The great game of business is changing from a process-centric view of work to a human-centric view of business as value creating networks. Collaboration tools and social networking technologies are gaining rapid traction even in the most traditional of businesses. This means that work design and management practices are approaching a significant turning point in the world of work design.

Traditional Game Boards

When it comes to running the great game of business most people – and even new technologies – are still stuck in traditional business “game boards." Three types of game boards have dominated business management for two decades:

1.  Boxes and Tables Familiar game boards are organization charts, spreadsheets, task lists, tables, and matrixes for organizing ideas.

2.  “Bucket Models” These are all those business models (at least one for every consultant on the planet) where issues are sorted into different categories or “buckets.” These are primarily static models yet are useful for thinking through specific issues.

3.  Production Line The post popular dynamic game board is the unidirectional, mechanistic “production line” model depicted as value streams, value chains, business processes, and workflows.

All of these traditional tools are evolving to more collaborative game boards that support business performance with a more human-centric perspective. Some “new” tools are actually based on traditional mindsets and game boards, while others really are embracing fundamentally different ways of working and managing. So what does the new game of business really look like?

Boxes and ledgers expand to collaboration and social network applications.

Social Networking applications of course are some of the most basic and essential new business game platforms. Companies like Jive Software and Lithium Technologies are offering an increasing a number of “game boards” for people to collaborate on documents, share information, and hold conversations. SocialText for example started with Wikis and now has expanded to group discussions, distributed spreadsheets, and blogs. Shared workspaces such as Salesforce.com also qualify as collaborative game boards with shared tasks and tables for contacts and opportunities.

Bucket Models evolve to custom models that emerge from collaborative sensemaking.

Carol Rozwell of Gartner recently posted on the importance of Storytelling, Hybrid Thinking, VEs and Context, particularly in simulations and training. Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge has also been a strong influence for the use of storytelling and narrative for collaborative sensemaking. The addition of visualizations during sensemaking exercises deepens the impact and further allows the emergence of collaborative models. Rather than the “imposed” structure of the traditional “bucket” models, a unique and often more creative mental model emerges from the shared insights of the group.

Visual graphic recording was pioneered and popularized by David Sibbet in the 1980s and is now used around the world for sensemaking and recording of critical conversations (as in the free form example here with Eileen Clegg of Visual Insight).

John Caswell and team at Group Partners have taken visual sensemaking deeper into the realm of technology by combining facilitation with digital recording and documentation. Group Partners uses a set of collaborative “game boards” to help groups focus and reach coherence for different types of planning challenges. These are more rigorously designed that most frameworks and are integrated as a coherent series. Each is essentially created and customized to fit the needs of each group.

Production line and process models evolve to value creating networks.

Increasing we are seeing the collaborative network pattern itself become a kind of “game board” for managing how the work gets done. The most basic of course is the social graph. This is a fairly straightforward social graph of people that ValdisKrebs follows on Twitter.

Social network analysis (SNA) is now used for a whole variety of business applications from identifying informal experts, to improving communication and collaboration, to managing business alliances - as well as detecting fraudulent insurance claims and analyzing criminal and terrorist networks. Plenty of examples on Valdis’s Orgnet website! The social graph and classic network analytics are becoming integral components of many collaboration and business intelligence applications.

The rising use of SNA visuals and analytics points to an even more significant evolution in the great game of business - modeling the work itself as human-centric value creating networks with Value Network Analysis (VNA). In the example below the informal collaboration interactions (blue dotted lines) are modeled right along with the formal business transactions (solid green lines) for a more systemic understanding of how value is created and how work really needs to happen.

See more on this example in
Value Networks for Business Process Improvement.

Value Network modeling and analytics are quickly gaining adoption in global technology companies, heavy industry and manufacturing, innovation networks, logistics and supply chain, service networks, and many others.

All of these new "game boards" and their wide adoption show show just how deeply the shift to collaboration and networks is impacting how work is managed.

See also:

Stop Whining and Get Back to Work(flow) is a great blog by Carol Rozwell on the need for Integration between the new social software tools and the existing applications workers must use is a prerequisite for adoption. Here is an excerpt:

In order to get workers to use new social software acquired with the intention of increasing collaboration, it is important that these tools support the existing workflow. Integration between the new social software tools and the existing applications workers must use is a prerequisite for adoption.

We completely agree. People have been dazzled by social networking and collaboration technologies but have missed the point that it is all about getting the work done. Collaboration cannot be the goal - the goal is improving how we work together. 

There is understandably little patience with process and workflow modeling, yet without it people needlessly reinvent the wheel, miss critical steps and checkpoints and flounder when they should be...well...flowing. A few simple rules and clear goals and outcomes might work for simple processes but very complicated business processes or large scale projects do require consistency in execution and cannot sidestep the need to consciously design work activities. 

Unfortunately traditional ways of modeling processes and workflows are not only tedious and time consuming, they also force rigidity and needless constraints where there should be flexibility and healthy variation. What ValueNetworks.com and others are driving toward are faster, more organic ways of organizing the work - that allow people to quickly model human interactions as part OF the work. With that as a starting point we can then readily integrate collaboration patterns and social software tools with transactional data from workflow applications. It is this kind of integration that results in productivity breakthroughs. 

The Recent Forbes Article, "Mining Human Behavior at MIT," describes how Pentland lab put sociometers on 80 employees at a Bank of America call center in Rhode Island. The inconspicuous badges used Bluetooth and infrared signals to measure which co-workers the test subjects talked to every minute for a month and, later, another period of six weeks.

After the first month the MIT researchers could see that individuals who talked to more co-workers were getting through calls faster, felt less stressed and had the same approval ratings as their peers. Informally talking out problems and solutions, it seemed, produced better results than following the employee handbook or obeying managers’ e-mailed instructions.

So the call center tried its own experiment. Instead of staggering employees' coffee breaks as it had previously, it aligned their breaks to allow more chatter. The result, Bank of America told MIT a few months later: productivity gains worth about $15 million a year. 

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0830/e-gang-mit-sandy-pentland-darpa-sociometers-mining-reality_2.html