S'mores

The best ingredients, when carefully combined, arranged into appealing combinations, and allowed to come together into a cohesive and improved manner can often result in fantastic accomplishment.S'MORES - Pamela Michelle Johnson

Whether it is the inputs to a multi-part process, the components of a product, or the individual steps that lead to a desired outcome - almost all the work we do (unless you are a solitary artist of some kind), involves us contributing our efforts and work towards some larger or greater goal. 

And truly, if the individual contributions are not of high quality, delivered on time, and often consistently repeatable, then certainly the overall product or service or project will suffer, and possibly fail.  So, thusly we focus, heads-down on our pieces, making sure that ultimately we feel proud of our effort, knowing if the end goals are not actually met, well, it was not our fault.  Which is sort of comforting to a point. You can only control what you can control right?

But the real consumers of the product, be they end users, employees, customers, or fans - they are less concerned with the relative quality of the various components (if they can even acknowledge at all the process), they only care about the end results.  

The S'more is either good or it isn't.  No kid has ever been handed a S'more and commented, 'The marshmallow is good, melted nicely, but I think the chocolate is a little off, and I give the graham cracker only a 'meets expectations'.

You can get pretty far in the world making the 'best' graham crackers, but what kids remember are the best S'mores.

Happy Weekend everyone!

Picture Credit - 'S'mores' by Pamela Michelle Johnson, oil on canvas - to learn more about Ms. Johnson's work visit here

Giving it all away. Sort of.

The sudden surge in popularity of the Q&A site Quora, and perhaps to a lesser extent the online community of experts being developed at Focus have once again led many to evaluate and assess the value and future of open, public, and community powered knowledge repositories.

Where other attempts have been made with varying degrees of success, (Yahoo! Answers, LinkedIn Answers), these new entrants, in particular Quora seem to have captured, at least for the moment, the interest and support of an influential subset of participants (most apparent in the technology space).

From many accounts, the quality of contributors and information found on Quora is unusually high, and in comparison to prior attempts at more broad Q & A sites like Yahoo!, the recent adoption and activity on Quora seem to have captured the attention of a well-connected and active user community.

Participation in open and public forums like Quora and LinkedIn Answers is often a recommendation made to job seekers, as their subject matter knowledge, reasoning ability, and the opportunity to be noticed and to forge connections with other industry or domain experts can all be seen as beneficial to a job search, or to the establishment of a professional identity or brand.

No doubt for many, the built in audience and reach of sites like Quora or LinkedIn offer individuals the chance to be seen and heard by large numbers of relevant people, much more so than can be reached by the launch of a new personal blog, or even by simply posting an online resume or professional profile. 

But for others, in particular for established professionals in a given field, the motivation to participate and contribute to public knowledge portals seems quite a bit different. Some may feel obliged and happy to simply share their insights openly, and willingly; driven simply by the satisfaction derived from adding value to the larger community in which they operate.  Some others might see these platforms in a kind of competitive manner; seeking to leverage them to establish their place in a virtual pecking order of sorts, a process made more acute and apparent when their specific contributions can be compared and contrasted against other well and lesser-known experts.

Most online professional community and networking effort is either directly ('please hire me', 'buy my company's stuff', or 'book me for a speaking gig'); or indirectly ('check out my new post on leadership', 'here's a great piece on productivity apps'), aimed at convincing or at least influencing the intended audience to do or feel something positive towards the contributor. And that makes perfect sense.  We all need to get paid, whether or not that payment is in hard dollars, or in the more amorphous currency of reputation and influence. Either way, the check always comes.

And I suppose that is the problem I get with sites like Quora or even on LinkedIn. I find it hard to read the individual contributions without thinking about the 'sell side' motivations, (or potential motivations) of the contributors.  Maybe that is just a weakness in my ability to distinguish the 'sell' from the content, but either way, these sites can easily degrade into the geek version of the high school homecoming queen contest.  A few popular, good looking, and well connected people trying to convince the rest of us how fantastic they are.  

I suppose at the end of the day, if you really want to contribute to the body of knowledge, you'd write or contribute to a Wikipedia page.  Everyone reads those, and no one knows who writes them.

Unlikely Sources

You are sick.

You are hospitalized with some kind of mysterious ailment.  The initial examination reveals a respiratory problem, but the exact diagnosis, and therefore the recommended course of action remains elusive.

As you lay in your hospital bed, feeling entirely unwell, concerned and nervous about your well-being, at least you can be comforted in the knowledge that by good fortune you are under the care of knowledgeable and experienced doctors, nurses, social workers, and law students.

Hold on a minute - social workers and law students?

What the heck?

I recently read an article about the University of Maryland Medical Center Pediatric Clinic's practice of involving cross functional teams of professionals and students in its assessment and treatment of its pediatric patients. A given patient's condition and potential treatment is discussed in a collaborative manner by medical professors,  seasoned doctors, first-year residents, medical students, and even professionals and students from the schools of pharmacy and law.

What possibly could a law student or social worker have to offer in the diagnosis of a patient's respiratory condition? Would a law student be able to discern pneumonia from an X-Ray?  Would a social worker be qualified to accurately assess asthma from a stress test?

No and no.  But expertise from these non-medical disciplines might have important insights to offer the attending physicians about the patient's environment; about the external forces of community, family, or living conditions that might factor in to a more well-informed evaluation of the circumstances surrounding the patient.  These 'non-experts' might indeed be able to provide valuable insight that ultimately could impact and improve the treatment of the patient.

