Technology Behind Business examines trends and analyses key IT concepts. Each week an expert panel focuses on one type of technology or strategy, explaining its use without the jargon, outlining the pros and cons and providing tips for all types of businesses. The panel in this episode included Felicity McNish from Woods Bagot and Gerhard Voster from Deloitte.

You can watch the entire panel discussion on the Sky News Website.

It is actually challenging to define KM quickly in a way that is both understandable to people new to the topic but that will also satisfy those already familiar with the idea. There are of course those who like to grandstand and declare KM is dead or never existed in the first place, but personally I still think the KM concept has a role even in the era of social software.

But what does KM looks like today? There are a number themes in Social Business Design that resonate particularly for me, some of which I hinted at during the panel:

• The Connected Company – encouraging us to understand the nature of large, complex systems, and let go of some of our traditional notions of how companies function.
• The Shift to Systems of Engagement – the importance of focusing on non-transactional systems.
• Data-Driven Business Improvement – the role of ambient sharing, dynamic signals and various other types of indirect or weak ties between people in networks.

Related ideas are also reflected in the themes highlighted by the other panelists:

• Felicity McNish from Woods Bagot (who were recently recognised with a 2011 Asian Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) Award) talked about the importance of mobile access. This really points to the concept of addressing “place” in the people, places and things model of KM.
• Gerhard also mentioned Deloitte’s use of social media internally as part of its approach to KM. Similarly, both across Dachis Group and within the Headshift | Dachis Group team itself we have been long term users of social software for collaboration and KM. A great deal of our collective knowledge is readily available thanks to the flow of social tools, but we recognise it doesn’t entirely remove the need to deliberately create opportunities for learning, building social capital and knowledge sharing.

The key commonality here is that knowledge management isn’t (and never should have been) just about information or data management; but neither is it dominate to such related disciplines.

Incidentally, I wrote about the future prospect of mobile knowledge management back in 2005, for Image & Data Manager magazine. I said then:

“While the business use of such software may not be immediately clear, the growing interest in social networks, communities of practice and the use of narrative and storytelling techniques within organisations will generate demand for a new generation of KM tools that help employees to record events and facilitate serendipity using tools that are familiar and intuitive.”

Hmm. Sound familiar?

If you are interested in understand more about the intersection of knowledge management and social business design, take a look at some of our case studies – many of them include elements of knowledge management and social learning.

Give the people back their air (or at least their voice)
Once you fight through the panic, remember that the core job will always be the telling of relevant and engaging stories. It became trickier when we left the old advertising model:  broadcasting a message about the brand or product features and assuming that the target audience receives it. In other words, cast a wide net with a one-way, outgoing dialogue. Nowadays, we help brands create experiences that engage the consumer while giving them ways to share that experience, either back to the brand, or in a small scale broadcast among the consumer’s social graph (with their implied endorsement). We give consumers the tools to evangelize for the brand. Social media marketing should inspire conversation around, with, and for our client brands. Brand-loyalists seek opportunities to delight in and declare their delight about their favorite brands. We create the destinations, pathways, and tools for fans to share their enthusiasm.

Medium, message, and authenticity
Social media has heralded the age of authenticity. Inauthentic behavior, like trying to skirt around an issue of communication, can be disastrous (we’re looking at you, Netflix). Communication breakdown also happens to brands through the misuse of technology. Authenticity becomes corrupted whenever the message is not clearly conveyed. The danger lies in losing or confusing the message due to lack of adequate knowledge of the delivery system. But as the method of delivery shifts constantly (web, mobile, apps, YouTube, Facebook, even augmented reality installations), the restrictions and features inherent to each technology help shape both the design and the concept itself. Design departments need to, at the very least, keep a constant dialogue with development teams. At the very best, companies need to harbor and nurture cross-discipline hybrids, if for no other reason than to act as translators between development and design. This removes potential barriers between the consumer and the brand. The medium is the message. So let the medium inform the shape of the message.

We can work it out
So, what do we need to know? At the risk of sounding like a supremely stoned guru, we need to know what we don’t know and better know those who do know what we don’t know (man). We must create cultures that allow for technology and creative to overlap, communicate at most phases of a project, and collaborate on concepts and solutions. Cutting creative out of technical solutions and excluding development from helping shape a concept is so 20th century thinking. Projects end with either a fantastic design/creative concept lost in a poor technical solution or an innovative and elegantly developed engine, ultimately rendered unusable due to design or UI missteps. The two main production disciplines of creative and technology, when working more closely together, actually can ‘know’ everything. We don’t need Creative Technologists, just the right kind of creative thinkers and communicators on both teams. Whatever your title, be it Media-Diviner or Social Video Transmogrifier, make the effort to understand the medium (down to the nitty-gritty) with the help of your more technical brothers and sisters.

