Category Archives: virtual organization

Lead your virtual organization from behind, and they will drive you forward

Posted on April 11, 2013 by | Leave a comment

The back of the bus

In March, 2013, David Reid at Palantir tweeted a quote: “Drupal’s community is a bus driven by the collective screams of its passengers.” At first glance, this seems really unfortunate. But on reflection, there are some great things going on here. First, it’s a bus, not a limo. Second, it’s filled with passengers. Third, they are passionately engaged in the destination of the bus. And fourth, the bus is responding to them. In short, the Drupal community is doing a lot of things right. 

This tweet took me back to a sunny afternoon in Berkeley at BADCamp. I was in front of Dwinelle Hall (where I first met my wife way back before there was an Internet) talking with Jacob Redding, who, at the time, was the Executive Director of the Drupal Association. I had recently finished Jono Bacon’s book, The Art of Community, taken from his experience helping to lead the community of developers who support the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. I mentioned to Jacob that, compared with Ubuntu, Drupal did not seem to be grounded in a common vision that was written down as a statement somewhere.

Jacob said that the Drupal community doesn’t have a single vision statement but the leaders of the project each may have their own. The Drupal project does have a mission statement (drupal.org/mission). In the project there is a lot of non-visible leadership. The Drupal Association is a good example of that. The Association does not guide or direct the project, but it certainly does watch what is happening with the project and provides the necessary support and services to either sustain momentum on areas in the project or encourage more involvement. “You can say the Drupal Association is leading from behind,” he said.

There are visionaries across the Drupal developer network, dozens of active people who are building new tools and pushing for better code. There are occasions in the year (at big Drupal Camps or at DrupalCon) and moments in the development cycle (sprints and telecons, in discussions on Drupal.org and elsewhere) where these leaders would come forward with their visions, and, at some point, a decision would happen. But the Drupal Association, which runs DrupalCon and hosts Drupal.org, is not out in front breaking trail for these decisions.

I called Jacob last week to get some clarity on this “leading from behind” technique. I might be involved in a grand experiment on governance that the NSF has fostered. It’s called EarthCube, and it proposes to corral all of the geosciences and environmental sciences under a new organization that can manage and promote the multi- and transdisciplinary sharing of data and knowledge. To bootstrap this effort, a seed of governance will be funded. In the first months, this governance kernel will need to get out in front and open up online opportunities for thousands of scientists to step into new leadership positions and get to work. In the subsequent months, the funded governance kernel will need to step back and lead from behind as the community finds its own governance footing. In the final phase, the funds for governance will be passed directly to the community, and kernel will become a front office. But this transition from leading from the front to leading from behind is truly experimental.

“Part of it is allowing chaos to reign,” Jacob told me. The point, I would propose, is to not spend a lot of effort (and time) establishing and then defending a set of top-down decisions. He continued,“a lot of things go wrong when you have a benevolent dictatorship that says ‘this is the way’.” When the community feels the need to make a decision, the lack of a top-down process enables people step up to offer solutions.

Behind the scenes, Jacob noted, the leaders of the Drupal project pay very close attention to all of the blogs and the threads on discussions and comments, and keep track of who was working well with others and who was influencing their peers. It would be vital to have these people in the room for important decisions. This internal eco-system is fostered through support for travel to Drupal events, and through email lists and other back-channel communication. Out in the front channels, the Drupal bus riders are shouting out their visions and their peeves.

The other eco-system to which the Drupal project and Organization pays close attention is the larger CMS world, where big corporations and government agencies are looking to make long-term investments. “This way we can counsel corporate users, and use their feedback to counsel Drupal developers,” Jacob noted. One big part of leading from behind is also watching the road ahead.

You can find Jacob Redding at: http://jredding.info/

Photo Credit: by Guerilla Features | Jason Tester used under CC license on Flickr.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in cybersocialstructure, governance, virtual organization

Tagged

Who says that “agile” is just for software? Architect an agile online community!

Posted on November 29, 2012 by | 1 Comment

If you’ve familiar with object-oriented coding using any agile methods, you understand that the customer is at the center of the software development effort. The customers problems, her needs and goals, laid out in stories that the programmers return to every day: these keep the software from feature creep and UX failure. Delivering working software in small increments helps the customer reveal the moment they don’t need or understand something. The programmers can toss out that new feature and go back to the customer stories again with fresh insight.

