Just finished Blink by Malcolm Gladwell which is a fascinating read.  One of the concepts he discusses is being “in command but out of control”.

The context is a U.S. war game in which Van Riper was placed in command of a rogue state (Red team) engaged in conflict against the U.S. (Blue team).  The U.S. had overwhelming numbers and data, and the Red team needed a way to counter their advantage.

Van Riper achieved this in part by going against the conventional wisdom of strategy meetings and terminology such as “Operational Net Assessment”.  He deployed a messy system of decision making where he provided overall guidance and intent, but the forces were trusted to use their own initiative and wisdom to make rapid decisions and rapid assessments without having to constantly explain themselves.

The key is that the sub-ordinates were trusted to do their job well.  Often when talking to clients about Enterprise 2.0 (or even something as basic as instant messaging) I’ll get the feedback that “they might spend all their time messing around”.  I have to respectfully suggest they have seemingly well behaved employees up to today, and something as simple as instant messaging turns them into serial time wasters then a) they have the wrong employees and b) they have employed some rather strange people who will transform from productive worker to time waster just because they have discovered instant messaging!

If trust in your employees is a legitimate reason not to deploy Enterprise 2.0 then you have serious problems within your business that need fixing first before you even consider Enterprise 2.0.

In fact – I’d be surprised you’re still trading at all and that some employee hasn’t sold the company CRM data to a competitor.

We see this outside of business to – there has been a pendulum swing recently on the value of setting targets in the public sector.  When the Labour government came to power, NHS waiting lists and police accountability were serious issues.  Targets were the answers, with the NHS and the police having to meet targets and fill in the required paperwork.  They were not able to operate spontaneously as Van Riper’s Red team could – they had to constantly account for what they were doing.

Recently the pendulum has swung back.  The targets started to be gamed – and there was serious public concern that police and healthcare professionals were spending far too much time filling in forms and not enough time doing their job.  Worse, on occasion the target encouraged un-desirable behaviour, such as only focusing on crime that was easy to solve (such as speeding tickets) in order to boost ’solve’ figures.

So this has nothing to do with instant messaging, blogs, wikis or social networking.  This is about whether or not you trust your employees enough to be in Command but not Control.  And if you don’t, is the answer to impose a bureaucracy of targets and accountability or find new employees?

Van Riper’s Red team thoroughly beat the Blue team by the way.  The U.S. re-wound the war game and put someone else in charge of Red.

One of the trends I’ve been noticing over the last 6 months or so is the focus of IT solutions being seen as a way of squeezing cost out of a business has faded. Instead, there is much more of a focus on how to drive innovation to grow the top line and differentiate an organisation in the marketplace. Obviously, we see Web 2.0 tools and corporate Facebook-style social networking as a great way to drive innovation.

It’s always good to see others reflecting this idea. I’ve just started reading The Only Sustainable Edge by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. They write “applications promised to standardize business processes … and deliver substaintial operating savings along the way”. However “savings no longer suffice: the savings are lost in competition and captured by customers.”
From the academic to the conversational, I tend to follow Ed Brill’s blog quite closely. He was asked recently what career advice he would give college (university) students. His answer was to contribute to innovation. Why? Because ” in so many industries, innovation is now the competitive differentiator”. Whereas organisations may have previously thought more about who the idea came from rather than what the idea is (Not Invented Here syndrome), social networking tools allow an idea to be developed via the wisdom of crowds by all sorts of people within an organisation, not just those at the top of the pecking order, or even those outside your company.

As Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems) said “there are always more smart people outside your company than within it”. Further, there are always more smart people within the company who are not on the board than those who are. Companies that encourage and nurture ideas wherever they come from, by using a social network irrespective of who belongs to it, will find a truly sustainable edge for the future.