We recently undertook a client engagement where we worked through these disruptions. The key to conquering these challenges? Recognizing the importance of serving customers where they demand service. Here are a few ways that helped us broker the transition from traditional to emerging channel support:

Develop a conversational approach to mirror phone support. The urge to ask a series of 10 questions, like typical phone support, is quickly thwarted by character limits and customer time constraints. We urge service participants to focus on the critical details of a comment and then direct the discussion based on the customer’s responses. While one of the most difficult concepts to master, public problem acknowledgement takes the pressure off the representative and comforts the customer.

Provide a consistent experience through enforcing workflow and service levels. A few years ago, companies assigned an expert to their Facebook pages to resolve distracting complaints. Today, we create sustainable operations — through process — that guide issue resolution regardless of social platform. Goals for the customer experience are also set; creating enjoyable interactions and giving employees targets to strive for beyond skill growth. For example, defining an initial response time goal ensures customers are treated equally regardless of the complaint they surface.

Accelerate skill building through coaching. Scaling the service process requires more than simply managing additional communications between the company and customer. Engagement and service content creation are long-term responsibilities. That’s why we grow the foundation of these skills through specific feedback and scheduled review sessions. These investments typically pay off in associate performance and allow people to take on additional service assignments more quickly — providing even more service avenues for the customer.

Create personal and genuine interactions through brand voice. Regardless of the platform, tone and brand nuances factor into how customer recognizes and engages with service representatives. We empower representatives to use their own voice as long as it taps into brand style guidelines appropriately. These contributions connect representatives directly to the program’s success and help maintain that connection as the social customer service strategy scales.

Establish dedicated program management to ensure scalable growth. To realize business impact from social customer service efforts, your vision needs to extend past real-time support. People don’t scale on their own: How will you augment customer service’s expertise and successful one-on-one interactions with customers? Continuous program management plays a key role here: defining strategy, shepherding internal communications, aligning key resources, and ensuring service interactions don’t suffer a quality fail once the program expands.

No company launches social customer service with all of these pieces perfectly in place. You must start strong with a few capabilities, and build as you go. Until then, questions will continue to fill your Facebook and Twitter presences; distracting prospects and customers from your other social initiatives and threatening your brand’s reputation.

1. Be real

The premise is simple: don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. A community manager should be selected because they’re a good fit for the community. Don’t select a community manager simply because they have community management or social media experience; make sure they also have a background that is relevant to the community or your brand. The community can tell if you’re insincere or clueless, and you run the threat of losing their trust.

Additionally, give your personality a chance to shine through. Community managers who are overly dry or technical might as well be robots. Community members appreciate the presence of a genuine personality with whom they feel a connection.

2. Listen

A good community manager makes time to check in on the community at least once a day. Depending upon the amount of activity on each community hub, you may want to check in three to five times a day. Reply to any questions people have asked, and let them know that you’re there for them.

Genuine interaction is a must. Take time to really read and understand what your community members need. Don’t try to make their questions fit into a formulaic category that can easily be answered with a stock response. This will frustrate them and make you lose credibility.

3. Share

When checking in, a community manager should post interesting material and encourage conversation in the community. Don’t feel like your posts have to strictly adhere to the theme of your community; feel free to post a funny video or cute picture when you see fit.

Encourage your community to share, too. When you post, always include a call to action to encourage responses. If you post a video of a puppy stuck on its back, ask your community members to share their favorite puppy videos in the comments. This creates a dynamic of mutual respect and open sharing, and keeps your community members interested.

4. Watch out for your friends

Every good community manager wears the hat of a moderator at some point in time. When a community member comes to you with an issue, do your best to respond and resolve it within one day. If a flame war erupts within your community, step in and take the necessary steps to restore peace. Moderation is an important part of community management, and your community will thank you for the support.

5. Pitch in during times of crisis

When there is unplanned downtime or unexpected technical difficulties, a community manager should do all they can to guide the community through the rough patch. It’s always a good idea to have a crisis response plan in place before it is needed so you can promptly escalate the issue up the proper chain of command and provide a swift resolution.

Radio silence from a community manager during times of uncertainty can lead to panic and frustration from community members. If possible, contact your community members via alternate methods such as email or other unaffected social outlets. If there is planned downtime on the horizon, make sure your community is aware of it at least two weeks in advance.

