I conducted a workshop on the future of project management at IIR's ProjectWorld conference in Baltimore last week. Here is the brainstorming based on Microsoft's future of information work scenarios:

Proud Tower

• Project Management = science
• Rigid processes, only need to know what you need to know
• Single methodology
• Strong government influence on practice, but company ultimately decides on competitive issues
• Scope, cost, schedule (pick one)
• Very reliant on internal resources and capabilities
• Schedule is driven even if not realistic
• Low level of forgiveness for failure
• Control + Good Model = company existence
• Low innovation and freedom of thought
• Quality= Doing what the boss says

Continental Drift

• Project Management = discipline
• Reduced Innovation
• Government dictated methodology
• No outsourcing
• Resources only extend to region
• No worry about language (assumed)
• Divergent standards around the world (practices by region)
• Duplication of many companies doing the same thing
• Reduced specialization at the individual level – more “Jacks of All Trades”
• Projects are low risk
• Highly secure environment
• Less variation among projects
• Many compliance projects
• Virtualization of organization takes place within trusted core
• Quality=do what is least risky

Frontier Friction

• Project management=art
• All about people, trust and relationships
• Resources: use who and what is available
• Need to learn to negotiate with power (when power isn’t constrained by common law)
• Dependent on the luck of the skills that are in the pool
• No certifications or standards
• Skills taught by mentoring
• Quality = do the right thing

Freelance Planet

• Project Management = experiment (adventure)
• Team recruitment=Ocean’s 11 model (people I know and trust)
• Highly networked teams
• Only as good as your last job
• Strong peer pressure to succeed (last job reflects on team too)
• Either very honest or very dishonest, no room for gray
• Many projects, smaller in scope
• Projects are interesting
• No big firms (can’t gain critical mass among branded individuals)
• Negotiating with teams for credit, pay, etc.
• Methodology is determined by team, by project
• Communities of practice
• Less economies of scale
• Prima Donnas
• Meritocracy
• Highly personal knowledge, shared only with trusted individuals (including very private Associations)
• Learn by doing on teams (Take responsibility for your own learning)
• Quality= do what offers the most learning within time and budget constraints that delivers what the customer says they want (so my contract will get renewed)

I attended a talk by Asif Ahmad of Duke University Health System & Medical Center. Here are some notes.

CIOs need to:

• Engage staff on a vision
• Learn the operations first (know what is important to the business)
• Understand operational processes (know how the business works)
• Make sure that innovations have a clear business purpose
• The role of the CIO should go away. Fortune 100 already seeing a demise of this role, replaced by Chief Innovation Officer or integrated with COO
• Should be pro-efficiency and pro-process, but not exclusively, they need to understand intangibles too
• CIO also needs to be a people leader (meet customers, meet managers, meet across employee base) and a people person: empathy and leadership
• Learn to talk to the business in business terms (don't talk about XML, talk about medical imaging, patient care, etc. and how technology can help, but about technology for technology's sake)
• Follow the information - don't think about systems, especially legacy ones, in terms of integration. If you follow the information, use new tools to bring in what is important and leave older systems in place. Much more cost effective and easier to deploy (and faster) than trying to reengineer old applications.
• Benchmarks. Don't use them to justify mediocrity. Use them to set the bar that you strive beyond. If you set your sights on being average you will always be below average.
• Work with CFOs to understand that data is an asset and put metrics and processes in place that manage it as effectively as they do capital programs and investments.
• Use BI to focus the business on the what really matters. Example: discussion in industry about deaths during care. BI reveals that it is about narcotic type, age and length of stay. This allows the hospital to focus on what is important rather than trying to do more for 62,000 patients, they can focus on those that are most likely to have an adverse visit.

That isn’t the headline. This is:

Weak Human Resource Is Botswana's Undoing - World Bank

(read more here)

but it is the embedded message. Africa needs to broadly drive to education access and reform. Many African nations could easily adopt the latest techniques in education as they have no burden of deep labor union entrenchment or old infrastructure.