They are testing all the code every day and releasing every week. So there’s never a time when the changing the software costs more than the last time. They are free to pivot toward some new capability that just might provoke delight in their customers; something they would never have tried if the cost of change was growing. Finally, they are solving their customers’ problems and building into the software new opportunities that might not have existed anywhere else in this way ever before. OK, so it rarely works out that well. But the philosophy of agile code development is sound and it offers valuable lessons beyond writing code.

Virtual organization community leaders would do well to consider how the Manifesto for Agile Software Development might be tweaked to be a working Manifesto for Agile Community Development:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software (working volunteers) over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration (member collaboration) over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan.

from http://agilemanifesto.org/

Let’s look at these one by one. Individuals and interactions are the daily work of the community leader. Staying in touch with members is more important than whatever tool (email, forum, listserve) is picked to accomplish this. Working volunteers build value and direction for the virtual organization. Having a grand, detailed volunteer guide is less important than having a team of members who want to move the organization ahead. Member collaboration means giving the membership as much ownership as possible. Staff are around to take care of day-to-day business, but budgets, planning, and the real work of the VO belong to the members. The staff are the sails, the members are the wind. Responding to change means having a full double-loop governance system and pivoting this to stay ahead of changes surrounding the organization. If you’re only following a plan, you are already lost.

Agile: it’s not just for software anymore!

photo credit: From flickr user magia3e  http://www.flickr.com/photos/magia3e/6236962059/sizes/z/in/photostream/

→ 1 Comment

Posted in governance, virtual organization

Tagged , , ,

Sharing Creativity: Talk given at 2012 ESIP Federation Summer Meeting.

Posted on August 29, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Here is a talk I gave at the recent (Summer 2012) ESIP Federation meeting. Sharing Creativity:

I am hoping that this talk will lead to some conversations over the potential for virtual organizations to achieve, with more efficiency and effectiveness, a capacity for creativity and predictable innovation. This capacity—in large part due to Internet-enabled capabilities for coordination and collaboration— can, I believe, rival (at various scales) the capabilities of dedicated R&D facilities/programs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC on the corporate side, and the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program on the government side.

Bohr, Oppenheimer, Feynman, and Fermi: Key requisite variety of knowledge assembled for the Manhattan Project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

Large research and development operations such as these were built as national laboratories, with hundreds or thousands of employees and forefront facilities. They were designed to assemble a critical mass of talent and direct this toward innovation. They were also enormously expensive: the Apollo program had cost more than $25 billion by 1973 (in 1973 dollars). The successful ones are rightfully famous.

Today’s top technology companies (Apple and Google, for example) often add to their innovation potential by buying forefront start-up companies, as much for their talent as for their technology. Their goal in a highly competitive market is to own enough talent, enough intelligence, enough creativity, to stay ahead of their rivals.

The basic business-school rule for improving the odds for successful innovation is to assemble a requisite variety of knowledge: a range of knowledge at least as large as the problem being tackled. The three ways to do this are the following: Hire it (add to your team); Grow it (reeducate your team); and, Buy it (purchase a rival company/team). All of these methods assume that you need to own the requisite variety of knowledge.

Science, on the main, has only one rival: the unknown. Scientists are relatively free to seek out new collaborators from anywhere. And, through Internet-based services, they are now enabled to become collaborators everywhere. This is one reason why the NSF has been promoting virtual organizations and research networks as the future of science collaboration (instead of building new centers at institutions). A good part of the potential that virtual organizations offer government and private funding agencies comes from a new logic for innovation: assemble and share the requisite variety of knowledge.  With the right sort of organizational governance and funding, a virtual organization can achieve what the older “think tank” R&D centers could: predictable, successful innovation.

There are some social aspects of the ESIP Federation that might be key to this capacity for creativity. These aspects are not secret, however, and can be fully copied and applied in other arenas. They are also not expensive (the Federation budget is remarkably small), but they are of great value, in that they have been worked upon by dozens of volunteers over the course of more than a decade.

Virtual organizations (VOs) come in many forms and sizes. The science of building and managing VOs is still being explored. There are many examples of early failures, and only a few examples that herald their potential success. Members of virtual organizations need to be sufficiently engaged to build collective intelligence. Take a look at the YouTube video and let me know what you think.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in innovation, virtual organization

Tagged , , ,

Imagine your virtual organization (VO) as a street festival

Posted on May 18, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Photo from Flickr. CC by Jesslee Cuizon

I once spent several years studying how communities assembled festival productions in the streets of their towns and cities. This includes almost three years in Kyoto, Japan, and other experiences from South India and the US. The impetus behind this (no, it wasn’t the beer, but that helped) was to see a form of cultural production that was forced to renew itself regularly, and to describe and explain how that cadence of activity could sustain an enormous volunteer effort every year. I was also interested in festivals as they often included activities and behaviors that were not available or advisable on the streets during the rest of the year (aspects of comedy, nudity, violence, politics, joy, and sex: stir together and stand back). The time and space of the festival did not just occur on the street, it transformed the street. Much the same could be said for the impact of the event on the lives of the participants.

I also saw a lot of festivals that failed to transform the street, that had been, somehow, reduced to parades and pageants, to a semblance of their former glory. In these events participation was simply another chore. As such, participants required payment. Volunteerism declined. The vestigial energy of the festival was provided by the music and the movement. But the ability to transform the lives of the participants was lost.

The craft and the logic of a festival event are in many ways similar to that of any virtual organization that hopes to engage its members. The face-to-face meetings or your organization may not achieve actual festivity, but the power of your organization to transform the capabilities and empower the hopes of its members should never be forgotten.

Several years ago I wrote a piece for the Kyoto Journal, “Imagine the festival as a building,” in which I asked readers to imagine their community-based organization (festival or virtual) as a building, a house that is rebuilt from scratch every year. The main messages of this article outlined how the process of designing and constructing the house each year supported the neighborhood in vital ways, and explored how this event would certainly be destroyed when its festival logic is violated, even if an event kept happening.

The essence of a festival logic is honest and free voluntary participation and expression.      A radical form of intimacy emerges. Some scholars tie this back to ancient forms of human physicality (e.g., Cox 1969; Stallybrass and White 1986); however, Anthony Giddens (1992) anchors this form of intimacy also as a hallmark of current modernity. We all want to achieve more moments of intimacy.

Festival logic informs the whole process of design and performance. When you incorporate a similar festival logic into your community-led virtual organization you unleash new levels of member engagement. Street festivals generally focus this energy into artistic forms, while your organization might focus this on product development, creativity, and innovation. If you can imagine your VO as a street festival, you might discover its festival logic. If you cannot, then you might want to ask yourself how to add this logic to your organization.

References

Caron, Bruce. (2011) Imagine the festival as a building… [Internet]. Version 1. lightblueblog. 2011 Dec 25. Available from: http://lightblueblog.wordpress.com/article/imagine-the-festival-as-a-building-2l8t3cliewok9-48/ .  From Caron 2003 http://junana.com/CDP/corpus/COMMENT20.html

Cox, Harvey (1969) The Feast of Fools. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Giddens, Anthony (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen & Co.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in governance, virtual organization

Tagged ,

Use a virtual organization to borrow enough requisite variety to innovate in a data-rich world

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Photo from Flickr, used with CC license. by http://www.flickr.com/photos/dominik99/

What can you do when your research team says, “This is way too complex.”

When your government agency or university laboratory looks to innovate in a world where multiple/large data inputs are coming on line, how can you stay ahead of the inherent complexity of the systems you are creating/interrogating? One way to look at this problem is through Ashby’s principle/law of requisite variety. A principle of cybernetic management, requisite variety notes that unless the control system has at least the variety of the environment it controls, it will fail. Which actually means that some part of the environment will be controlled elsewhere. Elsewhere is also where innovation happens; because unless you can corral the inherent variety of the problem you face, it will seem too complex for your team to innovate a response (Kofman [1]).  You can either go out and hire a bigger team, or you can borrow enough requisite variety just long enough to bring your own team up to speed. That is a great use for a virtual organization (VO).

Theorists of knowledge management have applied Ashby’s law in various modes, including a thread of interest in what is called a “learning organization” and mode of business communications management known as “systems thinking.” [There is a great amount of information about this available at the Society for Organizational Learning http://www.solonline.org/.]  The point they make is that the team you build to tackle a tough problem needs to have enough of a portfolio of knowledge and skills to address all parts of the problem. Not only that, but they need to communicate their skills and knowledge to one another so that each team member shares in this collective intelligence. Andrew Van de Ven put it this way, “Requisite variety is more nearly achieved by making environmental scanning a responsibility of all unit members, and by recruiting personnel within the innovation unit who understand and have access to each of the key environmental stakeholder groups or issues that affect the innovation’s development.”  (Van de Ven, 600).