6. Give your friends space

There’s such a thing as oversharing in a community. Good community managers make sure to avoid posting too often or dominating conversations. Doing so will lead your community members to ignore you or even leave the community.

A good rule of thumb is to not post more than three times a day. Additionally, allow your community members to interact with one another and create organic conversations around a central topic. Quite often, community members’ questions are answered by other members before you get a chance to respond. This builds a strong community based on mutual respect, and makes the community manager’s job a lot more pleasant.

However, in the last decade, a few industry observers have noted seemingly diminishing returns on the strategic value of technology to drive additional business value. In fact, towards the turn of the millennium, debates raged on whether IT had become just another commodity (or not) while the the gap continued to grow between companies applying IT well in terms of business performance and those who weren’t. As I pointed out in a recent post on organizing for social business, that the productivity gap looms ever larger. In a closely related trend, my colleague, well known business thinker Dave Gray, has been exploring how companies, becoming ever more global and conglomerated, experience dramatic productivity drops as they grow. This paints a discouraging picture for companies that have either not become digital natives or are dealing with the intense communication and collaboration overhead of today’s massive organizations: Better business performance is increasingly harder to come by as the easiest opportunities are seized.

The reality is, however, that the vast majority of large organizations have been direct beneficiaries of decades of IT investment. To date, the bulk of that investment has been in a category of IT sometimes known as systems of record. These are the well-known bread-and-butter applications (and their databases) that run our firms and contain the business records, electronic documents, and countless other information artifacts that we use to conduct the routine minutia of daily business. It’s safe to say that most firms would go out of business without the data within and automated capabilities of their systems of record. But systems of record are increasingly 1) becoming commoditized by SaaS and the cloud and 2) most organizations have reached the carrying capacity of the approach: There’s very little left to store and automate that isn’t already. So where are new business gains to be had?

Systems of record have matured to the point where there’s only a little strategic advantage to having your own unique capability. Instead, the discussion on strategic technology has shifted to the other 40% of what businesses in industrialized nations do: Knowledge work. These are highly variable, dynamic, and increasingly fast-moving processes that focus on the higher order activities of a business. Knowledge work involves high levels of communication and collaboration amongst the most valuable workers a company possesses. They are also represented in the most strategic activities taking place within an organization.

Thus, using technology to enable knowledge work as a strategic capability has sparked a growing interest in improving what are increasingly known as systems of engagement. As a key part of this, the rise of social media in the middle of the last decade has done a lot to change the global focus on how we look at communication and collaboration between knowledge workers. A corresponding change came when technology innovation and rate of change in the marketplace began to outpace what most organizations could adapt to. This has led to the aforementioned generational shifts in focus, and in certain early instances industry disruption, in the way we apply technology to business problems. Witness what open source has done to commercial software or what the Internet has done to traditional media (music, TV, movies, newspapers, electronic gaming, etc.) to get a sense of what is now also happening to the information technology and communication industries today.

For enterprises, ground zero for the transition to systems of engagement in many companies often centers around any pending update of the corporate intranet. Even today in most organizations, the intranet is much more of a system of record than it is a system of engagement. This is beginning to change and we can clearly see it in discussions that members have in the Social Business Council and in the initiatives that they are taking, which I’ll explore in coming months.

What’s also clear about the changes taking place in businesses today is that systems of record are not going away. They’re a critical element of our business infrastructure and have their rightful place. Instead, we’ve discovered how we’ve often overestimated them and their ability to provide us with the tools to empower the most valuable and highest leverage aspects of our organizations. Watching what’s been possible on the Web, we’ve learned that we’ve correspondingly underemphasized the ability to enable and transform the most important element of business today: How we as humans can best work together to create value and achieve objectives. In last year’s survey of the social business landscape, I explored in detail the many emerging ways this is changing in the large and how enterprises are generally behind the times as the consumer world creates and proves out powerful new ways of tapping into and unleashing human potential. Enterprise 2.0, in the form of internal social networks and other models, are just the beginning here.

New systems of engagement are now receiving considerable attention in the forms of online communities, crowdsourcing, Social CRM, open APIs, and many other means as a way to connect customers and business partners together to achieve useful outcomes with the most cost-effectiveness and largest result. From just one recent example of many of this trend, this week Gartner reported that “within five years we expect that community peer-to-peer support projects will supplement or replace Tier 1 contact center support in more than 40 percent of top 1,000 companies with a contact center.” Social systems of engagement have already become the primary way that we communicate in our personal lives and this is also happening for businesses.

