Innovation, Complexity and Social Business – Part 1

Business Model Innovation as Wicked Problem

This post is the first of a two-parts article on innovation and social business co-written with Ralph-Christian Ohr (@ralph_ohr) and cross-posted from collaborativeinnovation.org.

We live in an age where emergent technologies continue to have massive effects on business and society. Rising complexity requires companies and economies to cope with increasingly interlocking systems. If we keep on considering systems in a traditional, isolated way, this would lead to a totally locked view of business. This new hyper-connected nature of information entails an unprecedented change in business and societal environments. One major consequence for companies is the imperative to learn to anticipate those changes as well as to successfully adapt to them, or being at risk of disappearing.

The business model is the new unit of design

The life time of business models is declining. Organizations are forced to reinvent themselves more and more frequently in order to survive and thrive. This implicates the creation and pursuit of new businesses while maintaining and improving existing businesses – sustainable success depends on a proper integration of evolutionary and revolutionary innovation.

A recent Arthur D. Little study has found that the proportion of innovative new products in adjacent and new business areas is likely to be nearly 3x as big as it was in the last decade (figure below). Such an increase would have fundamental consequences for the way innovation is managed. These radical innovations typically entail the search of new business models and strategies in order to scale them.

Source : http://www.adl.com/uploads/tx_extprism/Prism_01-11_Innovation_Management_01.pdf

Furthermore, the latest IBM 2012 Global CEO Study, titled “Leading Through Connections“, indicates that there is no significant difference in their approaches to product and service innovation when comparing  outperformers with underperformers . Where they differ is in their approach to business model innovation. Outperformers tend to upset entire industries. According to the following figure, they are 48% more likely to break into other industries and twice as inclined to invent entirely new ones. Tom Hulme from IDEO puts it in a nutshell: The business model is the new unit of design.

Source: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbe03485usen/GBE03485USEN.PDF

The rise of co-creation

Confronted with growing complexity at every turn, organizations are finding it increasingly impossible to be successful when entirely executing on their own. In order to move along innovation s-curves more effectively and efficiently they aim at building appropriate open value networks. Another finding of the IBM Study confirms outperformers to be more inclined to innovate with external partners (figure below). There seems to be a clear tendency to leverage openness, connectedness and collaborative innovation for the successful creation of novel business models. Obviously, cocreation with partners, who may even be competitors, gives outperformers the edge to tackle the most challenging forms of innovation. (Re-) Combination of internal and external capabilities to create value across boundaries is becoming crucial for organizations to succeed.

Source: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbe03485usen/GBE03485USEN.PDF

Indeed, S. D. Shibulal, CEO and Managing Director Infosys Limited, claims co-creation to be “the future of innovation“:

Our research and experience clearly indicates that the success of tomorrow’s enterprises will be strongly linked to the inclusiveness of their strategic ecosystem – an ecosystem which drives innovation through active co-creation with key stakeholders. At a time when businesses are struggling to adapt to complex market realities or to become more efficient or to develop a competitive differentiator or to simply survive, those who converge their innovation strengths are likely to have the edge. (…)

Finally, co-creation also expands the canvas of creativity, such that organisations need not restrict their innovation endeavors to those core competencies they already have a proven track record in. If they lack the expertise to plumb the depths of a certain arena, they can “acquire” it by simply co-building such expertise and insight with the right organisations. It’s a win-win situation. To conclude we believe that co-creating products, services and solutions that cater to specific needs of the stakeholders is the only way we can build our enterprises of tomorrow.

Embracing emergent strategies

As previously outlined, organizational reinvention by entering new businesses requires a different approach than sustaining existing businesses. Unlike exploitation of existing business models, exploration of new business models follows an emergent strategy through iterative testing, adjustment and validation. In most cases both customer problem (job-to-be-done) and solution (viable and feasible business model) are yet unknown at the outset. Therefore, matching them entails an open-ended search process without predefined goals.

Due to interactions and interdependencies among diverse stakeholders with different values and perspectives (such as customers, R&D, finance, management, shareholders, suppliers, sponsors etc.), this process of creating and implementing a novel business model while maintaining the existing model exhibits features of a wicked problem. Wicked problems are the opposite of complicated -but ordinary- problems that can be solved in a defined time by applying standard analytical methods. Transitions between different business models can also be regarded as complex adaption processes aimed at responding to fundamental changes in the business environment.

