The one with the ungodly philosopher

So the story goes that University College London (UCL) was founded in the mid 19th Century as a reaction to perceived discrimination in other higher educational institutions. Specifically Oxford & Cambridge which at the time (not now of course…) required both wealth and religious affiliation as part of the entrance criteria and Kings College London which required the religious affiliation but not specific wealth.

The man described as its spiritual founder, Jeremy Bentham, was a leading philosopher who advocated amongst other things the separation of church and state and utilitarianism – fundamentally “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”. Some of this thinking can be seen today and is clearly impactful on positive psychology but we’ll leave that topic for another day. His mummified head can still be found on display at UCL and the origins of it’s formation lead it still to be referred to as ‘the ungodly college’ to some (and Gower Street Tech to others)

I recently wrote a post called ‘The one with the crowdsourced research’. The purpose of the post was two-fold, firstly to try to collect relevant data and case studies about the deployment of social networks inside organisations and secondly to understand people’s perceptions to social. I got some great comments and links (thanks to those who contributed).

The reactions I found most amusing/bemusing came from people who work specifically in this area who in some form or another ‘called me out’ for wanting evidence and one who went as far as to imply it was cowardice to seek validation – curious business development indeed! I think there was a misunderstanding that I was seeking to be convinced rather than gathering information to convince others and use a window of opportunity to get clear buy-in to change.

Around the same time I was revising for an exam on a college module entitled ‘Technology, Work & Organisations’ and in the course of my reading came across a reference to Bentham’s Panopticon. Despite the fate of the cat, my curiosity got the better of me and off I went to Wikipedia to try to understand what the hell it was…

The panopticon was envisaged by the same Jeremy Bentham as a prison design where observers could observe all inmates without the inmate being aware they were being observed. The basis of the design has been used in prisons all over the world. In the context of work and organisations the reference was the perception from within organisations that technology wasn’t just about enabling more effective and efficient working but a tool of managerial control – effectively creating a virtual panopticon.

The saying goes ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ and whilst I am pretty far from angelic there is a voice in the back of my head saying that whilst social has great possibilities the notion that everyone wants it and everyone will love it just seems ‘yet to be seen’ for me. Maybe it’s about specific purposes – collaboration, innovation, visibility, rather than just ‘social’s great – do it’. For the moment I’m going to keep working up my solution and give some more thought to how this will land on a very diverse group of prisoners people.

And I must close there as the red light on my Blackberry is blinking and if I don’t answer it in under 5 minutes…

The one where the contrast is lost

Barack Obama travels in style – whether it be Airforce One, Marine One or ‘The Beast’; the President of the United States is well catered for when it comes to transportation. However, if I had a question about transport infrastructure, I wouldn’t ask the person who manages it for the White House. I wouldn’t have the same requirement, resources or infrastructure to make what I’m sure would be excellent advice relevant to me or the organisation I was working for. That may seem a strange thing to open a post about people with but I promise I’ll return to it.

Yesterday I attended a session at #cipd11 which was all about HR & Social Media. To be honest I wasn’t going to write a post about it, the main reason being that Doug Shaw wrote two great posts (here & here) which didn’t seem to need adding to….but things moved on and here we are.

The session had 2 speakers – Neil Morrison, Group HRD at Random House and Matthew Hanwell, HR Director, Community & Social Media for Nokia. Neil’s half of the session concerned how Random House have approached their employees usage of social media and how they use it as part of engaging their teams but also for engaging with authors and readers. It was an interesting session and the thing that struck me was it was very portable – to do what Random House have done you only need buy in not capex.

Then came Matthew whose session was likewise very interesting and concerned how social media is now part of the way Nokia operates. How transparent communication and collaboration has developed their organisation and shared some great stuff about what they do and how they do it. However (and there had to be a however) what Matthew and Nokia have done requires significant investment both in terms of technology and resource. It requires a reengineering of internal communication and is only likely to feasible and valuable in an organisation that like Nokia is big and global.

I enjoyed the session and came away with plenty to think about and have already shared some of the content with people I know who were not in attendance.

Where it got interesting was in the write up published in People Management Daily (a version of People Management produced at the conference). If you were to read this article you would not know that Neil was there. There was absolutely no mention of him or his content. The article focussed purely on Matthew’s content.

Given the number of big global companies and the rest I was surprised at the exclusion of ‘the first half’ because for my thinking it would be as relevant if not more so to 95% of HR Practitioners who may be trying to move their organisations towards embracing social media. Even for the big global players, trying to start the journey what Neil discussed in terms of behaviour would be incredibly relevant.

Is this indicative of HR’s obsession with “shiny” when actually what delivers real organisational value for most of us is good stuff done well? To return to the original analogy what we ended up reading about was a fascinating insight into Barack Obama’s transport infrastructure when what we could have read about was the contrast between that and people who deliver results with a Toyota Avensis and a Premium Economy seat on Virgin….