Getting started is the easy part. Things begin to get more difficult when it's time to actually launch the network. The simplest network launch can be done in a morning meeting. Take the five principles and just add verbs. Clarify the purpose. Identify the members. Establish the links. Multiply the leaders. Integrate the levels.
Teamnets need to be self-organizing to some extent to be successful. The more rapid the change and the more fluid the organization, the greater the need for this capacity.
The recipe for self-organization begins with people:
- People
create the shared purpose.
Whether a team at a white board, an omnipotent ruler issuing an edict, or a lawmaker writing a preamble, people are the ultimate source of an organization's raison d'etre. - Purpose
generates the work.
"Why" leads the "what." This is essential in networks because purpose is the source of legitimacy for the activities undertaken and results achieved. - Cross-boundary
work becomes explicit through planning.
People need maps to help guide work through unfamiliar geographies. Teams that work at a distance need to be more explicit than those that don't. - "Those
who do, plan."
Participatory planning provides the energy for the self-organizing process. Openness and inclusion lead to trust. To maximize everyone's sense of involvement, invite everyone, expect some show up, and profusely thank the few who stay to do the work.
Planning is a continuous process of thinking about the long-range future and the immediate what-to-do-next. One pass at planning is never enough. A plan is never finished, but is often "good enough for now."
The five principles interrelate. Use a draft purpose statement to a broaden the circle of stakeholders who in turn reshape the focus. Actual relationships differ from those proposed and lead to different leaders. More work leads to more internal units and more external alliances.
Set a planning process in place that makes the work real, gains commitments, and kick-starts the internal leadership. Find a way for the process to be as participatory as possible. In words attributed to General Dwight D. Eisenhower:
The plan is nothing. Planning is everything.
Call a planning meeting and include these agenda items:
- Clarify purpose
- Identify members
- Establish links
- Multiply leaders
- Integrate levels
These action statements also can guide a longer planning agenda, stretching over days or months. Take the first item, for example, "clarify purpose." In some situations, a few minutes of discussion will reaffirm a common understanding, while in others extensive programs will be set in motion to discover a new vision and mission. Just getting to "Go" in a teamnet is often a considerable accomplishment.
Clarify PurposePurpose is the essential raw resource available to a teamnet. To make purpose useful, you need to "unpack it," to translate values, vision, and mission into goals, tasks, and results.
When people are physically distributed, their purpose needs to go beyond the unspoken and tacit behavior that works for those who are near one another. People need to generate and interpret purpose so that they understand it well enough to bring it back to their diverse locations and communicate it to other people. Internal direction cannot replace external command unless people participate in the process of defining their work. People can carry explicit purpose across boundaries.
If you already have gone through a period of searching and struggling to reach a new vision and mission, now is the time to push beyond the abstractions to what it means in concrete terms. Set your goals for the future. Only a handful, please! Brainstorm many goals, but select only a few. The "rule of seven," the number of things people can comfortably keep in mind at once, is strongly applicable here.
Next, pick a time horizon-a week, a month, a year-and place yourself at this future point and look back. Ask what results you want to achieve within that time for each goal. Results are the output, the deliverables, the products of a group's activities.
Finally, identify the tasks that connect the goals to the results. Tasks are what we do, the categories of work.
When you arrive at tasks this way, you have made purpose concrete. People understand the legitimacy of the tasks since they can relate them directly to the overall shared purpose. And if the purpose changes, they know that the tasks need reevaluation.
Identify MembersNow that you know what the work is, who needs to participate in what? Here lies one of the secrets of successful networking:
Everyone does not have to participate in everything.
Each task, driven by a goal, has at least one result, and represents a chunk of work carried out by a sub-group, a part of the teamnet. Only some members need involvement in most tasks, perhaps as few as one or two. For a few tasks, such as a milestone review, everyone may need to participate. Members sign up in the real world by sharing the work through one or more of the group's activities.
Members are the arms and legs and torso and senses of an organization. In teamnets, "they" becomes "we".
Membership goes beyond names on a list to flesh and blood commitments as the planning phase unfolds and the work clarifies. Groups define their boundaries by identifying their members. Inside and outside take form.
A core group expands its network view to include stakeholders and constituencies beyond itself that need representation in the plans. Customers, for example, may participate as full, temporary, or ex officio members of a network.
Some teams and networks may have distinct boundaries, but often they are bounded from the center. Core members, perhaps identified directly as a set of individuals, sit at the center of intersecting relationships. Farther out, organizational names or positional titles identify participants and stakeholders. Farthest out, people refer to constituencies by general categories, such as "customers," "media," and "government."
Don't be afraid to name members of a network at all these levels of abstraction at once. Networks include individuals and organizations. People may act for themselves, stand for a group, or represent a constituency-all at the same time.
Establish LinksWe need to take our thinking up a level for a moment as the focus comes back around to the links again. This is the arena where the 21st century organization is going to look especially different from its predecessors.
The convergence of digital technologies drives inescapable organizational change as the interconnected global network grows along with personal individual information mobility. Only a few years away, connectivity will explode dramatically. We put our bet on 2001 as the year when large-scale "digital convergence" snaps into place and an order-of-magnitude new jolt of change hits.
