The company, (Twitter) meanwhile, is trying to avoid the bureaucracy that plagues larger businesses. The topic is important to Mr. Williams, who says he started companies because he didn’t believe in aligning himself with institutions.

Twitter’s executives talk about the “Dunbar number” — the maximum number of people, generally believed to be 150, with whom one person can have strong relationships. This effort, mind you, comes from a company with a business model that fosters a multitude of ever-growing — and largely glancing — interactions among Twitter’s users.

“I’ve never seen a company so focused on avoiding the Dunbar number,” says Adam Bain, who recently joined Twitter from the News Corporation as head of global revenue. “You can tell Ev planned it out.”

Each time employees log on to their computers, for instance, they see a photo of a colleague, with clues and a list of the person’s hobbies, and must identify the person. And notes from every meeting are posted for all employees to read.

Speaking to a group of new hires at an orientation session last spring, Mr. Williams said Twitter had three goals: to change the world, to build a business and to have fun.

“You can succeed by only building a business, and many companies do,” he said. “We won’t consider it success unless it’s all three.”

When will "Magic Numbers" become central to HR? If you wish to look into Dunbar's work here is a link that will take you there directly. 

I find it bizarre now that much of the science of human groupings is known, that few business schools or HR department pay any attention. They still work in the realm of Alchemy.

So for all of you who wish that your schools would not have bullying, that your organization would be more functional, that your church would be better, that your twitter experience itself would be more satisfying, that as a entrepreneur you could see see the perils in store as you grow - here is Rob's Coles Notes.

As a reminder - Here are the Lego Blocks of the science of human groups. From these precise grouping you build the best performing organizations.

As with Lego, there is nothing random about how best to organize human beings. All well functioning organizations use these groups and they avoid the "Dip" - you will see the "Dip" below.

8 The Circle of Intimacy (The section): where you intuitively communicate as a great sports team will - 15 the dangerous nowhere group that you must either go back to 8 or rush to 34 from - 34 the ideal compound group (The platoon) - 89 the ideal large team - 144 The maximum unit where all can know each other to use trust rather than rules.

source Christopher Allen

So where do these numbers come from - for 144 or 150, the Dunbar Number is not the only number. The Numbers are of course found in the Fibonacci sequence

and are not made up but represent how nature stacks humans best. So here is the curve with the key numbers:

Here is how this was first put into practice - not because the Romans had a good theory but because they found that these numbers worked best in practice. The Roman Legion of more than 5,000 men was made up of units of 8 and 80. It had a head office of 3!!!!!

Here is the core of Dunbar's work - It is rooted in our evolution, our brain and the key insight that - humans use Culture to evolve more than biology. We live in a modern age but are wired as Neolithic People. Our wiring has not caught up with our culture.

It is generally accepted that human cultural evolution has proceeded at a very much faster pace than our anatomical evolution during the past few millenia. Given that our brain size has its origins in the later stages of human evolution some 250,000 years ago (Martin 1983, Aiello & Dean 1990), we may assume that our current brain size reflects the kinds of groups then prevalent and not those now found among technologically advanced cultures. The closest we can get to this is to examine those modern humans whose way of life is thought to be most similar to that of our late Pleistocene ancestors. These are generally presumed to be the hunter-gatherers (Service 1962, Sahlins 1972)............

In addition, it turns out that most organised (i.e. professional) armies have a basic unit of about 150 men (Table 3). This was as true of the Roman Army (both before and after the reforms of 104BC) as of modern armies since the sixteenth century. In the Roman Army of the classical period (350-100 BC), the basic unit was the maniple (or "double-century") which normally consisted of 120-130 men; following the reforms instituted by Marius in 104BC, the army was re-organised into legions, each of which contained a number of semi-independent centuries of 100 men each (Haverfield 1955, Montross 1975). The smallest independent unit in modern armies (the company) invariably contains 100-200 men (normallly three or four rifle platoons of 30-40 men each, plus a headquarters unit, sometimes with an additional heavy weapons unit) (Table 3). Although its origins date back to the German mercenary Landsknechts groups of the sixteenth century, the modern company really derives from the military reforms of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in the 1620s. Despite subsequent increases in size to accomodate new developments in weaponry and tactics, the company in all modern armies has remained within the 95% confident limits of the predicted size for human groups. The mean size of 179.6 for the twentieth century armies listed in Table 3 does not differ significantly from the 147.8 predicted by equation (1) (z=0.913, P=0.361 2-tailed).