Virtual organizations include online communities, research collaboratories, open source software programmer collectives, and other groups in a great variety of arenas and professions. What they offer is an open network of common interest and complementary talents. When your business or agency is looking to innovate in a world where data are more plentiful than insights (Abbott, 114) then it makes great sense, in terms of time and effort, to join a VO and gain enough requisite variety to conquer complexity and kickstart some innovation.

References

Abbott, Mark R. (2009) “A New Path for Science?” in The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. Hey, Tony, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle, eds.  Pp. 111-116. Redmond: Microsoft Research.

Fred Kofman [1]   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ARZBxIzsKk&feature=relmfu

Van de Ven, Andrew H. (1986) “Central Problems in the Management of Innovation.” Management Science. Vol. 32. No. 5. (May.) pp. 590-607.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in eScience, innovation, virtual organization

Tagged , , ,

Part 2: Immunize your virtual organization from institutional guilt

Posted on May 4, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Image from Flickr. Used under CC license. Photo by USACE http://www.flickr.com/photos/europedistrict/

The 5 ways that double-loop governance can save your organization from itself

Institutional guilt (see Part 1 below) is routinized violation of your organization’s values, vision, rules, or policies. It is symptomatic of dysfunctional communication strategies inside an organization. It leads to distrust of staff and disengagement from the organization’s vision. Staff and volunteer disengagement/disenchantment is a prime reason non-profit organizations fail (Duckles, et al 2005).

Institutional guilt is something that will ruin your virtual organization. It poisons the culture and it drives away volunteers while it demoralizes your staff. Implementing double-loop governance is a good way to build in protection against institutional guilt. You also need to be sure that your employees and volunteer committees do not fall into the trap of violating your own values and policies for some immediate purpose. Double-loop governance opens up learning capabilities and communication channels to help limit and repair occasions where volunteers or staff do stray from your organization’s vision and values.

1. Double-loop governance makes every member a caretaker of the vision and values for the virtual organization. 

Your values are not just a bulleted list on your website nor a poster on the wall. They are the deep logic of why your organization exists. When you create the knowledge loop that includes questioning and reaffirming your values into every decision, then your staff and volunteers can celebrate these values. Membership includes embracing the values, and entering into the ongoing conversation about them that keeps them current and vital.

2. Double-loop governance makes a virtue out of transparent decision making.  

Transparent here means available to all members (not necessarily public). Practically, transparency includes time and place availability. Members are told when and where a decision is being made. For a virtual organization, this might be a set period of time to edit a certain wiki, or a set period in which to vote online. The management of critical-path decisions may (and usually should) devolve to active subgroups charged with delivering the outcomes. These subgroups need to maintain their own transparent decision process. A great example here is Wikipedia, where each entry contains the edited text, a history of edits, and a discussion page about the text and its edits.

3. Double-loop governance brings conflict to the surface. 

Conflict avoidance is a major source of “unusual routines” (Rice and Cooper 2010) in general, including those that create institutional guilt. Conflict can arise in many forms. Personal issues surrounding time commitments, responsibility and authority, and expectation management cannot be avoided through double-loop governance alone, but they can be openly addressed and resolved in a manner that promotes reflective learning among those involved. Evaluation conflict avoidance happens when tests of deliverables are either postponed, curtailed, or done in private. Double-loop governance supports open and thorough testing, and the disclosure of competing interpretations. Conflict is rapidly promoted to the surface of discussions, where voices of dissent become available to all members. Resolution is commonly achieved through a working consensus, not 100% agreement, but something more robust than a simple majority. Conflicts over the underlying assumptions of the organization can result in new values and a new vision: the organization is free to pivot toward a novel direction at any time.

4. Double-loop governance accelerates failure to ensure success.

Remember that double-loop governance supports double-loop learning. Single-loop learning focuses on avoiding failure.  Double-loop learning focuses on using failure to recalibrate the underlying assumptions of the activity, this promotes the act of failing as a learning device, and a logic of rapid iterations of activities with open testing.  In software development efforts, double-loop governance actively supports agile development decisions. In all endeavors, the ability to fail quickly and recover takes the fear out of trying new strategies.  This almost guarantees a better final result.