We are in the midst of epochal change when it comes to our ability to link. This is not only a technology revolution, but a simultaneous social one as well. The plummeting cost of connectivity itself challenges the vertical channels of hierarchical information flow. Distributed, plentiful information enables distributed power.
Think about links at two levels: first, for the group as a whole, then for the specific tasks and subgroups. Indeed, you need to move through these perspectives several times to find a good mix of media and scheduled interactions.
You need to establish a communications environment for the group that supports its work and is conducive to growing relationships.
Consider multiple means for the physical links. Different people prefer different media; some personal preferences are extremely strong. The nature of the work and the location of the people greatly influence the choice and mix of media. In particular, cross-boundary work virtually guarantees the need for more than one mode of communication.
The answers are not always obvious. While it might appear that fax is a preferable mode of communication because of its simplicity, in some places, e-mail is preferable. "Fax is very hard for us," says Olya Marakova, a scientist in Frank Starmer's "lab without walls" doing basic research on cardiac cells, in an e-mail message from Pushchino, Russia. "We have only one fax machine for several buildings and it's very expensive. But everyone has modems and it takes no time to send an e-mail."
Harry Brown's EBC Industries' teamnet, by contrast, depends heavily on fax because e-mail cannot easily transport the complex manufacturing drawings that the companies exchange.
Not everyone has Marakova's fax deficiency, or Brown's need, but they make the point that communication mode depends on the situation.
Lay the groundwork for specific relationships to develop in planning a teamnet. You know that you want marketing people to work with their counterparts in finance. Here, you work to relate (hard) technology to (soft) relationships, in reverse of the 1-2-3 analysis (channel-interaction-relationship) you did in the Assess phase.
- Purpose is the source of a desire or need to establish relationships.
- By clarifying the purpose into concrete work activities, you detail the interactions that need to be supported.
- Choose and
set up the physical channels of communication required by the interactions.
In short, work drives the technology, rather than the technology determining the work.
This is a teamnet commandment. It's also where some people have the most trouble with the teamnet idea-alternatively fearing powerlessness or anarchy. "If you tell people they've going to have to give up power, they'll tell you to stuff it," says former Xerox CEO David Kearns. "The risk of democracy" is how one besieged airline executive put it.
We never said it is easy, only that this is the way things are going. This is potentially the most personally powerful aspect of teamnets. There is more room and more need for people to take responsibility and exercise leadership because the group is working complex issues concurrently.
Most groups include both appointed and natural leaders. Cross-boundary groups need to include people with positional power. A teamnet is no different from a bureaucratic committee that studies and recommends if it has no power to act.
Groups grow their own leaders regardless of the official structure. In networks, people use this capability to great advantage.
Natural leadership in a group springs up around the activities. People literally take responsibility for particular tasks, and in this way are self-organizing. Use the work to define leadership within the group, rather than the other way around.
When people generate their own tasks, they see why they need to be involved in specific activities. They are able to add unique contributions, exercising leadership as they do since they know their own expertise, experience, or perspective. Each person in the teamnet is a leader at some time in some activities.
Each cross-boundary task and set of activities offer an opportunity for leadership within the teamnet. Task leadership emerges as people take on responsibility for results. Linking specific results with specific people anchors responsibility for work.
Many tasks naturally lend themselves to co-leaders, which further expands the possibilities for leaders. These leadership roles also naturally end as the work completes and the process moves on.
What you don't want to do is what bureaucracy does-chunk all the work down to the level of individual tasks. This suppresses multiple leaders, proves more costly, and frankly does not work in complex situations.
Integrate LevelsPurpose, members, links, and leaders all involve multiple levels of consideration. Teamnets are at least three levels deep: the members of the teams, the teams themselves, and the network of teams (or individuals in task groups in teams).
Don't be afraid to connect across the levels, or even to confuse them. Levels are often confusing. Just keep moving your thinking up and down the scales of size and scope, looking internally and externally from the boundaries, from global to local perspectives and back again.
The planning process is itself is one of the best means of integrating the levels and of keeping everyone informed. Indeed, early plans are often most valuable as tools for communicating with the hierarchy. They are also great recruitment devices for potential participants not involved in the initial planning.
Can you fit your plan on a page? If so, you have a grasp of the whole that you can communicate to others. Can you break down the one-page plan to a greater level of detail, complete with places and dates? This indicates that your plan has depth. Can you fit your plan into a broader strategy and overall purpose? This indicates that your plan has a context, another way of integrating levels.
Face-to-face time is often at a premium for teamnets. Use precious meeting resources to develop a clear high level picture that people can go away and fill in. Each person needs to understand the whole, and each leader needs to balance global issues with local concerns. Trust fills in between the lines.
By ending the Launch phase with a "high level" picture, you have focused your original fuzzy 30,000 foot view down to a sufficient level of detail to do some real work. This degree of clarity in the work convinces others that the plan makes sense, simplifying the "marketing of the idea." Having taken the time to go to this level of detail, you now can:
- describe the project in a sentence or two;
- understand the sequence of work;
- keep a mental checklist of your specific responsibilities; and
- know who to network with outside the team.
