Image courtesy of 24 Media

Since corporations were formed, businesses always relied on analytical decision-making. Large corporations were able to create their own ecosystem, shaping their world at will. In this world, being smart was enough. But these walled garden are gone. And the world outside doesn’t follow the rules the corporations used to force on us. This created a severe alienation between people and companies/institution. And leaves many corporations craving for the old world order and fearing the future.

There’s nothing to fear. Actually, there’s a lot to look forward to. To an era where emotional skills will be paired with analytical skills. New MBAs already learn to focus more on “self-awareness and the capacity for introspection and empathy.” I would argue, empathy will be the key differentiator for successful institutions. And lack thereof their downfall.

Empathy will provide you with insightful knowledge of the world outside of your walled garden. Spock never was able to get the full ‘human experience’, just like many managers who are trapped by their own analytical skills. Empathy allows you to experience the world and analyze data outside of your own life experience. It helps you to develop innovative strategic and tactical opportunities. That’s what real Enterprise 2.0 is about: focusing on the strengths of the right brain, understanding patterns, argue holistically and interpret emotions. When we have all the analytical technologies and skills as a foundation and layer right-brain capabilities on top of it to deliver real value. Suddenly things make sense. Empathy helps us to transform enterprises by our new-found ability to see the big picture and take collaboration to a new level.

Empathy and collaboration are fellow partners. Both are closely linked because they require to focus less on self and more on the outside. People who have the ability to see world through someone else’s eyes are much more likely to share information with others. They understand how their work is linked to that of other people, understand the necessity to overcome of silos. Too many E2.0 experts base their opinion of collaboration on technologies and the obvious benefits for organizations.

Real collaboration is not reactive. Real collaboration is pro-active. Focusing on the needs of others before they can express them.

Not “I just got this information request, I should answer.” Instead, “I should share this information because it might benefit XY and her project.”

Not “A customer complains, I need to resolve this situation.” Instead, “My customer needs are changing and I have to change my products/services to accommodate them.”

We have to understand collaboration becomes more effective when it’s based on human interaction and relationships. When we have a comfort level with another person, see them as a human, not a resource, collaboration is an organic outcome. Technologies help us to organize and calibrate the collaboration efforts. Empathy helps us build trusting relationships and deliver ROI in the value chain. Empathy is critical for E2.0 organization to harvest the benefits of collaboration and co-creation.

Image and T-Shirt by Origin68

Orson Welles’s first film was Citizen Kane. It’s still considered one of the most famous and highly-rated films, partly because he deployed innovative cinematic and narrative techniques. In an interview in 1969 with Huw Wheldon, Welles explained where he got the confidence to make this new kind of film:

Welles: Ignorance, ignorance, sheer ignorance – you know there’s no confidence to equal it. It’s only when you know something about a profession, I think, that you’re timid or careful.

Wheldon: How did this ignorance show itself?

Welles: I though you do anything with a camera, you know, that the eye could do and the imagination could do and if you come up from the bottom in the film business you’re taught all the things that the cameraman doesn’t want to attempt for fear he will be criticized for having failed. And in this case I had a cameraman who didn’t care if he was criticized if he failed and I didn’t know there were things you couldn’t do, so anything I could think up in my dreams I attempted to photograph.

Wheldon: You got away with enormous technical advance, didn’t you?

Welles: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible, or theoretically impossible.

Embracing ignorance allowed Welles to challenge the boundaries of existing knowledge and develop innovative techniques still utilized in today’s film-making.

While organizations are racing to embrace Knowledge Management and deploy systems to benefit from it, enterprises that engage in creative and innovative activity need to consider ignorance as a virtue. Accumulating and managing knowledge can become a dangerous trap when it just reinforces biases and don’t drive organizations into new ways of thinking and approaching challenges.

Knowledge Management has to find the perfect balance between deploying existential information, eliminating knowledge that has run its course and embracing ignorance in the pursuit of creativity and innovation.

There’s a reason why companies are looking for fresh blood all the time: They need to get new ideas and new assumptions into the system in order to continue to be a living organisms. Too often, new ideas and new brains are being streamlined quickly to ensure the system doesn’t break and everybody can continue on their merry way.

Enterprises need to develop systems embracing ignorance as a corporate virtue and integrating Ignorance Management into their Knowledge Management system. Human knowledge is limited, human ignorance has no boundaries. Strategic Ignorance Management will transform your business and turn your workforce from order-taking drones to creative contributors.

Frankly, I have problems coping with the constant information overload. I’m pretty sure that most of us have the same problem. Not only in 2009; this has been a primal, human problem. I’m convinced that this feeling of being overloaded, swamped, barely making it is the real engine behind human progress. But only if we approach this challenge in a constructive way.

Since human beings started to communicate, the speed and enormity of societal changes have caused people to bitch and moan. The oldest known example is Plato in his “Pheadros”-Dialogue. He’s complaining about the invention of letters, claiming they will eliminate the necessity to memorize things. And this was 2,400 years ago.