In “Tackling Complexity and Wicked Problems with Design Thinking“ we suggested the following pillars to properly address such complex problems:

  • Experimentation and agility: In complex and uncertain environments it’s essential to let patterns emerge and to determine which ones are convenient. Every experiment exposes new aspects of the problem, leading to further adjustments of the following solution proposal. In place of finding ‘the right solution’, problem understanding and solution must be woven together from beginning to end through explorative iterations.
  • Interpretive approach: A wicked problem usually implies a radical uncertainty, i.e. not simply an inability to predict which of several options will turn out to be the preferred one. In the absence of a specified solution, no analytical problem solving can be applied by breaking the problem up into a set of separable parts that can be assigned to different specialists. An appropriate approach aims at initiating and guiding  among stakeholders in order to allow insights and shared understanding to emerge. Or as Harold Jarche puts it: organizations need to extend the notion of work beyond goal-oriented collaboration towards opportunity-driven cooperation.
  • Diverse ecosystems: Given that many people care about or have something at stake in how the problem has to be / could be resolved, the process of solving a wicked problem is fundamentally social, and solving a wicked problem is fundamentally a social process.

Dave Gray, author of “The Connected Company“ summarizes these requisites well here:

Diversity breeds creativity – ecosystems are richest where habitats and species overlap. With more connections and diversity comes more creativity: diverse communities are more interesting, more provocative, and more stimulating. (…)

Emergent strategy requires that the company continually generates a broad range of hypotheses, testing them in small-scale experiments, and feeding the more successful experiments while pruning the failed ones. (…)

Emergence is self-organization, order that bubbles up from the bottom instead of being pushed down from the top. Emergence is common in complex systems where agents have the autonomy to move around and interact to discover possibilities. For emergent strategy to be successful, there must be enough autonomy, freedom, and slack in the system for people and resources to connect in a peer-to-peer way, like they do in Silicon Valley.

Taken together, this makes an important point: Emergent strategies and tackling wicked problems, such as business model innovation, require appropriate social and engaging business environments in order to thrive. Findings by the McKinsey Global Institute further confirm: the greater the relative percentage of interaction workers (i.e. employees whose work requires complex interactions with other people and independent judgment) in an enterprise, the more competitive it is within its peer group. This suggests that solving the challenge of making interaction workers more efficient and effective, should build a significant strategic capability for innovation and adaption to changing conditions (figure below). Business needs to become social.

Tim Kastelle points out the foundation to make social business work: “If you want to make your organization more social, it requires tools and culture to work together. Tools by themselves will never fix your problem. “ They need to be embedded in a culture of openness, trust and shared purpose.

Obviously, social business’ adaptive and collaborative nature presents us with novel and actionable frameworks to tackle strategic and innovation issues, as we will outline more in detail in the second part of this post.

Takeaway

An ever increasing pace of change leads to a decrease in life time of operating business models. Companies are therefore forced to reinvent themselves more frequently by creating new business models. Entering new businesses through open business model innovation exhibits a wicked problem structure. In order to properly address those problems, companies have to follow emergent strategies and need to put decentralized, self-organizing structures in place. Social business brings an answer to the urgent necessity to successfully tackle corporate reinvention and to enhance strategic adaptability by connecting individual human stakeholders.

Read second part.

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From Knowledge Stocks to Knowledge Flows: the Journey Just Begins

“Increasingly, strategic advantage for corporate institutions will hinge on privileged positions in relevant concentrations of high-value knowledge flows and the adoption of practices required to participate in and profit from these knowledge flows”.

By these words, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson define in The Power of Pull what they call the second wave of the Big Shift. Their impressive concept and research have already been thoroughly and brilliantly commented. Social business, or whatever we call it, has the potential to drive us through the necessary changes to harness flows of knowledge and take fully advantage of human collaboration and creativity.

Are we stuck in a document-based view of the firm?

But to fulfill this promise, thus to trigger the third wave of the Big Shift, and demonstrate:

“how institutions will have to learn to innovate at institutional level, truly transform themselves from the foundations outwards; how they will move from scarcity-thinking to abundance-thinking, from diminishing-returns models (based on knowledge stocks and experiences) to increasing-returns models (based on knowledge flows and learning); how the environments and participants and techniques necessary for this will manifest within and beyond the enterprise boundary”

as writes JP Rangaswami, we might need to challenge the foundations upon which business is built down to the core, if not even further. Indeed, to quote Dave Gray and Tomas Vander Wal from their book, The Connected Company;

“Connected companies are networks that live within other networks. To be effective in a networked world requires different ways of thinking and acting. It’s less about predictability and control, and more about awareness, influence, and compatibility”

and organizations becoming social businesses require a transformation toward connected ecosystems where employees, customers, suppliers and even competitors build value through knowledge sharing. At some point, we will succeed in redesigning processes to make them agile and adaptive, and will switch to adaptive case management. We can be able to foster collaboration in most organizational layers, even at the strategic level, where it would have the most efficient impact, if supported by the right technology. This would even lead us to be able to redefine the nature of work. But none of these will be enough to really shift from stocks to flows, as we will still get stuck in a document-based view of the firm.