5. Double-loop governance supports do-ocracy and emergent leadership. 

While not all double-loop governed organizations are strict meritocracies, the best find ways to recognize and reward achievements and contributions. One of the benefits of the network effect is an ability to reach out beyond the founding team and find people who have similar interests and valuable skills. As the network expands, the chances of encountering tomorrow’s leadership improves. When these people become engaged in activities and outcomes, they need to have a clear path to leading subgroups and then larger groups, and ultimately the organization.

Final Thoughts: Double-loop your organization and forget the guilt

Remember that decisions that don’t get made by the people who are supposed to make them get made anyhow by the people who need them. Even the decision not to decide today is made by someone. When decisions are guided by the values and vision of the organization, when the process is transparent, when the conflicts appear on the surface, when failure is just another chance at success, and when leadership opens up in front of those who have proven their worth: that is when institutional guilt has no purchase on the logic of your organization.

References:

Duckles, Beth M., Mark A. Hager, and Joseph Galaskiewicz (2005) “How Nonprofits Close: Using Narratives to Study Organizational Processes.” Pp. 169-203 in Qualitative Organizational Research: Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, ed. Kimberly D. Elsbach. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Rice, R. E. & Cooper, S. (2010).  Organizations and unusual routines: A systems analysis of dysfunctional feedback processes.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in governance, virtual organization

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Part 1: Don’t let institutional guilt drag down your virtual organization

Posted on May 3, 2012 by | 1 Comment
Making fake wood

I made fake wood out of paper and plastic for a summer

Institutional Guilt: you know it when you see it

You may have experienced institutional guilt directly, and you’ve likely seen this on TV. Remember the cop show where the new recruit, still wet behind the ears, with a new house, a young wife and a family member (usually a child or a parent) who has a horribly expensive medical condition; this new recruit, who has every need for some extra money is standing near his locker when his sergeant claps him on the shoulder and hands him an envelope. “This is your cut,” he says, and walks away, leaving the recruit to either take the money or buck the system. So the rest of the movie all about how the organization is rotten at the core, which is exactly what institutional guilt does.

I experienced institutional guilt when I was working at a chemical factory on the Tacoma waterfront during the summer of 1971. (The above photo, also taken in 1971, is one of the machines I worked for that summer. The fake wood grain on the paper is called “Mediterranean Oak.” I sort of remember the guy in the photo, he was the chemical engineer on staff.  Source: Tacoma Public Library.) One night, during the graveyard shift, I noticed that someone had opened up a pipe into a storm drain, a pipe which was always supposed to be sealed and only emptied into drums labeled appropriately for their toxic content. I mentioned this to the crew chief and he asked me if the inspector was there. Of course not, the inspector went home at 5.

The next time I was on a day shift, I told the plant supervisor that the pipe was left open at night, and all the extremely nasty chemicals were being discharged directly into Commencement Bay. He looked like I had told him I saw him microwave a kitten. This was information he did not want to hear, but he reacted like it was something he already knew. He told me to get back to work, and retreated into his office. I don’t remember ever speaking to him again. Then again, I don’t think I ever worked the day shift again. I never trusted the company after that, and I developed a reputation for not following orders to do certain things that others would do. Plenty of people there had new houses and young spouses and kids with expensive medical bills, and didn’t ask many questions.

I would suggest that other employees didn’t trust the company either. Almost daily they were asked to do tasks that were explicitly prohibited by policies posted on the bulletin board. They could be fired for any of these infractions, or they could make a complaint about their supervisors at any time. There was plenty of guilt to go around. This was a company that paid union wages for manual labor, so there was a steady supply of workers. This was fortunate for the company, as there was a steady turnover of employees.

Institutional guilt happens when values and vision, and policies and processes are routinely broken. The routine creates an alternative policy, a counter-value, which becomes the operational norm for the organization. As this new policy and its values cannot be spoken of, it is almost impervious to change. “Rotten at the core” is a good analogy here. For a virtual organization this situation will lead to almost certain failure; volunteers and staff will flee. Those that remain do so for suspect reasons.

