People Are The Weakest Link

Last week, I presented a premise at the Enterprise 2.0 conference that because the costs of technology and human capital have flipped (relatively speaking), people are now the weakest link in organizational value chains. What that means is that those organizations that can most effectively optimize human performance will be those that win because their weakest link is stronger than that of their competitors. Below are my slides and you can see the recording here.

Are You The Red Queen? from The Community Roundtable

However - and this is the real issue - organizations have been optimized for technology and infrastructure that typically has linear performance results - i.e. applying twice as much infrastructure or performance should yield twice as much performance. That has resulted in a culture of linear business modeling in business schools and strategy groups. I believe this has led us to dismiss and dramatically undervalue human performance.

What I know about people is that the human performance and success paths are anything but linear. It's very instructive to have a toddler right now because toddlers are performance machines (in terms of learning, adopting, and excelling at new things). The path is strewn with stops and starts, regressions, and surges - never mind the emotional meltdowns and ecstasy that sometimes goes along with this. As adults, this learning and development slows but it follows much the same pattern. 

Combine people into groups, communities, and networks and performance becomes even more complex. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of how to optimize group performance - it's why the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence exists. We have learned some things about building environments for ideal performance and again, I go back to looking at the research in education, parenting, and disciplining children.

It turns out that emergent curriculum works better than curriculum that is 100% planned. Emergent curriculum is a balance between what the instructor wants to convey and what the students are interested in - it is a constantly evolving negotiation and conversation - not a one way presentation. It turns out this is quite a bit more effective because the lesson is given in the context that the student cares about and there is social pressure exerted by the rest of the class to care. The engagement of classes changes dramatically.

Another more established concept is positive discipline. The crux of this concept is that if your goal is to get someone to act in a certain way, the best means to do so is through partnering and mutual respect, not punitive action. Support, encouragement, and giving others the space to be responsible for the results of their own decisions is the best way to ensure lasting behavior change.

Currently organizations do not know how to account for this human performance pattern and because they cannot model and account for it, they cannot optimize it.  My position is that we need to figure out how to incorporate things like relevance, connection, loyalty, forgiveness and other human values into the balance sheets of our organizations. That may require a radical change in our current concept of accounting but I'm game, are you?

 

Comments

[Gia Lyons]

Oh girl. I so wish I could have heard this in person. You're the prince who kissed Sleeping Beauty with this presentation!

[KareAnderson]

One caveat Rachel, humans often affect how well the tech works or which tech is being used so the two are sometimes inextricably intertwined... as i have seen at all too many conferences, even for/with tech savvy staff & attendees, where some tech goes awry

[Rhappe]

Thank you Gia!

Kare - you are absolutely right and I didn't mean to leave the impression that it was either technology or people - just that their relative costs have flipped but they are absolutely intertwined.