So what is your organization based on? What is being taught at your business school? What is your HR function telling you?

 

Many look forward to the day when technology will enable their organization to become a real 2.0 place that draws on the full energy and knowledge of all who work there. Don’t hold your breath! There is a process that is in the way that all ignore. But it is the central implementation barrier.

Many years ago after the post war election that brought in the Labour Government in England, a new Labour MP was in a bar at the house of Commons with Nye Bevan, a very experienced Labour MP and Minister. The newbie noticed that several Labour Members were drinking with several Tories and both were having a good time. Shocked, he said “The’re fraternizing with the enemy!”. Bevan smiled and said, ‘The’re not the enemy. The’re the Opposition. You sit next to the enemy.”

We all go on and on in organizational life about the “competition”. But we all know really that the real enemy are those bastards in the other department or division.

Let’s get straight here. Here is the fractal. The sole purpose institutions is to get bigger and to accrue more financial resources in its direct control. The sole purpose of its subsidiary departments and divisions is to do the same. To imagine any other purpose is to be recklessly naive. Institutions do not exist to serve any external purpose. They exist to look after their own interests. The same is true for their parts.

All is reduced to money. So the only game in town is the budget.

At the centre of all job grading for executives, is the budget. The man with the biggest budget (I use the term man deliberately) gets the most points and is the King of the game. All executives know this. It matters not that the work that you do may have a bigger impact, budget trumps all.

Hence the silos. Hence the fact that every organization in the world will tell you that communications is their biggest challenge. They will tell you how they hope for more cooperation. But the truth is that because all are locked in a life and death struggle to get more from the budget, cooperation is impossible. For the foolish and naive executive to play the game any differently, I plead guilty here, means only that you lose and so do your people.

So to share resources is to dilute your budget. To reduce waste is to dilute your budget. To be more effective is to dilute your budget. To be more innovative is to dilute your budget. See!

True innovation becomes impossible too. Why? Because of the ROI issue. You are the ex big winner of the Trucks Division at say GM. You have a huge budget and you still are making out like a bandit back in the day. The discussion at the board is like this. Bright Board Member “Surely we all agree that soon gas prices will rise and our truck line will be vulnerable?” Senior Board Member “Yes but look at the ROI we have on this our largest investment. If we start to shift into smaller vehicles, our ROI will go down. We will not be able to bear the drop in ROI (under his breath – you idiot)”

Why did companies like BP or Shell not make the shift into renewables? Lots of talk. But when push came to shove all this was window dressing. Why? Because they cannot make the returns in the new that they make in a mature business like oil. It’s all about the budget lock in effect. The big shuts out the small, so the new cannot grow in a mature organization. If by any chance it does, the big will do its best to close it down. The Innovator’s Dilemma! The people at the top are not stupid – they are locked in by the budget.

So what does this mean?

• No executive who wants to climb will change the job grading system – who wants to be accountable for impact when a much simpler task of getting more budget is the alternative
• All the talk of innovation attacks the power holders of the mature parts that have the largest budgets – so rest assured it’s all bullshit
• All the talk of cooperation attacks the power holders ……
• All the talk of customer service being #1 attacks the main power holders….
• All the talk of beating the competition attacks the main power holders….

So what do big organizations do then to keep power if they don’t in fact do any of the things that we are all taught at school that we are meant to do and that is the public discourse inside the organizations?

They seek to get bigger. Size matters. And when they are really big, such as banks that are too big to fail, they use budget to rig the larger playing field.

So the main work of very large organizations for profit and non profit, is to influence their  field. So for schools, it’s not about the kids, it’s about the teachers. In health it is not about our health it is about big pharma. In defense it is not about our men and women in harms way, it is about big defense.

It is the same game all the way up – it is “Turtles” all the way up.

• In your department, you game the system to get and to keep more budget – your adversary is the other department in the division
• In your division…
• In your SBU…
• In your organization…
• In your sector….

So, where are we? I think that we are living a lie.

We thought that jobs were good and that our organizations were designed to compete. I certainly thought that and I was a SVP HR for a very large bank.

But we can now look behind the green curtain and see the reality. We have seen that the purpose of a job is to deskill people. We can see that all the core business process that business school teaches us to pay attention to, are subsidiary to the budget.

What this means is that nearly all the ideas that are baked into HR help make organizations grow into unresponsive dinosaurs. You get GM as a result.

So can GM be reformed? Or must we look at a new model?

From replaceable human resources to dynamic social groups

The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.

However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.

A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it.

MIT’s Peter Senge has made some important clarifications on terms we often use in looking at work, job classifications and training to support them.

Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life.

Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results.

Learning may be an individual activity but if it remains within the individual it is of no value whatsoever to the organization. Acting on knowledge, as a practitioner (work performance) is all that matters. So why are organizations in the individual learning (training) business anyway? Individuals should be directing their own learning. Organizations should focus on results.

Individual learning in organizations is basically irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.

Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing. Over a century ago, Charles Darwin helped us understand the importance of adaptation and the concept that those who survive are the ones who most accurately perceive their environment and successfully adapt to it. Cooperating in networks can increase our ability to perceive what is happening.

I love Harold's diagram - we are going full circle back to Artisan but to Artisan + - The Networked Artisan

This article is a gold mine - please dig in

We all worry about getting or losing a job. When we meet people, they ask us what we do and we give them a job description. When we apply for jobs, we get all fussed about the “skills” we need. When we have a job, we have to be managed and so have bosses. Politicians all talk about getting more jobs. School is all about getting jobs.

But the “Job” as we know it is a 19th century idea. In America very few people as a percentage of the population had job before 1905.

Here is a core idea, especially as we all fuss about skills etc. The whole purpose of a Job is to DESKILL people. What do I mean?

This picture is the key. Before Henry Ford, making a car was an artisanal activity. Really skilled people created each car. With the production line, tools and algorithms were used to enable the owner to use unskilled people. Yes each person could get good at assembly but that is like saying that, because I am good at putting Ikea furniture together, I am a cabinet maker. The men who made the Stanley Steamer could make anything. They had the metal working and engineering skills to be artisans.

This process of DESKILLING has taken place in all parts of ur lives.

Today we can all offer our friends and family an excellent meal. Many of us are Foodies. But in reality, most people today cannot cook. They can assemble but not cook. They have no deeper skills.

Yes it takes a certain amount of skill to do this. Chances are if the tractor breaks, it has to go to the shop. But think of the skill behind this!

The plowing is only a fraction of the skill. Farmers in the day knew what was really going on. Today agribusiness is no different from a production line. It’s all external process and algorithms. It’s Ikea.

It’s the same with white collar work. Sales people are all scripted. All core processes are scripted. There is no room to think or create outside the very narrow range allowed in the Chicken Box each of us live in. We are all working at Highland Park.

So all the skill aspects of the “job” are in effect about knowing how to follow Ikea instructions. They are “assembly” and obedience skills.

What is not wanted are people who really are engineers, or farmers or cooks. The assembly line has no room for thinking outside the proscribed process.

This is why when so many people lose their jobs, they are lost. They are lost because they have no real skills. Anyone can put an Ikea desk together which is why your job can be outsourced or replaced with a machine. Your only chance is to find another “assembly” line that still needs what you can do.

Today that will never happen.

This too is why the Manager is a dying breed too. Managers are in reality factory assembly line foremen who job it is to meet the quota and the rules of the process. Theirs is not the job to think of new ways of doing things. Their job is to keep it all moving and the sheep from straying. But with fewer sheep, who needs the manager?

Again the biggest farce of all are all the managerial skills that are in demand. All those managers that are truly innovative get asked to leave. What is demanded is to be able to keep control.

The skill that managers need to rise, is not to have results, but to be expert politicians. Anyone who has been an outstanding manager who has constantly delivered results knows that this means little compared with others who climb over them.