The routines that include institutional guilt are a subset of what Rice and Cooper (2010) call “unusual routines.” These are dysfunctional outcomes of flawed communication practices (and other sources). There is no organizational structure that can prevent these entirely, and there are practices available, however expensive (e.g., firing all the staff and starting over) to repair unusual routines. Double-loop governance and the communication practices that this supports and promotes can preempt institutional guilt in several ways. I will be outlining these in the next blog.

How have you experienced institutional guilt? What is your story?

 Coming next: Part 2: Immunize your virtual organization from institutional guilt

Reference:

Rice, R. E. & Cooper, S. (2010).  Organizations and unusual routines: A systems analysis of dysfunctional feedback processes.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in governance, virtual organization

Tagged , , ,

Building Double-Loop Organizations for Member Engagement and Innovation

Posted on April 23, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I’m going to explore the idea of “double-loop” governance, with some ideas and some suggestions as to why you might want to consider this form of governance as the heart of the physical or virtual organization (or network, or corporation) you plan to start or hope to change.

Below, you will discover how a double-loop governance scheme brings the values, the vision, and the underlying assumptions of an organization into an open and transparent decision cycle.  This decision process is characterized by distributed (shared) participation and control, free and informed choices, public testing of evaluations, and an ability to manage conflict on the surface of discussion threads.

Members in an organization with double-loop governance have the ability to redirect, refocus, and recommit to the values and the vision of their organization. Double-loop governance creates peers for a peer-to-peer network. Because of this, membership is well-defined, and provided with responsibilities and rewards.

Double-loop organizations tend towards meritocracies and value contributions over clout (or Klout). Because decision-making—to the level of deciding underlying assumptions—is distributed rather than top-down, double-loop organizations depend on double-loop learning (and Model II theories-in-use). Contributions to decisions and work toward goals (software code contributions, etc.) can be used to measure the value of members, and to reward their service.  The vectors for acquiring merit are ideally well-described and collectively fashioned. A great example of this is StackExchange (http://stackexchange.com). Clay Shirky, in a recent talk (available at http://archive.org/details/drupalconchi_day2_keynote_clay_shirky), describes how StackExchange uses double-loop governance to engage its members. Double-loop organizations are better able to discover and reward emergent leadership and harvest the long-tail of community participation.

Much of the added value of a double-loop governed organization comes from the quality of interpersonal interactions, the extra amount of available trust, and the additional flexibility that distributed decision making provides. This value does not arrive without additional costs (which are described below). For ventures that are designed to solve a single problem and then end, these costs may not be appropriate. But for enterprises that hope to grow and flourish in today’s changing IT landscape, these costs are essential to sustaining any organization.

While notions of double-loop governance apply to various organizations, here I want to focus on virtual organizations/internet communities. These have some common features. They are created to solve a problem or problems, often problems of some real consequence. They rely on the voluntary contributions of experts. And they bridge between groups that may have diverse or divergent interests. Examples of these organizations/communities of which I am somewhat familiar (either personally or through other sources) include the W3C, Ubuntu Linux, Stack Exchange, the Open Geospatial Consortium, the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, the National Science Digital Library, and the Digital Library for Earth System Education.

Some of these organizations are/were more successful in their governance efforts than others. Some of these examples no longer exist, in part because of their governance choices. Other authors have pointed to Apple Computer, the Valve Corporation (entertainment software makers), and Zappos (online shoe store) as good examples of culture-led corporations that use double-loop learning to pivot to new opportunities; and these provide some lessons on how double-loop management/governance can become an integral feature of a for-profit organization. The Valve Corporation Handbook for New Employees, First Edition (2012) welcomes new employees with this statement: “The company is yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green light projects. You have the power to ship products” (p. 4). In full double-loop mode, the Handbook is also editable by employees, new and old: “This book is on the intranet, so you can edit it. Once you’ve read it, help us make it better for other new people. Suggest new sections, or change the existing ones” (p. viii).

The various examples show how spending the time and effort to become a double-loop governed organization is important for innovation, for volunteer engagement, and for sustainability (i.e., the why of double-loop governance). What follows are some thoughts on where the value of double-loop governance is found, and how to boot-strap and support double-loop governance for a new virtual organization.