The article pivots on the following:

The researchers add that higher education and training need to address labour market needs. Together with other high performing African economies such as Mauritius, Namibia and Tunisia, Botswana will benefit from having greater flexibility in the labour market, they say. "However, such flexibility needs to preserve the social contract that helps those countries avoid violence, crime and endemic corruption."

Africa can be poised to change perceptions and lead change, but it needs to invest in education at the lowest level to ensure that individuals and nations have the human capital capabilities required to compete effectively.

The June 15, 2009 CIO Magazine asks about the shape of privacy (How Facebook and Twitter Are Changing Data Privacy Rules), but I think the issue is bigger, I think privacy is a component of property. The information about us, about what we know and who we know, will eventually become seen as part of the intellectual property that makes us valuable to the companies we work for, but it exists independently of those organizations. Today, most of us sign away our thoughts and dreams to our employers, but increasing use of non-traditional forms of employment will shift that, as will the free flow of ideas across public facing social computing sites. What companies need to think about is not how to control what they think is theirs, but how to harness the wealth of creativity that could stream between employees and other partners. I think this will happen on public networks first, and the trick will be to mine ideas, bring them in, and then develop them. That will be the core competency of organizations in the knowledge economy: transformation to value.

In any creativity class, the first thing they tell you is ideas are cheap. And they are right. What we need to nurture is the ability to quickly build links between ideas and strategic values, look for things that enhance the value. Then to capture those, quickly find ways to own them (lawyers enter here) and then to quickly turn the idea into  a valuable product or process (or business model) before it is replicated, not by copying, but by parallel investment for similar ideas others may have mined.

Individuals own what happens in their heads. They own what their bodies are made of and the works of their hands (feet, mouths, etc.). What we choose to keep private may not be as important as what we choose to claim that we own in public.

Recent evidence (see Temple timbers trace collapse of Mayan culture) suggests that it was an over harvesting of resources that caused the collapse of the Mayan civilization rather than disease or war. This is a good illustration of our current need for scenarios to help us imagine the unimaginable. The problems we face in the future may well come from unanticipated places. As the Maya looked to external threats or internal politics, it may well have been their relationships with nature that ended up taking them out of history. For those who doubt global environmental catastrophe, it may not be the melting of the ice caps that topples a civilization, but something much more local, perhaps something easy to anticipate if we permit ourselves to think beyond our bias.

As my friend Lawrence Wilkinson reminded his readers today (here), some of the smartest people in the world show their bias when they make definitive forward looking statements.

I read one today from Kevin Fong, lecturer in space medicine at University College London published in New Scientist.

"People in the spaceflight community are very clear that we can't do Battlestar Galactica-type missions where you put something the size of an aircraft carrier into space."

Holds up pretty well with these classics.

• "But what...is it good for?" -- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
• "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

We can't be definitive about the future, so we should be cautious about how we verbalize forward looking statements. In a world of sound bites, this means we force people to be wrong because we don't have the patience to listen to their reasoning. We need to make time or make mistakes. I vote for time.

Next year I will be working with Bellevue College as a Liberal Arts Fellow. I look forward to learning with and through you as well as the students at the college.  Read more here.

Last week I facilitated a session that was designed to show the value of scenario planning in real-time. After introducing my scenario set, I helped the group through a session on a topic of their choice. Here is the output of that exercise.

Proud Tower

• Government sponsored healthcare administered through a few large insurance firms
• Protected, but managed margins as healthy workers is a reasonable trade-off for firms. Political, supply and other perks supplement revenue
• Wellness is supported by most companies
• Some companies have mandated health screenings
• Health surveillance on the rise from employers
• Healthcare comes to the company

Continental Drift

• Government sponsored healthcare
• Health tourism driven by organ harvesting ventures
• Slow speed of learning so care is far from even across regions
• More virus outbreaks, but they are more contained with reductions in travel
• Equipment and supply shortages, including some key medicines still under strong patent protection
• Local hoarding of supplies
• Local/Town medicine
• Some procedures banned depending on ideology of a region

Frontier Friction

• Local Hoarding
• Declining Health, wellness and longevity
• Poor basic health services, including sanitation
• Grandmothers, midwives and medicine men supplement scarce professional resources that may cover wide areas

Freelance Planet

• Global medical records systems spread (people want access wherever, whenever they are)
• Individuals own their own healthcare (often facilitated through professional associations)
• People create their own informal healthcare networks
• Specialists rampant - hard to find general practitioners
• So much information it is hard to know what to trust
• More open and accessible clinical trials - lot's of off-the-grid experimental and non-approved use
• Generally more healthy population (social networks reinforce behaviors, some engineered to do so)
• Information have-nots at huge disadvantage

For more information about the scenarios, please read Listening to the Future.

The session was conducted at the Front End of Innovation.

In a previous post I discussed a scenario for Africa and just a few days later, I saw a mention in the 23 May 2009 New Scientist about a Peace Park designated by Sierra Leone and Liberia. This is the kind of signpost that points toward the future I describe. Read more here: Sierra Leone and Liberia Create Vast Transboundary Peace Park.

What signposts are you seeing?

Consider this:

In 2020 Europe starts to really worry about its aging population. The EU rallies behind this as a political, military and knowledge issue. Individual European countries merge their military into a new EU-based military body that can be coordinated more effectively, reducing costs and creating greater parity with the United States in a renegotiated NATO alliance.

With this military backing in place, Europe starts to invest in African education, with massive investments in elementary, secondary and university education. Early on, the best and the brightest are identified, supported and lifted to European universities. As the early entrants start to accumulate wealth, they send money home, steadily increasing the wealth of Africa through direct foreign investment of ex-patriots. Overtime, the EU establishes universities in Africa with status equal to the best European schools. The strong military ensures that regions remain calm during construction and create a safety net for learning within population centers. Government, emboldened by EU investments follow the EU lead and move into the more rural areas to quell violence, create educational opportunities and transform the economy. Strong incentives for education, including housing, medical care and food attract young people in unprecedented numbers to break cycles of poverty and violence.

Europe begins to import talent from Africa, creating the first major European-Trans-African relationship since the colonial period. Although Europe is clearly exploiting the talent in Africa to maintain its own economic position, the negotiated relationships offer mutual value and offer a new model of cooperation to the rest of the world.

Without the burden of Europe’s aging infrastructure, the increasingly wealthy and highly educated African population begins to build infrastructure that challenges the best of Western or Eastern capabilities. The African Union becomes a strong force in the world as united efforts across the continent converge to eradicate disease, reclaim and protect animal populations and build a thriving knowledge economy based on tourism, pharmaceuticals derived from native plants and energy, as they take control of their oil, generate vast amounts of solar and wind power and lead research on energy storage and transmission technology. Africa eclipses the Israelis as the leaders in arid land farming techniques.

Hunger is nearly eradicated as distributed, local farming becomes the norm, feeding the growing population of Africa while maintaining a sustainable environment.

Where would you take this story?

What alternatives do you see?

This morning I had the pleasure of listening to Jim Collins of Good to Great fame discuss new research in the context of his published work. I found his comments about WHO over WHAT synergistic with my own work on social computing, innovation and knowledge management. Adaptive organizations are not made of processes independent of people. Organizations are places of strong social context that attract and retain talent capable of adapting to change. People with curiosity, with a passion for insight and action, people who can embrace the core values of an organization, are indispensable in a time of uncertainty and turmoil.

This recognition was enlightened by the interview with 3M CEO George Buckley in USA Today (Monday, May 18, 2009) who said "There are things that we can develop. Strategic thinking, for example" when describing his philosophy of leadership.

Collins said it was people who could adapt to change that mattered most. In social computing, that creates opportunities for new ways of understanding people. We don't create metadata that points toward adaptive behavior. We certainly don't test for it in schools--and outside of "innovation" programs at universities, we don't attempt to teach it. So, if as Buckley says, we can't teach "intelligence" what do we do to raise consciousness about strategy?

I think we should add scenario planning to every employee's toolkit. I have heard over and over again that this technique of telling stories about the future opens new horizons and challenges assumptions. Scenario planning helps people practice futures. Collins says that it is not the external factors that kill companies, but weak people. He did not say helping people better understand external forces or thinking through their implications was wrong, just that those weren't the things that would ultimately take you out. So I encourage you to keep listening to the future as a way to prepare your mind for what might be, to help train yourself to be more open and adaptive -- if you already know you can't imagine the right future, you might as well prepare for any future the might unfold. That will be a core value in tomorrow's successful organizations.

For some time, I have been saying that we need to keep an eye out for holistic measures that recognize relationships between outputs and outcomes.  Obama is moving in the right direction with his auto plan. Read more here.

Listen as PRI’s Lisa Mullins explores the culture miscommunications that take place between call centers in India and the Americans who call them. (Listening to This is India – May I help you? here).

Despite the desire of some to retreat from globalization, we cannot do so without great strain and a cost greater than any benefit of self-sufficiency. As the world shrinks, our sensibilities should grow.

I bought a bookcase. I know this may be a shock to those of you who have visited my office (it is bookcase 10, BTW). I needed a 12 inch wide bookcase to fit the last remaining spot in my office. So I had to go with pressboard and assembly. I found the bookcase at Staples, waited for the 25% off coupon and ordered. The assembly was pretty easy, but as I unwrapped the last board (it is always the last board of course) I found a cracked lower corner and a big section of missing wood in the upper corner.  I immediately contacted Staples via the web and was given some options via their support staff. I opted for an additional discount as I was already 35 minutes and one board away from completion.

They were responsive. Apologetic. Unchallenging (they didn’t say: send pictures, bring the bad piece to a store, etc.) and provided multiple options for resolution (return and refund, contact manufacturer for a replacement part or immediate discount).

I have to give them credit for a great experience even if the product was not top of line.

I encourage all online retailers to learn that authentic customer service drives loyalty.

In our world where success is judged often by how much you can juggle rather than how well your tackle any one particular item, drugs have become the human answer to competing with automation. We see it in sports where performance enhancing drugs drive an industry once dominated by smoking, drinking and chewing tobacco. As we compete with models of perfection, we need to become a bit more perfect to succeed (and I haven't yet mentioned plastic surgery, makeup or other external beauty enhancements). It seem smart people can't keep up anymore.

This week's New Yorker ran a story called Brain Gain which explores the use of performance enhancing drugs by high school and college students trying to do just a little better against the pack, and perhaps save some time for play. Reporter Margaret Talbot also discussed her research on KRCW's To the Pont today (listen here).

My position here is the same as with sports. It's time for footnotes and asterisks. In sports, the record books would have a big red line across which is written: from this point on, performance enhancing drugs were permitted in sports so comparisons with un-enhanced humans should be done cautiously. We could eventually do the same thing with academic awards, scientific papers, even Nobel Prizes.

To some degree we have to give up the moral high ground and recognize where society pushes individuals and just how far we have come down paths that won't allow for retreat or retrenchment. We try to control our children through these mind altering substances so they will concentrate at school and do OK. Why didn't we consider that the smart kids would want to boost their performance too?

My biggest concern is that we use these drugs to create factory smart people, not open minded, creative people who test boundaries and want to discover new things rather than master many things we already know. The future of our society depends on creativity (so as the director of my daughter's school play said, that by definition, means creative investments are under funded) not just on doing old things well. I always refused to give my children anything that would make them concentrate better in class. I might admonish them, and encourage them to learn, but learning takes many paths and sometimes fidgeting is an indicator of more than poor social control (like systemic issues of curriculum or an educators inability to engage or a mismatch between student and content).

At the end though, all of these issues are personal, thus the footnote. And I do mean all of these issues. We live in a society that reflects its members, a society with emergent, not engineered attributes. Our choice to accept cognition enhancements to drive performance is sad, inevitable and perhaps even distributive in a positive way. Only time will tell, if we end up with enough patience to pay attention and enough compassion to care.

