The thing about reading a lot of business/management classics, which I’ve been doing lately, is that in order for a book to have been around long enough to become a classic, it had to have been written before the era of the computer-dependent, networked organization.

As I’ve been reading In Search of Excellence, I’ve been wondering how their eight principles of excellence would look in a virtually connected organization. Their examples and themes (e.g. getting plant managers, engineers, customers, and marketing all together in the same room; communication unlimited by organization structure; ad hoc and voluntary task forces; building a learning organization) still seem relevant, but what do they look like in today’s organization? I find that even email (let alone all the other ways to work virtually) can make so much invisible – even working in an office as small as 15 people, it’s easy not to know who works most with whom, who is most connected to whom, who is collaborating with whom, because so much of what happens is only visible one inbox to another. Some online connections become visible through social networking sites like facebook or LinkedIn (see Common Craft’s video explaining how LinkedIn makes connections visible), but those are inter- rather than intra-organizational.

Here are some examples I’ve thought of that bring In Search of Excellence’s principles into the world of the future:

autonomy and entrepreneurship – Tales from Google staffers come to mind

simple form, lean staff – modelled by the “lightweight organization”, e.g. Common Craft’s commitment to running a light operation.

bias to action – echoed in the prototyping phase of Theory U (although all of Theory U before that phase is about not doing)

Finally, the book Getting Real (a short, quick, and free online read) – a manifesto for building a lean and successful organization – is pretty much a Web 2.0 era guide for all the principles incorporated in the bias to action section of In Search of Excellence: chunking, speedy systems, abandoning formal structure in place of ad hoc systems of what’s needed, doing things quickly, putting units in simultaneous competition with each other, and generally letting information flow freely.

Returning back to making connections visible, I sometimes think that the work I do as a facilitator (creating spaces and enabling possibilities for listening and learning) has a lot in common with social media. And while I’ve been looking for ways for us to learn together, listen to each other, and reinforce each other in person, it turns out that my brother has been figuring out how organizations can do all of these things virtually too. He’s one of the brains behind Thoughtfarmer, “social software for Intranets”. Their blog gives lots of examples of how an organization can use social software to give employees the ability to connect with each other, recognize achievements publicly, and access the information they need, all while minimizing layers and barriers that might otherwise exist structually in an organization.

The feedback post from a few weeks ago has been on my mind, as I keep looking for texts or examples that provide a bit more theory on why certain feedback models have become so pervasive, and what the reasoning behind the models is.

In this post, notes from In Search of Excellence, in which the authors come out as strong Skinner-ists (fans of the behavioural positive reinforcement theory), and a story of positive reinforcement in action.

Theory

In Search of Excellence, originally published in 1982, is one of those standard business books that all managers are supposed to read to understand how an organization becomes great. The authors researched what they identified as excellent companies and extracted eight principles that create excellence.

In the chapter Man Waiting for Motivation (it was 1982…), their expounding of Skinner is that positively reinforced behaviour will increase and increase until it starts pushing less desirable behaviour off. So if you positively reinforce enough, the behaviours you want to see will expand until they fill up all the space, and what hasn’t been reinforced gets dropped off. And, because the person has chosen by himself/herself (consciously or not) to expand one behaviour and drop off another, he/she is unlikely to go back to previous behaviour patterns (unlike behaviour changes prompted by threat, in which reversion to previous behaviour is more likely).

Why is such a straightforward guideline (positively reinforce, extensively, and don’t worry about addressing negatives) so hard to follow? I admit it’s hard to follow – I tried to give someone solely positive reinforcement after watching him run a workshop, and it was hard: feedback models have ingrained in me that I need to find things wrong and identify them.

In Search of Excellence suggests: “[Managers] either appear not to value [positive reinforcement] at all, or consider it beneath them, undignified, or not very macho” (p. 70).

Why value positive reinforcement over negative or corrective feedback?

Skinner and others take special note of the asymmetry between positive and negative reinforcement (essentially the threat of sanctions). In short, negative reinforcement will produce behavioral change, but often in strange, unpredictable, and undesirable ways. Positive reinforcement causes behavioural change too, but usually in the intended direction…

…Says Skinner, ‘The person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.’

Positive reinforcement, on the other hand, not only shapes behaviour but also teaches and in the process enhances our own self-image…

… It nudges good things onto the agenda instead of ripping things off the agenda.

(p. 68-69)

Story

I was instructing for two weeks at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), running a leadership course for teenagers. The ROM’s summer program employs around 20 instructors at any given time, with about 300-400 kids coming through every two weeks. By the end of each summer, instructors who have worked all four sessions are exhausted, and the energy of instructors, volunteers, and assistants tends to wear down. But while I was working there, someone told the story of one instructor (also a leadership instructor) who started a “ROM dollars” program. Everyone tossed in $5 of actual money into a ROM dollars pot, and then the contest began. Every time you saw someone doing something great, keeping a smile on their face, still being positive and energetic and calm after eight weeks of pretty intense work, you’d give them a ROM dollar with a note of why they were receiving it. ROM dollars spread around the summer program, with people looking for behaviours that they could reinforce with a ROM dollar, and individuals looking to do things that would earn them ROM dollars. And at the end of the summer, the team that had amassed the most ROM dollars got the pot of actual money and a gift certificate at the favourite local after work hangout.

It’s a simple story, and probably many of us have been in a similar sort of reward system, but it struck me this week as the perfect story of a system that functioned solely on positive reinforcement and the participation of staff. There wasn’t a manager or higher-ups who instituted the system or who were in charge of giving the positive feedback, and there was no emphasis on corrective feedback. But an employee-initiated, employee-run system, based entirely on positive reinforcement, made for a more positive work environment for everyone when it was needed most.