At the core of this discussion is cultural pessimism: Old men decked out in Snuggies sitting in front of a fireplace, agreeing that things used to be better. Well, not everything is bad now, at least I can enjoy my HD but all this busy stuff and social garbage is just a waste of time.

This common rejection of cultural changes is understandable. Highly educated people believed for the longest time that we are able to control society around us. Besides some natural disasters, we have pretty much tamed nature and conquered its forces. However, we fight a constant battle against an institution we created centuries ago: Civilization. We still have a spear in our hand to fight dragons. It’s just a Dragons 99.0 fight against spears 101.0.

In 2009, we feel that our spear is not the right weapon against the dragon anymore. I would argue, the belief of being able to control your social environment was always an illusion. Propped up by executives, politicians and corporations. And the loss of control is felt more dramatically in C-level suites because their power has diminished dramatically.

One hint that control was always an illusion is the silly image that world knowledge is increasing at an unprecedented pace. There are stories that the world’s knowledge captured in books could reach the moon. Nice image, but we always had too much information to cope with. The library of Alexandria, the original Google, consisted of 500,000 papyrus scrolls. If you assume a length of 20 feet per scroll, the length of all scrolls would total 1,900 miles. Assuming a reading speed of 1 feet of scroll per 2 minutes and reading time of 12 hours daily, it would take one person around 75 years to read everything.

Sure, the mountain of information has dramatically increased since Alexandria – its insurmountability was always a fact. That’s why we invented filter mechanisms. Until the end of the 20^th century, this function was performed by the editors of mass media: A hierarchical structure making decisions in a non-transparent way to determine what the public should be interested in. Basically, editors decided how we should experience reality. A very powerful position, indeed. The editorial department as the gatekeeper has been challenged in the 21^st century. Most people will say it’s a technological challenge. I would argue it’s a social challenge.

Different rules apply to the virtual space of the digital realm. A few moments ago, editors decided what should be important us. Now, the web services play to the wisdom of crowds and let people decide what they are really interested in. The editorial edict of relevance is being supplemented  by the crowdsourced edict of “Do I find this interesting?” A new filter is challenging the power base of editorial departments. By utilizing the ancient tool of recommendations, the crowd decides what should be spread and what is not interesting enough to share. All Social Networks are based on the concept of “Look, I found/created something interesting.”

This doesn’t mean editorial departments will disappear. Professional journalism is more important than ever, even though all publishing companies face the monetization challenge. It’s just a fact that journalists aren’t the only game in town anymore, their competition is anybody with a camera and/or laptop.

The editorial department faces off against the crowd, not a machine. It’s a misconception to believe that Google’s algorithm decides what we should experience and read. Google understood from the beginning that algorithms alone won’t determine relevancy. Each and every individual has to make that determination – good technology helps us with that task. Google dominates the digital world because they were always the best in mimicking the way the human mind works. The holy grail of relevance is linking sites through human action. Google even fights a brave fight against automated machine relevance. Whole divisions are trying to ensure that human relevancy (defined by links created by humans) always trumps machine relevancy.

The Internet has conquered the consciousness of the young generation. And in different ways than we ever imagined when we started our digital journey. I would argue that the consequences of the digital revolution are much more severe and revolutionary, as if Print, Telephone and TV were invented at the same time. I’ve heard teenagers ask their parents how human beings joined the Internet. Can you better describe the intimate relationship young adults have to the digital reality? The virtual world can’t be separated from our carbon existence. This is so profound that people change the way they live, work and love. Yes, even love can be rooted in digital. Ask the millions of people who fell in love and grieved for Princess Diana (without ever meeting her) if they were deeply affected by an almost virtual person.

The predictable stories about the demise of our culture and consequences for our society completely dismisses the rise of written information, caused by the advent of digital and social technologies. Sure, some of them are grammatically challenged and need solid spell checks. But, think back 20 years: How many students wrote anything outside of their school and homework? Maybe a diary page. Nothing more. Compare this to the flood of written content just from the Millenials alone. A step in the right direction.

What remains is the nagging feeling that the machine is starting to control us. So, let’s step down from a throne of arrogance and level with the older generation. Fact is, the digital world is still too complicated and complex. The younger generation might not feel that way because their socialization process occurred during the advent of digital technologies. Technological progress is only a positive force for society when the majority feels positive about it. And this is mostly a question of coping with overload. The older people are the more pronounced is their fear not to be relevant anymore. We need to deal with this through support systems and the power of empathy.

This overload and fear of not being relevant anymore plays out each and every day in offices, cubicles and homes throughout the world. Staring at the screen, anxiety sets in and the fear that the digital life might pass you by. We need to explain to non-native digital nomads why we put weird images on our Social Network pages while we expect that our future employers don’t sniff around our private networks to find incriminating content. Would a respectable corporation ever sift through the garbage of a prospective employee even though the garbage container is easily accessible for anyone? We should explain that multi-tasking is just a symptom of the scattering media landscape – the generation before us left the TV for hours while reading books and newspapers. Let’s explain to them the difference of publishing your own data and institutional regulations as the difference between being ‘locking myself in the bathroom’ and ‘being locked in the bathroom’. It’s about freedom of choice, we control our own data.