This system was OK when it really was Highland Park. Then all of this was in the open and accepted as such. People also got paid well. Now all of this is obscured behind a touchy feely facade. On the surface we are all one big happy family. We need your ideas. Innovation is what it is all about. We are all going to cooperate. We are all leaders. This will be bottom up.

And worst of all, it doesn’t work anymore. Highland Park revolutionized how things were done in the world. This process worked very well for a long time. But it doesn’t work for any one now, not even the owners.

Later in the series I will talk about leaving the idea of the job behind. Of what true skills mean and how they protect us. Of how to look for work instead of a job.

Bu in my next piece I will talk about the central business process for the traditional organization. The process that any executive has to master. The key to success for you if you wish to climb what is left of the greasy pole. The main barrier against all forms of cooperation and why 2.0 will fail in most organizations. The Budget!

 

Jon and I hope to reveal to you why it is so hard to get performance from a conventional organization today? Why do they find change so hard? Why is cooperation all but impossible? Why are people so unhappy?

Why is HR and all it stands for in the way?

The simple answer is that the simple idea of a “Job” – really a new idea since 1905 and the advent of the Ford Motor Company – no longer works but all the rules insist that it does. HR is all about the Job.

But the Job is going away – even without my polemic. It is dying quietly. Maybe we could hurry it along?

Organizations are being de-capitalized and networked.

After I left CIBC, most of the operational aspects of the bank’s HR department were outsourced. The same for IT. Much of the data processing had preceded that and now lives in a utility coop with some other banks and IBM I believe.

Today large chunks of any large organization that would have been inside are now supplied as services from the outside. The monolith is looking more like an eco system than a machine.

Back in the day, 1994, there were part time employees but they were somehow seen as an exception. Most were in junior roles. They were landless serfs. The lowest of the low and there are even more of these roles now.

But now at the high end and at the skill end this is changing. No longer landless serfs, the new contrator is the Knight for hire – The White Company of our time.

Today, especially in smaller firms, many key roles are played by long term outsiders. I am involved in such a start up today where all the key roles such as accounting, HR, legal etc will be rented from people that will be working under a retainer. These will not just be “consultants” but high level people who will have long term relationships. I play this role with several clients already. This enables, smaller firms to have national or global capability at a price that they can afford.

There are Men at Arms for hire as well. People with important skills that everyone needs

All over North America, networks of book keepers are emerging. The ones that I know of have a roster of about 6 -12 clients each and back each other up. Such an arrangement is ideal for both sides. The firm gets consistency and security while not paying for full time staff – the book keeper has the security of having say 10 clients and with that she can lose some or break up with those that she does not like,

If the Contractor CFO is the Knight for Hire, these are the “Men at Arms”.  I use these terms because I think what we are seeing has happened before.

In the middle ages, the main occupation was war. But there was a revolution in the 15th century. Until then your birth determined your rank in the hierarchy. It mattered not much if you were any good, if you were born a noble or a knight (JOB) you were that. But after the Black Death, people were scarce. If you were a king, you wanted to have an army that was good. You paid for real skill and not for position. War became a profession where real accomplishment and the ability to attract good people to you became the new norm.

The centre of the problem is the whole idea of a job. I think it is a relic of the early industrial past ad has no place in the world we live in. It is bad for us as people and it is bad for organizations. It is all about the infantilism of the work place.

Strong words! OK lets look at the Job and what it means and then at the alternative.

• The Employee has a “Job”. This is an artifact that has skill boundaries and skill demands. Recruitment is an impersonal process based on the idea that the job has defined tick boxes and we are all ciphers. “Must have 4 years experience as a ********* Plus an education *******” Few interviews or jobs demand any behavioural attributes. It is seen as bad form to hire people you know. So you can be a psychopath and that is OK because the skills on the table are instrumental. Nor does a job imply what performance is. Somehow the work continues as defined for ever??? The employee is also assumed to be a child who needs to be supervised. The reason is that the outcome of what she does is never on the table. She is assumed to need training, for she could never get skills herself. Her #1 real job is pleasing her boss. The #1 career path is to get into management, for that is where the money is. The #1 aim is to have the largest budget for that drives the biggest pay check. None of any of this has much to do with the work at hand or the goals of the organization. The #1 process is the budget! This is why cooperation and collaboration are no no’s. The only route is up or out or burn out. It is every man for himself. There is no friendship in the executive ranks. The competition are people you understand and who know what you face. Your colleagues are the real foe. Sound familiar?

