Lift11 talk: Lee Bryant on "the social organization"

Lee Bryant is an online community and social networking specialist, and co-founder of the leading social business consultancy Headshift (part of the Dachis Group), which helps companies adopt social tools to support new ways of working.

At Lift11, Lee will talk about the "social enterprise", how we need to shift our organizations from the 19th century model to a more network based form of collective intelligence.

Lee Bryant

Managing Director Europe, Dachis Group
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Laurent Haug: what is the current situation inside organizations?

Lee Bryant: We are still working within an old model based on a fundamental assumption: that people do not want to work. It is the carrot and stick paradigm. We are finally starting to understand motivation better, but it will take time for these insights to flow through into organisational design and philosophy. Getting the social dynamics and calibration right promises a lower-friction, lower-cost future where positive behaviours spread within networks and we need less management, in the traditional sense.

The energy for an organizational system comes from people, not management. By making individuals more autonomous and responsive to change, you can actually cut costs and control mechanisms. We are shifting away from a central intelligence to a more distributed system. Intelligence is showing up at the edges, and this has the potential to bring organizations to life, creating an immune system that adapts and responds.

So our organizations are still structured along 19th century lines, how should it happen in the 21st century?

First, we need network centric organizations. We learned from the social web that networks of autonomous individuals can be a great force, able to achieve spectacular things like Wikipedia and Ushahidi. Concretely, it begins with creating more discussion and exchange, and putting in place feedback mechanisms that allow the understanding of what is happening, and where, to be shared where it matters most.

The second key element is energy. In organizations, energy is a combination of motivation, ideas and information. In small startups, we often see a small group of people achieve great things with little or no management. How do we scale this and apply it to large organizations, teaching them to try, learn, adapt and improve - to evolve. The way we do it is not to seek to change or replace everything and forget about the past. Instead, we try to weave a new networked, social layer on top, and over time hope that this will spread until it becomes the place where work gets done.

Tools are an important part of this transition, but it mostly comes down to how you motivate and connect people, and create opportunities for positive behaviours to win. We call this social experience design. We don't have all the answers, and this field is developing all the time, based on experimentation, experience and the synthesis of new and old ideas. But there is something happening, for sure, and it's big.

In what context are all these changes happening?

More connectivity. More transparency. More competition. Evolutionary systems, rather than mechanical systems.

Then there are the technologies themselves, often taken for granted by workers who can use them at home, but are frustrated at the workplace because of restrictions and policies that end up having a negative impact. That is an interesting phenomenon. In many cases, it is the employees themselves who are asking for new technologies because they have already adopted them in their private life.