldn’t buy a life-support system that didn’t come with an operating manual. So, why wouldn’t you aim to develop one that provided a better way of building more robust, responsive strategy for your business?

Likely as not, in any business, to achieve any of the array of possible favourable outcomes, effective strategy formulation will no longer be a one, two or three-man job, because the world is changing and the tools are here to enable a better job to be done collectively.

A company must develop a way of giving shape to its strategy that makes sense from the sum of the intelligence and experience available to it, not just a sub-set.

By engaging social technologies in this pursuit, many minds may make lighter work of developing new opportunities, because each has a perspective and critical sensitivities no other shares. But, collectively, they will only transform the scope for better strategy formulation if their understanding of the context in which they are making their contribution is common and shared.

As that is not the case in an overwhelming majority of companies, this is likely only to happen best when organisational learning, focused and directed for this purpose lies at the core of effective strategy formulation.

Community learning is a powerful force. There is energy to be tapped here, and common purpose and interest, because it protects livelihoods and provides opportunities for personal growth.

More importantly, when everyone is learning together, the most compelling purpose for applying that growing intelligence is to focus on strategy, because the articulation of strategic need paints a shared destiny and reveals the competencies on which the future organisation must itself be built.

As it is the stone on which the attainment of factors critical to success will be built, the explicit recognition of required competencies will come to shape the organisation itself. It will focus the learning of the learners.

Given a new, shared sense of where it is heading, the organisation has many new choices.

What delivers operational excellence to the business but does not deliver explicit strategic advantage may no longer need to form a core part of its operation. That which is not strategic may be achieved and managed in other ways, perhaps even outsourced.

Better knowledge and awareness improves focus on what matters most.

Much less a document than frame of self-constructed understanding, the operating manual for developing better strategy is built through the active engagement of precisely those sensitivities and insights that enable the organisation to learn from itself, that keep it in business and grant it the strongest possibility for sustained strategic superiority.

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Social business re-engineering: what is your strategy?

Over many years, companies have made major investments in technology to give their businesses a distinctive edge, a new competency that competitors find it hard to match.

Now, rather than the implements themselves, it may be the way which in certain instances cheap, generic tools of shared, social creativity, paid for by subscription, are used that provides the competitive advantage. As Michael Dell claimed for his Dell Computer back in 1998, some may be able to substitute intellect for inventory.

The tools place emphasis back on the inventiveness of human beings working together and their combinations of unique competencies that are valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate, and can not be substituted by other resources.

The social technologies and the flow of human capital that is their currency will unleash a wave of change within organisations and the way work is done, the like of which we have not seen since, as Harvard Business school professor Gary Hamel put it in mid-2011, the pyramids were built.

Hamel suggests one of the next major waves of innovation will be in management itself. His The Future of Management remains essential reading on this subject, despite having first been published in 2007.

It looks as if we will see the age of social re-engineering and the evaluation of a new ROI, the return on intellect, or on innovation or imagination, take your pick.

It is clear that not everyone will benefit from this.

The 2009 movie, Transcendent Man, about technologist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, suggests that as we build the next technologies with the ever-improving tools of the present, progress is exponential and may lead to humans encountering the “singularity”, an age in which humans and machines find integration and humans may be able to live forever. He puts this date at 2045.

Clearly, better enabled and more effectively enabled teams of human beings will contribute to this acceleration, which will influence the ways in which companies select and reward their teams. Effective knowledge contributors are likely to be high on their pick lists.

Nevertheless, how your workers are engaged, what they know and how that information is brought together in the creation of sustainable businesses which have the potential for creating competitive advantage is likely to become a defining differentiator.

Achieving the organisational agility future competition will demand is in large part about removing factors that impede it and reinforcing those that enable it.

The future differential is likely to be found in how distinctively a company can fashion its human response to keep it ahead. Currently, however, rigid hierarchy, in a world that favours networks, geography and 20th century management models are the major obstacles in many mature organisations wrestling the challenge of nimbleness.

Social technologies enable people to come together to dream up ways of doing a better job. How this is done itself creates a new kind of competency.

They make a team of committed people better attuned to spotting opportunity and they can help to facilitate a state of permanent and ready inventiveness.

Within any business, there are many layers of intelligence that remain unused and much game-shaping tacit knowledge to be drawn on which has to date has been underexploited.

When many organisations continue to retrench those with long-established workplace knowledge, this may come to be valued more highly when socially constructed knowledge itself is valued at premium.

This blog and the conversation it aims to become part of focus on organisational activities that can lead to new future states for businesses that wish to stay abreast of the change.

It looks at innovation as enabled by a collaborative "Enterprise 2.0" approach to its management. Enterprise 2.0 presupposes that an organisation’s forces for innovation can be more effectively harnessed, even across distance, by stimulating the creative collisions of tacit knowledge and insights of those who work within an organisation.

It looks at agility, and the future being about networks of competencies coming together in endless new and unprecedented reconfigurations to create and capitalise new learning and knowledge.

It talks about the need for purposeful organisational learning that ensures opportunities to share and learn are built steadily through networking the insights of those who do the work, where it happens.

One purpose of such learning will be to identify both ways in which work can be done better, where businesses are weak or vulnerable and to focus insights at the interface of change itself.

This has some profound learning for management, but once organisations find this is good for business, it will drive further exploration in every field of commercial endeavour.

And because all business models are vulnerable to the forces of time, it will expose those whose duration is up, just as part of the natural cycle of creation and destruction always has done.

Hierarchies are out, learning networks are in, so it’s time to get with the new ways of doing things. For some, it may prove easier said than done.

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