Wirearchy not hierarchy! Wirearchy? What’s that? Here’s organizational learning consultant Harold Jarche:
If you are convinced that your future workplace should look more like a Wirearchy, (a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on, knowledge, trust, credibility, a focus on results; enabled by interconnected people and technology) then the best thing you can do now is prepare.
Prepare yourself to be a continuous learner.
Prepare yourself and your team/department to work collaboratively.
Start narrating your work.
Become a knowledge curator and share widely.
Engage in professional social networks and communities of practice.
Model the behaviours you would like to see in others.
These days, this is excellent advice for anyone concerned about job security. As Seth Godin reminds us in a great video: We don’t have a shortage of factory workers anymore.
Furthermore, I believe our conferences should become wirearchies too: places where communication and learning are two-way, where presenters and attendees alike are continuous learners who work collaboratively during the event, and where we engage with our professional community rather than passively sit and listen. I work to model these behaviors—both at the events I organize and those I attend. We’ll all get a lot more out of our events when we practice wirearchy, not hierarchy.
I encourage you to join me.
Photo attribution: Flickr user tanakawho
HT to Chris Corrigan, who informed me that Jon Husband originated the term and the concept of Wirearchy!
When I was an IT consultant I used to build custom database management systems—complicated, company-specific software that handled the unique way an organization did things. The normal way to do this is the Microsoft Word or kitchen-sink approach. Add every feature and ability you can think of (or that any important customer asks for) into the application. Then, let the user work with the entire glory of what you’ve created.
Over the years I found I could make a good living creating integrated systems that did things a little differently. Instead of company staff facing a complete set of menus, choices, and features, most of which they never used, I built interfaces where users only saw the functionality they required. Once logged on to the system, it appeared to contain only the functions and information needed to do their work. Yet, because the software spanned the entire company, any departmental changes were immediately available elsewhere in the organization.
Employees loved these systems because they gave them just what they wanted and no more. Without unneeded menus, options, and reports, employees worked with minimal distraction, leading to less stress and higher productivity.
Large traditional conferences exemplify the kitchen-sink approach I described above. The thinking goes: “If we have a program that includes sessions on anything that attendees might want, then they’ll come and be happy”. And perhaps this seems like the only answer, given that traditional conferences, at best, do a poor job of predicting and then offering what attendees really want.
Give attendees just what they want
Well, we can do better. When we ask attendees what they want to have happen, it turns out they are remarkably good at telling us. Especially if you’ve just presented them with a smorgasbord of possible topics gleaned from the entire group. That’s what the Conferences That Work roundtable and peer session sign-up sessions do. First, they uncover participants’ needs, experience, and expertise. Next, within a couple of hours, they turn these discoveries into a conference program that optimally matches just what attendees want, and no more.
Attendees love these conference programs because they contain just what they want and no more. Wouldn’t you?
What do you think about the feasibility of determining your conference program at the start of the event?
Seth Godin wrote a powerful post—Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever—about why Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the first day of the iPad launch. Here are five of his secrets that are 100% relevant to the fundamental challenges facing event planners today.
2. Don’t try to please everyone. There are countless people who don’t want one, haven’t heard of one or actively hate it. So what? (Please don’t gloss over this one just because it’s short. In fact, it’s the biggest challenge on this list).
Designing events so that they will appeal to the least adventurous attendee guarantees the same-old snooze-fest. Event planners need to aim higher and use innovative formats, even at the risk of jolting people who didn’t expect to be jolted.
3. Make a product worth talking about. Sounds obvious. If it’s so obvious, then why don’t the other big companies ship stuff like this? Most of them are paralyzed going to meetings where they sand off the rough edges.
How many events have you attended that you still remember years later? (Or a month later?) It’s possible to create memorable events. And the best ones are memorable not because they had great content or great presenters, but because wonderful, unexpected things happened there. We know how to create events like this: by using participant-driven approaches. But we are afraid to take the risk of trying event formats that are different. Apple took that risk with the iPad launch. If we event planners won’t take the risk, who will?
6. Create a culture of wonder. Microsoft certainly has the engineers, the developers and the money to launch this. So why did they do the Zune instead? Because they never did the hard cultural work of creating the internal expectation that shipping products like this is possible and important.
Until we fully embrace the belief that it’s possible to successfully employ powerful interactive formats at our events, we’re going to be churning out more Zunes than iPads.
7. Be willing to fail. Bold bets succeed–and sometimes they don’t. Is that okay with you? Launching the iPad had to be even more frightening than launching a book…
Apple has been willing to make mistakes: the Lisa and the Newton come to mind. You can’t have great success without risking some failure.
Every time I facilitate an event I welcome the possibility of failure. Not the kind of failure where the event is a total bust—I’m not that far out on the edge—but the failure of a session’s process, or the discovery of a flaw in a new approach. And you know what? The new things I try that succeed more than outweigh the failures I experience. And, bonus, I get to learn from my mistakes!
So take some risks with your event designs. Have the courage of your convictions, trust your intuition, and be willing to make mistakes.
9. Don’t give up so easy. Apple clearly faced a technical dip in creating this product… they worked on it for more than a dozen years. Most people would have given up long ago.
We event designers can learn a lot from the success of the iPad launch.
I think we face a long hard road in changing people’s perceptions of what is possible at an event. It’s not easy to challenge hundreds of years of cultural history that have conditioned us to believe that we should learn and share in certain prescribed ways. But the rapid rise of the adoption of social media has shown that people want to be active participants in their interactions with others, and we need to change our event designs to satisfy this need when people meet face-to-face.
I’m willing to work on these issues over the long haul. Will you join me?
Wirearchy not hierarchy! Wirearchy? What’s that? Here’s organizational learning consultant Harold Jarche:
