serendipity

Dec

6

2011

Turning Serendipity into Probability

"I’m going to take a swipe at another cherished social software notion: Serendipity. We should ban that word from the social software lexicon. It’s misleading and it makes enterprise social software seem about as relevant to the business as the plastic mistletoe hanging at the office Holiday party: Something amazing could happen, but it probably won’t."

www.socialtext.com/...g-serendipity-into-probability

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serendipity probability businessproccess scalability repeatableprocess repeatability

The point is that social software doesn’t enable serendipity; it transforms serendipity into probability
Companies and their leaders only take social software seriously when they see it as part of mainstream business process. Mainstream business process is all about repeatability and scalability.

Sep

30

2011

Serendipity Happens… to Deliver Million$

"As the world turns… social, expect to be surprised by the fruits of serendipity. When large workforces embrace working socially, or as I love to call it – in “socialworking” mode, they discover new ways of solving problems and creating opportunities. Insights are revealed in the fluid web of connections and sharing. We’ve seen a dramatic mood swing toward all things social this year. Even the naysayers have been touting the benefits of working socially recently.

I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight just one example of how working in a truly social organization delivers benefits that could never have been predicted in an executive conference room undergoing the scrutiny of a hard-core ROI analysis."

www.dachisgroup.com/...ity-happens-to-deliver-million

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socialbusiness enterprise2.0 serendipity casestudies Lowe IBMconnections businessprocess workflow problemsolving

Lowe’s on-boarded 100% of its employee base to its collaborative platform, IBM Connections last year. That’s every executive, store manager, retail clerk, and stock boy on the payroll. The entire Lowe’s workforce of 289,000 employees have access to Connections
fter exhausting other traditional sources, the employee then turned to the Connections platform and asked “out loud”* if anyone knew how she could get more inventory. Funny thing happened. Although everyone felt her pain on the inventory shortage, they started replicating her paint mold/tray demo in their stores. And guess what? Suddenly other stores were selling out of the paint trays too. As interest in the thread and the display idea grew in popularity, sales skyrocketed.
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- When applied on an enterprise level, the unique display idea represented more than a million dollars in additional revenue
- It was only after she circumvented the traditional sources and leveraged the power of pull within her employee base, did the company realize this unexpected windfall in revenue. Not because she was able to order more inventory (her original ask), but because she shared her clever merchandising technique with the employee base creating demand for her idea far beyond her single store.
- Be sure not to overlook this important upside of working socially. In other words, “Be careful what you don’t ask for, you just might get it.”

Jul

31

2011

Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions

"I’ve earlier blogged about how I find intuition and seeing the value of the tacit knowledge as very interesting perspectives for the decision-making. As social business and new ways of working are now changing the organizations and the entire business landscape, and further adding to the complexity – I’ll find it even more interesting to study decision-making and how understanding is created."

raesmaa.wordpress.com/...ening-for-the-better-decisions

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socialbusiness decisionmaking leadership uncertainty unpredictability serendipity

- Way of Thinking, very simplified: Logical, analytical leaders are processing information serially versus intuitive and creative ones perceiving things as a whole.
- Tolerance for Ambiguity, again simplified: some of us have a high need to structure information in order to minimize ambiguity, while others can process many ideas and thoughts simultaneously.
Analytical types have a better tolerance for ambiguity than the “traditional” directive decision-makers. An analytical type of leader usually search for more information and alternatives than directive ones.
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- Leaders applying the conceptual style in decision-making are often considering many alternatives out of broad perspective. Additionally they take a longer term perspective. This style gives most room for creativity, the authors claim.
- The forth style, behavioral style, is the most receptive for suggestions from others, peers and subordinates, and leaders of this style love the meetings! They are also trying to avoid conflicts and find a consensus.
- “We need to move forward boldly and make decisions despite incomplete information… but also be prepared to change our path. It’s easy to just shut down when faced with an environment in which you can never be certain or absorb all the information available. But if you are a leader, you need to accept the uncertainty and move forward anyway. “
- When both systems are active, there’s a room for intuition, interaction and emotions – and for better understanding and decision-making.
- When I saw the decision-style model I was right-away thinking about replacing the Tolerance of Ambiguity into the Level of Embracing Serendipity.
- The third association I got is the value and importance of listening in decision-making,
- I found the fifth one, his RASA model, beautiful and absolutely something every one of us should apply in our daily life and the decision-making situations. Acronym RASA comes from Receive, Appreciate, Summarise, Ask – and these four verbs should be part of our personal decision-making, learning processes, and leadership.

May

5

2011

5 Reasons Why Activity Streams Will Save You From Information Overload

"I think they are probably one of the most fundamental, critical and relevant 2.0 capabilities that any company can turn into, if they would want to dive into the fascinating world of Enterprise Social Computing, and start seeing the business value right away. It probably cannot get any easier than that. In my own experience, next to my blog(s), they are the most significant component from the 2.0 world that have managed to help me live, rather successfully, “A World Without Email” for the last 4 years and counting… Now, do I feel overloaded because of them? Do I feel they are heading the same way our Inbox has been heading for the last few years? Absolutely not! Quite the opposite. It’s been, all along, if I can say so, quite a liberating experience so far altogether! And here is why."

www.elsua.net/...-you-from-information-overload

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email activitystream serendipity informationoverload

Activity Streams permeate throughout transparency and openness: Therefore helping reduce the amount of noise you are exposed to, while interacting with others. Call it ambient intimacy, declarative living or, my all time favourite, “narrate your work“, Activity Streams will help, over time, reduce the amount of transactions and frictions you will be exposed to, provoking that opportunity for knowledge workers to be on top of the knowledge flow thanks to that openness, clarity and transparency of what’s happening around you
They help you, greatly, be done with the obsession to read AND respond to everything: Eventually, teaching us all how we need to start letting things go. J
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- They facilitate serendipity and Informal Learning: When was the last time that you associated those two crucial concepts to your Inbox and the emails you receive? Probably, not that often, right? Yet, in the world of Activity Streams both serendipitous knowledge discoveries and informal learning, a.k.a. social learning, are fully immersed, rich experiences that one cannot avoid, but fully embrace when bumping into them time and time again
- They help flatten organisations and traditionally hierarchical structures
- They inspire an open knowledge sharing culture: Where “Knowledge SHARED *is* power” is the new mantra that percolates into the corporate world as we know it today, resulting in a much more dynamic, agile, understanding, public, clearer and innovative corporate environment where knowledge is no longer hoarded, but shared across openly.

Nov

2

2010

Companies Should Build Teams Not Communities

"Recently, I posted a response to all the wonderful comments and contributions that you all made to my last post on “Why Companies Shouldn’t Build Online Communities“. As I plan to delve further into this idea of “Social Teams”, I thought I’d re-post that reply as a post in its own right so as to make it easier for people to find and read – so here goes:"

www.business-strategy-innovation.com/...ld-build-teams-not-communities

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teams communities value valuecreation serendipity ROI intellectualcapital

It’s not unlike advocating participating in the lottery as your prime way of getting rich – sure, it’s possible that you could hit the jackpot if you take part, but only a fool would rely on that as their sole chance at fame and fortune.
Likewise, whilst there is definitely a place for serendipity in an organization (more on that in a future post) – it would be a foolish management team that would rely on its occurrence to generate value for the company.
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- Having said that, my core belief is still that people function and perform better with a degree of organization when compared to loose collective

Jun

8

2010

Beyond Serendipity for Enterprise 2.0

"I believe that the emphasis on serendipity and emergence as cornerstones of enterprise 2.0 actually inhibits the potential of social computing technologies to drive greater value."

rexsthoughtspot.blogspot.com/...ndipity-for-enterprise-20.html

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enterprise2.0 emergence serendipity value socialsoftware enterprise2.1 socialprocess processes policies

Enterprise 1.0, would suggest that only specialized, trained individuals with the resources knew how to find pearls (i.e. where to dive, specialized equipment, knowledge on how to abstract the pearl from the shelled mollusk, etc.).
Enterprise 2.0 suggests that we can simplify and remove some of the "specialization" barriers to enable more people to search for pearls.
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- Enterprise 2.1 would suggest that rather than "serendipitously" finding pearls, that we coordinate our efforts to actually create pearl farms.
- Without social engineering and modifying processes, models, policies and education, the initiative was doomed to fail before it even started.

Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged serendipity → View Popular, Search in Google

Turning Serendipity into Probability

Serendipity Happens… to Deliver Million$

Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions

5 Reasons Why Activity Streams Will Save You From Information Overload

Companies Should Build Teams Not Communities

Beyond Serendipity for Enterprise 2.0

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