A Picture Paints a Thousand Words and More
A Picture Paints a Thousand Words and More
What is happening?
Change is everywhere, continuous and not always in our control. The ability to respond, adapt and communicate effectively to your employees, clients, shareholders your organisations change of direction is essential in today's economy. It is becoming more widely accepted that 75 percent of an organisations value is contained within its intangible assets (high performing and reliable business processes; human capital; information systems; innovative development and collaborative culture; customer relationships and brands). This is also true for countries and both are moving from a product based model, to knowledge and serviced based economy. But how do we visualise this?
A strategy or roadmap is a typical way. It describes how an organisation or country is going to create value for its shareholders, clients and citizens. The development, communication and execution of the strategy need to clearly align both tangible and intangible assets in a way that is easily understood by all. Typically, that strategy has been a document, developed by a select few, without any opportunity to give any real-time collaboration (comments and feedback). The presentation and representation of the strategy, is typically in a less than engaging visual format, with no ability to offer different insights and views or being able to compare different aspects of the strategy to make informed decisions.
Another aspect to consider is the ability to simply decide what events and or actions need to be included within the strategy and communicating this to the business so that everyone understands and can execute the strategy. Having the ability to represent your organisations strategy in a visual format is helps to reduce the amount of words and provide a picture that everyone can understand.
A recent Harvard Business Review commented that typically only 5% of a company's employees understood the company strategy. Clearly only having 1 in 20 people understand your strategy is not ideal and goes some way to explain why strategy execution typically does not deliver the projected outcomes.
There are and will continue to be a various methodologies, processes, tools etc that help to gather information to develop a strategy and all have their benefits as well as a few downsides. That is a topic in itself and will be covered in another article. However, what is clear is the way it (strategy) is communicated, and shared is not ideal. Furthermore, coming back to the way that a Strategy is developed, no matter what process or method you have used, it has generally been completed by a "chosen few", who supposedly are the "experts" and are more than capable of producing the optimal strategy. This strategy when finally completed, is neatly packaged into a document, placed as a PDF on the intranet for everyone to read and understand, while the "chosen few" sit back and wait to see it all happen.
Well, there is usually a long (and anxious) wait - mainly because nobody goes to look at it. Perhaps people turn up for the strategy launch presentation to hear what the strategy is. But when it is all over, its back to business because somebody else will be taking care of it - won't they? After all they didn't ask me or get my view or ask for my contribution.
Maybe I have exaggerated it slightly - or have I? You can decide based on your own experience.
The other key issue highlighted here is that there is no ownership; no co-creation of the strategy has taken place, so everybody thinks it is somebody else's responsibility to make it happen. "I'll just carry on with my job as I don't really understand and wasn't involved any way."
Collaborative strategizing throughout the business is a way to overcome these issues. Collaborative strategizing is not going to be covered in-depth here but the focus is what we need to do to address the two issues identified above, namely:
Communicating in a way that people remember - 80% of people remember what they see and do compared to 20% what they read and 10% what they hear
How to engage the business on important activities such as strategy so that there is ownership, buy in, that supports execution -through business collaboration
Is Business Social Networking the next step?
The ability to connect and communicate with people both internally and externally within an organisation has increased dramatically.
It is clear that the world today is becoming ever more connected in real-time and there is an increasing expectation for people to respond almost immediately to a question, request, instruction or order, both in business as well as socially. So much so, that there is a convergence and sometimes an overlap of both business and social communications within a business organisation - so creating business social networking. This convergence expands the knowledge network considerably and can offer further insights and ideas that far exceed the wisdom and expertise offered by the "chosen few" mentioned earlier.
With the continual arrival of email in your Inbox, mobile telephones, smart phones and the increase of social networking, it is not going to get any simpler. In particular the phenomena of social networking is growing at an incredible rate with the proliferation of various applications such as twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, YouTube and the like, people are using these as their real-time collaboration platforms, both socially and in business because of their ease, format and style of communication.
Looking at social networking on its own and trying to develop a business reason about why a business should use these social networking channels as a formal communications channel is still too early and embryonic for most companies. However, social networking in a business context is not always ideal for various reasons such as security of information, company IP, the ease at which people can connect and share with other people could lend itself to an organisation being exposed to unnecessary risks, albeit unintentionally most of the time.
How then can the positive social aspect be used within a business environment so that collaborating real-time anywhere, anytime and anyplace is still possible? Also having this collaboration take place in a visual, content rich, intuitive environment, goes someway in addressing the issues identified earlier. Combining the needs of business in a social networking environment is starting to have a positive influence and will act as an enabler to support the new business model of "knowledge and services", from the traditional "product-driven" economy.
The internet continues to act as a catalyst for organisations to look at new innovative ways to conduct business. Applications delivered online based on Cloud Computing platforms are emerging as one of the technology trends in delivering business social solutions.
All of this needs to be in a secure environment, to facilitate the co-development of ideas and sharing information that can be highly critical and sensitive, so that business collaboration can be conducted in a "safe and secure" area, only allowing the right people and groups to be connected. Being able to see who is in the group, who is online whilst developing strategies, reviewing issues and making business decisions in a real-time collaborative way, in a very visual format, allows the social behaviour to continue but within the constraints of a secure business environment.
Coming back to our original issues, this technology enables us to address both the:
Visual Presentation
Collaboration
in a format that is suitable and scalable for small local business, to large global corporations and governments. This is starting to enable businesses and global corporations to operate in a connected environment. The result is that it permits organisations to complete critical business activities such as strategy planning, technology roadmaps, marketing, etc and be able to communicate these visually with their organisation, clients, partners and shareholders in a social context.
This will help to increase the percentage of an organisations employees understanding of their strategy, which supports the execution and delivery of the identified targets.
Now that the technology is in place and improving daily, organisations need to review their lines of communications and collaboration, agree the way forward, support the technology adoption and change of culture, through training and appropriate governance. It could also be argued that business social networking has been with us for a very long time. We just did not have an enabling technology to put it on.
And doing it collaboratively and visually online, certainly helps to "paint a thousand words" and more
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