Last week we had a great session with a large tech client who was convening a new global sales force for the first time.  Our goal was to take the individual insights gained by salespeople with 6-12 months of field experience with this new product and boil up best practices.  The challenge was that the sales team didn’t view their individual approaches as “special” enough to be considered best practices, so we needed to get people sharing without the pressure of needing to have the right answer.  Our approach: change the medium of communication (no PowerPoint, no roundtable discussions) in order to shift perspective and break people loose of their barriers to sharing. Here’s the story of one of the tools we used during the session that worked like magic.

The Approach

We used a build-a-box exercise to get the group aligned around what sales resources would be needed for the team to succeed in meeting their targets.  Teams were asked to physically build a box that represents all the tools, resources, information, and support needed to be the best sales force ever.  It was a fun time, as well as a powerful moment of clarity for the organization.  Here’s how it worked:

Why it works

The build-a-box exercise is a particularly powerful tool because it

• Makes the intangible tangible
• Uses modular components to allow for trading, sorting and prioritizing
• Is a democratic, bottom-up approach that acknowledges the expertise of participants
• Creates visual/physical reference points for the future
• Is just plain fun for participants, which creates a safe environment for dealing with tough issues

Changing the medium allowed for a breakthrough moment with this team – we were able to identify clear best practices and needed resources in a way that couldn’t be achieved by shared spreadsheets and conference calls. In this case we used boxes, blocks and pipe cleaners, but any shift in medium can be powerful: challenge your team to draw instead of listing bullet points, try Prezi if you usually use PowerPoint, switch to videos from newsletters, etc.  By establishing a new creative flow, old obstacles disappear.  It’s amazing what a simple shift in medium can do to unlock fresh thinking.

These initiatives are often led by a small team, sometimes a single individual who is driven to help the company work a better way — a more connected, dynamic and socially calibrated way of interacting for business.

The business of transforming a worldwide organization is difficult.  If it were easy, it wouldn’t be as rewarding and meaningful.  It requires a large amount of patience, perseverance, and oftentimes, courage. We are asking a lot of our fellow corporate colleagues and executive leadership when we ask them to embrace working socially.  We are asking them to veer far from their comfort zone and risk more communication, more connectedness, and more transparency in the service of empowering people to do more with less.

In spite of this difficulty, repeatedly we have heard, “This is the most important initiative I’ve ever worked on in my professional life.” The prevailing operational mission at present is to succeed at catalyzing the “ideological reformation” at the root level of the organization that needs to take place before the real business value can be extracted, measured, and fine-tuned.

There’s something extremely inspiring about the people and companies who are leading the charge toward reinventing themselves to become social leaders within their organizations. As you read through these profiles, we hope you’ll come to appreciate that while all of these companies are still early in their process, they all are confident in the success of their long term goals.  Some are realizing early successes, while some are struggling. All are passionate believers that there is a powerful evolution at hand driving change in their organizations, an evolution towards Social Business.

You can download the first set of profiles on People in Progress here:

• Alcatel-Lucent
• Alstom
• Avery Dennison
• The MITRE Corp.
• Nokia
• Swiss Re

We will continue to track the progress of these adopters.

We’d love to hear your story in the comments, or better yet join the The 2.0 Adoption Council.

Join The 2.0 Adoption Council

If you are working to bring social transformation to your large organization, we invite you to join The 2.0 Adoption Council, an influential peer to peer knowledge sharing community made up of other large enterprise adopters who share your passion for opportunities and the difficulties and challenges associated with adopting Social Business inside large organizations. Membership is free provided you meet the eligibility criteria. More information is found on The 2.0 Adoption Council in the section on how to join.

We’d like to thank IBM and MIT’s Center for Digital Business for lending support and sponsorship to this series of cases and profiles. Special thanks to the @20adoption member companies who participated in the series: Alcatel-Lucent, Alstom, Avery Dennison, Eli Lilly, IBM, MetLife, The MITRE Corporation, Nokia, and Swiss Re along with other The 2.0 Adoption Council members providing anecdotal information.

IBM Social Collaboration Software

Market leaders are using social software to get closer to customers and to transform how work gets done, to accelerate innovation and more easily locate expertise. Organizations that establish a social business environment across their internal and external relationships are outpacing their competitors. IBM Collaboration Software empowers individuals within organizations to stay connected, current, and creative any where, any time, so great thinking doesn’t stay locked behind closed doors. IBM offers the broadest, innovative set of secure Social Software and Unified Communications services for creating Web communities, locating subject matter expertise, project collaboration, content and idea sharing. Quickly locate the expertise you need, no matter where it exists inside or outside of your organization to get the job done faster. Smarter Software for a Smarter Planet.

MIT Center for Digital Business

Founded in 1999, the MIT Center for Digital Business (MIT CDB) is the world’s largest center for research focused on the digital economy. MIT CDB has worked with more than 50 corporate sponsors, funded more than 60 faculty and performed more than 75 research projects. The center’s faculty and sponsors represent the leaders in Digital Business research, analysis and practice worldwide. Together with its partners, MIT’s Center for Digital Business is inventing the future of Digital Business.