Today’s Harvard Business Review blog post, “The Terrorist Attack: Massive Failure in Collaboration” by Morten Hansen brings to mind the modus operandi, and grand failures, of many businesses (and people) when it comes to culture, communication, and technology.
As Hansen puts it, the first issue was that the “The Hoarding Barrier” seems to have prevented officials from sharing what they knew with others, partly due to the fact that the agencies have incentive systems that penalize sharing!
Is the culture in your company one of silos and information hoarding?
Simply put, there was no incentive for anyone anywhere to share information, even though they all knew the information may have been a crucial key to saving human life.
The other issue Hansen discusses is “The Search Barrier”. Agents, it seems, could not easily search relevant information which, if true, sounds to me like a huge technology #FAIL. With the knowledge and technologies we have today in the information management space, there’s no reason anyone, let alone the government of the most prosperous and powerful nation in the world, should be wanting for information about national security – or anything else.
Most recently, my work in the new media space once again proved that even the smartest organizations have fundamental issues that prevent them from achieving the results they want and deserve. These issues almost always center around the hoarding of information and lack of communication between departments and people.
Choose and use the right technologies for your business or project
There’s an argument here that the government should know better and do more, but there’s also the reality that these culture, communication, and technology problems are and have been around forever and will certainly continue, to the collective thrill of consultants worldwide.
Hansen is right on target when he says, “…the problems we face aren’t just about IT. It’s about changing the culture…” That said, here are four things you can do to improve things in your world right away. The first three are taken directly from Hansen’s post and they’re right on. The fourth was added by me:
- Change the incentives system. Reward people for sharing, and penalize them for not sharing.
- Recruit new people. Infuse the old culture with new employees who think differently.
- Rotate jobs. Move employees among agencies (a proven technique to build cross-unit professional networks).
- Choose and use the right technologies. Implementing technology without the early and frequent involvement of the people who will use it is a broken model. Make sure you engage end-users as well as stakeholders and take the time to first answer the question, “what are we trying to do with this technology – what are our desired outcomes?”. Do this before you write a line of code, buy any commercial product, or engage any technology vendor.
What have your experiences been with culture, communication, and technologies? Please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
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