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LavaCon 2017 - Silos. (And other concepts that make us average)
- 1. Silos And other concepts that make us average Megan Gilhooly, Sr Manager Content Management Amazon Seller Support
- 4. so·cial net·work noun Google 1. a network of social interactions and personal relationships. Merriam Webster 1: a network of individuals (such as friends, acquaintances, and coworkers) connected by interpersonal relationships
- 8. Controlled flow of information
- 9. 1984 Peter Blau and Joseph Schwartz Studied the impact of boundaries, such as class, race, and religious affiliation on communication among people who affiliate with those groups.
- 10. Scientific evidence that silos are bad?
- 11. 2015 Damon Centola Professor of network dynamics at University of Pennslyvania Supports Blau and Schwartz’ findings for simple information that requires only one contact for transmission.
- 12. Centola, 2015 Simple information • Breaking news • Sports scores • Winner of a reality TV show • Rumors • Political propoganda
- 13. Centola, 2015 Simple information • Breaking news • Sports scores • Winner of a reality TV show • Rumors • Political propoganda Complex ideas • Adoption of tools & processes • Training • Efficiency • Engagement • Content strategy & architecture
- 14. 2015 Damon Centola Complex concepts are more readily integrated across large organizations through strong social ties to departments and workgroups.
- 16. 2015 Damon Centola Reinforcement occurs where networks overlap, creating bridges.
- 17. 1 2
- 18. 1 2
- 19. 1 2
- 20. 1 2
- 30. Conveyance
- 31. We need real-time conveyance of our topics. Queue based on: •Delivery deadlines •Dependencies •Priorities
- 32. Solution #1: Automate handoffs
- 33. Solution #2: Eliminate handoffs
- 37. Own things that are difficult.
- 38. Own things that are difficult. Own things that are uncomfortable.
- 39. Own things that are difficult. Own things that are uncomfortable. Leave territory out of it. Own goals, tasks, & mistakes.
- 41. Stand out from the crowd 1. Embrace silos as social networks and build appropriate bridges 2. Automate or eliminate handoffs 3. Own your mistakes and other difficult things
Editor's Notes
- If there’s one thing I know about technical communicators, it’s that we’re some of the most tenacious folks in our organizations, for very good reason. To be successful, we have to be strong. We have to assert ourselves. We have to be confident in our opinions or we will be ignored. While I would never ask you to lose the tenacity, I will ask you to question yourself.
- Are you standing by your ideas at the right times and for the right causes? Today, I want to talk about three trends that run rampant in organizations. And I’m going to ask you to question them. Trends start for a reason and none of these trends are inherently bad. But, new information and new technology make trends obsolete. Let’s look at these trends and determine whether they still hold value for our organizations.
- The theme of this conference is Spanning Silos, Building Bridges. So, let’s start with silos. We like to blame silos for just about every communication or process breakdown in our organizations. But, silos aren’t going anywhere. Nor should they. To understand why, we need to know what silos are and why they exist. Silos are really just…
- social networks—groups of people that interact and have relationships based on the departments they work within or the projects they work on.
- Think about your org chart. A standard org chart shows vertical networks of people that have similar objectives and functions. People who work together closely develop close interpersonal relationships. Whether you turn the chart upside down, tilt it sideways, or rearrange it into circles, social networks exist. No matter how you organize masses of people around organizational objectives, there will always be interactions and commonalities between people based on…
- These social networks provide organization, focus, expertise, and…
- controlled flow of information. So why did we start blaming silos for our organizations’ lack of communication?
- Back in 1984, a couple of social theorists named Peter Blau and Joseph Schwartz studied the impact of boundaries, such as class, race, and religious affiliation, on communication among people who affiliate with those groups. They found that breaking down those boundaries increased communication among groups from differing affiliations. This seems pretty logical. When you break down barriers, people and messages travel across them. Shortly thereafter, organizational communication theorists used Blau and Schwartz’ findings to infer that breaking down…
- organizational boundaries, would also increase the flow of communication and collaboration within enterprises. This provided a scientific argument for us all to blame silos for bad communication. Now fast forward to 2015…
- …will spread rampantly within a community that is not segregated into silos.
- Not true for complex ideas.
