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glennhansen-blog · 13 years

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LCBQ for June - Breaking down organisational walls

Consider this a late entry for June's Learning Circuits blog Big Question. I've deliberately left it late because I was very interested to see what others thought about breaking through these obstacles and how they defined them, and I recommend the other posts as worthwhile reading (just click on the Learning Circuits link above to see them).

Now, for my two cents. Let's start by clarifying what I'm thinking when I talk about organisational walls. For this post, I'm going to look at two particular types of walls:

Walls within an organisation (e.g. the old "silo" mentality that many companies have struggled to overcome for the past 10 years or more), and

Walls between an organisation and the outside world

Intra-organisational walls

The disadvantages of the first kind of walls have been enumerated many times over by various people, and they revolve around the negative impact they have on communication, collaboration and the building of a wider sense of people from different business units "being in it together" and working toward common goals. They act as defining limits to little patches of knowledge and authority within the wider expanse of the organisation. Sometimes they exist because they have been deliberately created (perhaps by a manager or team leader who sees themselves of the "owner" of that particular area) and sometimes they appear almost out of nowhere as a consequence of the way a business is structured or the way it develops its operating processes. How is not as important as the fact they are there, and when they are there, there are good reasons to breach the majority of them.

Those brave enough to tackle the walls around teams, functions, business units and other intra-organisational entities will normally have to gird their loins for a battle, and this is particularly so if the barrier is there to define one person or team's "patch" that they own. Doing so can take tact, patience and no small amount of effort, but the rewards are worth the work.

Inter-team workgroups are a good way to begin to expose others (dare I say "outsiders") to the people, skills and knowledge of a previously closed off area of the business. Off-hand, I can't think of a business unit or team in any organisation that operates in complete isolation, with no dependency on the work of others or with no others as the recipients of the team's outputs. The simple fact of the interconnection of diverse groups within just about any organisation is a solid argument to make representatives or small teams work together on larger projects. This allows them to share commonality of purpose, to set and own shared expectations and to spend valuable time in collaborative effort.

This kind of approach will often benefit from well-planned groundwork to lay the foundation for the collaborative effort. This may be something as simple as a well-articulated project plan that shows the common sense and value of working collaboratively with other areas. At the other extreme, it may require certain interventions from the HR or L&D team (or external contractors) before the teams are brought together - this can be especially useful when vehement resistance is encountered.

The kind of "interventions" I'm thinking about here are those that relate to raising self-awareness within people as to why they have the negative expectations they hold about the planned effort, the evidence for holding them and an examination of how realistic they are. It can involve some pre-planning to put initiatives in place to head off issues or problems that are identified as being reasonable possibilities during the project (e.g. what do we do to make sure everyone adheres to the commitments they make?). This can lead into early team building sessions, perhaps using the old storming, norming and performing model. Emotional intelligence and personality profiling tools can be excellent means of broaching the subject of resistance, automatic thoughts, and realistic expectations, and I recommend their use at this point.

When bringing members of diverse teams who have not previously worked together into one project group, it is also a sound strategy to use a group facilitator (perhaps even a project manager) who is trusted, but not part of any of the groups. This way, they can act as a facilitator of collaborative discussion and planning, and they can lay the groundwork for a very important marker of progress in any collaborative endeavour - early success! Take the time to plan in a way for the group to experience an early success in their work, acknowledge it and allow them to celebrate the achievement. An early achievement can be an important milestone in the transition to true collaboration.

Enough of cross-team projects and work groups - you get the idea. Other ways of breaking down the insular walls include things such as providing areas for discussion and simple getting-to-know-you. A combination of online and real-world places are helpful - discussion groups, blogs (personal, team, project, etc.) and discussion spaces (areas of the office where people can come together and just chill out, sit down and chat. Other environmental strategies include removing the walls around work areas and dispensing with the traditional pod system when setting up desks in the workplace. The less physical barriers exist, the more interaction people feel comfortable with. Get managers and team leaders out of their offices and on to the floor. Of course, you need to provide private places for confidential discussions like performance reviews and personal problems, but do this with meeting rooms, rather than personal office space.

One final note on intra-organisational walls. Breaking them down doesn't mean all information becomes completely open and available to everyone. It's just common sense that everyone does not deserve to automatically know everything about everyone. The rest of the company doesn't get access to confidential HR or business records, certain management discussions and strategies are kept private and confidential until such time as others can be brought into the know. Don't take my advice above to be advocating some kind of wonderful fantasy land where everyone shares everything and the world is all collaboration, trust and love.