In recent conversations around how IT is changing, it’s been clear that this is part of a larger trend, part of it the move from push to pull systems, part of the move from the center to the edge, but all of it shows how networks and simple, freeform, emergent tools can enable much bigger results than the transactional systems of old. If you are investing in strategic new technologies today to drive your business forward, I believe this is one of the most important investments you can make at this time. Make no mistake, however, that this is very much an unfolding story and we’re all learning from watching the leaders. But as I’ve covered here and many times in the past, it’s a change that very few organizations will be able to skip and survive.

I’ll be exploring systems of engagement in more detail as part of my Why Social Business Is Different series. Stay tuned.

This is posing a growing challenge for organizations that are trying to assemble a mature set of social media capabilities across their business. It hasn’t helped that social business initiatives have — up until recently — consisted of very separate efforts focused primarily on social media marketing and internal collaboration (aka Enterprise 2.0) often with side bets on crowdsourcing and Social CRM. This has often meant the acquisition of very different social media products and services both on-premises as well as SaaS, each with their own social architecture, social identity, search functionality, etc. Now that the social business discussion is moving up to the CIO level in many of the large organizations I’m talking with, this has led to a growing desire to reconcile and make sense of social media platform investment and application portfolios across the enterprise.

To put in plainly, there’s a lot of work to do here, both on the IT side and the social media vendor side. It’s currently too difficult to integrate today’s social media products into a set of coherent and consistent social business capabilities with unified security, identity, discovery, analytics, management and governance. Some of the issues are technical and some of them are organizational but fortunately it turns out that gaining intellectual control of enterprise social media is certainly possible today. Frameworks and approaches of above 1.0 maturity for this now exist, such as Social Business Design (disclaimer: This is the process we use ourselves.)

So businesses have some choices to make today if they want to organize better around social media. The first choice is the set of platforms, technologies, and standards they would like to have. The second is the processes, organizational structures, and cultural/behavioral changes they’d like to see realized. And finally, the third set is the level of resources, prioritization, and funding that will be provided. IT departments will be affected by all of these, but the first and last ones the most, and yet they must also understand that it’s likely that social media is going to become a function in the organization that is somewhat similar to theirs. I currently see a growing parallel between IT departments and social business units, in that they supply capabilities across the business and support new business initiatives so that they’re successful in using technology to create better outcomes. Whether social business units ultimately become part of IT (not likely in most organizations in my opinion), move into HR or corporate communications, or become an independent unit is a trend that is still unclear, but these are the most likely scenarios of who ends up in charge of enterprise social media.

What is clear, however, is that social media is having an immediate and sustained impact on IT decisions at the moment. Sometimes this is a disruptive impact because social media now deeply affects how IT delivers on intranets, portals, collaboration, unified communication, content/document management, workflow, and business intelligence (at the very least.) This means there are some hard choices to make. They are also ones that once made will well situate the organization to much more naturally, gracefully, and effectively incorporate social media in the way it achieves top-line business objectives.

To reduce the undesirable aspect of social media impact and better capture the many upsides, IT departments should think carefully about several key issues related to 1) social media standards, 2) federated platform selection, and 3) on-the-ground consumer-style enablement of business uses of social media. In particular, this will help define a clear vision as social business service delivery is becoming increasingly blurry as organizations acquire a growing portfolio of internal and external social business platforms that also connect to existing IT systems that are in turn getting their own social media features. The list below will help focus on what’s important while enabling the business to meet its needs.

Preparing for Social Business as a Strategic IT Capability

I’ve covered the highest level management issues in getting a large enterprise strategically ready for social business before in Introducing The Social Business Unit and Organizing for Social Business: The Issues, so these are the concerns specific for preparing on the IT side of the house:

1. Vigorously encourage social computing standards, but don’t be held back by their immaturity. Enterprises have not pushed hard for standards in social software like we’ve done in previous generations of IT. Consequently most of the social media standards that exist today are consumer-focused. We cannot forget standards enable choice, interoperability, ensure pools of talent, prevent lock-in, lower costs, and provide many other benefits. Portable social graphs, open activity streams, standardized social applications are the focus here but there are other standardization issues as well. Not every vendor will support the emerging standards for enterprise social media and choices are going to be limited at first. It is essential for IT to defend this position and provide the advantages to the business in regards to social media. Security and mobility should also not be an afterthought in this discussion either.
2. Actively support business-centric social media platform selections. Unfortunately, I see IT departments encouraging the use of legacy platforms that aren’t what are sometimes called “born social”. There’s also more capability to acquire that just a base social network, social CMS, or social intranet platform. There is also social listening, analytics, management, compliance, and governance. Business users won’t necessarily know all the required moving parts for a mature and sophisticated social media capability but IT should and must. I’ll be exploring the social business stack soon to look at this in more detail, but the key is for IT to have a very open mind about building a set of strategic capabilities that makes sense for each of the various functions of the enterprise that will be heavily involved in social media. This is essential for genuine success since what IT either has on the shelf or wants to deliver as a one-size-fits-all to everyone is usually inadequate. Significantly poorer outcomes will also result when dealing with the platform capabilities of each part of the social business spectrum in isolation.
3. Proactively enable independent social media action on the ground with strong IT support. Social media is about empowering people and specifically here we’re talking about empowering workers with social media. They need tools, help, and support for their particular social business activity, whether that is sales, marketing, product development, customer care, or what have you. They will be looking, perhaps just once, at IT for help for service delivery with this. IT must enable and support choice and the widest possible options for both internal and external social business. Not doing so means that business users will be driven to service providers that can meet their requirements and deadlines, which often puts social media outside the range of IT involvement and governance. Preparing ahead of time for the growing lists of requests that I’m already hearing from IT managers means planning ahead and following an emergent enterprise architecture approach. Take this to heart and support centrally, while empowering locally.

For additional details, please read Reconciling the enterprise IT portfolio with social media and stay tuned for a deeper dive into the moving parts of what Peter Kim calls a modern holistic social business capability.

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Social business is driven by an integrated vision, grounded in a company’s business needs, capabilities and processes, and constituent met and unmet needs.

This vision must take current market considerations into account, given trends in technology, society, and the workplace.

With those in mind, effective strategy and tactics can be formulated and activated to connect the key elements of an enterprise’s value chain: end consumers, business partners, and employees. (The most common digital interfaces to these groups are internet, extranet, and intranet.)

The composite is a company’s social business design.

- LL Cool J

While I founded the company several months earlier, this week marks 3 years since I announced the formation of Dachis Group.

To put things in perspective:

Over the last 17 years, I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to work with some of the world’s most talented professionals for some of the largest companies in the world helping to pioneer the nascent digital communications field we know today.

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to play a small role in helping shape the way businesses navigate the most profound and exciting shift in the communications landscape in the history of mankind.

From digital change management, user experience design, information architecture, mobile application development, eCommerce, eBusiness, SEO, SEM, and digital advertising, to Web 2.0, E 2.0, Social Networks, Social Business and Social Business Design, not everyone has always understood the profound and fundamental impact the shifts we experienced and were trying to define for clients, were having on the future of business.

That’s OK.  Re-contextualizing things can be a jarring experience. It’s not easy describing the future to those that are wedded to the past or without a view beyond the present.

Throughout the span of that time period, I have been un-wavering in my belief that the most exciting times are ahead of us and that these dramatic shifts we have seen over the past decade and a half have only been the precursors to the even more profound set of changes we have yet to see.

Social Business Opportunities Defined:

John Hagel, who recently spoke at our Social Business Summit, along with John Seely Brown has written about comparing the diminishing returns generated from an economic model based on ‘knowledge stocks’ to the increasing returns generated from ‘knowledge flows’ and moving from ‘stable environments’ to ‘dynamic environments’.

Dave Gray has spoken and written about the resilience of a connected company and how a more fluid, living breathing company that listens, connects, communicates, participates, engages, and creates actions to exchange value with its constituents is one that will survive longer and thrive.

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of socially calibrated organizations. The purposeful creation of organizations that are designed and organized to listen, connect, communicate, participate, engage, and create action from its constituents.

Why Social Business Design? 1) Simply put, because it’s not going to happen all by itself, and 2) Because a company that is set up and organized to be more engaged with its constituents will first create leveraged outcomes capturing dramatically greater market opportunities and dramatically more operational efficiencies by removing the friction in communications from the core functions of a business. Second, it will create emergent outcomes created from the serendipitous connections and communications that might not have come otherwise, thus pulling the business in dynamic new directions.

Social Businesses by design, will survive longer, thrive, and generate increasing returns.

We believe that every business will become a social business.

Thinking ahead:  Social Business Intelligence

Moving forward.