- …What we call silos can actually help us to transmit understanding of and gain adoption for complex ideas.
- Said another way: The loyalty to the smaller group can actually work to our advantage when trying to disseminate difficult concepts.
- How do complex ideas spread across multiple silos? According to Centola, bridges. Bridges are formed when individuals within one group also belong to other groups. Key = size of bridge.
- Let’s over simplify this and say we have two groups, each with 1000 people.
- If only 10 people are simultaneously in both groups, then these groups have a narrow bridge and are very segregated.
- If 900 people are in both groups, then there is a lack of segregation needed for people in the groups to have strong social ties to one or the other.
- According to Centola, there is a sweet spot somewhere on the lower end in which the groups are siloed enough to have separation, but the bridge is wide enough for strong transmission of complex ideas.
- Centola’s research tells us we should not try to “break down silos”. We should focus on “building appropriate bridges”.
- Manufacturing and logistics organizations worldwide understand that in a long process…
- …having people specialize in specific tasks and removing variation increases employees’ ability to do that task…
- …more efficiently and with fewer defects. Intuitively, no one can argue this point. If you do one thing more often, you will learn to do it better. In factories, removing variation is a really great thing.
- Let’s move this concept to a large global content development process. The natural take-away from having people specialize is that in content, we should break our process up by step. Let’s say we have people who write content, people who word smith the content, people who code the content according to our XML standards. We have peer reviewers who review for code, style, and/or accuracy. We have specific teams that add conditions for language, market, product, or version. We have teams that translate, people who review translations, and people who then publish it. And it’s a miracle if we get through this process in 100 days!
- If factories can create cars from scratch in a few hours, if fulfillment centers can pick, pack, sort, and ship large orders in less than an hour…why would it take 100 days for a global team using similar methods to publish a fully localized set of content? Let’s make the assumption that each person is working at an optimized level. In my experience, the problem is not that people aren’t working fast enough. In analyzing the value chain, the steps that are actually adding value tend to take a few days or less.
- It’s the non-value-adding hand offs that suck up the most time. If hand offs are taking 1-5 days, and there are 8 handoffs, then handoffs are eating up between 8 and 40 days.
- What’s the difference between the fully six-sigma’d, lean, standard work process that leads to efficiency for manufacturers and fulfillment centers but not necessarily for us in content development?
- They have large systems of conveyor belts and software that rely on unique identifiers of every part in the system and RF technology to read those IDs automatically. A person does his or her specialty and then the system automatically carries the product to where it is supposed to be next. The picker doesn’t have to worry about which packer to send items to. The team adding the steering wheel doesn’t have to decide which team should add the tires. The conveyance system handles handoffs hyper efficiently, enabling people to focus on doing whatever it is they do.
- If we want to remove time spent on content handoffs, we need an incredibly smart conveyance system that not only places the content in the queue for the next appropriate person, but also prioritizes that piece of content and sorts it according to any dependencies. When we talk to our CCMS vendors, the goal needs to be real-time conveyance of our topic IDs from one step in the process to the next, accounting for delivery deadlines, dependencies, and priorities within the queue.
- We need the CCMS to be our robot.
- Plan B is to eliminate handoffs. How? One of the ways I’ve found to eliminate handoffs is through a Content Scrum. By bringing together writing, editing, coding, and QA functions into a Scrum, the Scrum commits to doing all of those functions without handing off to another team. NOT: a writer on a dev Scrum. A self-managed Content Scrum. The Scrum operates as a unit, learning together how to more efficiently produce content. This, of course, requires that the team understands the values and tenets of Scrum and knows that just saying you’re doing sprints and standups does not mean you’re doing Scrum.
- Have you ever asked someone what their role is and they say, “I own global sales” or “I own quality of content”? Why do you think they said the word “own”?
- Probably because someone at some time told them “don’t say what you do, tell people what you own”. Have you heard that before? That is TERRible advice. If someone asks me what my role is in the company and I say, “I own global content delivery”, you know what that person is thinking?
- That’s not to say you shouldn’t ever use the word “own”.
- Silos, one-size-fits-all processes, and loosely using the word “own”--If you are clinging to these trends, then you’re keeping yourself average.
- Learn to stand out from the crowd.