An industrial revolution heritage

To a large extent, the flesh and blood of modern organizations isn’t made of hierarchies, of any production of goods or services, of any financial flows, of managers, workers and customers, or even of profit. Organizations are structured, operated and managed around discrete but concrete documents: contracts and patents. Evidence is, we are calling for flows in a world which is more and more leaded by stocks.

Contracts, like most of present organizational artifacts, underwent many changes along history, and differ from country to country, but most of the legal structure that today frames their enforcement was formalized during the industrial revolution. As you might guess, their history is as much complicated as is the legal domain itself, and is intrinsically linked to the evolution of our society. In The Transformation of American Law 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy Morton Horwitz described how not only the American legal system, but with it the legal history, evolved over time to conform to the evolution of the economical and political system. A few years before, Grant Gilmore had drawn quite similar conclusions in a seminal book, The Death of Contract, stating that contracts were a philosophical as well as legal construction built to answer needs from the growing world of commerce.

Toward collaborative contract building

Organizations, indeed, need formal and enforceable accessions to operate and grow. But the rigid intricacies of legal constraints which rule today’s businesses drive them at the exact opposite of the support and trust required to thrive as true social businesses. Trust flourishes on consensual agreements, not on rigid rules. Creativity sparkles from guided improvisation, not from hard-coded regulation. No Big Shift will ever happen without rethinking our pervasive contractual environment.

Pierre Bonnard, the French painter, used to get into the museum of Grenoble, and later in the Musée du Luxembourg, where some of his paintings were permanently exhibited, tubes of paint and brushes in hand, to “improve” them. He did that so routinely that French journalists invented the verb “bonnardiser” to describe the act of touching up an otherwise finished work. For Bonnard, institutional ownership didn’t impair his right to modify his work. Introducing collaboration at the heart of the contract building, allowing some “bonnardization”, is a first step toward a redefinition of contractual links. When interviewed for the Future of Collaborative Enterprise project, Greg Lloyd described such a possible mechanism:

“That’s where I think you really have to rethink what it means to do collaborative work with customers. More people should be participating in the draft. Let’s take the example of a beneficial suggestion, by a junior engineer, on the Metagraphics side. This would lead to discussion, and to an enthusiastic response from Boeing on the consequences, and ultimately to “ok, that’s a very good idea, it means that we’re going to shift the way we do things whatever. Let us discuss how that would shift our agreement in terms of resources and deliverables and things like that”, which in turn would lead to new drafts of pages.

if you have the ability to make that distinction at technology level, you can open the discussion more widely. And you can open participation more widely, because the junior engineer who says “I think we ought to do that” can make a draft change, but that draft change does not commit even the customer to accept it or Metagraphics to do it, until it’s been discussed, not only in the informal sense of closure, but in a particular case that’s actually a contract. You’re doing the collaboration in the context of the document which is the contract itself. And that is potentially a profound shift”.

Relationships’ intellectual property

Beyond an inherently and overwhelmingly formal nature, our contractual environment raises even deeper challenges. If contracts are considered as a set of premises and obligations for both parts, their founding principle, “pacta sunt servanda” depicts nothing but the fundamentals of a relationship. During the industrial revolution, not only have organizations structured themselves in a way which impedes the kind of flexible adaptation required today to enable knowledge flows, but by favoring the proliferation of legal constraints over the principle of good faith which characterized the elder notion of contract, they have captured its very essence to their advantage; a shift has occurred, from relationships between individuals, toward relationships between organizations.

Can we reasonably imagine social businesses as sustainably “owning” such fundamental relationships? Contracts are today mostly private intellectual property objects, owned by organizations, but if we agree on the need to restore trust and to put emphasis back on human creativity through networked flows of knowledge, what does such ownership mean? Couldn’t corporations take inspiration from publishing houses, and relationships’ ownership be granted by all stakeholders, according to subsidiarity mechanisms?

