Bring Out The Best

Elinor Ostrom | The Failed Promise of Collaboration | Factoids | Elsewhere

Photo by J. Amill Santiago on Unsplash

A core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans. We need to ask how diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of participants, and the achievement of more effective, equitable and sustainable outcomes.

| Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences lecture 2009

The institution of business, and its relationship with market economies, social policies, and other institutions could be a wellspring of ‘more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes’. But I fear business is falling short.

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The Failed Promise of Collaboration

A tweet by Paul Jocelyn led me to a Simon Terry post from 2022 which I hadn’t read when published.

In Is Collaboration Is Dead After All? Yes, Time to do Something Better, Terry starts out by quoting Carrie Basham Marshall, who was involved in collaboration tools at Socialcast, VMware, and elsewhere:

Digital transformation in its current state no longer feels innovative – it’s a bit of a Groundhog Day industry right now, still offering the identical community and collaboration-related promises that we made more than a decade ago. It’s also too vendor-centric, which makes employee behavior change even harder.

She says she’s still a believer, although leaving the industry to be a rancher, but Terry is now ambivalent:

In recent years, I have heard similar sentiments from clients, consultants and vendors alike. […] We can talk about new features but mostly the vendors are in a cycle of copying each others features or copying the features of consumer social in an effort for relevance. Some vendors have given up discussing collaboration and social networking and focus almost entirely on employee communications. Hybrid work may mean everyone now has the technology likely through a major vendor stack or in opposition to it. Few are getting more than entry level value.

The technology is hardly new. We’ve been going around this technology block for a while. Jive was founded in 2001 and now have vanished into private equity hell. Yammer was founded in 2008. Slack was founded in 2009. Workplace from Meta the once new kid on the block was announced in 2015. Microsoft Teams was launched November 2016. Over the last 20 something years, a raft of other collaboration solutions have lit up the sky and either burnt out or scaled back to a niche. I’m sure there’s yet another Google product coming.

I think Google — a client of mine for a few years — is now gunshy about building new work technology despite minor efforts in Gsuite, and the focus on Hangouts.

But as I wrote in 2015, well before the pandemic, the push for performative productivity at the expense of deep work (as defined by Cal Newport) is a mistake:

The idealized company supported by social collaboration tools is not where we work today, if ever.

Work — in the basic sense of getting things done, not the place we go to do it — is a combination of focused individual activity, focused joint activity (working together with others in real time), and cooperative and coordinative activities (working asynchronously with others on framing and planning of work, like chatting online about deadlines and features in a product development cycle). Social collaboration tools overemphasize the last of these three categories of work, and de-emphasize — or ignore — the first two. The reason? Perhaps one reason is that the last category is the province of old-school managers: those who were charged with managing others.

Terry harmonizes with that to a large extent. And I was startled to see him quote me while making his argument:

Work is a wicked problem — a snarl of dilemmas, not a list of initiatives — and the whole world and all its actors are fighting to control it, bend it, contain it: in short, to own it.

Stowe Boyd, on Twitter

Stowe Boyd in his typical incisive fashion nails the first issue with much of the last decade of collaboration. The consultants and change agents were focused on the potential to create a new way of working based in agility, transparency, freedom and creativity. Organisations and their managers right down to the frontline were focused on extending models of power and leveraging the technology to improve employee engagement without real change. Employees wanted some improvement in their work, better information and better help, but they weren’t seeking the revolution of the advocates, mostly they wanted work to be rewarding, productive and safe.

This reminds me of Charles Lambkin’s comments about managers who ‘want change for free’.

Again, Terry:

The second issue flows from the first. With so many diverse interests at play, we could never nail a consistent metaphor for the activity that these tools were helping to improve. Were we focused on social networking, collaboration, employee communications, employee engagement, community, employee experience, innovation, or something else? The answer of all of the above doesn’t fit in the reductive simplistic management model in place around the world. No wonder people had so much trouble with ‘what to use when.’

And with that ‘confusion of goals’ vendors were all over the place focusing on features and copying each other rather than focusing on supporting what people actually want to do:

The benchmark of adoption became employees on a tool with some level of activity, not the potential to work better or more valuably. In a confusion of goals, the simplest metric dominates.

[…]

This top-down focus on doing-to-others meant so many organisations missed the peer-based bottom up doing-with-others that represented the exponential potential of value.

Terry suggests that these challenges can be overcome, and the promise of these tools can still be achieved. Take a look at his recommendations. But I am looking to other approaches, ones based on the insight of bottom-up doing-with-others as an outgrowth of each individual doing their own deep work, not the other way around.

In the weeks and months to follow I will be reintroducing a discussion of new directions in work technology to Work Futures, along with my other obsessions.

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Factoids

What are Americans thinking?

A recent Harris poll for The Guardian found that around half of Americans think the S. & P. 500 is down this year, and that unemployment is at a 50-year high. Fifty-six percent think we’re in a recession. | Ezra Klein

We are not in a recession. Unemployment is at a 50-year low. The S&P is up 12.86% YTD.

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Contrast Dublin with New York City.

Dublin is set to become the latest European capital to bar through-traffic from its city centre. The plan set a goal of a 60% traffic reduction and promises to both ease current traffic congestion and allow for the creation of new pedestrian streets and plazas that will make Dublin’s heart a more pleasant place to linger. | Dense Discovery

Meanwhile, Govenor Hochul of New York backed out of congestion pricing for downtown Manhattan, a few weeks before the fifteen yearlong effort was finally about to be initiated. Millions have been spent on cameras and other equipment, and the blockage will lead to a shortfall of billions for the New York City region MTA.

There are going to be a bunch of lawsuits.

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Elsewhere

AI Clones

Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, has knocked off the idea of AI intermediaries from Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who talks about potential dates being coordinated without human involvement. But Yuan envisions AI clones attending business meetings for you:

“You do not need to spend so much time [in meetings]. You do not have to have five or six Zoom calls every day. You can leverage the AI to do that.”

Yuan allowed that the “boring” parts of corporate jobs could be ceded and that the new initiative could be revolutionary to work-life balance.

The obvious question is what will the executives in the company think when a large part of workers’ jobs can be handled by AI clones?

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Katharina Pistor

Pistor, in American Business Will Regret Writing Off Democracy, makes the argument that American business leaders who back Trump might come to regret it. She names Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Stephen Schwartzman of Blackstone, and then outlines the fragility of the system that makes them powerful: