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Enabling Quantum Organizations through Pull Models
- 1. www.TamingtheUnpredictable.com Nathaniel Palmer, Chief BPM Strategist, SRA International Keith Swenson, Vice President of R&D, Fujitsu
- 2. "The most important , and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker .” Peter Drucker, 1969 coins the term “Knowledge Worker” in ‘The Age of Discontinuity’ 30 Years later authors in ‘Management Challenges for the 21st Century’ . . .
- 3. BPM = A Transactional Thread Linking Activities Across Multiple Systems & Applications State State State Control Control Control Activity Activity Activity Activity
- 4. The 2 nd Revolution in IT Architecture 1969 Today 1995 Led to 40 Years of Data-centric Application Design Laid the Foundation for Process-centric Applications ; Still the Reference Model for N-Tiered, Service-Oriented & Process-Driven Applications
- 5. How to Improve Knowledge Work? Productivity Pain Points Source: 2011 ACM Survey Greatest Productivity Hurdles Knowledge Workers Face in a Typical Workday Tracking Status & Information Represent the Greatest Hurdles to Knowledge Worker Productivity
- 6. Work Patterns of Knowledge Workers Percent of the Day Spent in Different Modes Source: 2011 ACM Survey 2/3 of a Knowledge Worker’s Day is Spent in Unstructured & Often Unpredictable Work Patterns Roughly 1/3 is Structured, Predictable, Automated or Automatable
- 7. Deterministic vs. Non-Deterministic BPMN Processes Are Deterministic, Where All Possible Paths Are Pre-Determined or Known in Advance, No Matter How Complex the Pathways May Be. The Direction of the Process is Determined by the Pre-Defined Path and Current State; State is Determined by the Preceding Activity, in Other Words, Wher e it is in the Process.
- 8. Case Management Focuses on Events and Outcomes An Event Occurs The Case is Completed A Case File is Opened Activities and Work Create Content & Context Added to the Case
- 9. Event-Driven? Yes. Agile? Maybe. ACM Processes Are Goal-Driven and Non-Deterministic, The End Point is Known at the Start, the Pathway for Reaching it is Determined by the Outcome at Each Stage as well as Rules and Policies Applicable to the Case. The State of the Case is determined by the Content and Context Within the Case, Not Wher e the Case is at Any Time. Issue Resolved & Recorded Customer Reports Problem A Case is Opened Issue is Investigated Solution Applied, Unsuccessfully Alternatives Researched & Applied
- 10. Goal-Driven = Non-Linear Cases Evolve Over Time in the Direction of Achieving a Goal, Often in Unpredictable Directions, Requiring the Ability to Jump Forward, Jump Back, Re-do or Otherwise Perform Work in a Sequence That Can’t be Determined in Advance.
- 11. Adaptable, Not Ad-Hoc Business Rules, Business Analytics, Context-Sensitive ‘Help’ and Knowledge Management Functions Help Guide Knowledge Workers to Make Decisions About Cases as They Evolved. The Case Management System Adapts to the Context of the Case, Guiding the Outcome Based on the Combination of Rules/Policies, Data, and Application of Knowledge Worker Know-How.
- 12. Case Management is a System of Record BPM Provides a Transactional Across Various Systems of Record. Case Management Captures the Context of “What Happened” in Virtual Case Folder Which Serves as the Long-Lived System of Record of the Case. Files (including email, voicemail and traditional documents) Reside Outside of the Case but are Tracked as Part of the Permanent Record.
- 13. Case Management is a System of Record A Case May be Restarted at Any Time, or Remain “Living” in its Current State for Any Duration Until Another Event Occurs. Knowledge Captured During the Performance of Case Work can be Used as a Template to Launch a New Case Instance.
- 14. Case Management & the iWorker ACM Will Further the Integration of Outside Tools and Social Media, Delivering "mash ups” to Facilitate Better Communication and Faster Problem Resolution
- 15. BPM, ACM & the iWorker Mobile Devices Will Change Work Patterns Faster Than Existing Applications Can Keep Pace. BPM and ACM will be the Platform Which Enables Work to Follow the Workers, Virtually Integrating Resources From Existing Systems With New Content and Context, Capturing Events and Providing Access to These Wherever Work is Performed.
- 16. Delivering Work the Way We Work By Enabling the Work to Follow the Worker, BPM and Case Management Provide the Cohesiveness of a Single Environment (single point of access) but Does Not Determine nor Impose Whether that is Virtual or Physical.
- 17. Enabling Quantum Organizations as a new level of effectiveness Keith D. Swenson Vice President of R&D Fujitsu America
- 18. 1990 2000 2010 2020 Mass p2p & tribe oriented communications We are standing on the crux of a change that will affect every aspect of our working lives.
- 19. How will you take your organization through this substantial change and benefit from it? 1990 2000 2010 2020 Dominated by << Push >> Organizations Dominated by >> Pull << Organizations
- 20. Our own conceptual limitations stand in the way of capturing the full benefit of social business 1990 2000 2010 2020 Remain << Push >> Change to >> Pull <<
- 21. The Root of the Conceptual Problem
- 22. F = ma Everything, it was thought, could be predicted if you measure the initial conditions carefully enough. Isaac Newton
- 24. We assume the system runs on simple rules.
- 25. Chaos was believed to simply be complexity so great that in practice scientists couldn’t track it, but they were sure that in principle they might one day be able to do so. - Briggs & Peat (1989)
- 26. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: Chaos can not banished through perfectly precise measurement.
- 27. At subatomic level, particles are constantly forming and disappearing. And yet…. structures at our level remain remarkably stable.
- 28. Newtonian vs. Quantum externally observable limited precision smoothness based on simple rules predictability turbulence relationship based unpredictability
- 29. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built. - Einstein
- 31. Routine work is already to a large extent, being automated
- 32. For Knowledge Workers, think not of a machine, but an ecosystem
- 33. Newtonian vs. Quantum externally observable limited precision smoothness based on simple rules predictability turbulence relationship based unpredictability
- 34. The Power Of Pull “ Pull platforms are emerging as a response to growing uncertainty.” “ They seek to expand the opportunity for creativity by local participants dealing with immediate needs.”
- 35. << Push >> Models
- 36. >> Pull << Models
- 38. Returning to “ Human 1.0”
- 40. Roles mean nothing without understanding the network of relationships and the resources that are required to support the work of that person. – Margaret Wheatley
- 43. Crossing the gap will require a new mindset at all levels of your organization. 1990 2000 2010 2020 Dominated by << Push >> Organizations Dominated by >> Pull << Organizations
- 44. www.TamingtheUnpredictable.com Nathaniel Palmer, Chief BPM Strategist, SRA International Keith Swenson, Vice President of R&D, Fujitsu
Editor's Notes
- We are standing on the crux of a chance that will affect every aspect of our working lives. The reason for this lies in this knee curve that you see here. Mass person to person and tribe oriented communication, such as Twitter, Facebook, and many other social network options, is allowing a boom in exchange of idea and we have seen the effect in many different areas. You seen how “Arab Spring” was dramatically effected by Facebook. You have seen how companies have see how companies have been able to transform the way that they communicate to their customers. I don’t expand more on this, because everybody here attending the Social Business Forum 2001 came because you already know this is a dynamic trend and you want to learn more. So you already know this is going to change everything. When historian look back at this time, they will identify 2010 (approximately) as the tipping point, the year that this kind of communications finally became widely pervasive. Things after 2010 will not be the same as things before 2010.
- No cultural change is ever sudden, but we might envision it as something like this. In the past decades the world was dominated by push organizations, and in the future pull oriented organizations will become increasingly dominant. I will touch upon the meaning of push and pull organizations later in the talk, but for now lets use these words simply as labels for the kind of change that social business will bring about in organizations. The question you all need to ask yourselves is how you will take your organization from a push organization to a pull organization.
- What will stand in the way of making the transition from push to pull will be the people that have to use the technology. Will the people in your organization move forward and rapidly adopt this or will they hold back, and hold on to traditional idea of how the organization will work. I looked at this problem in detail, and came to the conclusions that one of the barriers will be conceptual limitations with how they view their organization. Those limitations. The way that people view the way their organization works will be one the biggest things standing in the way of moving to a pull organization.
- Business Process Management BPM is my field I have been working in for a number of years, going back almost 20 years. We called it workflow in the 90's,a and then changed the term to BPR, and now BPM. All of this work is around the idea of mapping your business process. Making what was before intangible, making that explicit and tangible in a diagram that can be drawn.. If you look at all the standards specs and documents they usually talk about a simple diagram like this that has 2,3,4 activities. But in actual practice you diagrams tend to look a little more lik this. This diagram is an actual diagram from a customer for the process of ordering a piece of graphic art. We don't normally thing of this as a complicated process. When you dig into the kinds of things that needs to be done People in organizations are working in a very intelligent way. If you try to figure out all the rules, and pull all the rules out and draw a picture it starts looking very complicated. These are the real decisions that need to be made. When I work with different teams modeling their process, when we are done doing the modeling, in every single case people look at the resulting process, and they say that is not our process that is too complicated, our process is much simpler than that, or it should be much simpler than that. They think about their step in the process, and the step before them, and the step after them. Conceptually they are thinking about a 3 step process, and intellectually they known that there are more steps. It is universal, everyone things that it should be a simpler process. There are management books and business books saying that you need to simplify the process, slim down, remove the extra steps. Why is it that all of us desire to have very simple processes. Where does that come from. Who said that your processes should be simple in the first place?
- Probably this guy, Isaac Newton. A number of scientists around the 1500's thru 1700's pushed forward the idea that things happen the world due the a limited number of fairly simple equations. Like F=MA. Gravitation law that the force depends upon the inverse square of the distance between the two bodies. (Physics envy ... that I work in a soft science, and I wish I worked in a hard science with solid mathematical basis.) Isaac Newton worked out that a number of phenomena could be described by fairly simple equations. This was a new idea. Before the 1600 it was thought that there were unknown causes behind things that happened. Storms had emotion -- they might be mad you. Arrows flew because the hands of angels were pushing them along. Issac Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, and Descartes The new idea was that there were simple equations behind all the actions in the world, and that we can predict the outcome based on knowing the starting conditions.
- The universe became seen as a kind of complicated machine. There are lots of pieces,
- everything will be based on very simple rules. It also included the idea that everything could be observed. There was a big drive toward more and more precise ways to measure the world around us. Also embedded in this is the idea of &quot;smoothness&quot; What I mean by that is that an approximate measurement will give you and approximate prediction of the future condition, while a more precise measurement would give you a more precise prediction. Smoothness implies that you never have the case that more precise measurement give you a radically different result. Everything is predictable.
- What the Newtonians could not understand is turbulence. If laws controlling everything was simple, then when air flows around an object, it would be expected to snap back into place on the other side. Nowhere in the simple rules does it say anything about additional swirling that takes place. Turbulence made no sense. There is no denying that it is there, and clearly we were currently unable to measure the initial conditions precisely enough, but a good Newtonian believed that in principle it was not only possible, but that surely one day we would have the ability to measure the initial conditions precisely enough to be able to calculate the outcome. At that point, the entire world would essentially become predictable (as long as you were willing to go to the trouble of measuring up front.)
- So scientists started looking closer and closer and smaller and smaller levels. What they found was very interesting, and very disturbing. They discovered the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and that is that it is not possible to measure both the position and the moment of a particle precisely at the same time. No matter how you do it, there a lack of precision in one or both measurements. While this error is very small, it is not a problem simply with the instruments doing the measuring, but instead a fundamental constraint of the universe. It simply is not possible to predict the position of an electron in the future. So we have to live with chaos
- One of the most amazing things about this is that at the subatomic level, particles are constantly forming and disappearing, Look at the furniture before you, and the floor beneath you. They are solid. They are composed of atoms and electrons, and it is impossible to predict the position of an electron. That is the idea that was difficult for Newtonian thinkers to believe. If I want a well functioning machine, I want to have very hard and very finely crafted part The idea that you can have a well functioning machine, but the parts of that machine are fluctuating all over the place, seems WRONG. It violates our Newtonian way of thinking. Hold on to that idea, that while there are fluctuations in the behavior of individual particles, but relationships between the particles can be stable.
- Here is an overview of the comparisons of the two points of view. In the Newtonian view, everything is assumed to be observable. There is a smoothness that means that measurement that are close will still produce a result that is close, because everything is based on simple rules, and that gives a predictability to all natural phenomena. However, physicists had to face profound incompatibilities with their observations at the subatomic scale. There is a fundamental limitation to the precision of measurements, there is a lot of turbulence and quantum flux, however relationships between particle appear to the fundamental building blocks, but the net is that there is a fundamental unpredictability to the world.
- This was deeply disturbing. The feeling can be summed up best with this quote. This is the end of the physics lesson, but the take away is simply the idea that large scale structures can be stable, while micro scale structures have unpredictability. This unintuitive situation was deeply disturbing. We find ourselves in exactly same situation in management of organizations. And it is deeply disturbing to our preconceived notions. We have to learn a new paradigm about organizations.
- Henry Ford’s assembly line was the same thing: predictability through breaking the job into a series of simple tasks.
- This lead to what I call “the Triumph of BPM” Here you see a picture of a “typing pool” where workers would type up correspondence and other documents. This is an old picture, because we don’t have typing pools any more. In fact there are a large number of routine jobs which have been automated or entirely replaced by IT tools. Because of this success, there are fewer and fewer routine jobs. Instead, we are finding the number of knowledge workers rising. What are knowledge workers?
- This flies in the face of traditional control oriented management. Instead of thinking of the organization as a machine, that can be analyzed and reduced to a series of simplified steps, we need to think of the organization as an “ecosystem.” Ecosystems are stable forms, even though the small elements of an ecosystem are always changing. Immanuel Kant pointed out that the essential difference is that a machine has parts to support the whole, but an ecosystem is self organizing and re-creating the parts in relation to the others. The self-organizing aspect is critical, and really a better description of an organization This comes at the same time that there is a tremendous opportunity to incorporate social networking and enterprise 2.0 technology into business. Knowledge workers have the most to gain from such knowledge networks, and it is in every organizations advantage to adopt a paradigm that will support this kind of work.
- Here again, we see the same comparison. Scientific management takes the view that tasks are observable, that small changes in a task result in small changes in the final product, that ultimately all jobs can be reduced to simple tasks, and the outcome is predictable. Knowledge work however depends on many sources of information, and many factors, that is it hard to enumerate all the rules that would apply in a specific situation. However, intelligent people do this very well, but the specific rules are not observable. Turbulence reflects the way that each case must be handled differently, just as large customers and large project have unique conditions. The important aspect is making and maintaining relationships. And while the job of any given knowledge worker is unpredictable, it is still possible to build higher level structures, such as companies and departments, and that produce very predictable results.
- How should we respond. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison have written this excellent book comparing push systems to pull systems. Push systems are the centralized command and control forms of organizations of the past. Pull organization are more flexible. They can be more efficient, but the most important aspect of a pull organization is that it allows for a degree of autonomy for knowledge workers, and therefore is able to deal with uncertainty in a better way.
- In a push model, products are made by product experts, and consumers either buy or don’t buy the products, but the consumers are not actively engaged in the product in any way. All of the decisions are made in a central manner. Planning is done in a top-down way, first deciding what products to make, and then how many of each product to product, and then delivering to the sales channel. Workers perform tasks which have been designed and laid out for them.
- Pull models are supported by technology that tends to be loosely coupled and modular, because that gives the most autonomy to the knowledge worker. Pull models embrace exceptions, allowing every case to be different, instead of being designed to eliminate exceptions and make every case the same. Pull models enhance the potential for productive friction between people working on cases. Pull models continually expand the choices available, giving people more options on what to do, and not eliminating choices driving people into a single direction. Of course, technology to support a pull model should help find the most relevant resources, leveraging social maps, knowledge maps, and mining activity streams where possible. Most importantly, they allow for initiative and creative opportunities.
- The book, Mastering the Unpredictable was an attempt to capture this same idea that exceptions should not be eliminated, but that in fact systems could be designed properly to support the kinds of flexibility that knowledge workers need. We called it Adaptive Case Management because we needed a term to describe this idea, and ACM is clearly aimed to support pull organizations. Some people follow the GTM movement, and we know that this is necessary as a way for knowledge workers to get things done. This was really written for the BPM community which is filled with Newtonian thinkers trying to make their organizations into properly functioning machines, and that works to a certain degree, but there is work beyond that necessary, and a different approach must be taken for knowledge workers.
- I also wanted to highlight this excellent source of ideas on the ways that organizations can change to be hyper-social by Francois Gosseaux and Ed Moran. The way Gosseaux puts it, hundreds and thousands of years ago, people interacted using natural social patterns. Such social behavior was natural for us, and he calls this Human 1.0. Then Newtonian thinking forced us to make organizations that required workers to work in a very unnatural way. Human 2.0 was more analytic, more predefined, and much less satisfying. He sees the advent of social business software as bringing us back to Human 1.0, back to a more natural state of social behavior.
- IN the book, they make four important suggestions. Forget market segments, because these are classifications of people defined by a centralized control point, and as such are usually not very accurate. Market segments are a model of the world, but only that. Instead we should engage tribes which are groups of people that have themselves selected to relate to each other. Tribes are real, and they will give you information on how to make products if you have the adaptibility to engage and respond to them. Forget company centricity, but instead engage and respond directly to individual people. Forget information channels (like various media, publicity channels, etc) and instead tap into knowledge networks. Finally, and this is the one that is most controversial: forget processes and hierarchies. He says that the real potential to leverage social business will be a bit messy. Newtonian thinkers want everything tidy and organized (i.e. centrally controlled) but delegating to knowledge workers will appear messy to a centralized manager.
- Margaret Wheatly wrote a wonderful book called “Leadership and the New Science” which reflects upon how the change of paradigm from Newtonian mindset parallels the change in paradigm that is needed in management of organizations. The book is full of quotes, but I picked this one because it is one aspect of Netwonian simplification that people often fall into: We assume that a role can be defined independently of everything else in the organization. But that is not actually the case. The actual role that a person plays depends very much on all the other people around them, and to design a system that ignores this will be a limitation. The reason I picked this photo is not just that the web symbolizes the relationships, but also to remind us that in an ecosystem, everything is dependent upon other. One might define the activities of spider, but clearly a spider is dependent upon flying insects, and on tree and such for structure. They in turn are dependent on other parts of the ecosystem. So it is with the roles that people play in organizations.
- Dan Pink wrote a wonderful book called “A Whole New Mind” where he proposes that for the past century organizations have needed (and therefore valued) left-brined workers with strong analytical skills and procedural thinking. He sees the world shifting today in a new direction, where right brained thinkers will have an edge. I think this is very much like Gosseaux saying we are returning to Human 1.0. Dan Pink went on to say that in the future, there will be greater demand for workers with two types of skills: High concept - the capacity to detect patterns & opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High touch - the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.