These are questions I have no answer for, and I am not even sure there is one. We are at the beginning of a new era, and many crucial interrogations haven’t even surfaced yet. But to reinvent themselves to successfully tackle an increasingly fast changing environment, organizations will need to challenge most of the concepts and models they today take for granted. Social business presents us with a credible and promising path, but time hasn’t come yet to give actionable answers. Let us focus on asking the right questions, to avoid getting stuck in some less than optimal “local” pseudo-solution.

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Musings on Social Flows and Business Cliffs

This might look like a holiday postcard, and it in some way is. Summer always offers a great opportunity to switch off, step back and think a bit more critically. One has to admit that while our consumption’s habits are changing at fast pace, as a result of a rabid co-evolutionary race between all the internet-enabled devices and services at our disposal and the new behaviors these services enable, social technologies aren’t yet transforming the way most businesses operate.

Getting from rock to water

We have learnt that this problem is at least as much a cultural (getting the right mindset) as a technological (getting the right tools for the right tasks) problem. But shouldn’t technology by itself be considered under a behavioral angle, as the workplace itself conditions our behavior. Unfortunately, the studies dealing about the relationships between technology and organizational behavior are scarce.

Furthermore, most of today’s enterprise grade social tools more or less mimic tools and services we use in our private life. Even if the times of the “Facebook for enterprise” motto are gone, most of social platforms vendors expect that we will behave the same on our company’s network than on the internet. But behavioral differences do exist. For instance, Catherine Lejealle has demonstrated how the private and professional uses of a technology as “simple” as a mobile phone are conditioned by the gender of its owner.

To successfully become mainstream, social computing will need much more adaptation, backed by organizational psychology, than adoption. Rock isn’t a suitable place to swim. Drawing a parallel with the introduction of email is a fallacy, which ignores the fact that email was born in highly professional circles before hitting the rest of us.

Diving under the flow

On these days, there seems to be a consensus among the Enterprise 2.0 / Social Business crowd about the need to incorporate collaboration in people’s workflow, for an apparently salutary purpose: facilitating their tasks. By doing so, we begin to be able to measure productivity gains and efficiency enhancements. Diffusion of knowledge, empowerment of workers in problem-solving situations, are of course positive outcomes, and one might state that generalization of collaboration will erode actual hierarchical structures. Social flows will ultimately eat away at business cliffs. But by heralding that, are we really helping businesses in adapting to current turbulent, unpredictable, markets and conditions?

Since the invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 by James Hargreaves, technology has been mostly used to reinforce the homogeneity of businesses, the repeatability and predictability of operations. Work has been progressively shaped into the highly specialized flow of tasks we are all used to today, woven into more or less rigid business processes, to allow corporations to pursue what John Hagel calls their quest for scalable efficiency.

But the life span of companies is shrinking at an alarming rate, proving, if needed, that the current model is seriously broken. There is some kind of hypocrisy in pushing social technology at the workflow level, thus serving the corporate belief in automated performance, while thinking (or simply hoping) that collaborative behaviors will at the same time challenge this belief. Instead of enhancing actual workflows, shouldn’t we dive under the flow, and begin to tackle collaboration, not at worker’s level, but directly at business level? We need to envision the challenges and opportunities that social platforms bring to the core structure of businesses, in order to help them anticipate and face one of the most important transformations since the industrial revolution. A path I am following since I modestly launched the Future of Collaborative Enterprise project, which will very soon enter a second phase, with a new wave of interviews.

Hitting the cliff – at the top

Putting in gear social technologies at business -not worker- level means going beyond communities and knowledge sharing. On the public side, these technologies not only are modifying our behaviors, they are also changing the way we have to think over them. Customer facing departments are the ones which witness the more abruptly these changes. Marketing can no more ignore the many new customers behaviors that our new hyper-connected environment is now allowing. Customers are no more passive consumers companies can simply push products at. We have to take into account that they interact, listen, react. They have needs, expectations, and, even more significantly, a job-to-be-done.

Social technologies present us with an unique opportunity to not only work differently, as individuals or as groups, but to think differently at the how and why work is done. Why don’t we yet try to use inside organizations the same new lenses we are beginning to use in the consumer world? These will need many adaptations too, but isn’t it paradoxical to see that, at the same time that we are heralding the use of public tools and services in the corporate world, we are considering this world as totally separate and disconnected from the rest? Business processes aren’t the backbone of organizations, but an outdated answer to managers and C-level executives’ job-to-be-done.

