Naturally, the community feels adamantly the best way to work is the the open way, a manner of working that emphasizes values and principles like transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and community.
If you’re swimming with sharks, your fear might be legitimate. But fearing what people might think of you, especially during times of transformation, is likely unfounded fear. Stand up to the fear by speaking out, and it will no longer control you. You’ll also likely be surprised by the positive reaction from others who see a bold, courageous act that then empowers them to step into transformation as well.
Successful communities are the key to breaking down silos. Tools play an important role in the process, but if you don’t build successful communities around those tools, then you’ll face an uphill battle with limited chances for success. Tools enable communities; they do not build them.
On one hand, transparency is about access to and sharing of information; on the other hand, it’s about clear and authentic communication of information. Communities that run on openness will build environments that leverage both these aspects of transparency. Working transparently also involves a willingness to share information which will either create barriers between people or remove them.
Being transparent gets easier when you express the intention of your questions or motives and provide context when you can. Even a clear, capable communicator expressing additional context for people will help them open up and connect. Trust builds when you show you’re making every true efort to build a connection with others
Welcoming others to share their intent, and why this is important to them—and being willing to share the same yourself—can build trust and engage others into connection.
Your organization should strive to have people from diferent cultures, diferent parts of the world, from diferent backgrounds, with diferent skillsets or ability levels, and living in diferent social realities, for it to really be diverse. Cultural differences are some one of the most eye-opening qualities you’ll see at work in any organization (even if we don’t often hear about these diferences on the news and social media). Being deliberate about learning from the various cultural groups in your organization can help you to discover just how biased or partial some aspects of your organization really are— and how much you can do to improve.
In organizations that are fit for the future,” writes Jim Whitehurst in The Open Organization, “Leaders will be chosen by the led. Contribution will matter more than credentials [… ] Compensation will be set by peers, not bosses. ” According to Whitehurst, an open organization is a meritocracy: “Those people who have earned their peers’ respect over time drive decisions. ” But the way humans allocate their respect is itself prone to bias. And imagine what can happen when biased decision-making results in the wrong leaders being chosen, certain contributions being over- or undervalued, or compensation being allocated on something other than merit.
TRUST THE COMMUNITY. Opening a feedback platform to anyone on campus seems risky, but in hindsight I’d do it again in a heartbeat. The responses we received were very constructive; in fact, I rarely received negative and unproductive remarks. When people learned about our honest eforts at improving the community, they responded with kindness and support. By giving the community a voice—by really democratizing the efort— we achieved a surprising amount of campus-wide buy-in in a short period of time.
Business strategy and implementation should be an interconnected continuum of feedback loops with the goal of fast learning, rather than separate activities. I see a few reasons why. THE MARKET ISN’T SLOWING DOWN. Unless we have constant checks against what competitors are doing and what is delighting our customers, our strategy is doomed—even if we’ve already delivered on it.
THE STRATEGIC PLAN ITSELF. Focusing on delivering to the plan isn’t as valuable as learning from the implementation. Instead, focus on learning and iterating on the business goals/strategic plans themselves. Your experience of delivery will improve any business strategy. An imperfect strategy that the organizations can learn from is much better than managing to a set-in-stone strategic plan.
Collaboration works best when the other four open organization values—transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, and community—are present. For instance, when people are transparent, there is no guessing about what is needed, why, by whom, or when. Also, because collaboration involves negotiation, it also needs diversity (a product of inclusivity); after all, if we aren’t negotiating among differing views, needs, or goals, then what are we negotiating?
We use three “competence wheels” to defne general targets for personal development within our company. The competence wheels are divided into: • technical know-how (e.g., Java, SQL, ReactJS, Redux, Jasperreports and more), • functional know-how (e.g., inventory management, commission, logistics, accounting and more), and, • soft skills (e.g., self-responsibility, quality consciousness, solution orientation and more.
In the process of solving issues, all of us have the responsibility to achieve the knowledge we need for doing the work. When you don’t know something, you ask a teammate. And if someone asks you for help with an issue, then you can take that as an indication that your own professional development is on the right track. That’s one reason why we see our company culture, including the way we tackle issues as part of our daily work, tightly connected to our people development program. For us, both belong together—two sides of the same coin. This makes our personal development efective because work, control, and feedback rest on the shoulders of all team members.
By mirroring open source production practices, inner source can also mirror the benefts of open source code, which have been seen time and time again: higher quality code, faster development, and more engaged communities.
For example, if Mr. Grumpy is one who pokes holes in every idea, he’s a detail-oriented thinker who might be an excellent helper when you need quality or user testing later in the project. Compliment his attention to detail, and ask if he’d be interested in contributing in this way when the opportunity is available.
Each year we ran an invitation-only conference in which attendees were asked to design a new XPRIZE. Now, if we merely asked them to write down ideas, we wouldn’t get much actionable content. Instead we had a workfow that would scale across all attendees tease out the ideas in a form we could use. That workfow looked something like this—and I think it’s useful for anyone trying to foster innovative collaboration in their open organizations.
STEP 1. Define the problem/goal. We need to ensure everyone is on the same page with the scope of the exercise and the goals. STEP 2. Group collaboration. People love to work together in smaller groups. It gets the blood pumping, brings people’s personalities out, and keeps people mentally engaged. STEP 3. Group brainstorming and feedback. At the end of the exercise, everyone comes together to share their outcomes for the beneft of everyone to hear
More simply, the shared values and beliefs around which an open community develops has to do not only with what it does but how it does what it does. For example, at the heart of many open communities is the value of “meritocracy,” which members invoke to stress evaluation of ideas and work based on the intrinsic value of the work to the community and not on the value of the people performing the activity. Other key attributes of an open community are transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, and collaboration. These shared qualities help spur the self-organizing nature of an open community. The relative level of a community’s degree of inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration and transparency determines that community’s degree of “openness.”