Initially, we have seen businesses exploring how to organize for Social Business by designing and experimenting with new methods, process, tools, and by testing strategy and engagement programs to find out what works and what doesn’t. Some businesses are just starting to experiment and others are further along a path. In many instances efforts are tactical, and in others, efforts are applied with a laser focus on proper strategy and getting things right for the future. We’ve seen some amazing successes and some fantastic failures across various business functions and industry verticals, but experimentation leads to figuring things out and we are seeing our clients get it right.

The real opportunities begin to realize value materialized from integrating and aggregating the strategies and tactics that worked well in the initial phases of the journey to operationalize them into the core functions of business. This involves deeply integrating forms of listening, connecting, communication, participation, engagement, and constituent action throughout all business functions.  This will take the form of an integrated Social Business stack.  Many businesses may not be staffed, trained, or have resources dedicated to managing Social Business, but will realize that these integrated and aggregated forms of Social Business are increasingly the mission critical components to operating and succeeding in this networked economy and seek solutions to manage these efforts.

Going forward, it isn’t enough to just simply connect or communicate.  An ongoing never ending effort will be required to optimize Social Business operations by gaining insights and intelligence derived from the analysis of operationalized social signal data in the Social Business Graph and driving action on the part of the company.  Social Business Intelligence is the key to the intentional creation of socially calibrated organizations.

Without question, every single day we have been 100% focused on building a company to harness the power of Social Business Intelligence because we have always believed that Social Business Intelligence driven insights and action will be what powers the business of the future.

During his SXSW Interactive presentation, Jared Spool entertained with audience with classic examples of web design fail.  The audience enjoyed a good laugh in judging poor web design examples based on the final product.  But after the ice breaker, Spool challenged the audience to think about all of the decisions a designer made that led to that final design style.  The most insightful part of the presentation was Spool’s reference to his research at User Interface Engineering about what separates successful from unsuccessful companies as it relates to designing user experiences.  Spool entered the research project with the hypothesis that successful companies would have the best design methodologies.  He left the research project with vastly different findings.  The results showed that the most successful companies actually lacked methodology while the ‘struggling’ companies were the ones trying to put methodologies in place.

Spool rationalized the results stating that methodology is a systematic, repeatable approach to a process based on following specific set of rules.  He found that design rules did not work for designers.  According to Spool, rule-based decisions prevent thinking.  With rules, designers appeared to fall apart when faced with an exception.  Designers of the successful companies were on the opposite side of the spectrum (shown below) in that they relied on tricks and techniques.  In the case of successful companies, designers were left to their own devices to make informed decisions rather than follow hard and fast rules.

Source: Jared Spool, Anatomy of a Design Decision, SXSWi 2011 featured speaker presentation.  Posted on Twitter by @kennethkunz from Yfrog.

Spool’s dissection of design decisions applies to what we refer to at Dachis Group as social business design.  Successful companies trust and empower all employees to make informed decisions, not force them to follow strict, top-down methodology and dogma.  Dave Gray’s The Connected Company blog post points to research supporting this concept.

“It’s not about design for control so much as design for emergence. You can’t control a complex system, but you can manage its growth, and there are a lot of things you can do that will position it for success…Design by connection is not a top-down activity so much as bottom-up. Complex systems just don’t work that way. In a complex system, you need to pay attention to small things and make little adjustments along the way.” Dave Gray, The Connected Company, 2011.

During our recent Social Business Summit, John Hagel explained how the problem businesses face in today’s information age is that current knowledge is diminishing in value at an accelerating pace.  Knowledge workers need to constantly refresh knowledge stocks.  Businesses can no longer rely on competing with one piece of proprietary knowledge. Businesses must participate in a larger marketplace of information exchange to maintain a competitive edge.

According to Hagel, the key to a successful business is “small moves, smartly done” that lead to a cascade of change.  If we apply Spool’s teachings, we discover that each of these small moves are a result of many smaller decisions.  The insight that emerges is the most seemingly unimportant decisions lead to small moves that combined over time have a huge impact (good or bad) on business.  So I’ll make a leap in making the following statement:

What separates a successful business from an unsuccessful business is how it supports the millions of decisions its employees make.

There’s compelling evidence for companies to trust employees’ workarounds on established methodologies to solve business problems.  If you don’t trust your employees to make informed decisions, you need to look more closely at your hiring practices and training programs.  Trusting, supporting and empowering employees to make their own informed decisions is the most powerful way for the enterprise to scale operations and allow for the flexibility and innovation required to be competitive. Design for open business cultures, ones that are networked to support the sharing of employee expertise and learned techniques at scale.