It could be argued that single loop organizations and management were well suited for a time when the pace of innovation was much slower than today. The single goal of becoming more efficient in, and creating sustaining technologies for, the manufacturing of, say, automobiles or washing machines could carry a corporation for several decades. The pace of innovation within information technology now means that organizations need a new ability. They need to pivot to respond to external (disruptive) innovations, and they need to rethink their underlying assumptions to stay creative and innovative internally. These capabilities belong to the second loop of a double-loop organization.

References

→ Leave a comment

Posted in cybersocialstructure, governance, virtual organization

Tagged , , ,

Double-Loop Learning as an outcome of Double-Loop Governance

Posted on April 23, 2012 by | 1 Comment

The concepts of double-loop governance and double-loop learning (Argyris and Shön, 1978) share a common ground in the communicative acts required to support these. Double-loop governance puts into practice what Argyris calls a Model II style of theories-in-use. A Model I “theory-in-use” for Argyris (1982, 8) represents the set of assumptions that a person puts into everyday practice without reflection. A Model I theory-in-use greatly resembles what Pierre Bourdieu calls a individual habitus (1990, 56). What a Model II style adds is a critical reflective moment. A Model II style is characterized by valid information, free and informed choice, and internal commitment (Smith 2001). Model II supports double-loop learning: an ability to question an “organization’s underlying norms, policies and objectives.” (Argyris and Shön, 1978, 2-3; quoted in Smith 2001). This ability—which all nimble online organizations require to keep up with changing codes and capabilities—needs to be established as a cultural goal of the organization. And for this, it needs to be a visible part of the organization’s governance scheme.

This is what separates a double-loop governance effort from a single-loop governance structure linked to a management plan (or tied to a charismatic founder). “Governance is almost entirely based around values,” notes Jono Bacon (Bacon 2009), community manager for the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. “You need to not only understand your values, but celebrate them,” he concludes. In terms of double-loop governance, I would add that an organization needs to reflexively control (c.f., Giddens 1994: 122-123) its values, interrogate them regularly, and celebrate how robust they are. They are robust because there is an active process to reform and renew them as needed.

Single Loop Management

Organizational management provides at least a single loop of internal communication and learning. Goals, strategies and techniques are attempted and their outcomes evaluated. On the basis of this evaluation, new goals, strategies, and techniques are attempted. The desired outcome of the single loop is an improvement in efficiency. This is essential Twentieth Century business management guidance. How business was done.

This is also, in part, why so many Twentieth Century corporations are no longer here. Disruptive innovation and other rapid market changes cannot be addressed through efficiency alone. John Kao (2002) describes it this way, “We all want benchmarks to get the job done more efficiently. But this does not lead to disruptive, game-changing innovation, the stuff of which organizational renewal and competitiveness under conditions of uncertainty are all about.” (Kindle Locations 2686-2689).

Government agencies are also good examples of single-loop governed, problem-focused, service-delivery organizations. They work under externally mandated goals and priorities. Even their single-loop quest for greater efficiency is sometimes constrained by legislative demands and regulatory road-blocks. These constraints provide a motivation for for agencies to partner with double-loop virtual organizations where disruptive innovation capabilities can be built into the working culture and governance framework.

Clayton Christensen (2002) describes how the capability for innovation, and particularly for disruptive innovation, “…lies in the resources-processes-values (RPV) framework…” of an organization. (Kindle Locations 1962-1966). What Christensen found was that single-loop organizations (organizations that cannot reflectively question their underlying assumptions, values, and vision) create incremental, sustaining innovation that increasingly values high-margin results and high-budget customers. These organizations do not have the capability to pivot to take advantage of a disruptive innovation.

Double-loop organizations will have processes that resemble those of the single-loop organization (trial and error, experiment and review, etc.). Efficiency and linear, sustaining innovation for progress to a desired goal: these are not abandoned. But they are embedded in the larger discussion of their relative return on an investment in their outcomes based on a larger vision that includes disruptive innovation opportunities. All of the thousands of PPTs with arrows connecting the end of a process to its evaluation and then back to the start of the process can still be used: with some necessary modification. These must include another loop out to “review assumptions and rethink and reapply values”.

References

→ 1 Comment

Posted in cybersocialstructure, governance, virtual organization

Tagged , ,

Double-Loop Organization Membership

Posted on April 23, 2012 by | Leave a comment

The ESIP Federation Assembly meets every year to decide on a range of issues.