Yes, community is incredibly valuable—but many of us don’t know how to incorporate that value into our workplace. Let’s take a look at four ways we can curate community in the workplace: through access, through support, through collaboration, and through sharing work. As long as humans have been recording our history, we’ve had examples of community to learn about and emulate. We all have heard the maxim “It takes a village to raise a child”—and so it did. Everyone in community has a job, a responsibility.
We all have an innate need to be part of something bigger than ourselves; it’s how we’re hardwired. Community allows us to fnd that place we can belong and to which we can really contribute, and this leads to our feeling valued and purposeful. Understanding the value of our contributions—and the ways those contributions afect the ecosystems of which we’re all a part—creates a freedom and sense of ownership in all areas of our work.
We need human connection, purpose, and value in our day-to-day interactions. And with digital transformation, we have the opportunity to create places of connection and valuable contribution, and to build societies together for successful futures.
The best place to start removing barriers is with access to information and ability to have open communication. By creating knowledge commons, best practice repositories, and open feedback practices, you can begin to remove silos and see an immediate increase in productivity and eficiency. If we want to build agile people, we must remove existing barriers for them to become agile. The barriers in the actual workspace can be the space itself, the tools and feedback mechanisms you use (or don’t use!), and the way you structure access to various resources
The idea of community comes into place when we engage the members in our space, put ourselves in their shoes, understand their struggles, and walk it out with them” Corey explained to me. “Our question is always: How do we help them succeed?” For Roam, part of the answer is providing access to others who will help them with their work. That means connecting people to others across teams, or helping them collaborate to solve a problem. You can provide access and support by connecting others in the community
In order to have a healthy workplace, we need community. We need to feel comfortable, to feel supported, and to have a sense of adventure and connection to our work. We become extensions of each other who leverage positive intent in our interactions towards common goals.
We knew this process was going to be lengthy and messy, but the ultimate goal was to get something we are all proud of and stand behind to accomplish the mission. The statements we decided to wrangle were four-fold:
• Our vision: the world as we’d like to see it
• Our mission: how we intend to make our vision real
• Our values: what we are like as an organization and a community
• Our operating principles: the ideas that guide the decisions we makeRight away, questions arose: Who is included in “our”? Who is the “we” in all of those statements above? And depending on your answer, who gets to shape these statements? The answer is obvious to me, but the process by which one honors that answer has not been obvious or easy. The answer is that “we” includes those who want to help achieve the vision and the mission and who agreed to operate in ways consistent with the values and principles.
Having an open mindset and using modern communication and collaboration tools, the {code} Community has worked to institute best practices for how Dell Technologies integrates into the open source community. There are large and small open source projects run in the open by Dell Technologies’ employees and business units, shared between and collaborated on with thousands of community members. This direct feedback-loop enhances innovation, speeds up development and shows that Dell Technologies is focused and invested in the future of open source software, driving the future of IT.
By focusing on transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and the {code} Community, a space has been created within Dell Technologies for open source to thrive. Several factors have led to the success of the {code} Team and the {code} Community:
• Executive support was critical for getting the open source initiative started and for its continued growth. This helped the {code} Team greatly when getting started as we needed to encourage other internal teams to fully understand open source and its consequences and benefts.
• The fact that there were already many individuals within the organization who shared our open source mindset helped make the transition from closed-source-only to open source-friendly an easier (but still daunting) task. This was the basis of the {code} Community and also drove the DevHigh5 program from the start. The support from the DevHigh5 contributors has been extremely important for the team’s mission and the community.
• The corporate support we received from legal for licensing and marketing for public relations ensured that projects were vetted and promoted properly. This led to having a simplifed process that lowers the burden on the creators and on the {code} Team, while still ensuring accountability and responsibility when publishing open source code. This was crucial to the success of several open source projects.
Slalom is intentional about who and how they hire. What does that mean for them? For starters, it means: • experienced hires with diferent perspectives and a strong competency for feedback • talent acquisition based on relationship frst (investing in getting to know a person as more than a resume) • looking for innovation tendencies, communication skills, coachability, knowledge, and self-governance competencies
Scaling isn’t easy. Even with a strong ecosystem in place, one powered by clear values and vision, growth comes with a fair share of challenges. However, investing in your ecosystem from the beginning will help lessen the growing pains. Create strong structures for your people to operate. Leverage the wealth of talent within your people. Communicate with transparency and open realtime feedback loops to smooth transitions. Remain agile, and you’ll fnd the right sustainable business models that work for you. Slalom ofers a great example of how an open culture works to achieve the sustainability of scale. Growing our communities based on the right kinds of relationships with people and choosing to do the right thing, whether it benefts us immediately or not, creates a more inclusive and collaborative world.
Openness is becoming increasingly central to the ways groups and teams of all sizes are working together to achieve shared goals. And today, the most forward-thinking organizations—whatever their missions—are embracing openness as a necessary orientation toward success. They’ve seen that openness can lead to: • Greater agility, as members are more capable of working toward goals in unison and with shared vision; • Faster innovation, as ideas from both inside and outside the organization receive more equitable consideration and rapid experimentation, and; • Increased engagement, as members clearly see connections between their particular activities and an organization’s overarching values, mission, and spirit. But openness is fuid. Openness is multifaceted. Openness is contested. While every organization is different—and therefore every example of an open organization is unique—we believe these five characteristics serve as the basic conditions for openness in most contexts: • Transparency • Inclusivity • Adaptability • Collaboration • Community