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.

But in the world of work, we are only now seeing meaningful change. The technology is digital, but the way it is now changing the workplace is largely human and social – it is about people, culture, process and dynamics, as much as bits and bytes. We are now seeing what I think is the biggest change since the dot.com era in the rise of social computing in the workplace and social business design more broadly.

I find this incredibly exciting.

Social business has huge implications for business structure and organisational design, and I believe the way we organise will change thanks to the ease with which we can now find each other, share and collaborate using online tools.

To get the best possible picture of where we are headed and how we will get there, Dachis Group have invited key players, practitioners and clients to a series of summits to be held in March 2010 in the USA, UK and Australia. These will not be talking shops or pitches, but genuine roll-your-sleeves-up sessions where we build up a global picture of the present and future of social business design.

I will be hosting the Austin summit on 11 March, speaking at the London summit on 18 March, and video-teleconferencing in to the Sydney summit on March 25th. I really hope to get together with as many people as possible to get a sense of the challenges and learn about the opportunities ahead.

Please join us and sign up for one of our Social Business summits if you haven’t already done so.

I’ll see you there.

On March 18, SOMESSO and Headshift/Dachis Group will host Europe’s first Social Business Summit; an invitation-only event in the city of London, which is aimed at business and technology thought leaders interested in the future of social business design. This event will be part of a series including a summit in Austin, Texas on March 11 and one in Sydney on March 25, intended to engage with leading practitioners on three continents and provide a global view of the market.

Save the date and let us know if you wish to participate.

The use of social tools in business is now progressing from the experimental stage to the beginning of mainstream adoption. As with all transformational technologies, organisational culture change and technology adoption are closely related, with both influencing the other in subtle but important ways. We want to look ahead and consider the impact of social tools on the way we organise, structure and manage knowledge- and people-intensive businesses in the future, both internally and externally.

The relationship between technology and culture is an interesting one, and it plays out differently in the short-run and the long-run. We can see the increasing speed with which technological change bleeds into mainstream culture through the impact of printing, radio, the telephone, television and, most recently, the internet and social networking. Whether it is Time’s person of the year, or the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year, the influence of recent online developments is inescapable. But at a deeper level, more fundamental change is also happening, though less immediately visible, and over a longer time period.

In business, our use of technology is influenced by the way we work; but the way we work, and indeed the way we structure our companies and organisations, is also very much influenced by technology. The Twentieth Century corporation was partly a product of technological innovations in logistics, transport and communications. Those who could afford to exploit these expensive innovations were able to reap the benefits of scale associated with large-scale co-ordination of human and material resources.

But institutions can give longevity to ideas through codification into practice. So as the technological or economic constraints associated with our means of organisation fell away, companies did not always change their structure or practice in response. Fast-forward to the early Twenty-first Century and we face a mis-match between the affordances of the day-to-day technology most people use and the organisational structures they operate within, which have yet to adapt to take advantage of the way new technology changes how people interact and co-operate. This gap represents a huge business opportunity for those companies able and willing to adapt.

If, as Clay Shirky argues, the cost of collaboration is close to zero thanks to social tools, what does this mean for organisational design? Can we dramatically reduce internal cost structures by making better use of emergent behaviour inside the firm? If real-time data has the potential to transform service delivery, then how should organisations be structured to take advantage of it? These are just some of the questions that the adoption of social tools inside the enterprise are raising about the future of the firm. They touch on various aspects of technology, from enterprise architecture to user experience design; but they are also informed by economic theory, cognitive science, anthropology, psychology and organisational design.

Last year we outlined our thinking on how to apply social business design to the practical needs of companies. 2010 is set to be a very busy and interesting year for those of us who are exploring the impact of social tools, networks and concepts on the way we organise businesses and other forms of collaboration or collective action.

But we don’t have all the answers – indeed we don’t even have all the questions – and that is why we have decided to reach out to a mix of thinkers, practitioners and business people in knowledge- and people-intensive firms to help chart the next stage of this journey.

We will be announcing more details of the summit in the next few weeks. It will consist of at least 50% facilitated discussion, but there will be some great short talks too, and we hope everybody will go away with something useful. There will be a cost to attend, to cover the venue and logistics, but it will be worth it – promise But for now, please save the date and let us know if you wish to participate.

We’ve scheduled our summit for Thursday, March 11th which is the day before the SXSW Interactive conference begins in Austin, Texas. We’ve got some great speakers already confirmed, including Jeffrey Dachis, Peter Kim, Charlene Li, Stowe Boyd, Douglas Rushkoff, Lee Bryant, and Dion Hinchcliffe.

Our intention is to make this an intimate, focused, and valuable day for everyone. With that in mind, it is by invitation only. If you’re interested in attending, please send us an email at sbs@dachisgroup.com and tell us who you are, and what company you work for. The interests and roles of the attendees will shape the conference agenda and content, so please indicate your interest now.