Second Life for executive education

I've come to believe that a key catalyst in the revitalization of American industry is getting middle and upper management to start using relatively new models such as the Toyota Way, Theory Y, and other techniques of empowering employees and distributing the workload further down the organizational hierarchy.

The US National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine has similarly recommended empowering "microsystems" or front-line teams as the intervention that has proven successful in raising quality and lowering costs in hospitals.

And, where these techniques have caught on and worked, they have worked very well. The problem is, that's not very many places. There are far more failures than successes at this sort of cultural transformation of existing industries.

There are several big problems that I see.

One problem is that this change involves collaboration, and that's not something that single people can do. Even the IOM recognized that changing the behavior of a single doctor, in an unchanged culture, was up-hill to the point of impossible. The common wisdom in Public Health's field of behavioral modification also holds that any change has to be multi-level, and address higher levels of context and the individual, not just the individual. But, like one person with a phone, one is not a very helpful number. You need a larger critical mass before this behavior change can become self-sustaining and pay off.

So, it's hard to get started. There is no "good place" to start for those who want to.

The second big problem is that it is paramount that command and control not be lost during this transitional hand-off from central control to distributed control. That's huge, and generally not mentioned in these how-to books. We know how centralized control works, and we can find examples of distributed control working, but there are very few published examples of getting from one to the other successfully. The trajectories all seem to go through a disruptive middle ground where it is unclear who is responsible for what, with the expected results. In hospitals or the Army or aircraft cockpits or nuclear power control centers, disrupted control can result in a large loss of life.

So, a revised golf swing might be far better than then one you have now, but it is almost certain that transitioning from one to the other will involve a period that is worse than either. If a company is barely above water as it is, a period of worse performance may not only test faith in a process, it may simply not be survivable. If you can't get from here to there, it hardly matters how good "there" is.

A third problem is that the CEO or top executive staff might not like the idea of sharing power, losing the limelight, and losing the justification for being paid 100 or 1000 times what front-line workers are paid, regardless how beneficial this is to stockholders. It's hard to expect them to have an unbiased, altruistic interest in the good of the company at their own expense.

And, the fourth and biggest problem mentioned is "culture," or the self-sustaining, self-regulating norms for "how things are done here." Again, any single individual going up against culture, even the CEO, risks being brought back "into line" with the culture. As I've modeled this before, the culture is effectively a living thing with its own survival paramount, and one that has been rewarded for keeping things "in line" with the status quo.

Culture is far stronger than simple passive mass or inertia, which change when pushed on, even if annoyingly slowly. Culture, when pushed on, is as likely to retaliate and break your arm as it is to change direction.

Where are we?

OK, aside from the fact that the culture and the management team will conspire to fight back or comply maliciously, that there's no place to start, no visible route that works, and damn few role models, this is a great idea.

You can immediately understand why, say, brand new hospitals in Dubai or Bankok have a huge competitive advantage is starting with a blank slate, no legacy IT systems to stay compatible with, no legacy culture to fight back, a lot of space, and cheaper labor with fewer regulations. As Harvard Medical International pointed out in the Keynote address to the latest HIMSS virtual conference, they can also hand-pick administrators and clinical staff from day one that agree to a transparent, quality-oriented culture.

So, one way around all these obstacles is to forget dealing with them and just start over somewhere else. That's one model.

That doesn't do much for John and Mary Smith, or the local community here in the US though. Is abandoning the US and walking away the only model?

This is the point at which I suggest we look at using the best technology we have on this problem. It is, however, a social problem. So it requires social technology.

What's "social technology?"

There are many new tools that have only come to fruition in the last few years that are available to aid collaboration and employee empowerment. Many of them fall under the "Web 2" category, meaning they are on-line tools where the users are all active participants and content suppliers, not just passive consumers of content. An example is the op-ed columns of the New York Times, where a few paragraphs of opinion results in several hundred replies and replies to replies within a few hours, adding a lot of depth and richness to the conversation.

Some tools are more complete suites of collaboration software, with video and audio and shared-white-boards and files, which vendors are rushing into right now. Examples of more developed packages are on the website of the University of Michigan's School of Information under the mouthful "Technology Mediated Collaboration". I've taken their graduate class in that, SI689, and checked it out, and the short of it is that there is great potential but it's harder than it looks to get this working -- for the reasons I describe above.

Another reason it's hard is that most IT programmers still think in terms of single-users and "human interfaces" between man and machine, and don't think through the fact that it's really man-machine-man interface, in fact it's a many-people-to-many-people interface or a social product they are implementing the technical part of. As a result the designs tend to be inflexible and miserable, accompanied by the designers whining that the software works fine but the problem is "bad users" or a "bad culture." This is like designing an interstate highway with right angle turns in it, and complaining that bad users keep driving off the road -- the road is fine, so long as no one actually tries to use it.

Again, unless you deal with how the culture and command and control systems are all going to be migrated from point A to point B and not have serious issues in the middle, you haven't solved the right problem. This is not something "IT-people" even recognize, let alone own, in general. In their minds, this is just "implementation" which is like taking out the old PC and putting in a new one - what's the problem?

Still, these are not the most powerful social technologies out there. The most powerful one we have, in my mind, has a very low profile and looks at first glance like an innocent game. An example is the "Second Life Grid" by Linden Labs.

"Second Life" is a 3-D, multi-player virtual world in which people can wander around, build things, interact with others, run businesses, farm, fly, explore fantasies, whatever.

"Second Life Grid" is Linden Lab's name for their offering that world-construction site to anyone who wants to build or script an experience for whatever reason they want it. They have a corporate and educational branch as well.

Harvard, Stanford, New York University, Texas State University, and others have started using this tool. (A 16 page list of them is here.)

So, you might say, big deal. Aside from inane things like flying and walking through walls, how does this help get my management staff and culture through the transitional problems we discussed above? Why not just put people in a room and teach them the old fashioned way?

There are several huge advantages of training in a virtual on-line world. One is that it avoids the need for physical travel to some site, with all the costs and hassles that involves these days.

A second is that the virtual world is open 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. This means it's open from home to an executive who suddenly realizes they have 8-9 pm available because something got canceled. Everyone doesn't have to be in the same place at the same time.

The third advantage, but possibly most important one, is that Second Life can be anonymous. No one knows who you really are in real life.

This is huge. Everyone has some ego, but top executives or government officials or doctors have huge egos, to the point where they are totally resistant to any experience where they might look awkward or stupid or confused in public. And they tend to hang around with a small group of similarly minded people in a culture that supports or demands that personality.

So what we need, and what Second Life (or some equivalent) provides, is the ability to put on a different body, hang with a different group of people, and try out different ways of behaving without anyone knowing it's you.

This is huge. Most top executives can't even walk into a room without the whole nature of the conversation changing to fit their old personality and role. They have no idea what goes on when they aren't changing the rules just by being there, "observing." They are so used to dominating a situation that all they see anymore is a reflection of themselves in the survivors around them, and get no useful feedback about changes they should make in themselves and the way they behave. No one is honest with them.

With a different personality, all that changes. You could come to a virtual meeting of white males as a black woman, say, and suddenly understand first hand what it's like to be invisible in public with your opinion totally ignored or punished. Or, flip side, they could learn how to behave so that they aren't so over-bearing that lower-ranking people in their vicinity are not terrorized or intimidated into silence. They can practice that sweet-spot between authority and being perceived as being open to criticism.

Just getting doctors to behave in a way that let nurses raise a question, once, dramatically improved the tragic error rate in hospitals in the study Dr. Peter Pronovost did. Doctors had little idea how much they were intimidating the staff into silence, possibly based on some incident of flying off the handle 3 years ago that is still reverberating around the culture.

Or, you could join a group that is actually collaborating to get something done, instead of everyone trying to "win" every meeting and make everyone else look bad, and feel what it feels like to collaborate - an experience many MBA's have apparently never had.

The truth is, one day in Business School, as an MBA student, we covered a case in Personnel class and I suggested, naively, that the managers could consider collaborating to solve it. After a few second silence, the class burst into hysterical laughter. The concept is simply not even on the table for people trained in that way.

They literally cannot imagine managers cooperating.

That's a problem. And it's a problem that some hours in a virtual-life simulator could potentially fix.

No commercial pilot steps into a cockpit today who hasn't practiced various collaboration scenarios over and over and over in the simulator first. It matters, and it works.

Professor Bryan Sextan at Johns Hopkins found that 74% of commercial aircraft accidents occur on the first day new teams of people are in the cockpit together for the first time.

Hmm. First, it shows the power of collaboration, and teamwork, in flying something as complex as a plane, which is way simpler than flying a business. Second, it makes me ask why those people aren't required to practice collaborating with each other in a simulator before they try it out for the first time on the plane I'm on.

And, third, it raises the question of why we think management teams, or Boards of Trustees, can possibly collaborate well, honestly, and frankly if they've only practiced doing it wrong and never practiced doing it right.

Issues of time, cost, availability, and ego can all be dealt with by virtual-life simulators. I suggest we apply that technology to management teams as a way of passing on the fire, and having anyone, anywhere in the world able to role play to help mentor new anonymous mangers over their psychological barriers to this new way of acting.

There are literally hundreds of "content providers" looking for business at setting up new virtual worlds in Second Life, which is the only one I've looked at so far. I have no financial connection to Linden Labs -- I just think this is a very cool product that is worth investigating and supporting.



I just can't think of any other way to address the training gap for executives that doesn't take 20 years internship at Toyota, and we don't have 20 years to figure this out regardless. Interactions with others can only be learned by interaction with others, not by watching power-point presentations, or videos, or reading about it. This training goes into a different part of the brain than normal school-work anyway. The experience is required to change deeply-based beliefs. Even Toyota says that training for the Toyota Way requires actions first that change beliefs, not vice-versa.

Here's a way to generate, moderate, and improve those actions. It's a massive multi-person "game" setup at Linden Labs, so there would be no problem adding 10,000 people in a week to the system a their end.

I think we need to apply "Lean" to lean instruction. GM couldn't grasp that model change-overs could take less than 6 weeks until Toyota did them in 6 hours. Learning to control your alpha-rhythm in your brain takes 20 years on a mountain in Tibet, or 5 minutes with a clinical biofeedback monitor. Sometimes, technology can help.

Just because Toyota took 20 years to learn something doesn't mean, say, that all Michigan businesses couldn't learn it in 20 weeks of sponsored time in Second Life, or some such tool. That's the kind of breakthrough technology that scales up that we need to grab and run with.

Wade

exec ed photo by by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha
Teamwork (crossing stream) by ___________
pool by by prettywar-stl