As regular readers will know, I firmly believe that our over emphasis on productivity does a disservice to other measurements that aren’t so easily obtained, thus forcing us still see the world through the lens of the industrial age. When your only meaningful measure is productivity, everything looks like a factory.

This was reinforced as I read this article recently about the UK’s National Health Service, or NHS (read Bleak economic outlook "doesn't have to mean service cuts" for details).

Here is an innovative thought from the article:

He added: “Even more encouragingly, our research has proved that better care and productivity go hand in hand. Putting systems and processes in place to improve quality has a direct positive impact on efficiency.

Now, of course, the issue I have is that something other than a relationship between quality and productivity is probably going on – the right types of efficiencies that don’t impact patient outcomes, the right understanding of when enough efficiency is enough. Those are the types of questions we need to solve for in the knowledge economy. It isn’t good enough to create correlations informed by intuition. We need to understand where productivity morphs into something else and we need to be able to put a name on that and understand its attributes so that we can more effectively craft the business environments of the knowledge economy.

The Obama administration’s budget proposes eliminating the intermediation that accounts for the majority of today’s student loans. As a consumer watching interests rates rise because my good credit is helping fund the future of banks with failed models I believe future loans should offer stability unencumbered by middlemen with motivations other than educating our children.

Department of Education as reported in BusinessWeek (2007-2008 school year)

www.fafsa.com

Despite the incorrect date at the top of the web page, the April 27, 2009 BusinessWeek holds an article on how the technology geeks of startup land are landing in less posh settings to conserve their cash for actual investment in their ideas rather than on extravagant edifices (and offices) to what might be but probably won’t ever be. As a former IT analyst, I spend countless hours counseling startups to focus on product rather than enjoying the thrill of spending someone else’s cash on caché.

Enjoy the read (Bedroom Startups) on frugal startups starting to act like entrepreneurs of old who knew success was a privilege reserved for those who act with reserve.

As we all reach into our wallets for cash rather than credit cards, we could learn from the Latino community and their reliance on cash. The strategy reflects both a path forward, as well as a key indicator of the broken system established by banks, namely, if you don’t have credit, you can’t get credit. Credit scores are not part of our historic human relationship equation. People stress out about their credit scores. They may have mathematics behind them, but they do not reflect the fundamental idea of trust, they rather reflect an abstraction of trust. If you search for personal stress what you find are books, companies and banks who offer you ways to relieve your stress. The results look very similar to those that come from searching for a diet. Unlike the economy, however, nutrition (not dieting) is a natural process that has rules that exist outside of human invention.

It is important that we understand the structural depth to which we need to go to change the economy. Returning to the status quo is not the answer.

Listening to Back to the Future: Cash here from NPR and Latino USA.

A current CRM Magazine article (New Social Media Not Helping Sales) says what the title implies. Sales people are hard pressed to document how social media is helping expand revenue.

A few things to think about. Knowledge and relationships don't translate directly to sales in way that can easily be tracked. Think about white papers. We write these to change perceptions, create arguments for our point-of-view or to help educate customers. White papers can't be linked directly to sales. Leads perhaps, but not to sales. A sale is a transaction that takes place when the customer is willing to commit to an investment. Many things go into preparing them to make the commitment. Social media should be seen through that lens. It should be seen as a way to understand customers, cost effectively communicate with them in broad ways, making them aware, for instance, of new white papers you think would be important for them to know about - in the world of twitter, retweet tweets and links you think customers should care about. Help filter - add emphasis - don't add to the noise, create value - and listen.

Social media continues to evolve. We can't take a snapshot analysis and read much into it about how we should behave now or in the future because we haven't even started asking the right questions. If you believe your network of relationships helps keep your customers closer, and if you think that is valuable, or perhaps more pointedly, your customers think you help create value, then that value will accrue when it comes down to more hours, renewals of licenses or just more. In an economic downturn value more so than ever is perceived as part of the package. If you add value in more ways than expected, then you are more likely to be a supplier of choice rather than a supplier on the edge.