Double-Loop Organization Membership

Double-loop governed organizations place significant value on the rules and roles of membership. Whether the organization is a “purpose-led” corporation, such as Zappos, an open-source software community, such as Ubuntu, or a collection of research projects, such as the ESIP Federation: membership (or employee-ship) is important because members are tasked to create and celebrate the values and the vision of the organization and to work to fulfill its mission and goals. Members are inspired (rather than required) to commit to this vision. Membership is openly acquired and acknowledged, and its responsibilities are plainly spelled out. Somewhere in the shared rules and roles, an ability to rewrite the shared rules and roles is provided to all members.

This ability creates and supports a mode of reflexive learning. At the same time that members are working to solve certain problems—the solution for which is the mission of the organization—they are also evaluating this same mission. They are responsible not just for incremental success, but also for opportunities to pivot the entire organization into a different mission, one that resolves not just the problem at hand, but some underlying condition as well.

At Zappos, an internet shoe store (now a part of Amazon), employees in their first days of orientation are given the option of taking a $2,000 check to simply quit and walk away. “We want employees that believe in our long-term vision and want to be a part of our culture.”(Hsieh 2010; Kindle Location 2549). At winter ESIP Federation meetings all of the members present gather at Assembly meetings where fundamental issues (including the organization’s budget) and executive positions of the organization are brought up for discussion and a vote.

 

Single-loop organizations may also support membership, but membership for these is often perfunctory (e.g., a log-in account on the organization website), and may be loosely defined or changed without members having a say. The organization may simply use its membership as a list to broadcast (or request) information.

Here we might remember that the U.S. Government is (at least in spirit) a double-loop governed organization. Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution gives the Senate and/or the States a method to create a constitutional convention to rewrite the constitution. (After two hundred years since the first one, a constitutional convention would certainly produce some interesting new text.) A related power is given to amend the Constitution, a process that has been performed several times.

Similarly, Article 9 of the Constitution of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners gives the membership the right to rewrite or amend its constitution. Because members can re-vision the organization, membership rules and roles are taken very seriously by the organization, and consequently, by its members. The governance charter of the Ubuntu organization provide precise rules and roles for managing that software development (See: http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/governance ). Charters, statements of values, and constitutions are all indicators of double-loop governance, although the amount of double-loop capabilities rests in how much reflexive authority they give to the membership.

The vision statement, as Sinek reminds (2009) us, is the public statement about why an organization exists. Mission statements/business plans are Loop 1 outcomes. The mission statement tell us how the organization “intends to create [the] future” (Kindle Locations 2035-2045).  The “how” is firmly in Loop 1. This is further articulated in business and strategic plans, and then in policies that direct activities. The “why” lives in Loop 2, and is embodied in the values expressed through the vision statement. The why—the vision, expressed as values—is often described as the “culture” of the organization.

Tony Hsieh is famous for saying “your culture is your brand.” (2010, Kindle Locations 2529-2540). Your vision statement, including your core  values, is the center of your organization: “We believe that it’s really important to come up with core values that you can commit to. And by commit, we mean that you’re willing to hire and fire based on them.” (Ibid, Kindle Locations 2545-2566).  In a community-based organization, just as in a purpose-led company, double-loop governance—as difficult as this may be to bootstrap—forges a congruence between the words on the vision statement (whatever these are), and the quality of learning and knowledge management in the organization. When “your governance is your culture,” the members can more fully commit to the organization. This makes many subsequent (and consequent) tasks that much easier.

Done well, culture is not just an asset, it is an engine for double-loop learning within the organization, and that, in turn, is the foundation for knowledge management. Lehr and Rice (2002) make the following observation; “Double-loop learning is where knowledge is generated from information: more specifically, where the process of implementing information is evaluated, validated, verified, and adapted (p. 1062). Done poorly, “culture” becomes either decorative or punitive (something that employees are required to memorize, rather than something that could engage an active volunteer-base). Vision statements can and should be early Loop 2 outcomes. Single-loop organizations also have vision statements. What they lack is the built-in capability to question the underlying assumptions of these.

For a member/community-led organization the vision is what brings together all of the disparate intentions and backgrounds into one common, shared future. This vision should be visionary, it should announce with conviction the higher purpose that the organization will embrace (higher than profits or technological success). It needs to inspire the membership, and incite the impulse to leadership.

References

→ Leave a comment

Posted in cybersocialstructure, governance, virtual organization

Tagged ,