• So let’s look at the evolving alternative. The contractor has a “Gig” or a long term role to play. Central to the appointment is that there is an output, an impact and a result required. The real interview issue is, can you show that you can and have done this? Not only does the contractor have to prove that, but smart employers will find out what it is like to work with that person. Behavior is central. The hiring issue is reputation not resume. Not only should this person have skills but also a network. Much of what a contractor brings are others who can help in some way. If the contractor has a longer term connection it is because she can still add value to the ever changing work. The contractor gets more money by being more competent in fields that are of value. He stays as long as he is needed. He gets new work as a result of the good work he has done before. He looks after his own training. Most of his skill development comes from doing hard and new work not from taking courses.He needs next to no supervision, he is after all hired because he is competent. The focus is on the work. His security is his field and his good name. Having more than one employer is better than only having one. He tends to own his own tools that tend to be better than his employers! He is no threat to his employer and can often become close. His best allies are his colleagues in his field. As teams they do better. They help each other. They routinely collaborate.

In looking at these two views of how work is done we see the heart of the HR and OD issue today.

Let’s explore this dissonance over the next few weeks. For we have two systems that are in the same space.

The whole social software field is behind the latter. The adoption issues are all related to the OD metaphor.

If we can see the role that our conventional thinking plays in harming the real needs of the organization and of the people in it, we might make some progress.

Are the IT and HR practices in your organization making it impossible to break out of the silos, the firewall, the bureaucracy?

Are you being held hostage by the “Experts”?

Is the Chasm between the connected reality outside your organization and the prison inside becoming a strategic problem.

Does the idea of a static “department” make a lot of sense when all you do is project work?

What does “manager” mean when what is needed are project managers or coaches?

What does “Job” mean when what people need to know is whether you are any good at the work that is on the table?

What do skills mean when your character and your network are key values to what you bring?

What does “employee” mean when half of the workforce are contractors?

What is a contractor?

What is performance? A contractor knows – she is hired to do a job – not told how to do it. If she completes it well she has done well and gets more reputation. Her best rating is to be rehired – why is this so simple for them and yet so tortuous for an employee?

Why can’t you connect to the outside using social media tools? What are the real risks and solutions?

Are you really “working” on a task 8 hours a ay and so cannot look Outside?

What about when you are at home or on the road?

Why when millions of people look after their own tech are you so helpless at the office?

Why when you have all the latest gear at home do you use semaphore at work?

Why when you go to the CEO and complain about all of these things and she agrees with you that HR and IT still get their way.

It takes a poacher to become a good game keeper.

Jon Husband, ex HR Consultant with the Hay Group and I ex SVP HR OD at CIBC will be tackling these issues over the next week or so.

But first – what about your stories? Please fire away in the comments about the strange world of HR and IT – what do you see and what do you think can be done?

The difference between the web experience at the office and outside has just become a chasm.

I sent an email today to a client with four text attachments – not only did the firewall block it but stripped attachments off and destroyed them. The firewall is so extreme that it is getting all but impossible to send information in.

I was setting up a conference call with another client last week. It was a UK, US and Canadian call. I suggested Skype. But we could not use it because one of the parties, a university would not allow it. They also ban Twitter and Facebook.

Many I know have to go home to get much work done.

I have a friend who is working in the security arena for the Olympics. They were all given really heavy duty laptops. Great I thought, they can be in touch at any time at any place if there is a problem. But the problem is that the security is set so tight that the laptops only work when docked at the office.

So in the outside world – the cloud – iPads – a world of amazing connections and content – a world of conversations and sharing where all the tools that make life better can be applied.

In your office – a 3 year old Dell box – Windows XP – Word or worse Word perfect – and a firewall that wont allow anything.

And you want to join the 2.0 world too?

Oh I forgot – an HR and an IT department that makes the Gestapo look like nuns

Jon has put the fox among the chickens – what is all this control about?

More soon on HR and IT and how their grip on the culture of your workplace is so toxic.