And even if the law student can't offer any relevant or precise contribution to a specific patient's care, the benefits that accrue to the law student, and the doctors, and the pharmacists, etc. from this kind of up close, in depth, and important exposure and collaboration can't be discounted.

Dr. Jay Perman, the President of the University believes that if students from different schools watch one another in action, they will gain greater understanding of each discipline's value to a given case. In turn, he believes patients will receive more comprehensive care.

Collaboration and inclusion of cross-disciplinary teams to serve dual purposes - to better solve the immediate problem, i.e. treating and curing the patient; and the longer term and broader goal of developing more well-rounded and capable professionals that have a better understanding and appreciation of the point of view and challenges of their colleagues from complementary disciplines.

It is an interesting approach to what has to be considered a typical process in the medical field.  Does the inclusion of professionals and students so as to form a cross-functional team really improve patient outcomes and enhance professional development?

Hard to say for sure, since the practice is still in early days.  

But I suppose we could ask the question this way - How much can you truly learn if you are only surrounded by people that have undergone the exact same training and education programs as you?

Could you ever see a problem differently, and perhaps offer up a different answer if you have been trained and socialized in the same way as all your peers?

Would it make sense to ask Marketing, or Purchasing, or Sales their opinion once in a while? Or are you pretty sure you know it all?

What do you think?

More on Collaboration (I know, you're bored too)

Last week on the HR Happy Hour show, Jon Ingham from consultancy Social Advantage, and Matt Wilkinson from Enterprise Collaboration Technology vendor Socialcast joined us on the show to talk about HR and Collaboration, and more specifically the approach to and importance of technology in organizational initiatives to enhance and improve collaboration, innovation, co-creation, and likely several other important sounding words ending in '-tion'.

It was an interesting and informative show, but while looking back on some of the comments in the #HRHappyHour Twitter backchannel, and then upon reading this post today from Laurie Ruettimann on The Cynical Girl blog I think that perhaps we did not really do a good enough job making the case (as our guests certainly believe), that not only is enterprise collaboration fast becoming a critical concern and initiative for many organizations today, but that HR is uniquely positioned to be the key leader and driver in the organization for these projects.  I know that on the Happy Hour show the core audience are not tech geeks, and that doing shows too focused on specific technologies will unleash the snarky comments on the backchannel faster than dropping the 'seat at the table' reference.  But since I believe strongly in the importance and potential of these technologies, I am going to try to give the HR professional three compelling (I hope) reasons you should care about these technologies (while trying not to talk about technology).  

Failing that, I will revert to the 'Because I said so' line of reasoning.

Reason 1 - Twenty Years of Change

The last major change in organizational collaboration technology was the introduction of individual email accounts and widespread access in the early 1990's.  Since then, for the vast majority of mature enterprises, email remains the dominant tool used for almost all types of workplace collaboration.  And it is an awesome tool, the first and perhaps only 'killer app'.  Despite tremendous (and recent) advances in email capability by public and free email providers (Google, Hotmail, Yahoo), the email application and service that most knowledge workers utilize at work isn't tremendously different or superior to the 1992 model.  

Almost everything else about work, the organization, the nature of the global economy, the demands of the worker, the modern attitudes, technical ability, and expectations of the newest entrants to workforce has changed.  The need to adapt, to create and organize, to source information and expertise from the extended enterprise, and to develop new ideas and innovations faster than ever before are all real organizational challenges, and increasingly the anchor of email as the primary or sole collaboration tool to meet these challenges is seemingly more and more unsustainable.

How much stuff have you kept around since 1992? Besides your plumber.  Good plumbers are like gold.

Reason 2 - It is happening already, probably without you

Whether it is rogue departments that seek out new and better IT solutions that are currently available and are 'officially' sanctioned, or leveraging external and public networking technologies liked LinkedIn, the shift inside enterprises towards more collaborative and open technologies is begun.  And for a time, and perhaps for just a bit longer, the classic IT and HR reactionary response from the 'block/control/write a policy' playbook will no longer serve the interests of most organizations. In fact, CIO's at large companies seem to already have started to come to this conclusion, witness the growth of the IT-dominated Enterprise 2.0 conferences and the recent observations from industry leader Andrew McAfee about E2.0 beginning to go mainstream.

Reason 3 - Get that seat, place, position...  Dang it - help deliver results to the C-suite

In her piece Laurie notes, correctly I think, that the 'business leaders hate HR Technology more than HR itself'. Which is probably accurate when HR Technology is viewed through a lens of compliance, administration, and policy enforcement.  If all HR Technology delivers is accurate Payroll results every two weeks and on-time affirmative action reporting (while both necessary), then I don't blame the C-suite from getting bored by the whole thing.  Time and attendance systems simply aren't sexy.

But these new enterprise collaboration technologies are much more about creativity than compliance, and designed to better connect people with ideas, content, and more importantly, each other.  These tools are meant to support the generation of new ideas, to allow the entire organization to participate across locations and time zones, and to enable the organization to more rapidly find, surface, and validate innovative ideas and the people best positioned to act upon these ideas.  The reason these technologies are exciting are mainly because they are not traditional HR Technologies at all. So when you as an HR leader decide to pitch or promote these tools, you are 'selling' the ability to deliver results, to address business issues, and to squeeze more out of less.  

Ok, I am done - there's three reasons why this stuff matters to HR.  

And if I did not manage to convince you, well then -  these tools matter Because I said so!

Tonight - HR and Collaboration

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour show the topic is ‘HR and Collaboration’.

You can listen starting at 8PM ET from the show page, using the widget player below,  or by calling in on the listener line - 646-378-1086.