To cure today’s organizational illness and unleash the power of human interactions, we need to start at strategic level, just as marketing must consider products from the customer’s point of view. We don’t simply need to DO social, we have to THINK social, and the way it fits and enhances businesses’ purpose. This is anyway the direction I will try to pursue with my new consultancy, Transitive Society.

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When transparency is way too opaque

I had yesterday one of many great conversations with Luis Suarez on Twitter, during the online chat organized by CMSWire around social business. The subject was, you might guess it, about the main challenges encountered when helping organizations to embrace a collaborative mindset.

Transparency, of course, is a key driver here, but fostering transparency throughout a company not only is a real challenge, but also, if not nurtured in the right context, could sometimes prove itself more harmful than profitable by itself. Just imagine how would an employee behave, as the world stands, when, in name of transparency, he stumbles on highly strategic topics… Which answer can companies give to what could be considered as a major threat? The first, obvious, option is to limit transparency and to enforce a strict governance to the way information is flowing internally. This is what many organizations are doing right now, trying to enable collaboration at some layers, while staying within a command and control mindset.

Another option is to educate employees, to help them understand what should be kept inside the walls of the organization, and what can be shared in the wild. Most of today’s successful, or promising, social business initiatives have chosen this option, setting up Internal and external social media policies, limiting the scope of unshared knowledge, trying to ease the cohabitation of collaborative networks and key hierarchical structures. Consider for example the way BASF successfully nurtures internal communities. But, on the other hand, these organizations are in some way approaching a social sound barrier.

Outside of enterprise, our life is mainly made of struggles. People struggle with a tough economical context, in which, for more and more of them, each month passed is a small victory. States struggle with a sky-high level of debt which impedes sustainable politics. We struggle with the guy next door, who cuts in front of us when driving, who jostles you to be first to get in. We struggle with administration, so often deaf-and-dumb to our requests and needs. In a world where well-being more and more requests endorsing an individualistic and warlike behavior, transparency is way too opaque a concept to thrive into our organizations.

Transparency is in fact the visible doll from a Matryoshka set. Trying to leverage it requests us to restore a mutual and reciprocal trust inside organizations, which, in turn, necessitates us to instil passion into work, as passion drives trust and confidence. But starting such a virtuous circle is a more than a tough challenge in a world where class solidarities have been dismantled, and where employees are more and more disengaged. There is no radical remedy to this industrial disease, but to avoid social business to get stalled at the stage of promise, and in order to restore trust, companies must start understanding they are in part accountable for the present state of human relationships. Actually, most of the obstacles encountered in work environment are nothing but a reflection, and a catalyst, of a much more universal condition. Progressing further on the path toward the collaborative enterprise means mutating from leadership to fellowship, and reconciling social business with its original definition.

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Social Business isn’t About Companies, It is About Cities

In The Social Psychology of Organizing, Karl Weick exposed the theory of enactment, stating that organizations were fundamentally an abstraction of the reality, essentially brought to life through management’s narrative. In that sense, changing the way we work requires much more than technology and the empowerment of knowledge workers. Taking a broader perspective, and looking at organizations, not only as a production and profit-making machines, but as center of a part of human activities mainly taking place in cities, sheds a different light on the role and nature of what we call social businesses.

While trade was an important part of the wealth of cities during Antiquity, we had to wait until the XIth century for economic exchanges to regain importance after few centuries of Barbaric invasions and feudal wars. At that time, cities began to define themselves through their economic activities, and to specialize their production. Physically, as well as symbolically, delimited by heavy walls, the medieval city grew organically, around a center dominated by religious buildings, and commercial activities cohabited with residential houses at the heart of mostly undifferentiated territories. Furthermore, despite its strong geographical delimitation, the medieval city was interdependent with its surroundings. Rural territories provided the necessary food, were the place to build roads to link cities, and were inhabited by the most important part of the population (85% in France).

During the Renaissance, cities undertook a crucial transformation. Letting them grow anarchically was no more an option, and new cities began to take shape, planned and designed according to the notions of harmony, symmetry and simplicity rediscovered from Antiquity. At the same time, and during the following centuries, specialization was taken to another level, as cities were specially built to accommodate and support one of the three main powers of this era: economical, political and administrative, and military. Everywhere across Europe, royal cities competed in refinement, while engineers like Vauban in France or van Coehoorn in the Netherlands conceived and built fortified towns according to the principles of military architecture applied to urbanism. The economic role of cities was at that time preponderant, and more than a few had their name directly associated with a production or transformation activity. Think for example about Antwerp’s diamond commerce or Calais’s lace manufacturing.

