Speaking For All Mankind

Nancy Dixon (author of one of the best books on communities of practice – CompanyCommand) has a great blog post about how NASA used conversation to capture knowledge gained from currently canceled Constellation program.  She describes how she helped NASA develop a knowledge capture strategy by working with NASA employees and other thought leaders in knowledge management.  Some excellent stuff here and I hope she formalizes the process into a book.

I’ve launched a new wiki based on my dissertation research. The purpose of the research was to examine a possible link between mental models, change visions, and organizational alignment.

As of 2006, there were over 1 million articles on organizational change and a multitude of change models in the literature. But, surprisingly, these change models were prescriptive rather than descriptive of actual change processes. I knew from my project management experience that most organizational change efforts fail or are only partly successful. What I wanted to do was develop a research method to collect empirical data on change efforts.

The entire dissertation is available on Scribd any you are welcome to download a copy. With the wiki, I have summarized the dissertation chapters and will update the research as new articles are published and I review other organizational change efforts.

I appreciate any comments or suggestions that any readers have and I am also looking for any agencies that are interested in being research subjects. Thank you.

“An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.”

This is going in my book on organizational failure.

Two interesting articles about organizational culture in the latest issue of the “Journal of Organizational Change Management.”  The first article is a cultural analysis of organizational memory and its role in organizational change while the second article describes how organizational memory can hinder learning a new technology.

In the first article, McCabe gives a more detailed description of organizational culture as a collection of shared memories.  These memories can contradict each other or just be ambiguous about past organizational events but, woven together, these memories form a dynamic and conflicting culture for the organization.  McCabe disputes the common belief of many management theorists that the past can be erased in favor of the new reality because the past always blocks change.  Organizational memory is more complex than that because some memories can help facilitate change while other aspects resist change.  McCabe concludes by stating that organizational memory cannot be managed as part of the change process but must be accounted for.

McCabe’s article illuminates the findings in the second article by Becker.  The second article deals with the process of acquiring new technology in an organization.  As Becker explains, for employees to adopt a new technology they must unlearn the old technology.  They do this through releasing mental models of the workings of the old technology and create mental models of how the new technology works.  Memories of past change efforts can hinder the process of unlearning if it promotes fear and anxiety among the employees.  Becker does not have any specific remedies for dealing with organizational memory and unlearning but she does argue that further research is necessary to fully understand the unlearning process.

The relevance to Gov 2.0 is clear.  Many agencies have long and painful memories of past change efforts that have been woven into the current culture.  Gov 2.0 advocates must understand and acknowledge the past while developing strategies to alleviate the fear that will prevent government employees from unlearning the current way things are done in favor of making government transparent, open, and engaging.  Gov 2.0 advocates must take the positive aspects of the past and use those events to counter the negative past events while realizing that culture cannot be fully controlled.

References:

Becker, K. (2010). Facilitating unlearning during implementation of new technology. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 23:3. 251-268.

McCabe, D. (2010). Taking the long view: A cultural analysis of memory as resisting and facilitating organizational change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 23:3. 230-250.

There is an experiment at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to change how government works. The idea is to stop measuring how much time an employee spends at the office but rather to measure how productive the employee is. The employee sets their own working hours and negotiates with their supervisor on what they should be producing and how it will be measured. It is a revolutionary concept and has worked in private industry.

A great example of this is how IBM has reinvented itself to use a ROWE-like environment. As Robert Paterson explains, IBM employees can live where they want and work in virtual teams based on their own schedules. What holds the workforce together is the use of social networking tools and the occasional face-to-face meeting. As Paterson writes, “If IBM can do this with 200,000 people so can you.”

One aspect that he mentions is the use of chat tools in place of meetings. This is not revolutionary as places I have worked at have using instant messaging systems to hold impromptu meetings. You can quickly get to the point, bring in people as needed, and there is a record of the meeting when you are finished.  And this was easily done with 2001 technology. I do not understand why more organizations don’t hold meetings this way instead of dragging everyone into the conference room for the weekly staff meeting.

Another great example from IBM is how well the virtual team works even though employees are in different countries and different time zones.  Allowing people to work at their natural productive hours means you will have better work and happier people.  An interesting point in the IBM experience is that face-to-face meetings are used to help workers build trust and tend to be about team-building rather than doing work.  I wonder how much more effective government workers would be if agencies devoted substantial time to team-building?

ROWE solves a lot of problems from the time wasted to commuting to balancing work-life issues. I’m hoping the OPM experiment is a success.  ROWE is clearly working in the private sector.

According to Mark Drapeau of O’Reilly.

I’ve been saying in various posts on GovLoop how important apps are to Gov 2.0 (not a unique insight as plenty of others have come to the same conclusion).  What is great is the idea of crowdsourcing the development of government apps.

“Dawn of the commercial space age.”

As the author points out, private spacecraft don’t have to meet the requirements for a deep space mission.

“11,800 Direct Jobs to Result From NASA’s $6.1 Billion Commercial Spaceflight Investment, Independent Analysis Shows.”