Inter-organisational walls

I call them inter-organisational, but they can easily also be walls between a company and the general public. These are the things used when the "outsiders" are people outside the company as a whole, rather than those within the organisation, but from another work group. Some of these barriers are necessary and simply common sense; many companies have information and processes they need to keep to themselves to maintain a commercial and competitive advantage over their competitors. Others, though, are just plain self-defeating.

In my personal experience, there are more organisations that keep themselves to themselves as a reflex action than there are organisations that actively consider how they and others could benefit from sharing information, resources, people, etc. There aren't a lot of initiatives that ask companies to go out of their way to form links with others, and when they do exist, you'll most often find they are government initiatives that are kind of small-scale and often not that well resourced or supported.

The Australian Flexible Learning Framework is an excellent example of an initiative that encourages such linkages. I've been critical of the Framework in the past because many of the deliverables that arise from their sponsored projects are so very basic (I'd love to see them dream grander dreams and place more emphasis on business outcomes that vocational education outcomes), as well as being dated by the time they come to fruition (usually because the ideas were dated before the project even got going). It's to be commended, though, for its role in bringing together organisations such as commercial companies, RTOs, universities and not-for-profits in collaborative efforts related to extending exposure to elearning and blended learning practices (use the link above if you'd like to see some of the initiatives).

One of the ways the Framework encourages collaboration between disparate entities is through their funding of collaborative projects. To qualify for the larger sums of money, a project needs to encompass at least two businesses from a related field (say, community services providers) as well as an RTO or university. This sharing of knowledge, skills and resources has the potential to find innovative and creative solutions to problems that exist across many players in a single industry, and because the outcomes are available for everyone to see through the Framework's website, benefits can flow well beyond those involved in the project itself.

As many of you will know, I work in the employment services industry in Australia - specifically the federally funded employment services industry designed to help those who are out of work back into jobs. I've lost count of how many providers there are doing the work that my organisation does, but there are plenty all over the country. This is good - if one or a few players were to suddenly hit the wall and go under, there are others to step up to the plate and provide services to their clients. The way the federal contracts for this work are structured, though, and the way they are administered by Australia's Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, is not so good, though. Far from encouraging collaboration between organisations with the same goals, performance outcomes and who are facing the same issues that need to be overcome, the contract and the way it's governed encourage isolation and competition. It's obviously based on the free market premise that companies in competition will drive each other to develop more and more efficient services which ultimately cost the Australian taxpayer less. This isn't a bad idea, but it does act as a massive disincentive for organisations to band together to help each other develop innovative new initiatives and to solve common problems. Of course, many would argue that a contract that encouraged commonality of effort is not going to attract organisations that want to make money out of the endeavour. I don't have the perfect answer to the status quo, but there's something deep inside me that says there has to be a better way that both caters to the creation of potential profit and efficiency through collaboration.

With the development of social networking software, we've seen many companies and other entities (such as not-for-profits and educational institutions) reach out to their customers and clients, and further to those who are not yet, but could be customers or clients. Names like Dell, Cisco and Adobe spring to mind in this space. Those that do it well are able to engage in conversations driven by the members of the public they are seeking to engage. Those that do it poorly just see the medium as another way to market to consumers and to provide spin in times of crisis. How well it is used depends upon the skill and the objectives of the organisation. The fact it exists to be used is another great opportunity to engage people who are outside the traditional corporate wall (firewall, in this case?), and to build trust and win raving fans for those who do it well. I'm a big advocate of organisations taking the time to engage with their customers, clients, sponsors or whatever you'd like to define them as - just make sure you plan your strategy carefully and are willing to do it honestly and with commitment. People will quickly see through a thin facade covering another cheap grab for profit.

Traditional means of reaching outside the corporate moat include focus groups and other methods of engaging consumers, clients, etc. Done well, the provide the organisation with valuable insight and information and the public participants with a sense the organisation values them and sees them as worthy of their time. I hope we never lose these face-to-face opportunities to a completely online presence and focus. I can't see people losing their appetite for the opportunity to look someone in the eye and feel they are engaging on a deeply human level.

So, there you go. I've tried not to cover the same ground my fellow thought leaders in the LCBQ blog have gone over, though obviously there will be overlap when multiple people provide their thoughts on a topic like this one. I hope this post at least gets you thinking about the walls that exist within and around your own organisations, and about the things you may be able to do yourself to start bringing them down.

#LCBQ #Learning Cicuits #collaboration #strategy

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