Work and the city: the historical divorce

With the XIXth century’s industrial revolution took place a rapid and radical disruption: at that time, firms took over cities as symbols as well as guarantors of the whole economic activity. Work began to be dissociated from other social activities. The city, from holistic center of human activities, has progressively seen its role and influence diminish over time. As companies were gradually loosing contact with the other aspects of human life, some attempts were made to provide workers with a unified environment, this time not under the responsibility of city’s governance, but the one of modern “captains of industry”. Taking inspiration from Charles Fourier’s utopian theory of phalanxes, between 1856 and 1858, Jean-Baptiste Godin built the Familistère in Guise, Belgium, to provide workers with all the necessary infrastructure and services he supposed they needed to be productive at work. At the beginning of the XXth century, Edouard Michelin has built whole new districts in Clermont-Ferrand, allotting them schools, sports facilities, and even a church.

But such initiatives remained the exception. Most of the time, the city abdicated and the divorce with work was pronounced, leading to deep transformations. In Europe, under the influence of US cities, new districts discarded the old organic design to adopt a grid-like arrangement. Streets were drawn to favorite circulation over communication. The modern city was functional and efficient, according to The Athens Charter, the urban planning guidelines written by Le Corbusier and published in 1943. By losing its role as entity of production, the city had lost its connections to other cities, resulting in a fragmentation of local territories, and in an overall competition, as Richard Florida recently explained. Competition in which they are mainly spectators, as being orchestrated by external economical powers,. Overall, it lost most of its soul. In 1961, Lewis Mumford stated:

“A universal suburb is almost as much of a nightmare, humanly speaking, as a universal megalopolis: yet it is toward this proliferating nonentity that our present random or misdirected urban growth has been steadily tending. A large scale pattern of expressways and airfields and sprawling car parks and golf-courses envelops a small scale, increasingly shrunken mode of life.”

From customer-centricity to citizen-centricity

Drawing a parallel between the evolution of the city and the one of the workplace is of course tempting. The industrial era has rationalized space, productivity has got rid of shapeless shops and offices to implement neat open spaces, large passageways and functional lines of production. I might push the analogy even further: a majority of companies still operate in a Modernist-like manner: managers are the workplace equivalent of continuous commuters (the dark side of mobility), and knowledge workers populate impersonal open spaces or tentacular alignments of cubicles… But there is much more to be understood in the evolution of cities and of their relationships with economical actors.

The failure of Modernism, which gave birth to endless low-rise housing suburbs as well as dehumanized minimalist districts, nurtured alternative ways to rethink the city. Starting in the middle of the seventies, the post-modernist movement rejected the utilitarian view of post-war urbanists, aiming at integrating new constructions into the context of the city, and at reconciling the main human activities within the same space. Cities are complex systems, in which many networks and symbolic structures superpose or interweave, and the search for new harmony pursued by many urbanists and policy makers is a still to be solved wicked problem. But the movement has started…

Inside organizations, the frontier separating private from professional life is rotting, and “work” is no more a monolithic activity separated from others. Increased mobility and remote working, allowed by technology, are gaining in importance, and are quietly involving new relationships to time and to space. For how long will we afford to keep on dealing with urban landscapes and with the “socialization” of business as two separate perspectives?

As John Hagel and John Seely Brown write, the workplace needs radical redesign to allow for more collaboration and continuous learning. Customer-centricity, whatever this really means, not only implies the growth of different behaviors, but also to think differently about our spatial and symbolic relationships to customers. Providing them with more channels to interact is not enough, we need to design them in a more human way, and allow customers to embed these channels in their way of life. Cities, and those who think and design them, are ahead of organizations in tackling these problems.

Furthermore, the divorce between work and other facets of human life which took place during the industrial era has to be considered under the light of Enterprise 2.0. As organizations aim at leveraging the relationships dynamics, they must taking seriously into account their own role in the city, which encompasses most of these dynamics. Redesigning work means rethinking the place of work inside human activities, thus inside cities. Restoring the city’s economical role and identity has become a sine qua non condition to a successful urbanism as well as a truly social business. Organizations do not need to become customer-centric, but citizen-centric. Utopia? Have a look at Zappos’ Downtown Project, which goal is to restore a continuity between the workplace and the urban community. The future of Social Business lies at the heart of the city.

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