22nd February Earthquake
By now you will no doubt be aware of the seriousness of the latest earthquake on Feb 22nd in New Zealand and the human tragedy that the people of Christchurch are experiencing.
Aftershocks are continuing to cause distress and hamper efforts in the many rescue and cleanup operations that are underway.
At the time of writing 28th Feb:
- 148 confirmed dead and still many unaccounted for.
- 50,000 properties remain without water – 33% of the city (out of a total of 150,000).
- estimated that 75,000 houses are without sewerage.
- approximately 37,000 customers are without power.
- early estimate of the damage caused by last week’s 6.3-magnitude quake was between $10 to $15 billion – two to three times the $5b estimated cost of September’s 7.1-magnitude quake and 7 to 8 per cent of the GDP, compared to Hurricane Katrina’s one per cent impact on the US economy.
Any donation you can manage will be enormously helpful in this crisis situation, the internet options are:
When social software is introduced for use within an organisation it improves organisational capability but the type of organisational culture that exists also affects the uptake of social software. Here I present a way of dealing with this catch-22 by matching relevant social software to different organisational cultures.
I was lucky to hear Peter Duschinsky talk recently on his book, The Change Equation, and realised he was sharing ideas that helped explain the issues of adopting social software within the organisation. He asserts that change projects that fail to deliver their intended results, (estimated at more than 70% failure: McKinsey & Company Global Survey, 2008 N=3199/ Hamlin 2001), happen when organisations don’t have the ‘capability’ to cope with the change they desire. Capability is explained as a balance between cultural maturity on one hand and process maturity on the other.
Peter goes on to identify nine levels of cultural maturity and outlines a route map to improve an organisation’s capability by progressively stepping up these cultural levels.
I provide a table here of the first six cultural levels Peter identifies with a very short description (it is unlikely your organisation will be 7 or above).
| 1. Pragmatic Anarchic |
2. Structuralist |
3. Dialectic |
4. Aligned |
5. Pragmatic Aligned |
6. Empiricist |
| individual focus, micromanaged, little sharing, few formal processes |
department focus, formal rigid processes, silo working |
inter-department focus, formal processes, individual networking |
leadership focus, formal flexible processes, aligned staff & organisation goals |
team focus, flexible task groups, flexible processes, high level of staff trust |
real-world focus, flexible resources & processes, real-time information gathering |
We know that social software can help an organisation to climb up these cultural levels, microblogging, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, question and answer facilities, embedded application feedback, all improve culture. They’re brilliant for just-in-time learning, for emancipation of knowledge, for bypassing organisational hierarchies when they’re not relevant, for encouraging participation, for enabling staff as content producers, for gathering feedback, and spreading ideas.
But introducing social software is in itself an organisational change, it involves sponsors, infrastructure changes, new technology, learning, adoption, etc. For this reason it is subject to the same issues of failure as any change project. Peter also outlines how we risk slipping back down cultural levels if we skip steps, as they build on each other. So when is the right time to introduce what types of social software?
By introducing tools that align and match the organisations cultural maturity we can avoid issues of introducing a step change too much. This minimises issues of adoption, over-estimation of benefits, and general project failure whilst maximising the benefits from the social software itself and the resulting improvements in capability.
We can define appropriate social media tools for the level of culture within an organisation by matching the types of activity that are supported to those sought by that culture. Mapping this gives us a way of progressively introducing these new ways of working with minimum risk of failure.
This matching method provides a roadmap to introduce social software based on your organisational culture. At the same time the new ways of working provided by social software act to strengthen culture so that the next level is more easily obtained. Each step also amplifies the organisations ability to accept change making each step progressively easier. Moving up this scale will help to establish a self-learning organisation that has the agility to manage proactive changes and hence open the door to more security and success.
Note that this roadmap specifically outlines the introduction of social software for use internally across the organisation. Many organisations are deciding to use microblogging to talk to customers within a very restricted team – this is a separate discussion and not what the roadmap above aims to advise on.
If you’re interested in more detail on the matching choices made for each step then please email me.
Ben Stewart
ben@cautionyourblast.com
I’ve been asked many times over the last month about our company name “Caution Your Blast”. The short answer is that it’s a sign that attracts my attention when walking out to board the planes at London City airport. I know it somehow isn’t meant for me but still makes an impression. As it turns out it’s there to remind the pilots that it is dangerous to use full throttle when turning onto the runway as they will be endangering ground staff in the process.
I think it’s a great signifier for the problems and opportunities encountered where people meet technology. In this sense it describes our company remit to consult on strategy and direction for new generation digital solutions and hence it was adopted as the company name.
Also I wanted to use a phrase to achieve differentiation from classic web application and product names that tend to be short 4-6 letter words, real or fabricated as a proper nouns.
Such words are becoming impossible to find as domain names anyway and they’re getting kitsch – everyones got to have one. And anyway length is hardly an issue as typing skills are a lot better than in the past and getting to a website is often via clicking hyperlinks rather than typing the address, also on subsequent visits the browser address will auto-complete given a few letters.
When it comes to being easy to remember, memory science is loaded with references as to how phrases are a good way to drive memory. And that’s been my experience too as people have found it hard to forget the company name.
There’s a longer story as to the choice of this name, and why we like it, which you’re more than welcome to email me about.