Let’s invite them to participate in the digital lifestyle. What an amazing opportunity: It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, ugly or beautiful, if you want to talk about Canadian glaciers or Serbian poetry of the 17^th century. Showcase the steep advances or society made with the digital revolution – how lonely was a 16-year old gay person living in a rural village 20 years ago? What an amazing change and opportunity to be able to connect with like-minded people, escaping the frightening thought to be different.

Businesses need to implement systems to play to the strengths of the young and the weaknesses of the old. Just adding another technology layer to the mix will increase the divide. Instead, we need to implement systems that enhance the real-time experience of digital natives and help filter out the noise for the older generation to connect with signals.

And, as always, we still need to pay a price for all these positive developments: Media elites are not that elite anymore. Transparency and speed crushed their belief in being able to control the environment. Their greatest problem with the young generation is that they don’t belong to it anymore.

We are not Social Media experts. We’re not Six Sigma pundits. And we don’t have all the answers.

In fact, we are skeptical of people who claim they know all the answers and provide them through Org Charts, Twitter pages or pie-in-the-sky strategy decks.
We are simply people across a wide range of communications and management disciplines with the unifying belief that businesses need to adapt and transform in the new reality of a post-consumption economy.

We see an incredible economic opportunity if we develop new ways to reframe problems, seize emerging opportunities and design solutions by looking behind the consumption-oriented economic model.
Just as we emerged from the dark ages to a new era of social and artistic enlightenment, we are now entering the post-industrial and post-Lehman age with the realization that the well-being of our economy should not be based on consumption alone and focus more on the human element.

For more than 100 years, businesses have focused on driving efficiencies, improving processes and increasing shareholder value. With the advent of new technologies, businesses invested billions of dollars in technology and transaction systems to reduce latency and inefficiency in value chains. “Six Sigma” is the epitome of this focus and thinking. However, the ROI on further optimizing processes for operational excellence is diminishing because of the human element. Unless you’re an Android, you can only be that productive, that efficient, that process-oriented without losing your humanity.

As Super Social Primates, our need to connect with others is deeply ingrained into our DNA. This is the reason why solitary confinement is regarded as the ultimate punishment. And babies with a loving relationship to their family have dramatically better chances to succeed. New and intuitive technologies have allowed us to connect with people in ways we could not have imagined a few years back. But we warn against the focus on technology: Too much energy and attention has been spent talking about CRM/Social Media/Networking technologies that many have missed the point: without people none of that matters.

Our thinking is based on the fundamentals of human needs and behavior. Technologies are just tools to tap into these needs, allow for connections and enable like-minded to come together. These technologies are merely the platforms for connecting and sharing. And they allow people to deliver on the normal human desire to be accepted and valued by others. By linking, commenting, discussing and sharing, individuals gain authority and influence in the social space and thereby develop and increase their own levels of esteem.

We see a lot of encouraging signs that thought leaders and innovative practitioners are trying to incorporate principles of social networking/computing into the enterprise. Some call it Enterprise 2.0, human-centered design or Social Business Design. These models assume that humans are rational primates, always acting in their best interest.

The financial meltdown and newest studies in Behavioral Economics are super-sized reminders that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren’t true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.

Our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. We tend to believe data to confirm our prejudices and ignore data contradicting them; we overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; we weave single multiple events into a causal narrative; we applaud our own expertise and skills in circumstances when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.

In short, we had to learn that we’re predictably irrational (to borrow from Dan Ariely’s fascinating book). In ‘The Happiness Hypothesis” Jonathan Haidt compares the self to a rider on the back of an elephant. He writes:

“The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.”

For the longest time, institutions have focused on the little boy while tinkering with the elephant. And we’ve optimized the little boy for the longest until we finally hit the wall. It’s time to focus our attention on the elephant and tap into its enormous potential. We don’t believe current models effectively stimulate the endless potential of human emotion and creativity.

For that reason, we propose a new model: Human Business Design.
What is Human Business Design? It is a model based in the belief that all human interactions/conversation inside and outside of your organization matter now: The way human beings are motivated to connect and create value has changed. Every business has to realize that it is a co-creative eco-system that includes its employees, partners, competitors and customers and the way they are motivated to create and realize value is the only measure of success.

Organizations need to provide a framework for their customer base (and entire ecosystem) to participate in the co-creation of meaningful value. The new paradigm is co-creation, co-operation on bigger ideas than just the motivation to consume. Each good organization has a big vision behind its products and services. And the goal has to be that all stakeholders work on this bigger vision.

This allows us to merge the left-brain efficiencies of organizations with the right-brain imagination of hyper-connected human beings, creating new value propositions nobody ever imagined.