Organizational Design

What Level of Social Business Change Do You Really Want?

March 29, 2012

What level of change do you really want from social business? Do you want a little bit, or a whole lot? Do you want process improvement? Or, Do you want organizational transformation? Social technology means organizational change. Social Business and social technologies are indeed bringing changes into your organization. That we know. But what we [...]

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Scale Positive Behaviors by Designing Them Into Social Software

March 20, 2012

Why doesn’t every piece of cake come with two forks? There’s no fixed reason why the cake can only come with one fork. But, having only one fork is an obstacle to sharing, even for the most generous of potential dessert-sharers. Why not bring me a second fork, to make it easy for me to [...]

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Extended Organizations: Finding the Boundaries and Naming the Contents

February 1, 2012

Can you help me out with a messy research-related question? What are the best ways to set boundaries around subsets of an “extended organization”, and then give these subsets names so that they are easy to talk about? The problem seems on the surface looks like a question of semantics (i.e., what to call it). [...]

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Is Gamification a Cure for Entitlement?

October 19, 2011

What value is all this talk about gamification? It’s one thing to deploy game-design tactics to turn your for-profit services (like Foursquare or Hashable) into games. By playing games, folks actually will train themselves to use these products. More troubling to me is the idea of using gamification to redesign work tasks. Gamification and Work [...]

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The “New” Crisis of Meaning?

October 4, 2011

What’s up with the word “new” in the phrase “meaning is the new motivator”? From all corners of the interwebz conversation about ‘business’, I see mention of this idea that meaning at work is something new, something that we have just begun to desire. Seriously. It seems to come as a surprise, or as a [...]

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How to Design Social Business Systems For Engaged, Social Organizations

June 23, 2011

Organizations are social — they always have been. But, organizations have rarely been designed intentionally to help us flourish as social beings while we work together. Neither our analog systems nor our digital systems have been designed to help us bring more of our social selves to our work together. But, it’s not that hard [...]

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5 Ways That Systems of Engagement Bring Out Our Full Social Selves

June 22, 2011

Technology has a way of sucking the humanity right out of us. Consider how we describe, design and deploy ‘enterprise 2.0′ and work system technologies in our organizations: – When we talk about technology systems, we talk about machines, platforms, inputs and outputs.  We forget about values, emotion, flourishing, meaning and purpose. – When we [...]

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Social Intranet Design and Organizational Identity: Design for functionality and character

June 15, 2011

In a social organization, the design of digital social tools like intranets should reflect the organizational features that define the organization. These design features, no matter how subtle, can ‘auto-communicate’ and make salient the characteristics that matter most, and help organizations stay authentic. Especially in the digital workplace, our digital tools create an important shared [...]

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7 Ways That Social Business Advice is Wrong for Your Organization

June 9, 2011

“Social Business” is coming to your organization, whether you’re ready or not. Social business tools, also known as enterprise social media or systems of engagement, are increasingly being advocated by vendors and consultants as tools that help any organization do its work better. But, while the influx of social tools could really benefit your organization, [...]

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Authentic Competitive Distinctiveness — It’s all in the details

May 19, 2011

There’s a great photo in the New York Times (May 19, 2011) of a whitepaper chart created to manage the Delta-Northwest Merger’s Long and Complex Path. The chart is full of of post-its, probably more than 200 of them. Each post-it reflects a point where the systems and processes of the organizations need to be [...]

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